Menachem Begin: From Underground Fighter to Peacemaker

The Fighting Jew

Few lives in the twentieth century contained as many dramatic reversals as that of Menachem Begin. He was a wanted man who became a head of state. A militant who made peace. A Nobel laureate who died in silence and seclusion. His life traced the arc of modern Israel — from underground resistance to statehood, from war to peace, from triumph to heartbreak.

He was also, in a way that his rivals never fully understood, a deeply emotional man. He wept in public. He quoted the Bible in Knesset debates. He wore suits and ties when other Israeli leaders wore open collars. He was formal, proud, traumatized, brilliant, stubborn, and, at the end, broken.

Brest-Litovsk

Menachem Wolfovitch Begin was born on August 16, 1913, in Brest-Litovsk (now Brest, Belarus), then part of the Russian Empire. His father, Ze’ev Dov Begin, was a timber merchant and an ardent Zionist. The family was middle-class, religious, and deeply committed to the idea of a Jewish homeland.

Growing up in interwar Poland, Begin experienced antisemitism firsthand. Jewish students at his gymnasium were beaten. Polish nationalism grew increasingly exclusionary. Begin joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky, and rose quickly through its ranks. By his early twenties, he was the head of Betar in Poland — commanding 70,000 members.

Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism was maximalist: it demanded a Jewish state on both sides of the Jordan River and rejected the gradualism and diplomatic caution of the mainstream Zionist leadership under David Ben-Gurion. Begin absorbed this ideology completely. It would define his politics for life.

When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Begin fled east. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police (NKVD) in 1940 and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp in Siberia for “Zionist subversion.” He spent over a year in the camps before being released in 1941 under an amnesty for Polish citizens. He made his way through Central Asia, Iran, and Iraq, arriving in Palestine in 1942 as a soldier in the Polish army-in-exile.

Commander of the Irgun

In 1943, Begin was appointed commander of the Irgun Zvai Leumi (National Military Organization) — a paramilitary group that rejected the mainstream Jewish leadership’s policy of cooperation with the British. Under Begin’s command, the Irgun declared an armed revolt against British rule in February 1944.

The most famous — and most controversial — Irgun operation was the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. The hotel housed the British military command and the Criminal Investigation Department. The bombing killed ninety-one people — British, Arab, and Jewish. Begin later insisted that warnings had been given and ignored; the British denied receiving adequate warning. The attack remains one of the most debated events in the history of the conflict.

The British put a price on Begin’s head and launched a massive manhunt. He evaded capture by disguising himself as a rabbi and living in plain sight in Tel Aviv. The underground years forged his self-image: he was “the fighting Jew” — the antithesis of the passive, victimized Jew of the diaspora. This self-image, shaped by the Holocaust (his parents and brother were murdered by the Nazis), drove everything he did.

From Opposition to Power

When Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, Begin dissolved the Irgun and entered politics. He founded the Herut (Freedom) party, which represented the Revisionist Zionist tradition. For the next twenty-nine years, he led the opposition.

It was a long wilderness. Ben-Gurion refused to even say his name in the Knesset, referring to him only as “the man sitting next to Dr. Bader.” The Labor establishment treated him as a dangerous demagogue. Begin’s rhetorical style — passionate, dramatic, heavy with historical and biblical allusions — was mocked by the Ashkenazi elite as “Levantine.”

But Begin built a constituency among Mizrahi Jews — immigrants from Arab countries who felt discriminated against by the Labor establishment. He also attracted voters who rejected Labor’s socialist economics and dovish security policies. Slowly, methodically, he built a coalition.

In May 1977, Begin’s Likud party won the national election in what Israelis called the mahapach — the upheaval. For the first time in Israeli history, the Labor party lost power. Begin became prime minister.

Camp David

The mahapach was stunning enough. What followed was even more astonishing.

In November 1977, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Jerusalem — the first Arab leader to visit Israel. Begin received him with full honors and genuine emotion. The two men — the Egyptian president and the former underground commander — began negotiations that would culminate in the Camp David Accords.

In September 1978, Begin and Sadat spent twelve days at Camp David, the U.S. presidential retreat in Maryland, with President Jimmy Carter as mediator. The negotiations were grueling. Begin nearly walked out. Carter’s personal intervention was decisive.

The result: two framework agreements that led to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty of March 1979. Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula — conquered in 1967 — to Egypt. Egypt became the first Arab state to recognize Israel. Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.

For the man who had once bombed the King David Hotel, it was a transformation that seemed almost impossible. Begin made the peace not despite his militant past but, in some ways, because of it: only a leader with his hawkish credentials could have persuaded the Israeli right to accept such painful territorial concessions.

Lebanon and the Breaking

The second act of Begin’s premiership was darker. In June 1982, Israel invaded Lebanon, initially to destroy PLO bases near the northern border. What was presented as a limited operation expanded into a full-scale war. Israeli forces reached Beirut. The war dragged on. Casualties mounted.

In September 1982, Lebanese Christian militiamen entered the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila — under the watch of Israeli forces — and massacred hundreds of civilians. An Israeli commission of inquiry (the Kahan Commission) found that Israeli leaders bore indirect responsibility. Defense Minister Ariel Sharon was forced to resign.

The Lebanon War shattered Begin. The mounting death toll, the international condemnation, the Sabra and Shatila massacre — each weighed on him. When his wife Aliza died on November 13, 1982, the last anchor broke.

In October 1983, Begin resigned as prime minister. He told his cabinet simply: “I cannot go on.”

The Silent Years

Begin spent the last nine years of his life in near-total seclusion in his apartment on Zemach Street in Jerusalem. He did not give interviews. He did not attend public events. He rarely left the apartment. When old comrades came to visit, he sometimes refused to see them.

The man who had been one of the most eloquent speakers in Israeli political history fell silent. The man who had stood on platforms before cheering crowds withdrew from the world entirely. Some described it as clinical depression. Others saw it as the weight of conscience — a man who had sent soldiers to war and could not bear the result.

Menachem Begin died on March 9, 1992, at the age of seventy-eight. He was buried on the Mount of Olives, next to Aliza, according to his wishes. He had requested no state funeral and no eulogies.

The man who had fought for a Jewish state, led it, made peace, made war, and walked away from it all was laid to rest in the simplest way possible. The silence continued.