Who can forget the 1978 peace treaty between Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat of Egypt? Those of us without TVs in the house (no internet then) ran to neighbors to watch the signing ceremony on the White House lawn. We cried when Begin removed his yarmulke from his pocket to recite psalm 126, the Shir Hamaalot before benching – in Hebrew! This is the psalm that presages the return of the Jews to Eretz Yisrael, and Begin explained to the global audience that he had first learned it at his father’s table in Poland. He invited them to look it up in their English Bibles. What drama! What an emotional moment!
To most people under 60, the name Menachem Begin may as well be a part of ancient history. Ben Gurion is the famous one of Israel’s early days. Begin, with his diametrically opposing views, sat in the Knesset for years in seemingly permanent, albeit vocal, opposition. The Mapai Labor Zionists – a socialist, anti-religious, discriminatory (to Sefardim) party – ruled the government and dominated the society. The country was miserably poor and surrounded by implacable enemies.
Then, in 1977, in a surprise upset, Begin won the election and became prime minister. No head of the government before or since has been quite like Begin. He was one of a kind – a man of principle and resolve, steeped in Jewish tradition and feeling. In many ways, he changed the trajectory of Israeli history and laid the foundation for the strong and rich country we know today.
I want to review some incidents in his life which show the unique character of Menachem Begin so that we can have appreciation for one of the great leaders of our people.
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Begin was born in Brisk in 1913, four days after Tisha B’Av and was therefore named Menachem, comforter, as in the haftarah of that week, “Nachamu nachamu ami.” Although his home was shomer Shabbos, his father sent him to a more modern cheder where they also studied secular subjects. Menachem once recalled, “My father knew the Bible by heart, almost the entire thing. He and the three children loved a sort of family Bible contest. One of the children would recite a verse from the Torah, the Prophets, or the Writings, and our father would complete the chapter from memory.”
Zeev Dov Begin was prominent in the town council of the Jewish community of Brisk. Once he came upon a Polish officer who was trying to cut off a rabbi’s beard. This “proud Jew,” as Menachem referred to his father, took his walking stick and clubbed the Pole over the head. Menachem followed his father’s example of Jewish pride. He attended a Polish high school and refused to take a Latin test on Saturday, to the amusement of his classmates. He told the teacher, “This is my belief; I won’t write on the Sabbath under any circumstances.” The teacher gave him an F, but when he still refused to back down, relented and gave him his typically high grade.
At age 13, Menachem joined Betar, the youth movement of the Revisionist Zionists, and became enamored with its founder, Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky, whom he always referred to as “mori verebbi.” Jabotinsky was convinced that the Zionist leadership under Chaim Weizmann and David Ben Gurion was too weak and too passive. The Revisionists had the same ultimate goal as the mainstream Zionists, but they were more militant and wanted to achieve their goal by force, if necessary, and not depend on the goodwill of the gentiles.
The word Betar has two meanings: It was the name of the last fortress in the Bar Kochba rebellion against the Romans in 135 CE (near the present-day city of Betar). Betar also stood for Brit Yosef Trumpeldor. Trumpeldor was the role model and inspiration for the youth movement. He was a Russian Jew who helped Jabotinsky establish the Jewish Legion in World War I. As he lay dying defending the Tel Hai settlement in the Upper Galilee, in 1920, Trumpeldor’s last words were, “Tov lamut ba’ad artzeinu – It is good to die for our country.” No short phrase could have better captured the Revisionist’s commitment to Jewish military power, self-defense, and national pride, nor struck the Zionist establishment as so dangerous. Jabotinsky and his organization were pariahs to the Ben Gurion types, but Menachem Begin was his most loyal and dedicated student and disciple, although they did have many disagreements on tactics later on, as Begin became the head of Betar in Poland.
In the course of his travels for Betar, Begin stayed with a family in Galicia. The day after he met the daughter of his hosts, he wrote a note to Aliza Arnold: “I saw you, my lady, for the first time, but I feel as if I have known you all my life.” He wanted to marry her but told her up front that he was committed to a lifelong battle for a Jewish state. They were married wearing their Betar uniforms in May, 1939 with Jabotinsky in attendance.
Begin had to return to Warsaw and continue preparing for the outbreak of war. He accelerated his effort to enable Jews to immigrate to Palestine. Begin and his bride boarded one of the last trains out of Warsaw, fleeing toward Romania hoping to find a ship bound for Palestine. The train was bombed repeatedly, and the Begins turned to the north and traveled to the safety of Vilna.
