Is it older than Israel?

The Irgun, the National Military Organization, split from the Haganah in 1931 and from 1937 followed Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist line of answering Arab attacks with attacks on Arabs. Its market bombs of 1937 and 1938 killed well over a hundred Palestinians. Under Menachem Begin from 1943 it declared revolt against Britain: the King David Hotel, the Acre prison break, the hanging of the sergeants, the bombing of the British embassy in Rome.

In April 1948, with Lehi, it carried out the Deir Yassin massacre. It was absorbed into the Israeli army in June 1948 after the army shelled its arms ship, the Altalena. Begin's Herut party, and then Likud, is its political descendant; he became prime minister in 1977.