Left I on the News

Ariel Sharon is well-known for the massacre of thousands of Palestinians in the Lebanese refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila. Even an Israeli commission found him "indirectly responsible." Before him as Israeli Prime Minister, there was Menachem Begin, the former head of the Jewish terrorist group Irgun, whose murder of 92 people with the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 was one of the seminal events leading to the establishment of the state of Israel (a bombing which was recently commemorated (!) with a new plaque in a ceremony attended by yet another former Israeli Prime Minister, Benamin Netanyahu). I'm sure there are others I'm omitting.

But now, from an article in The Independent (with a hat tip to Footnotes from a Small Village), we learn that Israel is now being led by the second-generation:

Through the 1930s and 1940s, [the Irgun] planted bombs across Palestine, targeting both British soldiers and Palestinian civilians. It had two goals: to drive the British imperialists out, and to terrorise the Palestinian population into unconditionally accepting the creation of Israel. Ehud Olmert, Israel’s ‘war on terror’ Prime Minister, can scarcely condemn them. He spent the first three years of his life living in one of their terror training camps while his parents worked as their gun-runners. Tzipi Livni, the Israel foreign minister widely tipped as a future PM, is the daughter of the Irgun’s director of military operations, a mastermind of civilian-slaughter.