A Past That Is Certain

“We fight, therefore we are.”

—Menachem Begin, as leader of the Irgun

He was always the outsider: as a Jewish youth in Poland when the Nazis were on the march; as leader of the Jewish underground organization, the Irgun, when the Jews were fighting the British in Palestine for their own state; as the opposition leader against the dominant Labor Party for 26 long years in the Israeli Knesset. When Menachem Begin triumphantly led his right-wing Likud coalition to an upset victory in 1977, he was a stubbornly independent leader who was unlike any the young nation had ever had as Prime Minister.

From the start, Begin showed how strongly he had been influenced in his world view by the Old Testament. He began calling the occupied West Bank by its biblical names, Judea and Samaria, and turned to the prophets of old to justify what he felt was Israel’s historical claim to the territory. He espoused the sanctity of “Eretz Yisrael,” a term meaning “land of Israel” and referring to the region that in biblical times would have encompassed present-day Israel and the West Bank.

Begin’s rhetoric was more high-pitched, his images more starkly drawn than his predecessor’s. All of Israel’s older generation of statesmen had been deeply affected by the Holocaust—many in tragically personal ways, as was Begin—but Begin somehow seemed more indelibly marked by it, almost in fact to the point of obsession.

Israeli Prime Ministers David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir belonged to the mainstream of Zionism that took its impetus from socialist idealism. By contrast, Begin grew up on the teachings of Vladimir Jabotinsky, a Zionist “revisionist” who advocated a militant posture of self-defense for Jews. Begin joined Jabotinsky’s paramilitary youth organization in Poland at the age of 15, and the experience was to shape his entire life. “A new specimen of human being was born,” he wrote in his memoirs of those days, “a specimen completely unknown to the world for over 1,800 years, the fighting Jew.” After a year in Soviet prisons, Begin went to Palestine and in swift order was leading the Irgun’s violently anti-Arab and anti-British campaigns.

With the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, Begin adapted his militant views to politics. He was never a consensus seeker; he dominated his supporters by the force of his personality. He also sees himself as leading a kind of mission on behalf of the Jews. Says an intimate: “He still believes Jews are the victims of hatred and prejudice. Jewish blood, the sight of helpless Jews being killed by enemies and pogroms. The fear of elimination and liquidation. That’s what goes through his mind all the time.” Says a Begin aide: “He feels a duty to see that the Jewish people are safe. Not just Israel.” He adds, “Begin refers to himself again and again as a ‘simple Jew.’ To be a simple Jew means to feel respect for every other Jew.”

As a result, Begin cannot conceive of Jews feeling no responsibility for the fate of other Jews. Politics thus is more than government or party work to Begin. It is about the survival of a people. He recently listed the five most important things he had accomplished as Prime Minister. They were: 1) the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor, 2) the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, 3) the annexation of the Golan Heights, 4) Project Renewal, a nationwide slum rehabilitation program, and 5) the establishment of more Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza.

Those who know him best do not doubt that the one ambition he would like to see accomplished before he retires from political life is to ensure that Israel never relinquishes the West Bank. Says a Begin lieutenant: “Eretz Yisrael is the thing that at this point in his life is at the core of Begin’s political existence.”