Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (16 August 1913 to 9 March 1992) commanded the Irgun underground against British rule in Mandatory Palestine, spent 29 years as Israel’s opposition leader, then won the 1977 election that broke Labor Zionism’s monopoly on power, signed the first peace treaty between Israel and an Arab state, and shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize with Egypt’s Anwar Sadat. He is also the Israeli prime minister most associated with a war that went wrong: the 1982 Lebanon invasion he authorized ended in the Sabra and Shatila massacre committed by Israel’s Lebanese Christian allies, a disaster an Israeli commission found him indirectly responsible for failing to prevent, and one he never recovered from politically or personally.

Who he was

Begin was born Mieczysław Biegun in Brest-Litovsk, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, to a Zionist family; his father was murdered by German soldiers in 1941 and his mother and brother died in the Holocaust. As a teenager he joined Zeev Jabotinsky’s Betar youth movement and became a committed Revisionist Zionist, the wing of the movement that rejected gradualism and demanded a Jewish state on both banks of the Jordan. Arrested by Soviet authorities in 1940 and sent to a Siberian labor camp, he was released under the 1941 Anders Agreement, joined the Polish army in exile, and reached British Mandatory Palestine in 1942, where he took command of the Irgun (Irgun Zvai Leumi) in 1943.

What the Irgun did under his command

Begin led the Irgun’s armed revolt against the British Mandate from 1944 to 1948, a campaign of bombings and raids aimed at forcing Britain out of Palestine. The most consequential operation was the 22 July 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the British Mandate’s civil and military headquarters; the Irgun phoned in warnings that were not acted on in time, and 91 people were killed. In April 1948, Irgun and Lehi fighters, operating alongside but not fully coordinated with the mainstream Haganah, attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin near Jerusalem; the death toll, contested at the time and since, is now generally put at just over 100, well below the 254 claimed by Arab propaganda within days of the attack. Honest history concedes this was a real atrocity that Begin’s forces bear direct responsibility for, whatever the surrounding wartime chaos and disputed casualty figures.

The Altalena and the birth of the state

Weeks after Israel’s founding, the Altalena affair tested whether the new state would tolerate an armed faction outside its own army. The Irgun ship Altalena arrived off Tel Aviv in June 1948 carrying weapons and fighters; when negotiations over handing the cargo to the new Israel Defense Forces broke down, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered Yitzhak Rabin’s unit to shell the ship rather than allow a private militia to operate independently. Begin, aboard the Altalena, ordered his men not to fire back and to avoid civil war, a restraint that cost him politically among his own followers but that he later cited as proof of his democratic commitment. He then folded the Irgun into civilian politics, founding the Herut party in 1948.

Twenty-nine years in opposition, then power

Herut and its successor coalitions spent nearly three decades as Israel’s permanent opposition, a period Begin used to build the political movement that became Likud in 1973. On 17 May 1977, in an upset Israelis still call the “mahapach” (the upheaval), Begin’s bloc defeated the Labor Alignment that had governed the country since independence, ending 29 years of single-party dominance and making him Israel’s sixth prime minister.

Camp David and the price of peace

Begin’s defining achievement came fast. In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic trip to Jerusalem, and in September 1978 he and Begin met at the US presidential retreat at Camp David with President Jimmy Carter mediating. The talks produced two framework agreements, and on 26 March 1979 Israel and Egypt signed a full peace treaty, the first between Israel and any Arab state. Begin agreed to return the entire Sinai Peninsula, captured in the Six-Day War, including the settlements Israel had built there, a wrenching concession from the leader of Israel’s territorial-maximalist right. Begin and Sadat shared the Nobel Peace Prize in October 1978. Begin’s government also pursued the reverse instinct in the same years, annexing the Golan Heights in 1981 and formally applying Israeli law to East Jerusalem, moves that drew international condemnation but that he never treated as contradicting the peace with Egypt.

Lebanon and Sabra and Shatila, answered in full

In June 1982 Begin’s government launched what became the First Lebanon War, publicly framed as a limited strike to clear PLO rocket and terror infrastructure from southern Lebanon but which expanded, under Defense Minister Moshe Dayan’s successor Ariel Sharon, into a siege of Beirut. In September 1982, after the assassination of Lebanon’s president-elect, Israel’s Christian Phalangist allies entered the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps and massacred hundreds of Palestinian civilians while Israeli forces controlled the perimeter. Israel’s own Kahan Commission of Inquiry, convened under domestic and international pressure, found in February 1983 that Begin bore indirect personal responsibility for not anticipating the risk of Phalangist violence and failing to act once reports of a massacre reached him; his defense minister Sharon was found to bear direct responsibility and forced to resign. Begin never fully answered the findings publicly, but his government did not need him to: it opened its own inquiry into its own prime minister’s failure, named the massacre’s actual perpetrators as the Phalangist militia that carried it out, and forced the resignation of the minister it held directly responsible, a public accounting Begin’s enemies in the region have never subjected themselves to. Compounding the crisis, his wife Aliza died in November 1982 while he was in Washington; grief, the mounting Israeli casualties in Lebanon, and the commission’s findings together broke him. He resigned as prime minister on 15 September 1983, reportedly telling aides only “I cannot go on,” and withdrew almost entirely from public life for his remaining nine years, rarely appearing even at his own party’s events. He died on 9 March 1992 and, by his own request, was buried in a simple grave on the Mount of Olives among Irgun comrades rather than beside Israel’s other prime ministers on Mount Herzl.

Legacy

Begin remains the founding figure of Israel’s modern political right, the man who proved an alternative to Labor Zionism could govern, and the leader who traded hard-won land for a peace with Egypt that has held, imperfectly, for more than four decades. He is also inseparable from the record of the movement he led: the King David Hotel, Deir Yassin, and Sabra and Shatila are cited by critics as the throughline of his career, while supporters point to his restraint at the Altalena, his adherence to parliamentary norms once in power, and the treaty with Sadat as proof the same man who fought as an underground commander became a democratic statesman. Both readings draw on real events, and the record does not need to flatten either one to render its verdict: a man who built an underground army, held fire when a shooting war with fellow Jews was one order away, dismantled his own life’s work rather than let it become an excuse for chaos, and still cashed that same restraint in for a peace treaty with Egypt that has outlasted him by more than three decades.