Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (1978)

Menachem Begin ( Hebrew מנחם בגין; born on August 16, 1913 in Brest-Litowsk , Russian Empire , as Mieczysław Biegun ; died on March 9, 1992 in Tel Aviv , Israel ) was Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel. After he had fled Poland from the German occupiers, he reached the Mandate Palestine via the Soviet Union , where he became the commander of the underground terrorist organization Irgun Tzwai Le'umi . After the founding of the state of Israel , he turned to politics and rose to the position of minister, and in 1977 he was promoted to prime minister of Israel . In his tenure both fell peace treaty with Egypt , for 1978 he and Anwar Sadat the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded, and the first 1982 Lebanon war . In 1983 he resigned as prime minister due to a lack of success in Lebanon.

Youth and Resistance Activity

Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk (then the Russian Empire, now part of Belarus ). His father was the secretary of the local Jewish community and his mother came from a rabbi family . Both were murdered by the German National Socialists during the Holocaust . Menachem went to a Misrachi school and then attended a Polish high school.

Begin (center) inspecting a Polish Betar group (1935)

From 1929 he belonged to the revisionist-Zionist Betar movement under the leadership of Vladimir Jabotinsky . He studied law at the University of Warsaw and at the same time rose to leading positions in the 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 German attack on Poland in the same year, he fled from the advancing Germans to Vilna , which was under Soviet occupation after the invasion of the Red Army . Begin was imprisoned there and sentenced as an “agent of British imperialism” to eight years of forced labor in a prison camp in Vorkuta , Siberia .

He was released in 1941 after the Sikorski-Maiski Agreement was signed and voluntarily 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 , where he resigned from service in the Anders army . His son Benny Begin was born there in 1943 .

Palestine

Began camouflaging as Rabbi Sassover with wife Aliza and son Benyamin-Zeev (Tel Aviv, December 1946)

When Begin was released from the army in Palestine in 1942, he joined the Zionist terrorist underground organization Irgun Zwai Leumi (also known as Etzel ) and became its leader in 1943. The Irgun saw themselves as the spearhead of the fight against the British mandate. The Stern group ( Lechi ), which separated from the Irgun , advocated not only the fight against the British mandate, but also actions against the Palestinian Arabs and organized bomb attacks on marketplaces and restaurants.

Begin was responsible for the 1946 bomb attack on the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, in which 91 people were killed (including 28 British nationals, 41 Arabs, 17 Jews).

Under Begin's orders, two British soldiers - Clifford Martin and Mervyn Paice - were kidnapped and hanged. Begin was then wanted by the British. Among other things, he disguised himself as a bearded Rabbi Sassover.

Menachem Begin's involvement in the Deir Yasin massacre of April 9, 1948 against Arabs is controversial . However, Begin himself spoke of a massacre and justified it. His political opponents of the socialist spectrum of parties in Israel and of a broader political spectrum abroad saw Begin, as in general revisionist Zionism , as fascist and right-wing radical. David Ben-Gurion compared Begin in 1963 with Adolf Hitler and Erich Fried compared him with Reinhard Heydrich in 1982 . Many historians, such as the Israeli Ilan Pappe , who teaches in Exeter , accuse the Irgun, led by Begin, but also the Israeli leadership, of systematic ethnic cleansing and massacres of the Palestinian population.

Israel

After the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948, the Irgun dissolved and Begin founded the Cherut Party, which later became the leading force in the Likud bloc. When Begin was in New York in late 1948 to raise money for the newly founded party among Americans with a Jewish background, 26 mostly Jewish intellectuals, including Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein , wrote a letter to the editor to the New York Times in which she wrote his condemned terrorist past and criticized the Cherut party.

His party, which sought to expand Israel to the borders of the British mandate prior to the secession of the Kingdom of Jordan in 1922, became the third largest force in the Israeli parliament in 1949. However, Begin stayed in the background and was shunned due to his terrorist past.

However, Begin led with comrades in arms, such as B. Elieser Sudit , continued attacks by: In 1952 Menachem Begin was the mastermind behind the bomb attack attempted by Sudit against Federal Chancellor Konrad Adenauer on March 27th. A German policeman was killed while trying to defuse the bomb. Begin had been a staunch opponent of the reparation agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany. He had called Adenauer a "murderer" in the Knesset.

Political rise

Due to the fragmentation of the workers' camp , the opening of the Herut to other parties and the rejection of the image of Greater Israel , which included the Kingdom of Jordan, in the mid-1960s Begin was not only able to win his camp a place in the trade union monopoly of the powerful Histadrut , which was previously closed to revisionist Zionists , but also through skillful coalition after the Six Day War in 1967 rise from opposition leader to minister without a portfolio in the coalition cabinet of Levi Eschkol of the Labor Party. The cabinet approved the US Secretary of State's peace plan, which called for Israeli troops to withdraw to safe borders. Fearing that Israel might now be divided, Begin left the government in protest in 1970 to protest against the land-for-peace policy. In 1973 he joined forces with other parties from the left, right and religious camps and founded the Likud Bloc as a counterweight to the further fissured union of the workers' parties.

Prime Minister

Menachem Begin, Jimmy Carter and Anwar as-Sadat in Camp David (1978)

Due to its increased power potential through the Likud bloc, through the growing following of oriental Jews ( Mizrachim ) as well as allegations of corruption against the Rabin government and the ever increasing inflation, the Likud party became the strongest force for the first time in 1977 and Menachem Begin the first Likud from May 1977 Prime Minister (or the first Prime Minister of the political right) and the sixth Prime Minister of the State of Israel.

