The New Germany and the Old Nazis

In August 1951, Begin went on holiday to Italy. Despite repeated appeals, he refused to return to the leadership and was considering setting up a private law firm. Arieh Ben-Eliezer took over as acting head while Begin was on ‘extended leave’. Begin hired a room at a guest house, where he wrote White Nights about his experiences in the Gulag and studied for the bar exams. Yet a restless Begin could not distance himself from the political realm for very long. Indeed, his political career in one sense was just beginning.

On 12 March 1951 Israel had made a claim for reparations for Nazi crimes from the Federal Republic of Germany. This was driven in part by Israel's dire economic situation. Like many who had survived, Begin exhibited a deep antagonism towards the new Germany. For Begin, there was no such thing as ‘a good German’. Even anti-Nazis were Nazis in disguise. Begin adhered to Mirabeau's celebrated comment that ‘some countries possess armies, but Prussia is an army that happens to possess a country.’ Only Germany surpassed Britain in Begin's ranking of loathing.

Since his arrival in Palestine in 1942, Begin had made accusations against the failure of the Jewish Agency and the Zionist movement to help Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. He also cast aspersions on the motives of the Allies and later tarred the British with the Nazi brush. The escalation of violence against returning Jews in post-war Poland reminded Begin of what he had escaped from. Jews were killed near Czorsztyn in April 1946, near Korscienko in May 1946 and forty-two died in the Kielce pogrom in July 1946. Jewish patients were murdered in a Lublin hospital. Bishop Stefan Wyszynski of Lublin and Cardinal Hlond, archbishop of Warsaw, explained that this had happened because there were so many atheist Jews in the new Communist regime. All this brought an angry response from Begin.

Moreover, there was a concerted difference in the manner in which Begin and Ben-Gurion viewed the Shoah from the heights of the 1950s: ‘Begin thought about the victims while Ben-Gurion thought about the survivors.’ Begin, by temperament and through experience, looked to the past and tradition – and not ‘the new Jew’ promoted by Ben-Gurion.