T H K Q l ES'I LON ( I f P A L E S T IN E In the event that an occasional report or colum n, such as Von H offm an’s, gets published or gets a little attention, its rarity and isolation— which comes from the absence o f a context or tradition to set it in— drain it o f any effectiveness. The power of a consensus, o f a tradition, o f a coherent discourse such as exists between Israel and liberal opinion, is that its sheer institutional presence dispels any evidence to the contrary, flicks it away as irrelevant. More: it can convert what one would expect to be devastating challenges to it, into support for it. Take as the most reccnt instance the election of Menachem Begin. For years and years, Begin has been known as a terrorist, and has made no effort to hide the fact. His book The Revolt is to be found in any university or medium-sized public library as part o f the standard Middle East collection. In this b ook. Begin describes his terrorism— including the w hole­ sale massacre o f innocent women and children— in righteous (and chilling) profusion. He admits to being responsible for the April 1948 massacre o f 250 women and children in the Arab village o f D eir Yassin. Y et a few w eeks after his election in May 1977 he emerged in the press with his terrorism forgotten, as a “ statesman” with implied comparison to Charles De G aulle. Here one cannot say that evidence o f Begin's terrorism had been suppressed. It was there, has always been there in front o f anyone discussing modern Israel, and has regularly been cited (in distinctions m ade, for exam ple, between Begin and say, David Ben Gurion or Golda M eir, who were supposed to be statesmanlike). Y et so strong is the consensus decreeing that Israel’s leaders are dem ocratic, W estern, inca­ pable o f evils normally associated with Arabs and Nazis (which, after all, Israel is supposed by its existence to have negated), that even a morsel as normally indigestible as Begin has been transmuted into just another Israeli statesman (and given an honorary L L D by Northwestern University in 1978 and part o f a Nobel Peace Prize to cap it all!). Precisely those liberals who discover causcs and outrages everyw here simply have nothing to say about Begin, about torture in Israel, or about the literally unstoppable annexationist policies o f the Israeli state.