In November of the same year there was a historic meeting with Egypt's President Muhammad Anwar as-Sadat. On the mediation of US President Jimmy Carter , the year 1978 was marked by negotiations on his vacation home Camp David , which culminated in an agreement and in March 1979 led to the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement. Begin and Sadat received the Nobel Peace Prize of 1978 for the Camp David Agreement . Protests against the decision to award Begin were so violent in Norway that the handover ceremony had to take place in Akershus Fortress .

According to the principles of the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement, Israel surrendered the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt. At the same time, all Israeli settlements (including the city of Yamit ) were removed. Begin had to face considerable resistance within his own government camp, which at the same time led to a break within the Likud bloc. In June 1981, however, his political role was re-elected and he remained Prime Minister.

Shortly before, he had ordered the bombing of the Iraqi light water reactor Osirak , as he feared an imminent nuclear threat to Israel from Iraq .

In 1982, Begin had the army invade Lebanon . He justified this on the grounds that the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) fired rockets into civilian areas in northern Israel and, not least, continued terrorist attacks against Israelis abroad. The terrorist attack and death of the Israeli ambassador in London by a PLO faction was now the main reason for the military operation in Lebanon.

This is how Operation Peace to Galilee began and lasted six months. In the ceasefire agreement that followed, it was agreed that a buffer zone would be set up in southern Lebanon and that Israeli units would be stationed there until the year 2000.

The occupation of Beirut caused a worldwide stir in September 1982 with the massacre in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila : Christian Lebanese militias massacred hundreds of Palestinians there - women, men and children - without intervention by the Israeli army units stationed nearby. The Israeli army illuminated the camps with flares during the night to support the Phalangist militias. After an Israeli investigation by the Kahan Commission , the main person responsible for the Lebanon campaign, the then Defense Minister Ariel Sharon , had to resign. However, Sharon became Minister without Portfolio in the same year. On May 17, an Israeli-Lebanese agreement was reached that provided for a complete withdrawal of Israeli troops. In July of that year Begin actually withdrew some of the troops. The area bombing of Beirut on August 10th, ordered by Sharon, worsened relations with the American government under Reagan. Begin's refusal to allow foreign aid organizations access to the battlefields and bombed cities and villages in Lebanon has led to a loss of reputation for Israel. Great Britain, France and the EC condemned Begin's actions.

Begin resigned surprisingly on September 15, 1983 from all his offices. It is still not clear what the exact circumstances were for this. Historians suspect that it was due to a long-term depression that was intensified by the events of the Lebanon War and the death of his wife in 1983. He died in Tel Aviv on March 9, 1992.

Start in art

• Begin is portrayed in the cartoon Waltz with Bashir .
• Begin appears in the novel The Fifth Horseman by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre .
• David Opatoshu played Begin in the TV movie Who Knows No Mercy (1976)
• Barry Morse played Begin in the 1983 television movie Sadat .

literature

• Avi Shilon: Menachem Begin, A Life. Translated from Hebrew by Danielle Zilberberg and Yoram Sharett. Yale University Press, New Haven / London 2012, ISBN 978-0-300-16235-6 .

Web links

Commons : Menachem Begin  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Menachem Begin in the catalog of the German National Library
• Information from the Nobel Foundation on the award ceremony for Menachem Begin in 1978
• Menachem Begin (1913-1992). In: Jewish Virtual Library (English).
• Begin Menachem (1913-1992). In: The Jewish Agency for Israel .
• Menachem Begin Heritage Center website (Hebrew, English).

Individual evidence

1. ^ Jewish Defense Organizations: The Role of Jewish Defense Organizations in Palestine (1903-1948). In: Jewish Virtual Library. (English).
2. ↑ Menachem Begin. ( Memento of March 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ). Betar Tagar UK. (English).
3. ^ Markus A. Weingardt: German Israel and Middle East Policy . Campus Verlag 2002, ISBN 359337109X , p. 33.
4. ↑ Pól O'Dochartaigh: Erich Fried's Höre, Israel - More Than Just Shoes in the Sand. In: Pól O'Dochartaigh (Ed.): Jews in German literature since 1945. German-Jewish Literature? Rodopi, Amsterdam / Atlanta 2000, p. 200.
5. ↑ Ilan Pappe: The ethnic cleansing of Palestine . Zweiausendeins, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-86150-791-8
6. ^ Albert Einstein Letter to The New York Times. December 4, 1948 New Palestine Party. Visit of Menachen Begin and Aims of Political Movement Discussed, A letter to The New York Times, published in the "Books" section (Page 12) of Saturday December 4, 1948
7. ↑ ^{a b c d e f} Colin Shindler: The Land Beyond Promise, Israel, Likud and the Zionist Dream. 1995
8. ↑ Henning Sietz: With love for Adenauer. In: Spiegel Online. October 19, 2007.
9. ↑ Nobelprize.org facts (Eng.)
10. ^ Thomas L. Friedman: Beirut Massacre: The Four Days. In: New York Times, September 26, 1982.
11. ↑ Time Magazine (Eng.)
12. ↑ Lebanon: The Long Dying In: Der Spiegel. 27/1982, p. 87.