Begin Center Diary

Begin's NKVD File to Yad Vashem

2012-01-27T05:27:00.000-08:00

Reported in Israel Hayom:-

Introducing Menachem Begin, prisoner of Stalin's secret police

Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum and memorial, has a new artifact in its collection: the KGB file of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Begin was arrested in September 1940 by the Soviet Union's secret police, who were then known as the NKVD. He was 27 and serving as the head of Betar Poland, the country's largest Zionist movement, at the time.

The NKVD compiled a thick file, no fewer than 150 pages, about the future Israeli prime minister. It includes a photo of the young Begin in a suit and tie, his home address and many other private pieces of information regarding his personal life.

The file also mentions Begin's law studies at Warsaw University, his law apprenticeship, that his father was a civil servant and that his mother was a homemaker. It also mentions Begin's membership in a Revisionist Zionist movement, which he had been active in from 1930 to 1939.

The new edition of White Nights also contains most of these particulars.

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Bolstering the Peace Process With Israel by Egypt

2012-01-21T22:12:00.000-08:00

From a newspaper report:

Mubarak's defense lawyer: My client didn't violate the law in Israel gas deal

Egypt Independent Sat, 21/01/2012

Former president Hosni Mubarak didn’t do anything illegal in the deal to export natural gas to Israel, Mubarak’s lawyer, Farid al-Deeb, argued on Saturday, before Cairo Criminal Court adjourned the trial to Sunday. On Saturday, it heard Mubarak’s defense team, led by Deeb.

The prosecution had accused Mubarak of exporting gas to Israel at sub-standard rates and of allocating responsibility for the deal to businessman Hussein Salem, thereby squandering public money.

Deeb added that the Supreme State Security Court completed investigations into the case and referred former Petroleum Minister Sameh Fahmy, Salem and
five others for trial. The investigations did not mention any accusations against Mubarak, he said.

Still, the prosecution later added Mubarak to the case.

He said that former vice president Omar Suleiman said in his testimony that then Mubarak learned of the low price of the gas, he asked him to meet with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to renegotiate the contract or cancel the deal.

According to Deeb, Suleiman said that Israel agreed to amend the contract such that the new price of one million thermal units would be US$ 3.5 instead of US$ 1.5.

He added that it was agreed that the price would be reviewed every three years instead of every 15 years. According to Deeb, Suleiman said that it was Mubarak who asked for amending the contract when he learned of the prices. Mubarak also threatened to halt exports if prices weren’t raised, Deeb said.

The lawyer said that Suleiman, former head of Egyptian intelligence, said that the intelligence apparatus led negotiations over the gas deal and
sought to create common interests with Israel, bolster the peace process and improve Egypt's chances of influencing Israel. He also said the deal
involved other components related to national security.

Deeb added that Egypt 's gas provided Israel with 40 percent of its electricity needs, which he said proves that the deal was intended to create leverage over Israel.

Deeb also said that the Supreme Administrative Court said in its ruling on the gas deal that the decision to export gas to Israel was a sovereign decision, and that Mubarak’s only role was to approve the deal.

Odessa, Jabotinsky and Begin

2012-01-20T00:31:00.000-08:00

From an academic article on Odessa:

Odessity: in Search of Transnational Odessa (or “Odessa the best city in the world: All about Odessa and a great many jokes”) by Joachim Schlör which

presents a research into, and a very personal approach to, the “Odessa myth.” It races the emergence and development of an idea – that Odessa is different from all other cities. One main element of this mythical or legendary representation is the multi-cultural and transnational character of the city: Not only does Odessa have a Greek, an Armenian, a Jewish, a French and an Italian history, in addition to the more obvious Russian, Ukrainian, Soviet, and post-Soviet narratives, it also finds itself in more than just one place – wherever “Odessity” as a state of mind, a memory, a literary image is being celebrated and constructed.

Here are relevant excerpts:

...One columnist complained that Odessa’s civil society was dominated by the “middle class meshchanstvo,” aspirants to what Jeffrey Brooks has called the “new” intelligentsia, people with “cultural pretensions” who “wanted their tastes to be recognized as legitimate […], wanted to be included in the cultural life largely dominated by the old intelligentsia.” Noting the growing ‘prosperity’ of a new middle class, these journalists felt that they had a pedagogic duty to foster the necessary ‘spiritual development’ to go with it. This was an honourable aim and it is, as I have said, well documented by Sylvester, with a wealth of examples. But here, inspired by no less an authority than Theodor Herzl and his defence of the petty bourgeoisie as the “yeast” of the city,24 I would like to speak up for “cultural pretensions.” The operative word is “wanted”: “people who wanted their tastes to be recognised.” To me this suggests intention, energy, ambition. What was about to be pedagogically taken in hand and improved was a kind of raw state, something unfinished, still in the making, expectant. Pretension there was, certainly, but also a kind of innocence.25 That civilising mission (which incidentally, with a strange parallelism, has reappeared today among those who seek to protect their image of Odessa from its current immigrants and their ignorance of the city’s past) aimed to overcome that innocence, and it cannot be criticised for that. But I would like to argue that that sense of innocence, of expectancy, of hope, has survived as an ‘Odessa feeling’ among those who emigrated.

The accusation of false pretension, an attitude of mind which according to Ahad Ha’am, for instance, was characteristic of the city’s Jews, was not unjustified. But perhaps such criticism failed to recognise what energy, what potential lies in this apparent ‘falseness.’ Jewish Palestine, born in Odessa, was animated by similar notions of perfectibility, ideas about the ‘new man’ and the ‘new Jew’ who would build up a perfect society of farmers and warriors and forget about life in the Diaspora. But History cunningly ensured that the experiences of impatience, of starting afresh, of pretension, of life in the Diaspora, came in with the immigrants and turned Israel into the multi-faceted society it is today.

Vladimir Ze’ev Jabotinsky celebrated this heritage. Politically correct persons cringe when they hear the name. Jabotinsky? Isn’t he the spiritual father of Begin, Sharon and the Etzel – terrorists, dreamers of a Greater Israel? But political correctness, I am sorry to say, has no place in Odessa. For my guides in Odessa, Anja and Lena, and maybe for the entire city, he is the most important journalist and writer of the 20th century. His book Patero, [The Five] – originally published in Russian in 1936 – was only recently translated into English by Michael Katz, with the assistance of Anja Misjuk. Writing about the “springtime” of his life and of his city, “our carefree Black Sea capital with acacias growing along its steep banks”, Jabotinsky chronicles the lives of five children in the Milgrom family and their different orientations, choices, and fates. In the background, Odessa gleams. Their stories are intimately related to the city of their birth and experience. All this is set before the background of a beloved city:

“To the present day, if I squint, I can recall, albeit through a mist that obscures the details, that large square, a monument to the noble architecture of foreign masters of the first third of the nineteenth century, and witness to the serene elegance of the old-fashioned taste of the first builders of our town – Richelieu, de Ribas, Vorontsov, and the entire pioneering generation of merchants and smugglers with their Italian and Greek surnames. Ahead of me – the front staircase to the municipal library and, on the left, against the background of a broad, almost boundless bay, is the peristyle of the Duma: neither would disgrace Corinth or Pisa. To the right, I see the first houses on Italian Street, in my time known as Pushkin Street, since it was there the poet wrote Onegin; turning around, there is the English Club, and farther off in the distance, the left façade of the municipal theatre: these were built at different times but all with one and the same love of the foreign spirit of the city (Roman and Hellenistic) with its incomprehensible name, as if borrowed from the legend of a kingdom ‘to the east of the sun and west of the moon.’”26