We, who live in this peaceful land, cannot judge the decisions of people in those war-torn years but others did. In Vilna, Begin got a letter from Palestine criticizing him for leaving ahead of his Betar members: “The captain leaves last, not first.” This rebuke stung Menachem, and he sought to return to Poland, but his group outvoted him, and they stayed in Vilna for the moment. He worked on getting visas for fellow Betar members, insisting that this time he would not take his own (he could have left) until the rest of the group had left.
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In 1940, the Soviet authorities, the NKVD, arrested Begin for anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda. That is, he was a Zionist and head of Betar. Though well aware that people arrested by the NKVD were never heard from again, Begin did not break from the pressure. He actually enjoyed debating his interrogators, some of whom were Jews. Begin was always a stickler for terminology. He refused to confess, but he openly “admitted” that he was the leader of Betar. To confess would be to accept that he had done something wrong, which he did not believe.
At one point, his interrogator insisted that an educated man cannot believe in G-d. Begin replied,” Faith does not stand in contradiction to intelligence; but man, in his intelligence, understands that there are things he cannot fathom by rationality, and so he believes in a Higher Power.” Despite the overwhelming hunger of all prisoners, Begin surprised his two cell mates in October, 1940, when he refused his daily portion of soup. It was Yom Kippur, and he was fasting. His ravenous cell mates ate his portion.
Begin loved to debate and there was lots of time for that in prison. One of the other inmates was a fellow named Garin, who had been the assistant editor of Pravda, the Communist party newspaper. Garin was imprisoned for “Trotskyism,” but he was a devoted Communist. Later, he and Begin were aboard the Etap, a miserable ship with 800 prisoners, but only two toilets, where lice covered everyone’s bodies. Garin turned to Begin and asked him to sing the song “Loshuv”(Loshuv el Eretz avoseinu” an early form of Hatikva. Menachem Begin was very inspired that this man, after 30 or more years of total devotion to Communism, when he was really down and out, remembered something from his distant past, a Hebrew song about the yearning to return to the land of our fathers. At that time in his life, could Begin possibly have imagined the central role he would have in making the dream (Hatikvah) a reality?
He was sentenced to eight years and he worried that Aliza would lose hope. Aliza did not lose hope or the daring she had shown by marrying Begin and fleeing with him. A few months later, Menachem received a handkerchief in prison with the letters OLA embroidered on it. At first he had no idea what the letters meant. One of his fellow prisoners figured it out. OLA was not a set of initials but the Hebrew word “olah,” which means immigrating to Israel. Aliza was letting him know that she was on her way to Palestine.
Because he was a Polish national, Begin was freed in July 1941, under the Sikorski–Mayski agreement between Poland and the Soviet Union. He joined the Free Polish Army and was sent with the army to Palestine, arriving in April, 1942. Most accounts tell that he deserted when he got to Eretz Yisrael; it is not true. He declared “A deserter from whatever army is still a deserter, and any man who deserted an army that was fighting Hitler could under no circumstances stand at the head of a national militia.” Begin spent two years in Palestine working for the Polish Army while at the same time building relations with the Etzel and Betar cells there. Ironically, only four months after he arrived, the Haganah had him tailed and opened a secret file on him. He was let go by the Polish army and was soon made the head of Etzel, the Irgun Tzva Leumi, a military organization. We in this country usually refer to it as the Irgun.
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Unlike the Labor Zionist’s Haganah, which stopped fighting the British while the Allies fought Hitler in Europe, Etzel was committed to armed struggle even during the war to force the British to open the doors of Palestine to any Jews who could still escape. They looked upon the British as enemies who had to be driven out. Begin was declared an outlaw, and a bounty of 10,000 British pounds was placed on him; it was a lot of money in 1944. Begin went into hiding, in plain sight. He moved his family to a dilapidated street in Tel Aviv and assumed the identity of “Rabbi Sasover.” He wore a hat and grew a short beard, went to shul morning and evening, and sat in on the gemara shiur. No one in the shul imagined that the timid rabbi was the arch-terrorist Menachem Begin.
The most famous operation of the Irgun was the bombing of the King David Hotel. The details of the bombing are complex. The British were warned but refused to take the warnings seriously. Ninety-two people died in the attack on the hotel, which was the headquarters of the British. The Jewish Agency, headed by David Ben Gurion, denounced the act as a “dastardly crime perpetrated by a gang of desperadoes.”
