The End of the Armed Struggle

Begin remained in hiding and in disguise during the Revolt, writing articles and issuing declarations. He promoted the martyrs of the movement, those whom the British had sent to the gallows. He remembered David Raziel and ‘Bloody Sunday’. He commemorated the deaths of Herzl and Jabotinsky and celebrated their political journeys. He railed against Ben-Gurion and the gradual drift towards partition.

Begin considered himself to be primarily a political figure who had been thrust into the role of a commander of a military uprising. His political acumen was therefore called for when explaining away blunders such as the large number of civilian deaths in the bombing of the King David Hotel.

Begin possessed ‘an intuitive sense about the interplay between violence, politics and propaganda’.4 His approach was predicated on a narrow interpretation of what was in the national interest. It meant mourning, for example, solely for the Jewish victims of the attack on the King David Hotel. It meant that any attack on the Jewish Sabbath – a non-working day for the Jews – would cause fewer Jewish casualties. For the secular Zionist Left, Begin became a demonic figure who denied the internationalism of socialist belief. Only the Jews mattered, and the Zionist Left feared that Begin would be content with only a new ghetto, isolated from the other nations of the world. In one sense this was unsurprising, since Betar never followed the model which had fashioned the other Zionist youth groups. Jabotinsky had taught that there should be no mixing with other ideologies during the national struggle to secure the state. This ideological monism was depicted as analogous to the biblical prohibition on mixing different kinds of material such as wool and linen. The idea of a determined people that dwells alone was cultivated: ‘Within the Temple where the altar of Zion stands, there is no room for other altars.’ The cosmopolitan Jabotinsky did not denigrate the nobility of other excluded philosophies, but argued that these could wait until the state came into existence and became a laboratory for testing ideologies. Until then there could be one – and only one – ideal, that of establishing a state of the Jews.