In the next citation Jabotinsky describes a meeting with the other members of the literary circle in Odessa, and he notes something very important for our question:

“Looking back at all this some thirty years later, I think that the most curious thing about it was the good-natured fraternization of nationalities. All eight or ten tribes of old Odessa met in that club, and in fact it never occurred to anyone, even in silence, to note who was who. All this changed a few years later, but at the dawn of the last century we genuinely got along.”27

It is not really important whether or not this account is true. This is the image he had in mind – of a city (and a youth, an innocence) lost. The “foreign spirit” of the city made it a possible home for everyone who was foreign. In 1897 – one year before Jabotinsky left Odessa for the first time – one counted circa 17 babies and 123 children between the ages of one and nine years for every one hundred Jewish mothers, 13 and 96 for the Russian mothers, 12 and 75 for Ukrainians, 10 and 55 for the Poles, 8 and 62 for the Germans. Let’s return to our bus and see what happened in other parts of the city...

...we have to hurry to meet Vladimir Jabotinsky once more.

“I’ll probably never get to see Odessa again. It’s a pity because I love the place. I was indifferent to Russia even in my youth: I recall that I always got pleasantly agitated when leaving for Europe and would return only reluctantly. But Odessa – that’s another matter: arriving at the Razdelnaya Station, I would always begin to be joyfully excited. If I arrived today, my hands would probably tremble. I’m not indifferent only to Russia; in general I’m not really ‘attached’ to any country; at one time I was in love with Rome, and it lasted a long time, but even that passed. Odessa’s a different matter: it hasn’t ever passed and it won’t.

If it were possible, I’d like to arrive not at the Razdelnaya Station but on a steamship, in summer, of course, and early in the morning. I’d rise before dawn, while the lighthouse on Bolshoi Fontan was still shining, and I’d stand all alone on deck and look at the shore.”36...

.... Jabotinsky reminisces about Odessa, the Fontan, Langeron, Arkadija, the black column of Alexander II – “well, they’ve probably removed it by now, but I’m talking about old Odessa” –, the Quarantine Harbor, the piers, the “buildings high on the hill,” the palaces, the grand staircase, the statue of Duke de Richelieu. In this way, he returns to the topic of the diversity of cultures and ethnicities within Odessa, “just remember how many different peoples had gathered here from all corners of Europe to build this one city.” What then follows is something only someone from Odessa could have written:

“They say that people regard even the name Odessa as something of an amusing joke. To tell the truth, I’m not offended, it isn’t really worth revealing one’s own sorrows, but I don’t take offense for a risible relationship to my homeland. Perhaps it really was an amusing city; perhaps it was so because it laughed so readily. Ten tribes converged, each and every one so fascinating, one more interesting than the next: it all began when these tribes started laughing at one another, then they learned to laugh at themselves, and then at everything on earth, even at what hurt and at what they loved. Gradually their customs rubbed up against each other and they ceased regarding their own sacred altars in such a serious manner; they gradually discovered a very important secret in this world: that what you hold sacred your neighbour thinks is rubbish, and that your neighbour isn’t a thief or a vagrant; perhaps he’s right, perhaps not, but it’s not worth grieving over.”38...

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Amr Moussa: Egyptian – Israeli peace treaty is in place

2012-01-16T00:08:00.000-08:00

In a long interview with Asharq Al-Awsat, former Arab League Secretary-General and Egyptian presidential hopeful Amr Moussa spoke on a number of topics, including the political situation.

In summary:

Amr Moussa: Do not think Egyptian – Israeli peace treaty will be cancelled under any circumstances, must decide if selling gas to Israel [note: the supply of gas is the result of a signed contract - YM]

Egyptian – Israeli peace treaty is in place, and I do not think there are any circumstances that will lead to its cancellation. I do not think this will happen, and I do not think it would be wise for this treaty to be cancelled. The treaty will continue so long as each party respects it…as for the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula and the presence of Egyptian forces there, I believe that the security articles of the treaty should be reviewed in this regard. This is something that can be discussed within a political framework.

Excerpt:

Let me tell you that the Middle East region needs a new
system. The Arab world and the Middle East are in the process of change, and so the previous way of doings things is no longer good enough. Firstly, we must put forward a new political, economic, and security system in the region. Secondly, and with regards to Egypt, the Arab – Israeli conflict, and the Palestinian Cause, Egypt must and will continue to be part of the Arab Initiative [for peace]. Egypt’s policy on the Arab – Israeli conflict, and its resolution, must be based on the Arab Initiative. As for Egyptian – Israeli relations, the Egyptian – Israeli peace treaty is in place, and I do not think there are any circumstances that will lead to its cancellation. I do not think this will happen, and I do not think it would be wise for this treaty to be cancelled. The treaty will continue so long as each party respects it…as for the security situation in the Sinai Peninsula and the presence of Egyptian forces there, I believe that the security articles of the treaty should be reviewed in this regard. This is something that can be discussed within a political framework. As for the Palestinian Cause, Egypt must not turn its back on this, for this is part of Egypt’s national security. As Egyptians, we are the largest neighbor to Palestine and Israel, and so we must work to control the situation in this region. This is via three points: solving the Arab – Israeli conflict in a just and respectable manner, solving the Palestinian Cause through the establishment of a genuine Palestinian state, and by establishment an atmosphere where everybody feels
safe, most prominently through nuclear non-proliferation

[Asharq Al-Awsat] What about the issue of Egypt’s sale of natural gas to Israel? Will this deal remain unchanged?

[Moussa] There are two issues that must be decided. Firstly, whether we will sell natural gas to Israel or not, and secondly, how such sales will take place. There is a lot of corruption in the gas deals that occurred in the past. This corruption must be immediately addressed. As for the issue of
whether we will continue such sales, the [Egyptian] political apparatus must look into this and consider how it will manage Egypt’s gas and oil policies, environmental policies, etc.

(Hat tip: IMRA)

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Crude Propaganda

2012-01-12T06:00:00.000-08:00

Arabs and their supporters have employed crude propaganda tricks or even basic errors to besmirch Menachem Begin.

For example, here:

Nor has the Zionist terror machine hesitated to kill its own. In 1940, Menachem Begin's Irgun Zwei Leumi terrorist gang bombed the ship Patria in Haifa harbor, killing 240 Jewish refugees, (while blaming the British)...

In the first instance, Begin was still in Lithuania at the time and arrived in Mandate Palestine in April 1942, becoming Irgun commander in December 1943.

But, by that as it may, that operation was done by the Hagana and first revealed in English in Munya Mardor's book in 1964!

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Academic Paper on Begin and Herut

2012-01-12T05:23:00.000-08:00

Found here (the full Hebrew text is here):-

Yechiam Weitz, "The Change in Ben-Gurion’s Attitude toward the Herut Movement during the 1960s"

In July 1965, a few months before the elections to the 6th Knesset, David Ben-Gurion left his original political party, Mapai (Labor Party), and established a new party, Rafi (Israel Workers List). This move was largely the result of the bitter disagreement between Ben-Gurion and Prime Minister Levi Eshkol over the “Lavon Affair.”

