Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (Hebrew: מְנַחֵם בֵּגִין) (Brest-Litovsk, August 16, 1913 - Tel Aviv, March 9, 1992) became the sixth prime minister of Israel in May 1977. Negotiated the Camp David Peace Accords with Egyptian President Muhammad Anwar Al-Sadat, for which they jointly received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978.

Youth

Beguin was born into a Jewish family in Brest-Litovsk (located in what from 1918 to 1939 was part of Poland and today belongs to Belarus and is known as Brest). From his youth he was a convinced Zionist encouraged by the teachings of his father. At the age of 16 he joined the Beitar Zionist youth movement, created by Zeev Jabotinsky.

He graduated in law and from 1939 led the Zionist organization Beitar in Poland. In anticipation of the coming events, Begin concentrated on the military training of the members of the group. At the outbreak of World War II he escaped to the city of Vilnius, where in 1940 he was arrested by the NKVD of the Soviet Union and sentenced to eight years in a labor camp in Siberia, but in 1941 he was released due to citizenship. polish of him

Stamina

In 1941 he voluntarily joined the Free Polish Armed Forces that had been established in the USSR, along with many other Jewish soldiers.^{[citation needed]} In 1942 he arrived to Palestine as a soldier and contacted the Irgún Tzevaí Leumí paramilitary organization, known as Etzel, which was going through a period of lethargy at that time. At the end of 1942 he was discharged from the army and began the revival of Etzel, becoming a leading leader. In 1943 Begin became the leader of the Irgun and in 1944 he formally declared the start of the rebellion against the British Mandatory authorities.

In 1948 Begin ordered a clandestine shipment of arms for the Etzel, which ended with the shooting down of the Altalena, ordered by Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion who demanded that all military factions unite under the Defense Army of Israel and that all weapons fall under its jurisdiction.^{[citation needed]} In September 1948 the last units of the Irgun were dissolved in Jerusalem and all its members joined the Tzahal.

The attack on the King David Hotel

In 1946, when Begin was the leader of the Irgun, said terrorist organization attacked the King David Hotel, located in Jerusalem. The southern wing of the Hotel had been occupied by the British to house the central institutions of the regime administering the British Mandate for Palestine. In addition, it served as the headquarters for a UN office. On July 22, 1946, the terrorists entered the Hotel infiltrated as milkmen and planted powerful explosives. The objective of the attack was to eliminate important secret documents that revealed the relationship of clandestine groups with the Jewish Agency, which were guarded by the British at the King David Hotel. Once the bombs had been activated, the terrorists left the Hotel and announced that a bomb was going to explode, but all they got was a crowd of onlookers around the hotel. The explosive planted by Begin's organization detonated, taking the lives of 91 people with it. This attack was described by Winston Churchill, defender of the Zionist cause, as "one of the most devastating and cowardly crimes that had been reported in history."

The Deir Yassin massacre

Two years after the attack on the Hotel Rey David, on the night of April 9, 1948, 132 paramilitaries belonging to the Irgun and Leji assaulted the Arab village of Deir Yassin, located 5 kilometers from Jerusalem, where they were killed among 107 and 120 villagers. The massacre was condemned by Ben-Gurion, the Haganah, the Chief Rabbinate, and the Jewish Agency for Israel. Albert Einstein, representatives of the Yishuv, and other Zionist intellectuals published a letter of denunciation in the New York Times, in which they accused the Herut party (Freedom Party) from resorting to fascist methods.

Political

Menájem Beguín in 1978.

After the creation of Israel, Begin founded the Herut political party (later to be the dominant party in the Likud coalition).

With the establishment of the state of Israel, the Irgun (commonly known as Etzel) was dissolved and its members integrated into the ranks of the Israeli Defense Forces. Begin then established and placed himself at the head of the Herut movement which defends the policies of his Zionist mentor Jabotinsky. In 1965 he went on to lead the Gahal after a merger of the Herut with a liberal party and as already stated, this would form the basis for the later formation of the conservative Likud party.

In 1977 the Likud won the elections in Israel, thus becoming Israel's prime minister. At the end of that year, he signed the Camp David peace accords with Egyptian President Anwar el Sadat, for the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Sinai and the creation of Palestinian autonomy, for which both leaders were awarded the Nobel Prize. of peace (1978).

In 1979, Begin signed the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty with Anwar Al-Sadat. Under the terms of the treaty, Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. This required the dismantling of all Israeli settlements in the area (including the town of Yamit). Begin faced intense internal opposition to this move, which led to an internal split within his own Likud party.

Under his mandate, famous military operations were carried out such as Operation Opera, in which the Osirak nuclear reactor, near Baghdad (Iraq), and Operation Litani were bombed.

In 1982 the government of Begin, when Ariel Sharon was Minister of Defense, invaded Lebanon with the aim of dismantling the PLO bases and thus trying to prevent the successive attacks on the northern towns of Israel. This invasion, called "Peace for Galilee," lasted six months and although it did not fully achieve its objectives, it managed to expel the members of the PLO from Lebanon. In addition, it plunged Israeli public opinion into deep divergences, after the massacre in Sabra and Shatila and Sharon's resignation as Minister of Defense, which precipitated the end of Begin's mandate. The Israeli military presence in Lebanon continued until the year 2000.

Beguin resigned from his position in August 1983, depressed by the death of his wife Aliza, deeply disappointed by the consequences of the war in Lebanon, and afflicted with a series of ailments that, it was said, alienated his mental faculties, but that were jealously hidden by their environment from the knowledge of the population. During his last years he submitted to voluntary ostracism, secluding himself in his little house on Tsemaj Street, in Jerusalem, and was not seen in public except on rare occasions. In his voluntary seclusion he wrote the book & # 34; Rebellion in the Holy Land & # 34;. Begin never agreed to satisfy public opinion's curiosity about the last months of his government, nor about the truth about how the decision to invade Lebanon was made. He died in Tel Aviv on March 9, 1992. At his express request, he was buried in a simple and popular funeral in the Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem, along with his wife and far from the official pantheon of the " Great Ones of the Nation", on Mount Herzl.