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As prime minister, Menachem Begin was
heralded for making peace with Egypt and
chastised for making war with Lebanon.

Menachem Begin, Soldier For Peace

In death, the former prime minister is admired for his steadfastness
in the face of opposition.

enachem Begin's
public life ended in
September 1983,
when, saddened by
the death of his wife
and disillusioned by
Israel's war in
Lebanon the previous year, he stepped
down as prime minister. At the time he
said simply, "I cannot go on."
He died a recluse at the age of 78, in
March, and was eulogized as a peace-
maker, though he was known through
much of his life as a man of the sword.
In many ways his life characterized
the 20th century Jew, whose world view
was forged in the fires of the Holocaust
and who came to see the State of Israel
as the last and only hope of the Jewish
people.
Most of Mr. Begin's family was killed
in the Holocaust. A Polish Jew, he be-
came a young and avid follower of
Vladimir Jabotinsky, the father of Re-
visionist Zionism who envisioned no
compromise between Jews and Arabs

M

over Palestine. Jabotinsky vowed to an-
swer Arab resistance with "an iron wall
of Jewish bayonets."
A fiery and charismatic speaker in his
own right, Mr. Begin led Betar, the mil-
itaristic Zionist youth movement, es-
caping from Poland to Lithuania when
the Nazis invaded in 1939. Though he
was arrested and imprisoned by the So-
viets, some say that his "Holocaust com-
plex" — a tendency to invoke the tragedy
as a rationale for many of his policies —
came about because of his guilt over flee-
ing Poland.
In 1942, having survived a Siberian
labor camp, Mr. Begin was freed to join
an army of Poles being formed to fight
the Nazis. He enlisted with a group
headed to Palestine, where he deserted
and joined the Irgun, the Jewish mili-
tary group that was, despite the world
war, fighting the British.
A year later Mr. Begin became com-
mander of the Irgun, whose most dra-
matic operation was the July 1946
bombing of British offices in the King

David Hotel in Jerusalem. The explo-
sion killed 91 British, Arabs and Jews,
and wounded 45 others.
Two years later, a bloody Irgun oper-
ation at Deir Yassin, an Arab village
near Jerusalem, resulted in charges that
Jews massacred Arab civilians, though
Mr. Begin, labeled a terrorist by many,
maintained that it was a conventional
military procedure.
Even after statehood, Mr. Begin was
the leader and spokesman for the op-
position, calling for Israel to take a more
militant stand toward the Arabs and to
fulfill the Biblical command to inhabit
all of the land of Israel.
In 1977, after decades in the political
wilderness, his Likud party was victo-
rious in national elections and Men-
achem Begin, the perennial outcast,
became prime minister. His six years in
office were marked by a commitment to
establish settlements in the West Bank
and Golan, the ill-fated war in Lebanon,
and, of course, the 1979 peace treaty
with Egypt, which remains the model

for current Arab-Israel negotiations.
But perhaps the act most symbolic of
Mr. Begin's personality was his 1981 de-
cision to send Israeli airplanes to destroy
a nuclear reactor nearing completion in
Iraq. Israel's successful mission was
condemned by the United States and
the United Nations but was recalled
more respectfully a decade later when
Iraq provoked the Persian Gulf war.
Mr. Begin felt vindicated by his ac-
tions, in which he invoked the Holocaust
and his commitment to protect his peo-
ple. He did not care about world reac-
tion, only about the Jewish people. Right
or wrong, he stood up for his embattled
beliefs, whether that meant making war,
or peace.