Although Rafi’s attitude toward the main right-wing party Gahal (Herut-Liberals Bloc) was not defined during the election campaign, it subsequently became clearer when contacts emerged between the leadership of both parties concerning a future coalition in several cities. Considering Ben-Gurion’s previous attitude toward Menachem Begin and his famous saying, when prime minister, “without Herut and without Maki [the Communist Party]),” this cooperation was surprising.

The most signifcant coalition between Rafi and Gahal was in the Jerusalem municipality where Teddy Kollek from Rafi became mayor and one of his deputies was a member of Gahal. The new coalition and cooperation between these two opposition parties in the new Knesset broke Ben-Gurion’s old taboo.

Begin at Brusselles 1976

2012-01-11T01:53:00.000-08:00

Begin at the Second World Conference for Soviet Jewry in Brusselles

Another Carter Reminisce

2012-01-10T23:07:00.000-08:00

The following is excerpted from "Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President." (and published here):

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.”
--Matthew 5:9

During 13 difficult days, Prime Minister Menachem Begin of Israel, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, and I worked at Camp David to negotiate a historic peace agreement. When we returned to Washington, I was invited to address a special session of the U.S. Congress.

I had no time to develop a lengthy speech, but I decided on the way to the Capitol to quote Matthew 5:9. I wanted to say, “Blessed are the peace-makers,” but I couldn’t remember what came next. So I called for a Bible to be waiting for me when I got out of the limousine. Upon my arrival, a staff member slipped me a piece of paper that said, “for they will be called children of God.” I repeated it as I asked Sadat and Begin to stand.

Peacemakers are very special people. They have to understand and sympathize with others who have differing points of view. Begin and Sadat’s countries had been at war four times during the previous 25 years. They hated each other. I kept the two men apart for their last 10 days at Camp David because they couldn’t sit in the same room without all the old animosities coming out.

Peacemakers have to empathize with both sides, even though both sides can’t be completely right. Through common trust, understanding and flexibility, they must find a way to get both sides to come together. They must make sure that every time one side gives up something, they can expect to get something more important at the end. And finally, both sides must win. If one side loses and the other wins, the peace will not last.

Every Christian faces altercations or arguments that can degenerate into animosity or misunderstanding. But if we choose to be peacemakers -- if we choose to act as children of God -- then we can make a positive difference for good, as did the Prince of Peace.

Get Ready for the Begin Run

2012-01-08T03:13:00.000-08:00

Carter Recalls Camp David

2012-01-08T00:30:00.000-08:00

In a recent interview on the occasion of his new book, "Through the Year with Jimmy Carter: 366 Daily Meditations from the 39th President" which includes "fascinating glimpses into behind-the-scenes activity at the White House", we read:

Was there a role for faith when you were brokering peace with Egypt and Israel?

There was. When I was elected President nobody asked me to negotiate between Israel and Egypt. It was not even a question raised in my campaign. But I felt that one of the reasons that I was elected President was to try to bring peace to the Holy Land. And I was blessed with two other deeply religious persons, in fact Menachem Begin was the first religious Prime Minister of Israel. The rest of them were quite secular in their attitudes, particularly Golda Meier, who laughed when I brought that up when I met with her when I was governor.

Anyway, Anwar Sadat was a deeply religious Muslim and Begin was a religious Jew and the first thing we did was to provide a common prayer to the world that we would have peace there. And Sadat brought it up quite often and wanted to build a shrine on Mount Sinai that would be used by all three faiths. We would have done that, but he was assassinated soon after I left office, and the idea was dropped. But we talked about our common worship of God quite frequently while we were negotiating the peace agreement.

Did you actually pray together?

No, we didn't have a chapel at Camp David but we used a little room and the Muslims used it on Friday, the Jews on Saturday and the Christians on Sunday. We were very assiduous in our worship.

Thatcher, Begin and Lankin

2012-01-06T02:21:00.000-08:00

In a Jewish Chronicle story:

...This did not mean that the Thatcher-era marked a golden era of UK-Israel relations. As the JC revealed in 2010, secret papers released by the National Archives showed that she thought Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin was the "most difficult" man she had to deal with, a man whose policy on West Bank settlements was "absurd".

In June 1981, she unleashed the full force of her fury at Israel after the bombing of Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor. In 1983, she made plain her opposition to former Irgun fighter Eliahu Lankin becoming Israel's ambassador to the UK, as she viewed him as a terrorist. He later withdrew...

Moshe Arens on Begin's Gamble

2012-01-03T05:41:00.000-08:00

Moshe Arens' op-ed in Haaretz: Begin's gamble

Could Begin have insisted on a better deal, on a compromise in Sinai, without giving up everything?

In 1867 the United States bought Alaska from Russia. Over 1.5 million square kilometers, an area the size of Texas, for $7.2 million. Czar Alexander II sold and U.S. President Andrew Johnson's Secretary of State William Seward bought. For a number of years this purchase was referred to as "Seward's folly." But it was no folly - it was the best real estate deal ever.

A little over 33 years ago another real estate deal was concluded: Israel agreed to surrender the Sinai peninsula, 60,000 square kilometers, an area three times the size of the State of Israel, to Egypt in return for a peace treaty. Menachem Begin, after 12 days of secret negotiations with Anwar Sadat at Camp David in the presence of Jimmy Carter, had signed the deal. It was the biggest real-estate deal of the 20th century. It was Begin's gamble. Was it a good deal? This is a good time to look back and attempt to dispassionately answer that question.

Two questions surrounding the Israel-Egypt peace treaty signed in 1979 were raised at the time, and are still relevant to this day. Was it a good deal, or should Begin have held out for better conditions? And was the peace treaty, paid for so dearly, going to be no more than a temporary arrangement signed with a dictator who would eventually be replaced, and if so, was the temporary arrangement worth the price?

The price Israel paid was unprecedented in the annals of international relations. Never before had an aggressor who had been defeated been compensated for all he had lost. Egypt had committed aggression against Israel four times - in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Its army had been beaten each time. Now all the territory it had lost was going to be returned. There was no precedent in history for such a reward for aggression. And what kind of a precedent was this going to set for aggressors in years to come?

And what did this mean regarding future negotiations between Israel and its other neighbors? Israel was giving up great strategic depth sorely missed these days, military bases, its naval presence in the Red Sea and areas that were to become major tourist attractions, in addition to the evacuation of the Israeli settlements that had been established in the Sinai.

Could Begin have insisted on a better deal, on a compromise in Sinai, without giving up everything? Or was it going to be another war with Egypt unless he gave Sadat all that Sadat demanded? Although not likely after Egypt's total defeat in 1973, we will never know the answer to this question. Begin decided not to hold out for better terms. Sadat received everything that he asked for and Begin received the peace treaty and an Israeli ambassador in Cairo.

There was never going to be the normalization of relations between Israel and Egypt that Begin had hoped for, but peace came to Israel's southern border.

