295-302.

Wilkins argues that terrorist acts may sometimes be justified. He
offers the atrocities of Nazism as an example and suggests that terrorist
acts against Germans by Jews would have been justifiable during the
Holocaust. Wilkins defends his thesis with the claim that Germans
collectively shared the guilt of the Nazi policies. While the notion of
collective guilt is foreign to political libertarians, the concept is coherent in some
communitarian approaches as well as in a Marxist moral framework.
The notion of collective guilt makes sense, according to Wilkins, if
one sees a community as pursuing a common interest.

A communal interest in eliminating the Jews would implicate individual
German citizens. Shared responsibility on the part of German citizens would
make individual Germans legitimate targets of violence inflicted by Jews.
Self-defense could be offered as justification for violent or terrorist
acts against German citizens.

Wilkins replies to some objections that could be raised against his
proposal. The first is that such acts of terrorism would make the Jews'
situation worse. The second is that it would reduce the Jews to the level
of barbarism practiced by the Germans. Wilkins responds to the first by
saying that the Jews' situation was already as bad as it could get.
Terrorism aimed at drawing international attention to the plight of the
Jews may have helped.

Wilkins responds to the second objection by limiting the targets of
terrorism to members of a community whose policy is to annihilate the
community to which the terrorists belong. He includes this limitation in a
rule that would, under some circumstances, permit terrorism. The rule is
that terrorism is justified as a means of self-defense under two
conditions: first, all other means of stopping a policy of annihilation of
one's people have been eliminated; the target of the terrorism is a member
of the community that has adopted the policy of annihilating the community
to which the terrorist belongs. Failure to adhere to the limits imposed by
such a rule would reduce society to a state of barbarism akin to Hobbes'
state of nature.