Why Israel's Founding Father Refused to Denounce Terrorists
Last week my father gave me a book of the English essayist Isaiah Berlin's portraits. Berlin was a friend of Chaim Weizmann, the moderate Zionist and first president of Israel, whom Berlin often visited in Palestine during the tortuous years under the British mandate, 1945-1947, when Jewish terrorists blew up the King David Hotel, killing 91 people, and captured and executed British soldiers. Berlin says that Weizmann refused to condemn the terrorists. Why?
When Jewish terrorism broke out in Palestine he felt and behaved much as Russian liberals did when reactionary Tsarist ministers were assassinated by idealistic revolutionaries. He did not support it; in private he condemned it very vehemently. But he did not think it morally decent to denounce either the acts or their perpetrators in public. He genuinely detested violence: and he was too civilised and too humane to believe in its efficacy, mistakenly perhaps. But he did not propose to speak out against acts, criminal as he thought them, which sprang from the tormented minds of men driven to desperation, and ready to give up their lives to save their brothers from what, he and they were equally convinced, was a betrayal and a destruction cynically prepared for them by the foreign offices of the western powers...
Noteworthy for a couple of reasons. Palestinian sympathizers are continually called upon to condemn terrorism. Sometimes they comply, sometimes they don't. Many of them, as Weizmann did, understand the desperate and tormented reasons for terrorism, which are not generally religious, per Robert Pape, but utterly mundane: about land and occupation.
If Phil knew the real history of the bombing of the King David Hotel, he would know that everyone inside was warned to leave before the bomb was set off. It was the desire of state of Israel that no one be hurt but to destroy what was then a symbol of British imperialism.
There's also the minor detail that they were guerillas, attacking military and government targets. They weren't blowing up pizza parlours or felafel stands.
But mentioning anything true is verboten on MondoWeiss. How much is CAIR paying you to write this filth?
And as usual, one wonders if the people spewing cookie-cutter hatred in the comments here really believes that their pathological stalking will help their cause, or just make it obvious to everyone that Phil might be on to something.
So, now we get to learn a bit more about the making of little philly weiss. Little phils' dad, who obviously failed to provide him with any jewish education or identity, seizes an opportunity to use his own offspring as a vehicle for his left wing moral equivalency theory. No wonder little phil is so full of self-loathing; it was instilled.
Phil
I'm sure that you know this already, but the people who demean and ridicule you for discussing the true circumstances of Israel's founding are not assimilated Americans whose first loyalty is to this country. Rather they are apologists for a 60 year old middle east genocide which they'd just as soon the world not know about. Since they don't have the facts on their side they accuse you of not being a true Jew (someone apparently who puts loyalty to Israel above all else, including the truth). My Jewish in-laws don't read your column, but your views more accurately reflect their values than anything I ever read in the morning paper or see on the evening news.
"There's also the minor detail that they were guerillas, attacking military and government targets. They weren't blowing up pizza parlours or felafel stands"
The Irgun and Stern Gang may not have blown up pizza parlors, but they did bomb plenty of civilian targets. Anybody who says otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about.
Whenever you hear of demands for Hamas to renounce violence, it's worth remembering that one of the founders of the Irgun was Ehud Olmert's father, and that its head of operations during the King David bombing was none other than foreign minister Tzipi Livni's father. To this date, neither official has ever publicly repudiated their forebears' actions.