There is a myth that Begin also wanted to throw in the Gaza Strip and that Sadat refused to accept it. This is untrue. We know that the reason Begin was able to overcome his reservations about conceding all of Sinai was that he did not consider the Sinai to be part of the Land of Israel. On the other hand, as far as he was concerned the Gaza Strip was an integral part of the Land of Israel and he was not prepared to concede an inch there.

As for Sadat's insistence that all of Sinai was rightfully Egyptian, that is historically questionable. It was only in 1906 that Britain, the ruler of Egypt at the time, forced the Turks to withdraw eastward to the line that now delineates the Israel-Egypt border.

Was it going to be a permanent arrangement? Part of the answer we already have - the peace treaty has held up with minor perturbations, like temporary withdrawals of the Egyptian ambassador from Tel Aviv, for the past 32 years. Did Begin consider the fact that he was signing a treaty with a dictator and that the permanence of the treaty was therefore in doubt? Who knows? He decided to gamble. It outlasted the assassination of Sadat in 1981. Will it outlast the present turmoil in Egypt?

As Zhou Enlai, Mao's foreign minister, is supposed to have said when asked about the significance of the French Revolution - "it is too early to say."

Evelyn Gordon Again on Begin's Lessons for the Left

2012-01-02T21:37:00.000-08:00

Begin’s lessons for the left

Begin didn’t jump ship because he couldn’t get his way; he worked to effect change.

In last week’s column, I discussed the lessons Israel’s far right ought to learn from Menachem Begin. But the left is no less in need of Begin’s wisdom today – and once again, the Altalena incident shows why...After 2,000 years of exile, Begin understood that any Jewish state was better than none, and that civil war would be its death knell – a lesson, as I noted last week, amply proven by Jewish history, but that right-wing hooligans clearly haven’t learned: Their irresponsible attacks on Israel Defense Forces soldiers could easily spark an escalating cycle of fratricidal violence.

Yet it seems leftists haven’t learned it either, judging by how easily they advocate civil war – something you almost never hear rightists doing. For the more people talk of civil war as a reasonable option, the more likely it is to someday come to pass.

It’s bad enough coming from the radical leftists of Haaretz, who have been urging civil war against the settlers for years now. But it’s truly frightening when it spreads to the mainstream, moderate left – like former Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer (Labor), who last month said, unblushingly, that IDF soldiers should have opened fire on stone-throwing right-wing extremists. Or Jerusalem Post contributor Daniel Gordis, who equally unblushingly urged the government last month to deal with right-wing and ultra-Orthodox extremists the way Ben-Gurion dealt with the Altalena – in other words, to shoot them.

...Indeed, most leftists would be appalled at the suggestion that soldiers shoot Palestinians engaged in non-life-threatening hooliganism; they would correctly insist on sticking to routine law enforcement techniques. Yet they unabashedly advocate the use of live fire to suppress Jewish hooliganism, even though most of the vandalism, arson and rioting to date, while outrageous, hasn’t been life-threatening. Are Jewish lives worth less to them than Palestinian lives? Has it not occurred to them that opening fire in such circumstances could easily drive the extremists to retaliate with far worse violence, since these hooligans don’t have a Begin to restrain them? Or have they simply not grasped Begin’s key insight: that civil war is always the worst option?

But that isn’t the only lesson the left needs to learn from Begin. Equally instructive was his behavior after the Altalena bloodbath: Instead of saying “if this is the kind of Jewish state we’re going to have, I want no part of it,” he sent Irgun troops into the thick of the fighting in the War of Independence and then spent three decades serving as the government’s loyal opposition, patiently using the tools of democratic politics to try to bring Israelis around to his views. This effort finally paid off only in 1977, with his election as prime minister.

But too many on the left aren’t willing to work patiently to get their views accepted. They present their fellow Israelis with an ultimatum: Accept our dictates as to how the Jewish state should look, or we’re all going to jump ship.

Gordis made this threat implicitly when he said that many Israelis prefer to “live in America because what’s unfolding in Israel is so thoroughly unappealing to them.” Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit, another moderate leftist, has repeatedly made it explicitly. In June, for instance, he declared that the left’s willingness to fight in Israel’s defense depended on the government’s willingness to accept its policies on the peace process. In November, he went even farther, declaring that if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu didn’t kill various bills opposed by the left, then left-wing scientists, intellectuals and entrepreneurs would all emigrate: “That elite will simply not be here. It will hand over the keys to the Putinists, the Shas party and the settlers, and leave them to enjoy one another's company.”

This brings us back to Begin’s insight that any Jewish state is better than none. First, this is because, even if Israel were as “illiberal,” “medieval” and “undemocratic” as its leftist critics claim (which I don’t for a moment accept), it would still fulfill functions that moderate leftists like Gordis and Shavit deem important. For instance, Israel still offers sanctuary should any Jewish community worldwide ever need it – a role no other state, even friendly America, can be counted on to play (if you doubt it, just look at how America closed its doors to Iraqis who helped it during the Iraq War).

Secondly, however, no country is immune to going through bad patches; look at the current woes in “enlightened” America and Europe. The question is how its citizens respond: by saying “my way or the highway,” or by engaging in long-term political efforts to make things better. The latter option is obviously preferable for any country, but it’s particularly vital for the Jewish state.

Because as long as the state exists, so does the possibility of reforming it, assuming opponents of its current policies are willing to invest the time and effort that Begin did. But if we abandon this Jewish state out of disgust with its flaws, we may well have to wait another 2,000 years to try again.

Menachem Begin Employed in Context of "Palestinains' Yearnings"

2012-01-01T14:51:00.000-08:00

In an op-ed, mostly negative about Newt Gingrich's opinion on the "invented" Palestinian people, A Man of the Past, HDS Greenway writes:

Every four years we hear presidential candidates say that the first thing they would do in the Oval Office is move the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Yet when any of these Zionists of opportunity actually reaches the White House, they stick with the old formula that the status of Jerusalem should be negotiated among the parties.

But when presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich recently said that the Palestinians were “an invented people,” the former speaker of the House broke new ground. Going beyond any official position held by the government of Israel, Gingrich was implying that the Palestinians are not worthy of a country of their own. Even Benjamin Netanyahu, who has thrown up endless obstacles in order to forestall a Palestinian state, is on the record as favoring one.

...Gingrich is right that there has never been a state called Palestine. The term “Palestine” in Ottoman times loosely included what is now Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, as well as a bit of Lebanon. Britain’s “Palestine Mandate” included what is now Jordan, too, until the British drew a line on the Jordan River and called their territory to the east Transjordan — today’s Jordan.

Whereas the 1917 Balfour Declaration, named after Britain’s foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, promised a Jewish homeland in Palestine, as long as it did not “prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities,” no one consulted the Arabs of Palestine. Prime Minister Lloyd George ran it by the Arab leaders who were fighting alongside Britain. But he said he couldn’t get in touch with the Palestinian Arabs, as they were fighting against Britain — presumably as conscripts in the Ottoman Army at that time, or residing in Ottoman controlled territory.

Later, Palestinian Jews who fought in the British Army in World War II had “Palestine” sewn onto their uniforms.

