Menachem Wolfovich Begin

Mieczysław Biegun, August 16, 1913 – March 9, 1992) was an Israeli politician, Nobel Peace Prize laureate and the first Likud Prime Minister of Israel. Prior to the organization's dissolution at the founding of the State of Israel, he was also head of the Zionist underground group Irgun.

Begin’s legacy is highly controversial and divisive. As the leader of Irgun, Begin played a central role in Jewish military resistance to the British Mandate of Palestine, but was strongly deplored and consequently sidelined by the mainstream Zionist leadership. Suffering eight consecutive defeats in the years preceding his premiership, Begin came to embody the opposition to the Ashkenazi Mapai-led Israeli establishment. His electoral victory in 1977 not only brought to an end three decades of Labor Party political hegemony, but also symbolised a new social realignment in which hitherto marginalized communities gained public recognition. However, the extent to which this symbolic change was translated into government policy remains highly debatable.

Begin’s first significant achievement as Prime Minister was to negotiate the Camp David Accords with President Sadat of Egypt, agreeing to withdraw Israel Defense Forces from the Sinai Peninsula and to return it to Egypt in 1978. In the years to follow, however, Begin’s government was to reclaim a nationalist agenda, promoting the expansion of Israeli settlements in the Israeli-occupied territories. As retaliation to attacks from the north, he authorized the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, igniting the 1982 Lebanon War. As Israeli military involvement in Lebanon deepened, and the Sabra and Shatila massacre shocked world public opinion,[1] Begin grew increasingly isolated,[2] losing his grip on IDF forces in Lebanon as the economy sputtered into hyperinflation. Mounting public pressure, exacerbated by the death of his wife Aliza in November 1982, increased his withdrawal from public life, until his resignation in September 1983.

Early life

Menachem Begin was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family of timber merchants in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno Governorate ("Brisk"), a town famous for Talmudic scholars, including Rabbi Chaim Soloveitchik. On his mother's side he was descended from a venerable rabbinical family. Brisk was at this time a part of the Russian Empire. Between the World Wars, the town was located in the Eastern Borderlands of the Second Polish Republic. It currently lies within the western boundary of Belarus. His father was a community leader, an ardent Zionist, and an admirer of Theodor Herzl. Both of Begin's parents perished in the Holocaust. His elementary education was at a Mizrachi school, where for seven years he received a traditional Yeshivah education. At age 12 he joined the Zionist Hashomer Hatzair. Due to straitened circumstances, at age 14 he was sent to a Polish government school, where he was instructed in secular subjects.

From his primary education he retained a life-long private commitment to Jewish observance and Torah study and maintained consistently good relations with Haredi rabbis, going so far as to adopt a Haredi guise under the alias "Rabbi Yisrael Sassover" when hiding from the British in Palestine as leader of the Irgun.[citation needed]) From his secondary education, though in an antisemitic environment,[3] he received a solid grounding in classical literature, and gained a lifelong love of classical works, which he was able to read in Latin, such as Virgil's Aeneid.

Begin began studying law at the University of Warsaw, and was deeply impressed by the training in oratory and rhetoric, skills that left their mark on Begin; his oratorical skills were much noted many years later in Israel. He graduated in 1935, but never practiced the profession. In these same years he became a key disciple of Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, the founder of the militant, nationalist Revisionist Zionism movement and its Betar youth wing. His rise within Betar was rapid: in the same year he graduated, at age 22, he shared the dais with his mentor during Betar's World Congress in Krakow. In 1937 he was the active head of Betar in Czechoslovakia and Poland, leaving just prior to the German invasion of that country.

In September of 1939 after Germany invaded Poland, Begin managed to escape the Nazi round-up of Polish Jews by escaping to Wilno, then located in eastern Poland. The town was shortly to be occupied by the Soviet Union, but from the 28th of October 1939, it was the capital of the Republic of Lithuania. Wilno was at that time a largely Jewish town; an estimated 40% of the population was Jewish, and the YIVO institute was located there. Wilno's period of relative safety from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union did not last long. On June 15, 1940 the Soviet Union invaded Lithuania. Mass persecution of the Polish and Polish Jews began. An estimated 120,000 people were arrested by the NKVD and deported to Siberia. Thousands were executed with or without trial.


On September 20, 1940 Begin was arrested by the NKVD. Ironically, he was accused of being an "agent of British imperialism" and sentenced to 8 years in the Soviet gulag camps of Siberia. On June 1, 1941 he was sent to the Pechora labor camps, where he lived until May 1942. Much later in life, Begin would record and reflect upon his experiences in Siberia in great detail in a series of autobiographical works.

In June of 1941, just after Nazi Germany attacked its former allies (the Soviet Union), and following his release under the Sikorski-Mayski Agreement, Begin joined the Polish Army of Anders. He was later sent with the army to Palestine via the Persian Corridor, just as the Germans were advancing into the heart of Russia. Upon arrival in August 1942, he received a proposal to take over a position in the Irgun, as Betar's Commissioner. He declined the invitation because he felt himself honour-bound to abide by his oath as a soldier and not to desert the Polish army, where he worked as an English translator. Begin was subsequently released from the Polish Army after the Irgun intervened unofficially on his behalf with senior Polish army officers[citation needed]. He then joined the Jewish national movement in the British Mandate of Palestine.