ahhh, the sweet romance of ethnic cleansing. In the NY Times today..

Interview with Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister during the bloody massacre of Cast Lead, here interviewed in the NY Times magazine

  Solomon: Your parents were among the country’s founders.

   Livni: They were the first couple to marry in Israel, the very first. Both of them were in the Irgun. They were freedom fighters, and they met while boarding a British train. When the British Mandate was here, they robbed a train to get the money in order to buy weapons.

   Solomon: It was a more romantic era...NY Times

HT to Mondoweiss.

One can never underestimate the official hate and indifference to the lives of Arabs or Palestinians in particular in the NY Times corporate culture.

The Irgun "freedom fighters" were, among other things, responsible for numerous attacks against civilians. Including mass murder in the village in Deir Yassin

Irgun and Deir Yassin

The former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin terror gang (IZL or ETZEL) committed the famous massacre which resulted in the murder of 94 people, many women and children. It is worth noting that 25 of the survivors were paraded in West Jerusalem as trophies, who later were brought back to Deir Yassin and murdered, see the Stories and Memories section for an Israeli declassified intelligence report describing the massacre.- Palestine Remembered.

This massacre and others like it would help terrorize civilians and force them to leave their homeland. At some estimates, over 500 villages were cleansed of some 700,000 men, women, children. Israel would not allow them to return.

It would also, in the eyes of Deborah Solomon, serve as a romantic time, so that the likes of Livni's parents would fall in love.

An indictment was filed in Belgium Wednesday calling for various Israeli officials including Defense Minister Ehud Barak, opposition leader Tzipi Livni, and former prime minister Ehud Olmert be tried for war crimes, reported Hungarian News Agency MTI. J Post

the apple does not fall far from the tree kind of thing.