...after Israel took the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 there were Israelis who said that the West Bank never legally belonged to Jordan, having been captured in defiance of the U.N. resolutions on how Palestine should be divided between Arab and Jew. Thus, the occupied territories belonged as much to Israel as to anyone else. I remember Golda Meir telling me that Palestinians were just Palestinian Arabs, not a separate people with rights. And there were others who thought the Palestinian Arabs should wander off to other Arab countries, as Gingrich says. Followers of Ariel Sharon used to say Jordan is Palestine.

But times change, and attitudes, too — although, apparently, not for Newt Gingrich. I have always been impressed how Palestinian nationalism grew up as a mirror image of Israeli nationalism. The Palestinians yearn, as Menachem Begin once wrote about the Jews, to be “a free people ... in our own country.”

The Palestinians have made themselves an historical people, and I believe most Israelis today accept that, and would be happy with a two–state solution if their security could be guaranteed.

Gingrich may qualify as a man for the past. But for the future? Or even the present?

New Reform Head Recalls Advice on Begin

2012-01-01T04:36:00.000-08:00

Reported:

Expanding on how the Reform movement can relate to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and government policies that are sometimes at adds with the movement’s professed values, [Rabbi Richard]Jacobs [incoming president of the Union for Reform Judaism (URJ)] recalled that when the Likud Party’s Menachem Begin became prime minister, Rabbi Schindler—then URJ’s president—said “We relate to the Prime Minister of Israel because we relate to Israel.” In turn, the Reform movement should “express our moral commitments here and in Israel” and “bring them to the conversation,” Jacobs said.

Begin's Senses

2012-01-01T00:37:00.000-08:00

Reported:

The United States had no warning of the attack on the Osirak reactor ordered by Menachem Begin, the Israeli Prime Minister, in June 1981 amid fears that Saddam Hussein was trying to build a nuclear weapon.

Files released by the National Archives show that Britain's ambassador to Washington, Sir Nicholas Henderson, was with US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger as the news came in.

"Weinberger says that he thinks Begin must have taken leave of his senses. He is much disturbed by the Israeli reaction and possible consequences," Sir Nicholas cabled London.

Britain's ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Stephen Egerton, disclosed that the Iraqis had been just as surprised when the Israeli F15 fighters appeared in their skies.

"The diplomatic corps had a ringside view of the belated ack-ack and missile reactions to the raid when we were gathered for the Italian national day reception on the Bund [waterside]," he wrote.

And a second report:

When news broke that Israeli fighters, flying at dusk from a Negev airbase and crossing Jordanian and Saudi air space, had destroyed Iraq's Osirak reactor, the perceived nuclear threat from Saddam Hussein appeared to have been lifted.

But confidential documents, just released by the National Archive, show that the attack, in June 1981, brought an angry response not just from Saddam but from many of Israel's firmest friends - including the Americans.

US Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger reportedly said: "[Menachem] Begin must have lost control of his senses."

This less-than-diplomatic outburst was overheard by a British embassy official who passed it on to the Foreign Office, where a similar view was taking hold.

The Israeli raid, by F15 and F16 jets, on Iraq's French-supplied nuclear facility, followed intelligence reports that the reactor was on the point of producing weapons-grade nuclear material - despite Iraqi protests that it was developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

"I will not be the man in whose time there will be a second Holocaust," Prime Minister Begin had told his military chiefs.

An eye-witness report on the raid came from the UK's ambassador in Baghdad, Sir Stephen Egerton.

In a "secret" cable to Whitehall he described how "at 18.34 local time, enemy aircraft, later shown to be Israeli, bombed the Osirak reactor.

"They flew in low at dusk from the Western Desert, and to avoid the enormous earthworks surrounding the reactor, they climbed sharply and then precision-bombed their target." World reaction to the operation - codenamed Operation Opera - was a mix of shock and dismay, the documents revealed. Despite some comments that displayed thinly-veiled respect for the audacity of the Israeli pilots, even Israel's traditional friends were furious.

After much debate, the US voted in favour of a UN Security Council motion condemning Israel's actions and it also delayed the delivery of a consignment of jet fighters to the IAF. This followed successful diplomatic efforts by the West to persuade the Iraqis and their Arab allies not to push ahead with a resolution demanding tough economic sanctions against Israel.

"Clearly, it would be right to avoid sanctions," said a Foreign Office official in a report to Britain's prime minister, Margaret Thatcher.

This was essential, he added, if America was to support the resolution - something that would have "real impact on Israel".

One staffer at the British UN mission, in a message to Downing Street, said that America's UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick was under particularly heavy pressure "from the Zionist lobby". The official added: "I know this for a fact. She has bared her soul to me."

Known for her sterling support of Israel, Mrs Thatcher was also urged by lobbyists to understand Israel's actions. She dismissed their arguments as "unsupported".

Begin's Legacy for Today's Hilltop Youth

2011-12-29T23:52:00.000-08:00

Evelyn Gordon writes:

We need Begin, not Ben-Gurion

Both left and right need to relearn Begin’s lesson: Any Jewish state is better than none. The Altalena seems to be on many commentators’ minds these days, mine included, but most of those who cite this incident misidentify its hero. The man Israel needs today isn’t the first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, he’s former prime minister Menachem Begin.

The Altalena was an arms ship belonging to the Irgun, Begin’s pre-state underground. The ship reached Israel in June 1948, a month after statehood was declared, and Ben-Gurion ordered the arms transferred to the provisional government unconditionally (Begin had agreed to the transfer in principle, but wanted input into where the arms were sent). When Begin refused, Ben-Gurion – in a move subsequently credited with establishing the principle of the government’s monopoly over armed force – ordered the ship shelled. Survivors reported being shot at, even after they fled the burning ship and were helpless in the water. Sixteen were killed, and Irgunists begged Begin to authorize revenge attacks.

Begin refused to retaliate. However viciously Ben-Gurion’s government had acted, or might act in the future if this slaughter elicited no response, nothing, as he later wrote in his memoir, The Revolt, could be as bad as a “fratricidal war” that would “destroy the Jewish state before it was properly born.” For any Jewish state was better than none at all.

This is a message both left and right in Israel desperately need to relearn. But, for lack of space, I’ll defer the left until next week and focus on the right...As I wrote last week, their disdain for democracy and the law is understandable, but their disdain for the state itself is another matter – because, by every parameter they themselves claim to value, our imperfect Jewish state is infinitely better than no state at all.

Jewish settlement? Yes, the 2005 disengagement uprooted some 9,000 settlers; outpost evictions have uprooted additional dozens, maybe even hundreds, and more may well follow. But, under the Jewish state’s protection, the number of Jews inhabiting the Land of Israel has risen from 650,000 in 1948 to 5.9 million today, including hundreds of thousands in the Biblical heartland of Jerusalem and the West Bank...

Access to holy places? Thanks to the Jewish state, Jews can pray freely at the Western Wall, Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and other sites from which successive foreign governments barred them for 2,000 years. That Jewish worship remains forbidden at some sites, like the Temple Mount, is indeed shameful. But, without the Jewish state, the list would be far longer.

Saving Jewish lives? Yes, the state is sometimes delinquent in protecting its citizens; its ongoing tolerance of rocket fire from Gaza, for instance, is disgraceful. But the approximately 14,500 Israelis killed in all wars and terror attacks combined since 1948 pales beside, say, the six million Jews murdered from 1939-45...

