Brest-Litovsk
Menachem Begin was born on August 16, 1913, in Brest-Litovsk, then in the Russian Empire, later Poland, and today Brest in Belarus. He was the youngest of three children of Ze’ev Dov Begin, a timber merchant, community leader and ardent admirer of Theodor Herzl, and Hassia, who came from a line of distinguished rabbis. As a small child he and his family fled the fighting between German and Russian armies in the First World War.
He was educated at a religious Zionist Hebrew school and then at a Polish state gymnasium, where he received a solid classical grounding. Like many Jewish children in his town he belonged to the socialist-Zionist scouts of Hashomer Hatzair until he was thirteen; at sixteen he joined Betar, the youth movement of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism, which preached Jewish self-defence, military discipline and a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan.
Jabotinsky’s disciple
Begin studied law at the University of Warsaw, graduating in 1935, though he never practised. There he organised Jewish students to defend themselves against antisemitic harassment on campus and honed the oratory that would make him famous, and that critics would later call demagogic. He rose quickly in Betar: he was sent to lead the movement in Czechoslovakia, returned to Poland in 1937, was briefly jailed there for leading a protest outside the British legation against British policy in Palestine, and in 1939 became head of Betar in Poland, its largest branch, organising illegal immigration to Palestine. In May 1939 he married Aliza Arnold, the daughter of a Betar host; they had three children, Binyamin, Leah and Hassia.
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Begin fled east to Wilno. In 1940 he was arrested by the Soviet NKVD as an “agent of British imperialism” interrogated, and sentenced to eight years in the Gulag; he was sent to the Pechora labour camps in the far north. He later described the experience in his memoir White Nights. Released in 1941 under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement as a Polish citizen, he joined the Free Polish army of General Anders and reached Palestine with it in 1942. His father, mother and elder brother were murdered in the Holocaust; his father was among thousands of Brest Jews shot or drowned by the Nazis in 1941.
The revolt
In Palestine Begin left the Polish army and in 1943 took command of the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Revisionist underground. On February 1, 1944, the Irgun proclaimed a revolt against British rule, arguing that Britain had betrayed the Balfour Declaration and that its 1939 White Paper had shut the doors of Palestine as Europe’s Jews were being exterminated. The official Jewish leadership, the Jewish Agency and its militia, the Haganah, opposed the revolt, and in 1944–45 the Haganah handed Irgun members to the British during the so-called Hunting Season. Begin ordered his men not to retaliate, determined to avoid a Jewish civil war.
The Irgun’s campaign included bombings of government offices and police stations, the 1947 Acre prison break and, most notoriously, the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946, where the southern wing housed the British administration and military headquarters. Ninety-one people, Britons, Arabs and Jews, were killed. The Irgun said it had telephoned warnings; the British government said no warning had reached anyone able to act on it, and the timing and adequacy of the warnings remain disputed. The operation had initially been approved by the Haganah, which had withdrawn its approval by the time it was carried out. In 1947 the Irgun hanged two British sergeants in reprisal for the execution of Irgun members. Britain offered a £10,000 reward for Begin, who lived openly under false names, bearded, as a supposed lawyer. Britain designated the Irgun a terrorist organisation; for decades Begin rejected the label, insisting he had led a war of national liberation.
1948: Deir Yassin and the Altalena
After the UN partition vote of November 1947 the Irgun fought in the civil war against Palestinian Arab forces. Its most controversial operation, carried out with Lehi in April 1948, was the assault on the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem, in which more than a hundred villagers were killed. Begin and Irgun sources denied that a massacre had taken place; the killings were condemned at the time by the Jewish Agency and became a lasting symbol of the Palestinian Nakba.
In June 1948, weeks after independence, the Irgun ship Altalena arrived carrying arms and volunteers during a UN truce. Begin wanted part of the weapons to go to Irgun units; David Ben-Gurion’s provisional government regarded this as an army within an army and ordered the ship taken by force. The Altalena was shelled off Tel Aviv and burned; sixteen Irgun fighters and three soldiers were killed. Begin, who was aboard, ordered his followers not to fire back and prevented civil war. The episode left a lasting enmity between him and Ben-Gurion.
