The Prophet Armed

Menahem Begin was a student and lover of history. It could provide insights into the future and lessons from the past. Yet it was contemporary history that weighed down upon him. The territorial appetite of the Nazis and the Stalinists in 1939 had temporarily been satisfied by the devouring of Poland – and in its train the destruction of the Jewish civilisation that had rooted itself in Eastern Europe. The poets and the businessmen, the Bundists and the capitalists, the assimilated Germanophiles and the devout ultra-orthodox had all disappeared into the ovens of Auschwitz. Despite his desire to inhabit the world of modern Israel, Menahem Begin remained very much a Polish Jew, permeated by the demons unleashed by the Shoah.

Begin had always summoned up the ghosts of the past to justify the policies of the present. In mid-1971 he compared the defence pact between the USSR and Egypt to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. As he got older and in particular as he embraced the premiership, the equating of Palestinians with Nazis became more common. Arafat in besieged Beirut became Hitler in his Berlin bunker. During the Lebanon War in 1982, Begin's use of historical examples was even more accentuated. He spoke of the PLO's Maginot Line and reminded the cabinet that there would be ‘no more Treblinkas’. As one writer observed, ‘Israel was an idea [to Begin] not a place or an environment in which he lived.’

Yet his continual evoking of the Shoah to justify controversial events deepened the rift between Left and Right in Israel. Amos Oz told him:

The urge to revive Hitler, only to kill him again and again, is the result of pain that poets can permit themselves to use, but not statesmen … even at great emotional cost personally, you must remind yourself and the public that elected you its leader that Hitler is dead and burned to ashes.

Begin's throwaway remarks about ‘a blood libel levelled at Israel’, which seemingly belittled the massacre of Palestinians in the camps of Sabra and Shatilla, was described as ‘moral autism’ by the playwright Yehoshua Sobol.