Terrorist commando Yitzhak Shamir later became Prime Minister of Israel, perhaps because of his philosophy on terrorism:
<<< The pre-state Zionist movement carried out extensive terror against Arab civilians, British, and Jews, also murdering UN mediator Folke Bernadotte (whose killers were protected after the state was established). In 1943, current Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir wrote an article entitled "Terror" for the journal of the terrorist organization he headed (Lehi) in which he proposed to "dismiss all the 'phobia' and babble against terror with simple, obvious arguments." "Neither Jewish morality nor Jewish tradition can be used to disallow terror as a means of war," he wrote, and "We are very far from any moral hesitations when concerned with the national struggle." "First and foremost, terror is for us a part of the political war appropriate for the circumstances of today, and its task is a major one: it demonstrates in the clearest language, heard throughout the world including by our unfortunate brethren outside the gates of this country, our war against the occupier." As has been widely observed in Israel, the British occupation was far less repressive than Israel's rule in the occupied territories and faced a much more violent resistance. >>>
The philosophy of another Israeli leader:
<<< British philosopher Isaiah Berlin recalls that Chaim Weizmann, first president of Israel and considered one of the saintly figures of the national movement,
"did not think it morally decent to denounce either the acts [of Jewish terrorism] or their perpetrators in public... 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." >>>
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