Three decades in opposition
In August 1948 Begin founded the Herut (Freedom) party, which won fourteen seats in the first Knesset in 1949. During his visit to the United States in late 1948, a letter in The New York Times signed by Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt and others likened Herut to fascist parties. Ben-Gurion refused to refer to him by name. In January 1952 Begin led the bitter campaign against accepting reparations from West Germany; his speech at a Jerusalem rally was followed by a riot in which demonstrators stoned the Knesset, and he was suspended from the chamber for several months.
Begin lost eight consecutive elections. Slowly he built a broader base: Herut merged with the Liberals to form Gahal in 1965, joined the national unity government on the eve of the 1967 Six-Day War, Begin’s first cabinet post, and left it in 1970 over acceptance of a US peace initiative. In 1973, with Ariel Sharon, he formed the Likud. His formal suits, Old World courtesy and open respect for Jewish tradition appealed to many Mizrahi Jews who felt slighted by the secular Labour establishment.
The upheaval and peace with Egypt
On May 17, 1977, the Likud won the election, ending nearly three decades of Labour dominance, an event Israelis still call the mahapakh, the upheaval. Begin took office on June 21. One of his first acts was to grant asylum and citizenship to sixty-six Vietnamese boat people rescued by an Israeli freighter, citing the plight of Jewish refugees turned away before the Holocaust. He surprised the world by making the Labour veteran Moshe Dayan his foreign minister.
In November 1977 Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat came to Jerusalem and addressed the Knesset. Negotiations led to the Camp David Accords of September 1978, brokered by President Jimmy Carter, and to the Egypt–Israel peace treaty signed on March 26, 1979, the first peace between Israel and an Arab state. Israel returned the entire Sinai Peninsula and evacuated its settlements there, including the town of Yamit, by 1982. Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. The treaty, which has held ever since, split Begin’s own camp: several Likud members abstained, hardliners left to form the Tehiya party, and the peace passed the Knesset with opposition votes.
Settlements, Osirak and Lebanon
Begin was far less willing to implement the Camp David framework for Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank and Gaza, which he called Judea and Samaria and regarded as part of the Land of Israel. His governments greatly expanded Jewish settlement there, a policy that critics in Israel and abroad argued was meant to make territorial compromise impossible. At home his economic liberalisation was followed by soaring inflation, while his government extended free secondary education and new social benefits. His decision to encourage the immigration of Ethiopian Jews prepared the way for the airlifts of the 1980s.
On June 7, 1981, he ordered the destruction of Iraq’s Osirak nuclear reactor, declaring that Israel would not allow an enemy to develop weapons of mass destruction, the “Begin Doctrine.” The UN Security Council unanimously condemned the strike. In June 1982 his government invaded Lebanon to drive out the PLO. The war went far beyond its stated forty-kilometre limit to Beirut, and in September Christian Phalangist militiamen allied with Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinians and Lebanese in the Sabra and Shatila camps. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis protested. The Kahan Commission found Israeli leaders indirectly responsible and Defence Minister Sharon personally responsible.
Withdrawal and legacy
Aliza Begin died in November 1982 while her husband was in the United States. Grieving, unwell and burdened by mounting casualties in Lebanon, Begin told his cabinet in 1983 that he could not go on, and in October handed office to Yitzhak Shamir. He spent his last years in near seclusion, reading, watching films, and visiting his wife’s grave. He died in Tel Aviv on March 9, 1992, aged seventy-eight. At his request he received a simple Jewish burial, not a state funeral, on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, beside Aliza and two underground fighters who had taken their own lives in a British prison; tens of thousands attended.
Begin’s legacy is fiercely argued. To admirers he was a democrat of rare integrity who, though a former underground commander, accepted the authority of the state, deepened Israel’s democracy by bringing excluded communities into power, and made a lasting peace with Egypt. To critics he led an organisation responsible for attacks that killed civilians, entrenched the occupation through settlement, and launched a war in Lebanon whose costs haunted Israel for decades. Both views describe the same man: a son of Polish Jewry, shaped by the Holocaust, who saw his life as a struggle to ensure that Jews would never again be defenceless.
Sources & further reading
Menachem Begin, Wikipedia · Menachem Begin, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Menachem Begin, Nobel Lecture, NobelPrize.org · Menachem Begin, Jewish Virtual Library · King David Hotel bombing, Wikipedia · Vietnamese refugees in Israel, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
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