Remembering Menachem Begin
erman, were among the Zionist pioneers in Brest at a to achieve? He obstinately argued with his inquisitors
time when the movement was still fighting for recog- in a constant, private act of self-heroism and hadar,
nition. After the death of Theodor Herzl [the father of the dignity and pride that would later inspire his pol-
political Zionism] in 1904, Ze'ev Dov and Sheinerman itics in Israel.
broke down the door of the main synagogue with an
In 1942, Mr. Begin and other Polish prisoners in the
axe, when the rabbi...refused to let them hold a memo- Gulag were freed to join an army of Poles that was be-
rial service and took home the key."
ing formed to fight the Germans. He enlisted with a
From his father, states Mr. Silver, young Begin group heading to Palestine, where he promptly de-
absorbed the "allusions of pride and martyrdom" that serted and joined the Irgun, which, undeterred by the
he invoked throughout his life. And from Vladimir war, was fighting the British. By December, 1943, Mr.
Jabotinsky, the father of Revisionist Zionism, came Begin became commander of the Irgun, which soon
"an ideological and organizational framework, the ex- intensified its assaults on English military installa-
citement of a cosmopolitan intellect, a rhetorical mod- tions in Palestine.
el, a hero to be worshipped."
The Irgun committed its most spectacular opera-
Mr. Jabotinsky was among the more strident of tion on July 22, 1946, when saboteurs left milk cans
the early political Zionists. He envisioned no compro- packed with explosives in Jerusalem's King David Ho-
mise between Jews and Arabs over Palestine, and tel, a wing of which housed government offices and
he vowed to answer Arab resistance with "an iron the headquarters of the British Mandate's criminal
investigation unit. The explosion killed 91 British,
wall of Jewish bayonets."
Menachem Begin made his first public speech at Arabs and Jews and injured 45 others.
the age of 13 at a Lag B'omer Zionist festival. Within
As controversial as was the King David bombing,
a few years, he was a regular speaker at the annual the uproar over it was exceeded two years later by an
memorial meetings for Herzl and at rallies for Be- Irgun operation at Deir Yassin, an Arab village along
tar, the Jabotinsky-influenced, militaristic Zionist the northwestern rim of Jerusalem. The Jewish mili-
youth movement. Betar members drilled and wore tia attacked the village at dawn. Once the initial Arab
uniforms and, by 1939, largely due to Mr. Begin's ef- resistance was quelled, the invaders reportedly
swooped into the village. What followed has been sub-
forts, numbered 70,000 in Poland.
Soon, Mr. Begin's militarism exceeded even that of ject to varying reports.
The worst say the Jews knifed and machine-gunned
Mr. Jabotinsky: In 1935, Mr. Begin publicly chided
Mr. Jabotinsky for trying to make peace with the more old men, women and children. Some say women were
raped, then killed. One account claims that up to 25
moderate David Ben-Gurion.
`You may have forgotten," Mr. Begin said, "that Arab men were executed in a nearby quarry. What
Ben-Gurion once called you, 'Vladimir Hitler,' but we seems indisputable is that the Arab toll eventually
neared 250, and that the Irgun had run amok in the
have a better memory."
At Betar's 1938 world congress, Mr. Begin sided village, indiscriminately killing unarmed civilians
For decades after the raid on Deir Yassin, Mr. Be-
with the Irgun, the Jewish military group in Palestine
gin maintained that it had been a conventional mili-
that advocated retaliation for Arab attacks on Jews.
"The conscience of the world has ceased to react," tary operation in which his men had maintained
he said, "the League of Nations has lost its values. Our discipline and observed the Jewish ethics with which
British partner leads us to the gallows, imprisons they had been raised.
Robert 0. Freedman, a professor of history at Bal-
the finest of our nation."
But Mr. Jabotinsky, who assumed the West would timore Hebrew University, rebuffed claims that Mr.
provide a haven in Palestine for the Jews of Europe, Begin had been a "terrorist" while heading the Irgun.
retorted that if this was how Mr. Begin felt, he might The Zionist, said Prof. Freedman, had "tried to limit
as well drown himself. Relations between mentor and the Irgun's activities to the British. As for Deir Yassin,
it was a village paiticipating in the strangle-hold on
disciple were never the same again.
In September 1939, Nazi Germany invaded Poland, Jerusalem in 1948. Reports are that the Irgun urged
and several Betar leaders, including Mr. Begin, es- women and children to leave before the fighting start-
caped to Lithuania. This left Betar the only mass move- ed."
ment of Polish Zionists facing the Final Solution
without its leaders. Yehuda Bauer, perhaps Israel's
enachem Begin's truculence continued long af-
foremost historian of the Holocaust, has claimed that
ter Israel was founded. An incident that Prof.
Mr. Begin's guilt over his having left Poland was the
Freedman called "disgusting" and "proto-fas-
seed of his "Holocaust complex," and of his later ten-
dency to invoke the Holocaust as a rationale for many cist" occurred in early 1952 during the debate over
whether Israel, then in desperate financial straits,
of his policies while prime minister.
Shortly after the Soviets, who were no friend of Zion- should accept funds from Germany to help it absorb
ists, invaded eastern Lithuania, Mr. Begin was ar- hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived the
rested and eventually sent to a Siberian labor camp. Nazi terror.
Of all the political factions opposed to dealing with
In White Nights, he explained that he withstood in-
terrogation and brainwashing attempts by treating the Germans, Herut, the party then headed by Mr.
the entire experience as an intellectual exercise: How Begin, was most vehement. On Jan. 7, he led about
did the system work? What did the interrogator want 15,000 demonstrators against the Knesset building.
`I Cannot Go On '
M
THE DETROIT JEWISH NEWS
37