  He goes on to deny that any actual recent terrorism has been “a means for avoiding disaster” rather than merely a “reaching for political success” (Walzer 2004b, 54).  So the supreme emergency/dirty hands exemption seems available, given significant qualifications concerning probability of success, for terrorists aiming to save a communal way of life. In a later paper again, Walzer allows for exceptional cases in which sub-state terrorism might be excusable though not justifiable; he imagines as excusable “a terrorist campaign by Jewish militants against German civilians in the 1940s—if attacks on civilians had been likely (in fact they would have been highly unlikely) to stop the mass murder of the Jews” (Walzer 2006, 7). The shift from justifiable in the earlier quotation to excusable in the later clearly needs more explanation; Walzer seems hesitant, if not confused in his resort to these categories. Nonetheless, on Walzer’s own grounds, there would seem to be a case, given some likelihood of success, for the employment of terrorism by Palestinian groups seeking to salvage what remains of their community’s way of life from the ravages of Israeli occupation, settlement and military attack. It is perhaps pertinent to this prospect that the Palestinians refer to their dispossession and ongoing sufferings at the hands of Israel as “al-Nakba”: the catastrophe. No doubt, their achieving that prospect would involve some sort of “reaching for political success” but this hardly counts against its status as a response to supreme emergency. The point here is not to make any particular claims about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather to stress the idea, noted earlier, that Walzer’s move to a criterion of genocide is puzzling as the sole interpretation of what a threat to the continuity of a communal way of life could mean. 