Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (16 August 1913 – 9 March 1992) was a Jewish terrorist, mass murderer and an Israeli politician. Begin was Prime Minister from 1977 to 1983, as well as Foreign Minister (1979–1980) and Defense Minister (1980–1981) of Israel. Begin was a leading representative of Revisionist Zionism.

Life

NKVD mugshots of Menachem Begin in 1940

The British administrative headquarters for Mandatory Palestine, housed in the southern wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, were bombed in a terrorist attack on 22 July 1946 by Irgun during the Jewish insurgency. 91 dead. A dozen of the slain were women. Serving military personnel accounted for 13 of the fatalities. More than two-thirds of the Secretariat's entire staff was either killed or wounded.

Begin was born as Mieczysław Biegun in Brest (then the Russian Empire, now Belarus). His father was secretary of the local Jewish community, and his mother came from an Orthodox family of rabbis. Menachem went to a Mizrachi school and then attended a Polish high school.

Zionist activities

Since 1929 he was a member of the revisionist-Zionist Betar movement under the leadership of Vladimir Jabotinsky, which represented maximum and uncompromising demands with regard to the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz Israel. It was intended to include not only the then British mandated territory of Palestine west of the Jordan, but also Transjordan. Begin studied law at the University of Warsaw and at the same time rose to leading positions in Betar.

From 1936 to 1938 he was general secretary of the Czechoslovak Betar branch and in 1939 he became head of the Polish Betar. After the start of the German Poland Campaign, he fled from the advancing Germans to Vilna, which was under Soviet occupation after the Red Army invaded. Begin was imprisoned there and sentenced to eight years of forced labor in a penal camp in Vorkuta, Siberia, as an “agent of British imperialism”.

Polish corporal

He was released as a Polish citizen in 1941 after the German Operation Barbarossa and the signing of the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement and joined the Polish Armed Forces in the Soviet Union under the command of General Władysław Anders. In 1942, with the rank of corporal, Begin was transferred with the Polish army to Iran and later to Palestine. He came to the country in 1942, where he quit service in the Anders Army and joined the Zionist underground paramilitary organization Irgun Zwai Leumi (also known as Etzel), which used terrorist means to fight against the British mandate and Arab Palestinians.

Terror

As of 1943, Begin was the murderous leader of the Zionist terrorist organization Irgun, from which the notorious Stern Gang terrorists under Avraham Stern had split in 1940. These terrorist groups were instrumental in the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Palestinians.

On July 22, 1946 six members of the Irgun, a Jewish underground group headed by future Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, entered the basement of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel and planted seven milk churns filled with explosives underneath the wing housing the headquarters of the British Mandatory Government of Palestine. The ensuing explosion killed ninety-one Britons, Arabs, and Jews, in roughly equal numbers, at the time the greatest death toll in any single act of terrorism. The bombing was a pivotal moment in Israeli and Palestinian history, and was one of several dramatic attacks that eventually persuaded the British to leave Palestine.

Begin was head of the Irgun when on 22 July 1946 they blew up the five-story wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem which housed the offices of much of the British Palestine Administration. Over 90 British, Arabs and Jews lost their lives with three times that seriously wounded and mutilated. Sir John Shaw, Chief Secretary of the Palestine Government wrote:

I lost nearly 100 of my best officers and old friends....I helped to dig out their stinking putrefying bodies and I attended 14 funerals in three days. In these circumstances I find the niceties and refinements of political argument and discussion rather hard to digest [...]

Begin had hidden for several days in a secret compartment in his house in Tel Aviv, thus escaping the British Army as they systematically searched every house in the city in search of the bombers. This attack resulted in Dorothy Thompson becoming a staunch anti-Zionist, many more should follow.

At the events to mark the 60th anniversary of the attack, Benjamin Netanyahu, then chairman of Likud and Leader of the Opposition in the Knesset, opined that the bombing was a legitimate act with a military target, distinguishing it from an act of terror intended to harm civilians.

Politics

Begin was founder of the Likud party, and the sixth Prime Minister of Israel between 1977 and 1983. He signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979, for which he shared the Nobel Prize for Peace, presumably nominated by his friends.