I agree with lots of that actually! The altalena affair is a shameful stain on ben gurions legacy although he might have been justified in distrusting Begin considering how much the irgun had been relentlessly persecuted. But Begins decision not to descend into civil war over it speaks volumes about his moral fortitude and clarity. For Begin violence and terrorism was a means to an end not a way of life. When peace was an option he took that path. It was Begin who made peace with Israels mortal enemies - Egypt and he did the unthinkable, gave back the sinai peninsula.

Shamir too, saw no further use for violence after 1948 and eventually took to politics and only in that theater did he engage with his mortal enemies on the left.

I can't help but contrast that with the actions of Yasser Arafat who unleashed the second intifada on Israel after signing the Oslo Accords or hamas who used the de facto palestinian state of gaza as a base to launch attacks and missiles at Israel.

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jedimind 14 hours ago | parent [-]

It is truly incredible to see those Zionist terrorist's pragmatic calculation rebranded as "moral fortitude." Begin avoided a civil war because he knew his extremist ideology would eventually conquer the state from within, and he was proven right.

The idea that violence for him and Shamir was just a "means to an end" that stopped in 1948 is a complete fantasy. They simply nationalized their terrorism. Begin didn't find peace. He swapped his Irgun uniform for a state uniform to launch the brutal 1982 invasion of Lebanon and to oversee a massive, violent expansion of illegal settlements. His "peace" with Egypt was a strategic masterstroke. It neutralized his biggest military threat, freeing him up to colonize Palestine with impunity.

This continuous, state-sanctioned violence was never just random. It was the implementation of an ideology that sees Palestinians as subhuman obstacles. And now, that project has reached its logical and horrifying conclusion. It has culminated in what leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International and hundreds of the world's foremost genocide scholars explicitly call it: the crime of genocide.[1][2]

So your attempt to contrast this with Palestinian leaders is a disgusting exercise in victim-blaming. You are defending the architects of a political project that resulted in genocide, while slandering its victims for resisting their own extermination. It is a morally bankrupt position that rests on a complete inversion of reality.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/sep/01/israel-committ...

[2] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/12/amnesty-inter...

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FridayoLeary 13 hours ago | parent [-]

Who are they a victim of exactly? Hamas can't be a victim when they are still actively holding onto hostages and started this whole war. You can say it's the average gazan, so long as they don't support Hamas. Which makes them a victim of both Israel and Hamas which is a fair claim, but they have been horribly let down by their leaders while Israel hasn't, which was kind of my point?

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kalberg6429 12 hours ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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breppp 12 hours ago | parent [-]

> It started with the Nakba

I would suggest you read about the Hebron 1929 massacre which ethnically cleansed the largely non-zionist Hebron population

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yodafx 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I would suggest you read about the context of events you're trying strip off its context. It didn't happen in a vacuum. It was a brutal outburst in the context of a British-backed colonial project that was openly planning to take over Palestine. At that point, Zionist colonialism was also in full force and the worst fears of the natives who resisted your colonialism were proven correct. It's like saying "I would suggest reading about the 1939 Bydgoszcz massacre in Poland against the German settlers" without providing any context as to why there were so many settlers there to begin with. The Nakba was the foundational event of the state of Israel and the source of the refugee crisis. That is the subject, and your desperate attempt to derail the conversation with that false equivalence was predictable.

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breppp 11 hours ago | parent [-]

As everything it is complex, some might think that mass killings, rape, decapitations, and ethnic cleansing of a non zionist jewish population is not a valid reaction to legal zionist buying of land.

However, the poster above seemed to indicate "it all started with the Nakba" which is very wrong chronologically, and of course also predated the Hebron massacre

	▲	yodafx 11 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Meh that's just your typical Zionist atrocity propaganda on steroids similar to the "40 beheaded babies" hoax, you're basically projecting on them what you Zionists have done to Palestinians for a century. "PRESS RELEASES INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATION “More than a human can bear”: Israel's systematic use of sexual, reproductive and other forms of gender-based violence since October 2023 https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2025/03/more-human-c... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-sexual-abuse-pales... "U.S. decries reported sexual abuse of Palestinian prisoners after graphic video aired on Israeli TV https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-sexual-abuse-pales... >However, the poster above seemed to indicate "it all started with the Nakba" which is very wrong chronologically, and of course also predated the Hebron massacre Zionist colonialism started even before the 1900s[1], that's almost half a century before that event, so you have to revise your hasbara narrative such that it isn't that blatantly ahistorical. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Colonisation_Associatio...