Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin was prime minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983, and the man who made peace with Egypt after a lifetime of arguing against compromise. He was born in Brest-Litovsk, then in the Russian Empire, and led Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement, in Poland. His parents and brother were murdered in the Holocaust. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1940 and sent to a Soviet labour camp, released under the amnesty for Polish citizens, and reached Palestine with the Anders Army in 1942. As commander of the Irgun from 1943 he declared revolt against British rule. The Irgun bombed the King David Hotel in 1946, killing ninety-one people, and its part in the killings at Deir Yassin in 1948 is still disputed in its details and not in its fact. Ben-Gurion regarded him as a menace and kept him out of government for nearly thirty years, during which he led the opposition through eight elections. The 1977 election ended the Labour Zionist monopoly on power and brought him in. Within a year Anwar Sadat had come to Jerusalem, and the Camp David accords followed in 1978; Begin returned the whole of Sinai and dismantled Israeli settlements there, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Sadat. He also ordered the bombing of Iraq's Osirak reactor in 1981 and the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. The massacres at Sabra and Shatila and the mounting casualties broke him. He resigned in 1983 saying he could not go on, and lived in near-total seclusion for his last nine years.

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