Observance of Jewish precepts? True, Israel isn’t a halachic state. But it’s the only state in the world where government offices serve, and major supermarket chains sell, only kosher food; where the army is forbidden to make soldiers do nonessential work on Shabbat; where the government subsidizes yeshiva studies; where Shabbat and many Jewish holidays are mandatory days off...

Yet all these achievements are endangered by right-wing extremism...the worst danger of all is civil war. Certainly, that isn’t the extremists’ goal. But, if they keep attacking soldiers, some soldier will eventually feel threatened enough to open fire...

...Jewish history is one long lesson in the catastrophes that occur when Jews raise their hand against other Jews. Begin understood that, and taught it to his followers. We desperately need someone who can do the same today.

Margaret Thatcherand Menachem Begin

2011-12-28T11:21:00.000-08:00

From this article in The Tablet, Thatcher and the Jews by CC Johnson:-

...She also condemned Israel’s bombing of Osirak, Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor, in 1981. “[The Osirak attack] represents a grave breach of international law,” she said in an interview with London’s Jewish Chronicle in 1981. Israel’s bombing of another country could lead to “international anarchy.”

In fairness, Thatcher wasn’t alone in this position. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the U.S. ambassador to United Nations at the time, compared Israel’s bombing of the nuclear reactor to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The U.N. Security Council unanimously condemned the raid. “Just because a country is trying to manufacture energy from nuclear sources, it must not be believe that she is doing something totally wrong,” Thatcher said in the House of Commons. Iraq’s facility, she noted, had just been inspected and so it was particularly unhelpful for Israel to have attacked. Reagan agreed—at least, officially. “Technically,” Reagan wrote years later, “Israel had violated an agreement not to use U.S.-made weapons for offensive purposes, and some cabinet members wanted me to lean hard on Israel because it had broken this pledge … but I sympathized with [Israeli Prime Minister Menachem] Begin’s motivations and privately believed we should give him the benefit of the doubt.”

That Thatcher did not give Israel the benefit of the doubt is disconcerting, though she made good by later calling for the liberation of Kuwait and eventually the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. But in this Thatcher ought not to have let the mandarins in the Foreign Office get the better of her judgment: She should have trusted her philo-Semitic instincts.

A View From the Ramparts

2011-12-27T21:56:00.000-08:00

The Begin Center as viewed from the roof of David's Tower:

Daniel Gordis Misrepresents the Altalena Affair

2011-12-24T15:17:00.000-08:00

Daniel Gordis presents a mischaracterized version of the Altalena affair:

At moments like this, it’s hard not to think about the Altalena affair. Tragic though it was, it was the defining moment at which Ben-Gurion made it clear to all that there would be one central authority in the Jewish state. Those who sought to subvert it would be treated in accordance with what they were – threats to the state’s very existence. One prays that some progress can be made here without the use of force. But if it cannot, it’s worth remembering that we once had a prime minister who knew what had to be done.

"Israel Must Be Handled With Great Caution"

2011-12-22T23:47:00.000-08:00

IMRA has provided the link to this story:

We must re-examine peace treaty with Israel - Egyptian Judge

Alexandria, Asharq Al-Awsat – Judge Mahmoud al-Khudairi is the former vice president of the Egyptian Cassation Court. He is also a newly-elected member of the People’s Assembly, having won the seat of the Sidi Gabir district, Alexandria, in the latest round of the Egyptian parliamentary elections.

In an interview with Asharq al-Awsat, conducted from the city of Alexandria, al-Khudairi spoke

...[Asharq al-Awsat] How do you envision relations with Israel in the post-revolution phase?

[Al-Khudairi] Let’s talk frankly in this regard. Israel must be handled with great caution, and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty must be re-examined, especially in relation to the reconstruction of Sinai, which is yet to be completed in full. The agreement cannot prevent any state from freely
carrying out reconstruction projects on its own territory. However, this does not mean that the current treaty recognizes this, for there is much ambiguity regarding the terms of the treaty and its specific appendices. Thus, we must raise the question of the treaty in its entirety, and present it before parliament to re-examine and re-define its terms.

[Asharq al-Awsat] What is the first question or request for information that you plan to submit in the forthcoming parliament, and to whom?

[Al-Khudairi] There are two requests I intend to submit to the Egyptian Foreign Minister. The first is to disclose the agreement under which gas is exported to Israel, which I deem to be illegal or unconstitutional, because it is squandering the country’s natural resources, which are the right of the Egyptian people. As for my second briefing request, this will refer to the continued blockade of Gaza, and Egypt’s international role in lifting this blockade, as the situation in Gaza can be considered an extension of
Egyptian national security...

Begin Mentioned at the Politico Blog

2011-12-14T22:06:00.000-08:00

Making Bibi look like a pussycat

By BEN SMITH

I wrote yesterday about how Ronald Reagan directed the sort of open criticism and threats at Israel that today's Republican Party views as beyond the pale; a reader notes that Reagan's Israeli counterpart, Menachem Begin, gave as good as he got at a moment when Israel's security felt far more fragile than it is today.

The reader sends on a couple of passages from Yehuda Avner's "The Prime Ministers."

At one point, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, Samuel Lewis, informed Begin that Reagan had decided to impose a peace plan on Israel without consulting the Israeli government, to which Begin replied:

Please inform the president that I have read his letter and am most unhappy both with its contents and its implications. I have also listened very carefully to your oral message and am extremely upset by its contents. You may tell the president and the Secretary of State that I am astonished that your government did not see fit to indicate that such an initiative was in the making, or to consult with the government of Israel at any stage of its elaboration. This is entirely unacceptable. The whole initiative is utterly contrary to all our understandings with your country. It is not in accordance with the Camp David agreements; in fact it is a violation of those agreements. Of course, I will consult with my cabinet, and then give you a response. We being a democracy - unlike those others with whom your government has seen fit to consult - necessitates my being given time before giving a formal response.

And here's Begin's response to Reagan's decision to impose a peace plan on Israel on national television before allowing Begin's cabinet to convene (to Ambassador Lewis):

Is this the way to treat a friend? Is this the way to treat an ally? Your government consorts with our despotic enemies and yet you choose to ignore us on a matter of vital import to our future? What kind of a discourse is this between democratic peoples who purport to cherish common values? Is this the way to make peace? We do not deserve this kind of treatment...Mr. Ambassador, please convey to the president exactly what I've just said. Tell him I am hurt to the core. And tell him that our cabinet will convene tomorrow as planned, and then we shall provide your government with our official response. Good night!

And the conclusion of Begin's September 2, 1982 letter to Reagan:

Mr. President, you and I chose for the last two years to call our countries 'friends and allies.' Such being the case, a friend does not weaken his friend, and an ally does not put his ally in jeopardy. This would be the inevitable consequence were the 'positions' transmitted to me on August 31, 1982, to become reality. I believe they won't. 'L'ma'an Zion lo echeshe, u'l'ma'an Yerushalayim lo eshkot' - For Zion's sake I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest.

Reagan, per Richard Reeves' biography, quipped privately after the 1981 Israeli decision to annex the Golan Heights, "'Boy, that guy Begin makes it hard for you to be his friend.'"