Begin fought the British in a different way than the establishment, which I will demonstrate with a few examples below. The Haganah, the Jewish yishuv’s official defense organization, wasn’t in favor of any of Etzel’s activities and, to this day, will not admit that it was Begin, more than they, who drove out the British. (That is my opinion, at least.)
Here is some of Etzel’s history: In 1946, the British sentenced two Etzel men to hang for stealing ammunition from a British base. The Etzel kidnapped five British officers. They issued a warning that if the British executed the Etzel men, their five officers would be hanged. The two were not hanged; they were sentenced to life imprisonment. Etzel had won that round. On December 27, 1946, 16-year-old Binyamin Kimche was flogged 18 times. He had been robbing a bank, to “retake” tax money that the British had collected. Although lashes were sometimes meted out to petty criminals, they were not given to soldiers, and Begin wanted to make the point that his men were not thieves but soldiers.
Begin had a poster put up in Hebrew and English, stating, “Warning! A Hebrew soldier, taken prisoner by the enemy, was sentenced by an illegal British military “court” to the humiliating punishment of flogging. We warn the occupation government not to carry out this punishment, which is contrary to the laws of the soldier’s honor. If it is put into effect, every officer of the British occupation in Eretz Israel will be liable to be punished in the same way: to get 18 stripes.”
The British ignored the warning and gave Kimchi 18 lashes. The very next evening, Etzel kidnapped a British major sitting with his wife in a hotel lounge in Netanaya, flogged him 18 times, and returned him to his hotel still stripped to his underwear. In Tel Aviv, they kidnapped two sergeants and whipped them 18 times, then in Rishon Letziyon, another sergeant was whipped 18 times. The story continues, but after another round the British had learned their lesson, and no Jews were ever flogged again in Palestine.
The conflict escalated when the British captured and sentenced four Etzel members to death by hanging. They were hanged in Acre on April 16, 1947. One of the four, Dov Gruner, composed a letter addressed to Menachem Begin. I want to quote excerpts so you understand the way an Etzel martyr went to the gallows.
“Whatever happens, I shall not forget the teachings on which I was weaned, the teaching to be proud and generous and strong, and I shall know how to stand up for my honor and the honor of a fighting Hebrew soldier…for the world knows that a land is redeemed by blood. I write these words 48 hours before the time fixed by our oppressors to carry out their murder, and at such a time, one does not lie. I swear that if I had the choice of starting again, I would choose the same road, regardless of the possible consequences to me.”
At the news of the hanging, Begin immediately ordered the Etzel troops to attach field martial courts to every unit. “Should any enemy troops fall into your hands, they would be liable to die as our four comrades died.” The British kept a low profile, but they were not ready to stop hanging Etzel “terrorists.”
At this time two more men were awaiting execution in Jerusalem. Meir Feinstein had been arrested following an attack on the Jerusalem railway station. Moshe Barzani, a Lechi (the British called it the Stern Gang) fighter, was found with a hand grenade. Merely carrying a hand grenade was a capital offence. Feinstein and Barazani were determined to do what Gruner and the others could not. They would die but would take some British soldiers with them. It was the biblical model of Samson, who had vowed to “perish with the Philistines.” The two wanted to die in the model of “our ancient hero.”
A hand grenade was smuggled in, but there was a last-minute problem. The British brought a rabbi who promised to return in the morning and be with them when their end came. They couldn’t carry out their Samson plan because they couldn’t kill the rabbi with the British. So, that evening in their cell, after the rabbi had gone to sleep elsewhere in the prison, Feinstein and Barazani hugged each other and together they sang “Adon Olam” until one of them detonated the hand grenade they had placed between them.
Many years later, Menachem Begin left instructions that he did not want to be buried on Mount Herzl with the important leaders of Israel; he wanted to be buried next to Feinstein and Barazani on the Mount of Olives, and so he is. To skip ahead, when Begin was running for re-election to his second term as prime minister, a TV comedian made fun of the Sefardim who were Begin’s main constituency. He called them some slang term for insects. I remember seeing this on a video at the Menachem Begin Museum a number of years ago. Begin got up in front of a crowd and said, “I never heard this term before. In the Irgun, we did not know the difference between Jews. Feinstein was an Ashkenazi; Barazani was Iraqi; together they died: lochamim, achim, Yehudim – warriors, brothers, Jews!” And that, in a nutshell, shows why the underclasses loved Begin and eventually brought him to high office.
To be continued.
