Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin led the Irgun, an armed Zionist underground group, in its campaign against British rule in Palestine, then spent nearly three decades as the leader of Israel's right-wing opposition before winning power in 1977. As prime minister until 1983 he made peace with Egypt, sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with Anwar Sadat, and launched the 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Supporters remember him as a founder of the state and a peacemaker; the British authorities of his day, and many critics since, regarded the Irgun under his command as a terrorist organisation.

Begin was born on 16 August 1913 in Brest-Litovsk, then in the Russian Empire, to a timber merchant who admired Theodor Herzl. He studied law in Warsaw and became a follower of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, founder of the nationalist Revisionist movement, rising to head its youth wing, Betar, in Poland. When Germany invaded in 1939 he fled to Vilnius, where the Soviet secret police arrested him in 1940; he was sentenced to eight years in a labour camp in the far north of Russia. Released in 1941 as a Polish citizen, he joined the Polish army formed in the Soviet Union and reached Palestine with it in 1942. His parents and brother were killed in the Holocaust.

Begin took command of the Irgun in 1944 and on 1 February declared a revolt against British rule, which the mainstream Jewish Agency opposed. The Irgun bombed government offices and attacked police stations, aiming to make British rule too costly to sustain. In 1946 it bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the seat of the British administration, killing 91 people. Other operations he ordered, such as the Acre prison break and the Sergeants affair, have been widely credited with turning British opinion against staying.

In the war that followed the UN partition vote of 1947, Irgun and Lehi fighters attacked the Arab village of Deir Yassin, where more than a hundred villagers were killed; the event became known as the Deir Yassin massacre, although Irgun and Lehi sources denied that a massacre took place. In June 1948 the new government under David Ben-Gurion shelled the Altalena, a ship bringing arms for the Irgun; 16 Irgun fighters and three soldiers died, but Begin ordered his men not to fight back, and the Irgun was absorbed into the army.

Begin founded the Herut party in 1948 and led it, and the broader Likud bloc formed in 1973, through eight successive election defeats. In 1952 Begin led a violent protest against accepting reparations from West Germany, for which he was suspended from the Knesset. He entered government only once in those years, in the national unity cabinet formed when the Six-Day War broke out in 1967. Labour's troubles after the 1973 war, and support among Mizrahi Jews who felt neglected by the old elite, brought Likud victory in May 1977.

Begin negotiated with Egypt's president, Anwar Sadat, and in 1978 signed the Camp David Accords, followed by a peace treaty in 1979 under which Israel returned the Sinai. The two men shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. At the same time his government greatly expanded Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza. In June 1981 Israeli aircraft destroyed Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, a strike condemned by the UN Security Council.

In June 1982 Israel invaded Lebanon to drive out the PLO. Forces advanced to Beirut, and in September Lebanese Christian Phalangist militiamen allied to Israel carried out a massacre at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. An Israeli inquiry found the government indirectly responsible and Defence Minister Ariel Sharon personally responsible.

Weighed down by the war's casualties, poor health and the death of his wife Aliza in November 1982, Begin resigned in October 1983 and lived the rest of his life largely in seclusion. He died in Tel Aviv on 9 March 1992 and, at his own request, was buried on the Mount of Olives rather than on Mount Herzl.

Our 1945 map shows British-ruled Palestine during the Irgun revolt, and the 1985 map shows Israel shortly after his premiership.