The tensions then, like now, were very public: When the Reagan administration sought to sell the AWACS radar system to Saudi Arabia in 1981, American friends of Israel lobbied to kill the sale while Reagan worked Congress (successfully) to get the deal done.

The New York Daily News cover: "Ron to Israel: Butt Out - Raps Jewish anti-AWACS Lobby."

Prime Minister's Bible Class Revived

2011-12-14T03:14:00.000-08:00

As reported in the Jerusalem Post:-

Netanyahu re-establishes PM Bible class

Taking a page out of David Ben-Gurion and Menachem Begin’s playbook, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will begin hosting a regular Bible study group in his official residence for researchers, public officials and invited guests.

Netanyahu announced the establishment of the study circle on Friday at a ceremony marking 30 days since the passing of his father-in-law, Shmuel Ben-Artzi. The study group will be named after Ben-Artzi, a noted poet and Bible teacher.

Both Ben-Gurion and Begin, when they each served as prime minister, hosted regular Bible study groups.

Netanyahu said he was establishing the class to perpetuate love of the Bible.

Last Sunday, at a ceremony in Sde Boker marking the 38th anniversary of Ben-Gurion’s death, Netanyahu recalled the first premier’s Bible study class, saying that his father-in-law used to attend.

“Ben-Gurion understood that the Book of Books is our mandate for our country, as he said in that same unforgettable statement before the Peel Commission in 1936,” Netanyahu said. “He viewed the Bible as the wondrous story of the Jewish people, the unique spiritual, cultural and historic heritage of our people, and also as one of the cornerstones of all of human culture.”

Update From Egypt

2011-12-13T14:24:00.000-08:00

Senior Member: Ikhwan Al-Muslimun to Review Camp David Accord

A senior member of the Egyptian Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun (Muslim
Brotherhood) party underlined the necessity for revising Camp David Accord between Cairo and Tel Aviv, describing the pact as "cruel".

"It is natural that after the victory of the revolution many things and issues should be studied and dealt with," Kamal al-Halbawi told FNA on Tuesday.

"Hence, the issue of revising the Camp David Accord will also be in the list of the top priorities of (Egypt's new) officials to be studied in its appropriate time," he added.

He reiterated that the Camp David Accord has damaged Egypt's honor and dignity, and called on all Egyptian people and politicians to stand against the shameful pact which was signed at hard time in Egypt.

Earlier, Former Egyptian Ambassador to the Palestinian territories Gamal Mazloum had also told FNA that Egypt should take action to boost its forces in the Sinai Desert and make a formal request to correct and modify the Camp
David Accord.

Since the Zionist regime has several times breached the Camp David Accord, Egypt should use its power and increase its military presence in the Sinai Desert if the Israeli regime rejects a willing modification of Camp David, he said in October.

Earlier, a leading Egyptian political activist had underlined the necessity of revisions in the Camp David Accord between Cairo and Tel Aviv, stressing that the deal is no more valid.

"Camp David has been annulled and has no more credit and value," member of Egypt's National Association for Change George Ishaq told FNA in Cairo in September.

"Since the Zionist regime attaches no respect to the accord and in order to reclaim Egypt's sovereignty over the Sinai region…the agreement should be reviewed and revised," underlined Ishaq, a former coordinator of Kefaya Movement, a political movement opposing Hosni Mubarak's regime.

Yet, the position of the Egyptian people is much stronger than their politicians as they urge an immediate cut of all ties with the Israeli regime and their country's full sovereignty over the Sinai desert.

Retrospect on The Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty

2011-12-11T05:20:00.000-08:00

From:

Into the Fray: Begin – in retrospect
By MARTIN SHERMAN

Israel cannot afford the same miscalculations made in the peace treaty with Egypt on its fronts with the Palestinians and the Syrians.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions – Aphorism attributed to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153)

We cannot conclude from the good intentions of a statesman that his foreign policies will be either morally praiseworthy or politically successful....How often have statesmen been motivated by the desire to improve the world, and ended by making it worse? And how often have they sought one goal, and ended by achieving something they neither expected nor desired? – Hans Morgenthau (1904-1980), on political realism

The sweeping victory of the Islamist parties in the election in Egypt is – somewhat belatedly – beginning to concentrate minds. Israel is being forced to confront the stark possibility that in the foreseeable future, it may be left with no peace, no Sinai... and eventually, no demilitarization.

Inevitably, this unpalatable prospect will force a national reassessment of the process – and the personalities – that brought this ominous situation about, of the prudence of the decisions taken at the time and of the beforethe- fact predictability of its potentially perilous outcome.

Inevitably, too, this will focus attention on Menachem Begin and his role in precipitating Israel’s evacuation of the strategic expanses of the Sinai Peninsula in return for a peace treaty with Egypt, then Israel’s principle adversary.

A brief history
The deal, brokered by US president Jimmy Carter, was concluded in 1979 after two years of intense negotiation following Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s historic 1977 address to the Knesset. It was greeted with great international acclaim – except in the Arab world where it was long regarded as an act of treachery – and the award of Nobel peace prizes to the Egyptian and Israeli leaders.

The intended strategic substance of pact was mutual recognition of each state by the other, and the cessation of the state of war that had existed since the 1948 War of Independence.

Israel undertook a complete withdrawal from Sinai, held by it since the 1967 Six Day War, while Egypt agreed to the demilitarization of the peninsula. The agreement also provided for the free passage of Israeli ships through the Suez Canal, recognition of the Strait of Tiran and the Gulf of Aqaba as international waterways, and massive US economic and military to Egypt, whose military has since received almost $40 billion from Washington, allowing it to to modernize and revamp its aging Soviet equipment.

Stark asymmetry
Whichever way you slice it, the treaty was afflicted by a stark structural asymmetry in the undertakings of the contracting parties: On the one hand, Israel was called on to relinquish vast physical assets of great strategic and economic value, which could only be retrieved – if at all – by a massive outlay of blood and treasure.

In return for the receipt of these assets – plus generous US financial support – all that was demanded of Egypt was paper promises, which could be violated whenever it deemed it expedient or the profit worth the pain.

This asymmetry was perhaps most aptly articulated by Sadat himself, when in a 1980 interview with The New York Times, he remarked bluntly, “Poor Menachem... I got back... the Sinai and the Alma oil fields, and what has Menachem got? A piece of paper.”

From the outset then, the durability of the peace agreement hinged not only on Cairo’s continuing willingness to honor its commitments, but also its continuing ability to do – despite domestic opposition. This clearly applies – and applied then – not only to the Sadat regime, but to any successors who might accede to power – be it by the bullet or by the ballot.

Predictable perils
There is – and was – no need for the benefit of hindsight to grasp this pivotal feature of the agreement. It was distinctly discernible as an inherent element of the treaty from the get-go. It was always a precarious arrangement — its abrogation, whether sudden or in stages, always a plausible possibility.

Indeed, it would seem that Sadat himself was keenly conscious of the fragility of the treaty and how future Egyptian regimes may well feel unbound by its terms. In a 1975 interview he openly stated: “The effort of our generation is to return to the 1967 borders.

Afterward the next generation will carry the responsibility.”

