Daniel Gordis - Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israels Soul

Copyright 2014 by Daniel Gordis
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Schocken Books, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

Schocken Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

by Erica Halivni.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Gordis, Daniel, author.
Menachem Begin: the battle for Israels soul / Daniel Gordis.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8052-4312-3 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-0-8052-4313-0 (eBook)
1. Begin, Menachem, 19131992. 2. Revisionist ZionistsIsraelBiography. 3. Prime ministersIsraelBiography. 4. IsraelPolitics and government20th century. I. Title.
DS 126.6. B 33 G 67 2014 956.94054092dc23 [ B ] 2013023333

www.schocken.com

Cover photograph of Menachem Begin, May 21, 1977,
Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. Bettmann / Corbis
Cover design by Pablo Delcn

v3.1

For my parents,
with gratitude, with admiration, and with love

And in memory of Sami Rohr,
who, like Menachem Begin,
loved Jewish books and the Jewish people

We returned to the land of our ancestors not by virtue of might but by the virtue of right.

MENACHEM BEGIN

I observed all the oppression that goes on under the sun;

the tears of the oppressed, with none to comfort them;

and the power of their oppressorswith none to comfort them.

Ecclesiastes 4:1

O ne of my most vivid college memories is of Menachem Begin. It was November 1977, the first semester of my freshman year. The radio was on, and I heard the news that President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had accepted Prime Minister Begins invitation to come to Jerusalem.

I can still picture the moment. The doorway in front of me, my roommates desk to the left. The cinder-block walls wed painted soon after wed moved in. I leaned my head against the door frame, closed my eyes, and prayed that Begin would stay alive long enough to see the process through.

I knew virtually nothing about Begin then. Id lived in Israel for a couple of years as a young child but had been all too happy to depart, and subsequently ignored Israeli politics almost entirely. I still cared enough about Israel, though, that the newscast stopped me in my tracks. The prospect of peace in Israel was so stunning that, for the first time in my life, I found myself begging some power out there to take care of Menachem Begin.

It may have been the first time that I truly prayed.

F our years later, on my honeymoon in Hawaii, I was walking back from the beach with my new wife when we stopped to peer into a local newspaper vending machine. Israel Bombs Iraqi Nuclear Reactor, the headline said, and we both laughed out loud. People in Hawaii, it seemed, would believe anything.

Back at the hotel, we absentmindedly turned on a brand-new cable network called CNN. Israel, it reported, had destroyed Iraqs Osirak nuclear reactor. The attack had been ordered by Menachem Begin. We asked ourselves and each other questions people had been asking about Begin for decades: Had he just made the world safer, or had he recklessly endangered it? Was the attack reprehensibly irresponsible, as the United States would soon claim, or was it the courageous step of someone who knew better than anyone else how to safeguard the future of the Jewish people?

I never met Begin, never even saw him in person. But he is an indelible part of my freshman year, my honeymoon, and many other subsequent moments I will never forget. When my wife and I eventually moved our family to Israel many years later, countless taxi drivers, listening to the news of whatever calamity was unfolding at the moment, would turn around to tell me, You know what this country needs? We need Menachem Begin.

It was not only the taxi drivers. Even Israels left-leaning newspaper,

Everyone, it seems, misses Menachem Begin.

I wrote this book to find out why. I wanted to understand how someone so polarizing, so controversial, in his own country and abroad, can appear today as the soul not only of Israels best self but as a living fusion of Jewish consciousness and national aspiration.

A ll of Israels founders made extraordinary journeys, but it is hard to imagine any of them enduring an odyssey anything like Begins. He fled the Nazis, lost his parents and brother, was imprisoned by the Soviets and hunted by the British. Condemned by Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt in the pages of The New York Times, scorned by Israels political elites, portrayed by many as a demagogue, and relegated to the political opposition for twenty-eight years, he served as prime minister for six years, and in that time made peace with Egypt, received the Nobel Peace Prize, and destroyed Iraqs nuclear reactor. He also led Israel into its most unpopular war, resigned as a result of the wars dark course before his term was completed, and went into seclusion for almost a decade. An orator who thrived on crowds, he was almost never seen or heard from again.

When he died, though, tens of thousands of people choked the streets of Jerusalem, desperate to make their way to the Mount of Olives, where he was buried. They hadnt forgotten him. They wanted to say good-bye. And they wanted to thank him.

To thank him for what? What was it that Menachem Begin evoked in Israelis and in Jews worldwide? Loved by many, reviled by others, his life and the principles to which he was committed touched something profound in Jews almost everywhere. The key to Begins abiding grip on the memory and fascination of Israelis and Jews around the world was bound up with his unabashed, utter devotion to the Jewish people. Committed to Israel though he was, Menachem Begins life was a story of commitment first and foremost to the Jewish people. Many of Israels founders Hebraized their founders, he saw no reason to leave that tradition or legacy behind.