More Misinformation

Jonathan Shainin, on the staff of the New Yorker and editor, with Roane Carey, of The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New Press, 2002), reviewed the book on car bombs. And he also alight upon the Lechi bomb and gets his facts mixed up as well:-

Mario Buda’s primitive wagon bomb lay buried like a fossil for decades, until it was excavated in the late 1940s by Jewish terrorists in Mandatory Palestine. The followers of Avram Stern—led by future Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir—were the “first to improvise vehicle bombs as a sustained tactic,” initially against British forces in Palestine in an effort to “sabotage a truce between the British and the mainstream Zionists” and then against Palestinian civilians. Battlefield deployment showcased the stunning power and severe limitations of the tactic: You can raze a building and spill some blood, but you can’t exactly win a war with trucks full of dynamite. You can, however, destroy a peace, sabotage a truce, terrorize civilians, and escalate a conflict. Indeed, what Davis calls the “hellish innovation” of the Stern Gang was quickly “franchised to the other side,” as Palestinians launched their own exploding trucks against Jewish installations. The car bomb, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s trenchant description of nationalism, “proved an invention on which it was impossible to secure a patent. It became available for pirating by widely different, and sometimes unexpected, hands.”

Source.