Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin was born on August 16, 1913, in Brest, then known as Brest-Litovsk, a city of the Russian Empire that became part of Poland after the First World War ^[1]. His father, Ze'ev Dov Begin, was a timber merchant, a committed Zionist, and a communal leader among the city's Jews. The household was religious and politically engaged, and the young Begin absorbed both traditions. He attended a Mizrachi religious school before moving to a Polish state gymnasium, where he became fluent in Polish and developed the formal, rhetorical speaking style that marked his entire public life ^[2].

At sixteen he joined Betar, the youth movement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism, which called for a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan River and rejected the gradualism of mainstream Zionist leaders ^[1]. Jabotinsky became the defining influence on Begin's thought. Begin studied law at the University of Warsaw, receiving his degree in 1935, though he never practiced. Instead he rose quickly through Betar's ranks, and by 1938 he headed the movement in Poland, responsible for tens of thousands of members at a moment when Polish Jewry faced intensifying antisemitism ^[2].

The Second World War destroyed the world he grew up in. Begin fled Warsaw ahead of the German invasion in September 1939 and reached Soviet-occupied Vilnius. In 1940 the Soviet secret police arrested him as a Zionist activist, and he was sentenced to eight years in a labor camp, an experience he later described in his memoir White Nights ^[3]. Released in 1941 after the Soviet Union agreed to free Polish citizens, he joined the Polish army-in-exile under General Anders and traveled with it to Palestine in 1942. His parents and his older brother were murdered in the Holocaust, a loss that shaped his politics permanently ^[1].

Anyone asking who was Menachem Begin before he entered government must begin with the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground militia of the Revisionist movement in Palestine. In December 1943 Begin took command of the organization, and in February 1944 he proclaimed a revolt against British rule, arguing that Britain's wartime restrictions on Jewish immigration, imposed while European Jews were being exterminated, had forfeited its legitimacy ^[4]. Under his direction the Irgun attacked British administrative and military targets. The most notorious operation came in July 1946, when the Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, headquarters of the British administration, killing 91 people ^[4]. Begin maintained that warnings had been telephoned in advance; the episode remained a source of controversy for the rest of his life.

The British placed a large reward on his head, and he lived in hiding under assumed identities in Tel Aviv for years. He evaded capture until the British withdrew in May 1948 ^[2]. After Israel declared independence, the new government under David Ben-Gurion moved to absorb all armed groups into a single national army. The confrontation came to a head in June 1948 over the Altalena, a ship carrying arms for the Irgun. Ben-Gurion ordered the ship shelled off the Tel Aviv shore, and sixteen Irgun men were killed. Begin, who was aboard, ordered his followers not to retaliate, a decision widely credited with preventing civil war ^[5].

With the Irgun dissolved, Begin founded the Herut (Freedom) party and entered the first Knesset in 1949. For almost thirty years he led the opposition, losing eight consecutive elections while Ben-Gurion refused even to address him by name in parliament ^[1]. He built Herut into a broader alliance, Gahal, in 1965, and served in the national unity government formed on the eve of the Six-Day War in 1967, his first taste of cabinet office. In 1973 the alliance widened again to become the Likud ^[5].

The election of May 17, 1977, transformed Israeli politics. Likud defeated the Labor alignment, which had governed in one form or another since independence, and Israelis came to call the result the Mahapach, the upheaval ^[1]. Begin's victory rested on more than Labor's corruption scandals and the trauma of the 1973 war. He had built a durable bond with Mizrahi Jews, immigrants from Middle Eastern and North African countries and their children, many of whom felt patronized by the Labor establishment and responded to Begin's traditionalism, his formal courtesy, and his unapologetic Jewish nationalism ^[6].

On June 20, 1977, he was sworn in as Israel's sixth Prime Minister. Observers abroad, who knew him mainly as the former Irgun commander, expected confrontation. His government did accelerate settlement construction in the West Bank, territory he called by the biblical names Judea and Samaria and regarded as part of the Jewish homeland by right ^[6]. Yet within months of taking office he was engaged in the most far-reaching peace diplomacy in Israel's history ^[7].

Any honest account of Menachem Begin achievements starts in November 1977, when Egyptian President Anwar Sadat accepted Begin's invitation and flew to Jerusalem, the first visit by an Arab head of state to Israel. Sadat addressed the Knesset, and the two governments opened direct negotiations ^[7]. The talks nearly collapsed several times before President Jimmy Carter convened both leaders at Camp David in September 1978. Thirteen days of bargaining produced the Camp David Accords, a framework under which Israel agreed to withdraw fully from the Sinai Peninsula, captured in 1967, in exchange for peace and normal relations ^[7].

Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for the accords ^[8]. The formal Egypt-Israel peace treaty followed on March 26, 1979, signed on the White House lawn. It was the first peace treaty between Israel and any Arab state, and it has held ever since. Carrying it out demanded real political cost from Begin: the Sinai withdrawal meant dismantling Israeli settlements, including the town of Yamit, evacuated in April 1982 over bitter protest from parts of his own camp ^[7].

Other decisions of his premiership were more contested. In June 1981 he ordered the air strike that destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor near Baghdad, an operation condemned internationally at the time and later cited by supporters as the model of preventive action against nuclear proliferation ^[5]. His government also formally extended Israeli law to the Golan Heights in December 1981. Domestically, Begin championed Project Renewal, a program pairing diaspora Jewish communities with distressed Israeli neighborhoods to fund housing and social services, part of his effort to lift the towns and districts where his Mizrahi base lived ^[6].

Begin married Aliza Arnold in Drohobycz in May 1939, shortly before the war scattered Polish Jewry. She followed him through the underground years, when he lived under false names, and remained his closest confidante for over four decades. The couple had three children: a son, Ze'ev Binyamin (Benny) Begin, who later became a Likud politician and cabinet minister, and two daughters, Hassia and Leah ^[2].

His personal habits set him apart from Israel's founding elite. He lived modestly in a small Tel Aviv apartment for most of his career and kept the same frugality as Prime Minister. Though not strictly observant, he was respectful of Jewish religious tradition in a way rare among his generation of Zionist leaders, quoting scripture readily and keeping a kosher official residence ^[1]. Colleagues and adversaries alike noted his old-world manners, his insistence on formal dress, and his devotion to Aliza. Her death in November 1982, while he was on an official visit to the United States, devastated him and accelerated his withdrawal from public life ^[3].

The final chapter of Begin's premiership was dominated by Lebanon. In June 1982, after years of cross-border attacks and an assassination attempt on Israel's ambassador in London, his government launched Operation Peace for Galilee, an invasion of southern Lebanon aimed at destroying the Palestine Liberation Organization's military infrastructure ^[5]. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon pushed the campaign far beyond the limited operation initially described, besieging Beirut. In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militiamen massacred Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps, which were under Israeli military control of the surrounding area. An Israeli commission of inquiry, the Kahan Commission, found indirect Israeli responsibility and forced Sharon from the defense ministry ^[9].

The war's mounting casualties, weekly protests outside his residence, a deep economic crisis with soaring inflation, and grief over Aliza's death wore Begin down. Visitors described a man who had gone silent, a stark change in a leader famous for his oratory. In August 1983 he told his cabinet simply that he could not go on, and he resigned in September, succeeded by Yitzhak Shamir ^[1].

He spent his last nine years in near-total seclusion in his Jerusalem apartment, seeing family and a few old comrades, leaving mainly for memorial visits to his wife's grave. He declined almost all interviews and public appearances. Menachem Begin died of a heart attack in Tel Aviv on March 9, 1992, at the age of 78. At his request he was buried not among Israel's leaders on Mount Herzl but on the Mount of Olives, beside Aliza and near two Irgun fighters who had taken their own lives in a British prison rather than face the gallows ^[3].

Few careers in Israeli history invite such divided judgment, which is why any Menachem Begin biography must hold opposites together: the underground commander condemned as a terrorist by the British, and the statesman who signed the first Arab-Israeli peace treaty and shared a Nobel Peace Prize ^[8]. His decision on the Altalena not to fire on fellow Jews, and his decades of accepting electoral defeat while insisting on parliamentary rules, gave him a reputation as a democrat even among critics of his policies ^[5].

His political legacy endures in concrete ways. The Likud he assembled has been the dominant force in Israeli politics for most of the period since 1977, and the coalition he forged with Mizrahi voters redrew the country's electoral map for generations ^[6]. The peace with Egypt removed Israel's largest Arab adversary from the cycle of wars, while the settlement expansion he authorized in the West Bank continues to shape the conflict with the Palestinians. The Lebanon war and Sabra and Shatila remain lasting stains in the view of his detractors ^[9].

Israel commemorates him extensively. The Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, established by law in 1998, houses a museum and research institute devoted to his life, and streets, interchanges, and public buildings across the country bear his name ^[10]. Historians continue to argue over the balance of his record, but on the basic Menachem Begin facts there is little dispute: a refugee from a destroyed European Jewry who fought an empire, waited out eight election defeats, and then, in power, traded land for the first peace his country had ever known ^[8].