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Friday, March 29, 2024

Menachem Begin’s Legacy on his 100th Birthday – Part One

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BETAR UNIT WITH MENACHEM BEGIN, Bielsk Podlaski, Poland, year unknown Menachem Begin, seated front row center, with glasses.
BETAR UNIT WITH MENACHEM BEGIN, Bielsk Podlaski, Poland, year unknown Menachem Begin, seated front row center, with glasses.
Begin’s life had, at its core, an unwavering constant, a guiding principle that shaped everything. It was a life of selfless devotion to his people. That devotion fashioned a life in which determination eradicated fear, hope overcame despondency, love overcame hate, and devotion to both Jews and human beings everywhere coexisted with ease and grace. It was a life of great loyalty-to the people into which he was born, to the woman he loved from the moment he met her, and to the state that he helped create.

Menachem Begin, Israel’s sixth Prime Minister, was born one hundred years ago. A century after his birth, and more than two decades after his death, it behooves us all, regardless of our political stripes, to take a moment and to reflect on the profundity of his contribution to the Jewish people. That claim will undoubtedly strike many as strange, since more than half a century after he helped rid Palestine of the British, Begin is still disparaged by many of the very same Jews who see in the American revolution a cause for genuine pride.

Begin himself seemed to sense the irony, so he spoke time and again about the American revolution. In an article commemorating the thirty-fifth anniversary of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s death, he combined two passages from Thomas Jefferson’s letters-one to James Madison and another to William Stephens Smith. “I hold it that a little rebellion now and then is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms in the physical,” Begin quoted Jefferson, adding the American revolutionary’s sobering observation that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

It was natural that Begin thought about the Zionist revolution in light of what American revolutionary patriots had wrought 175 years earlier. After all, the American and Zionist revolutions shared much in common. Both were fueled by a people’s desire for freedom after long periods of oppression in which religion had played a central role in their persecution. Both were designed to force the British to leave the territory in question so that they (the American colonialists and the Zionists) could establish their own, sovereign countries-in Israel’s case on the very ground where a sovereign Jewish nation had stood centuries before. Both produced admirable democracies. And both were violent revolutions.

Given those similarities, it is worth asking why many Jewish Americans bow their heads in respect to Nathan Hale, but wince in shame at the mention of the Hebrew freedom fighters who sought precisely what it was that Nathan Hale died for. Why is George Washington, who conducted a violent, fierce, and bloody campaign against the British, a hero, while for many, Begin remains a villain or, at the very least, a Jewish leader with a compromised background?

Some of the difference has to do with time. We have photographs of the two British sergeants Begin ordered hanged in response to the British hanging of his men, and of the shattered King David Hotel, which he ordered bombed. We know the names of the sergeants and of the victims in the hotel attack, but not of the British young men who died at the hands of America’s revolutionaries. The passage of time and the absence of details have allowed the heroic story of America’s freedom fighters to endure, while the pain and suffering of those whom they fought has gradually faded into oblivion. The leaders and fighters of the Zionist revolution have been afforded no such luxury.

The fighters of the Zionist revolution have also had the misfortune of another inequality. Native Americans are not the object of the world’s sympathies. Early Americans killed or moved entire tribes, yet the American revolution is now seldom assailed for its treatment of Native Americans as vehemently as is the Israeli revolution for its conflict with Arabs. The Palestinians have been infinitely more successful in their quest for international support, and the reputation of Israel’s revolutionaries-despite their similarity to those in America two centuries earlier-has borne the brunt of the international community’s displeasure.

And Begin’s reputation was also scarred by David Ben-Gurion’s refusal to acknowledge his own participation in some of the events for which Begin is vilified. Ben-Gurion consistently denied having had anything to do with operations that did not go as planned, while Begin stood ready to take responsibility. The Haganah’s David Shaltiel had approved the now infamous Deir Yassin operation, but when it went tragically and horribly awry and many innocent people died, Ben-Gurion painted Begin as a violent thug, pretending that his organization had had nothing to do with it. The Haganah was also intimately involved in the approval and planning of the King David bombing (for Ben-Gurion had come to see that Begin was right, that the British needed to be dislodged), but when civilians were killed because the British refused to heed the Etzel’s warnings to leave the building, Ben-Gurion assailed Begin, pretending that he and his men had known nothing of the plan.

David Ben-Gurion was one of the greatest Jewish leaders ever to have lived, and the Jewish state might well not have come to be were it not for him. But his greatness notwithstanding, he was unfair to Menachem Begin-consistently and mercilessly.

Yet Ben-Gurion was not alone. Menachem Begin is, in many ways, still the victim of campaigns waged against him by Diaspora Jews. When, on the eve of Begin’s planned 1948 trip to the United States, Albert Einstein and political theorist Hannah Arendt joined some two dozen other prominent American Jews in writing to The New York Times to protest his visit, they could probably not have imagined the long-term damage they would do not only to Begin’s reputation, but to the causes for which he stood. “Within the Jewish community,” Einstein and Arendt wrote, the Etzel has “preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.”

American Jews believed them. But that characterization of Begin was utterly false. Unless believing in God makes one a religious mystic, Begin was far from any such thing. The Menachem Begin whom they accused of “racial superiority” was the same Begin who argued for the end of military rule over Israel’s Arabs, whose first act as Prime Minister was to welcome the Vietnamese boat people as Israeli citizens, who initiated the project of bringing Ethiopian Jews to Israel and who gave up the Sinai to make peace with Egypt.

That Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt, both immigrants to America who had found in the United States freedom that they would never have been afforded in their native Germany, could not-or would not-see the similarities between the American and Zionist revolutions is astounding. They saw the American colonists as harbingers of freedom who created the world’s greatest democracy, a land of unlimited opportunity for those who came to its shores, but Begin and the Etzel as “terrorists” worthy only of shame and denigration.

Why?

(Continued Next Week)

Daniel Gordis is President of the Shalem Foundation and Senior Vice President and Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Israel

 

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