Yet within the Israeli public discourse, any suggestion that the potential long-term strategic dangers might outweigh the undeniable short/intermediate-term benefits, were dismissed as the demented raving of extremist warmongers. Anyone who dared caution that the situation now emerging in Egypt and along our southern border, might in fact emerge, was scorned either as a deranged scaremonger or a uniformed ignoramus.

Consequently, there was no serious public discussion of how to respond to an intentional violation of the agreement, or an unintentional collapse of Cairo’s ability to uphold it. And in the absence of a clear and credible comprehension of what penalties such violations would incur, only a giant leap of faith in Arab altruism could induce the belief that these scenarios were implausible.

However, beyond the mindless malice and myopia of political debate in Israel, questions must be raised as to the judgment and foresight of the Israeli leadership that consented to forgo the tangible fruits of military victory for the ephemeral promise of political peace.

As Begin was the overwhelmingly dominant figure involved in Israel’s acquiescence to the treaty terms, it is likely such a reevaluation would, as an unintended side effect, damage his standing in the national pantheon.

‘The road to hell...’
The objective would be to enhance awareness of the non-static nature of Israel’s political environment, and to develop deeper understanding of how the nation should manage long-term risk in the dynamic instabilities of the Middle East. But more specifically – and more important – it is imperative to avoid creating similar situations of strategic danger through similar strategic misunderstandings of the dynamics in play on Israel’s other fronts with the Palestinians, the Syrians and the Jordanians.

There can, of course, be no doubt as to the totality of Begin’s commitment to Israel and to its security, or as to fever of his devotion to Zionism and its ideals. Indeed for many, he was the epitome of the leader whose absolute dedication to his country and his people was never subordinated to, or sidetracked by, the pursuit of partisan interest, private gain or personal prestige.

However, pure motives and noble intentions are no guarantee of effective statesmanship or strategic acumen.

Indeed, as Hans Morgenthau, one of the most influential figures in the study of modern international politics, remarked: “Chamberlain’s politics of appeasement were, as far as we can judge, inspired by good motives; he was probably less motivated by considerations of personal power than were many other British prime ministers, and he sought to preserve peace and to assure the happiness of all concerned. Yet his policies helped to make the Second World War inevitable, and to bring untold miseries to millions.”

While any comparison between the two men is wildly inappropriate, the bloodcurdling frenzy of the lynch mob that stormed the Israeli Embassy in Cairo in September may prove that Begin’s declaration of “No more war, no more bloodshed, peace forever” was no less premature and naïve than Neville Chamberlain’s “Peace in our time.”...

Op-ed on Alan Dershowitz's Reception of the Begin Prize

2011-12-06T12:03:00.000-08:00

Yaakov Ahimeir's op-ed on last night's special program, awarding the Honorary Begin Prize to Professor Alan Dershowitz:

The case for Dershowitz

Renowned law professor Alan Dershowitz has long used his rhetorical strength and intellectual talents to tackle controversial subjects. He recently was awarded the Menachem Begin Prize at an event marking the publication of "The Goldstone Report 'Reconsidered': A Critical Analysis" -- an important book by the Jerusalem-based organization NGO Monitor -- which refutes the Goldstone report on the 2008-9 Gaza war between Israel and Hamas, on legal grounds. Our number one defense attorney, even when Israel is isolated in the international arena, more than hinted that Israel must heed what is said about it around the world. His remarks were aimed at officials who objected to recent criticism from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about dwindling women's rights in Israel. Her detractors claimed that she should not interfere in the country's domestic affairs. Dershowitz warned that there is no such thing as "internal affairs" in Israel. Anything discussed in Israeli public discourse is no longer internal, he said.

Dershowitz defined himself as "center-Left", as a lawyer who cares about human rights, gay rights and feminism, yet he garnered applause even from the many traditional Jews in the audience. This very same public might not approve of the character of the Supreme Court, but Dershowitz vigorously defended the institution currently engulfed in controversy, saying unequivocally: "Israel's best weapon, single best weapon in the international community, is Israel's judiciary, Israel's independent Supreme Court."

In other words, you can love the Supreme Court or detest its rulings, but when it comes to the international community it is one of Israel's most essential, prestigious institutions. Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch's husband, attorney Yehezkel Beinisch, was present in the auditorium. He presumably could have told her later that the institution she presides over has a first-rate defense lawyer. And what a lawyer: Professor Dershowitz, who personally knows all the U.S. Supreme Court justices.

Dershowitz went on to "interfere" in another internal Israeli dispute: the subject of free speech. He was particularly resolute when defining the greatest enemies of freedom of expression. The greatest censor of freedom of speech is the Stalinist radical Left, he said. He told the audience how he was banned from speaking at any university in enlightened Norway because he is considered to such a great extent a defender of Israel. He also was not allowed to speak in Cape Town, South Africa.

In principle, Dershowitz said, he opposes restrictions on freedom of the press, but added that there was no point in responding to the anti-NGOs bill or the amendment to the libel law with cries about "the end of democracy." He called for restrained discourse, in which the Left defends the Right's freedom of speech and vice versa. He also had an encouraging promise for senior Israeli officials who fear arrest in foreign countries such as Britain. Don't be afraid, go abroad, he said, adding that he would personally defend any such official in court.

Finally, Dershowitz said that he learned a great deal about defending human rights from someone he only knew as a "terrorist" before they met: Menachem Begin.

And that's all I have to say about Dershowitz's lack of involvement in Israel's public affairs.

Alan Dershowitz Receives Honorary Begin Prize

2011-12-05T01:15:00.001-08:00

A joint/multiple program sponosored by NGO-Monitor and the Begin Center had Alan Dershowitz speaking on human rights and on defending Israel as well as receiving an Honorary Begin Prize which he was supposed to receive last year.

Pics:

Video

^

Abe Foxman Recalls Jabotinsky and Begin

2011-11-30T23:28:00.000-08:00

In his JPost blog, Abe Foxman recalls what he learned as a young Betari in New York:-

...Most significantly, the efforts by some on the right to paint these laws as consistent with Likud ideology are egregiously off the mark. Indeed, those who initiate these laws are doing great damage to the nationalist cause they espouse.

A little history is in order. When Ze’ev Jabotinsky, and then Menachem Begin created and built Revisionist Zionism, they were often accused by the Zionist establishment as not only being extreme nationalists but of being anti-democratic. Some suggested they were Zionist “fascists” in the making. Indeed, when Begin was elected prime minister in 1977, there were those on the left who implied that Israeli democracy was at risk.

Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The very fact that Likud came to power after 30 years of Labor’s dominance of the Israeli political system was a sign of Israel’s democracy strengthening and maturing. Whatever one thought about their broader nationalist views, and clearly, the arguments about territory continue to this day, the charge that the Revisionists, and later the Likud leadership, were anti-democratic was inaccurate and insidious. Prime Minister Begin, consistent with the views of his mentor Jabotinsky, did everything to strengthen democratic values, free speech, free courts and free expression.

For decades, Likud, representing the mainstream right, has been a living example that nationalism and democracy can co-exist in a healthy and harmonious relationship. Indeed, as strong defenders of Israel’s democratic values, the right was more able to make its case for nationalist foreign policies. Whether one agreed with them or not, the case could not be made that they were undermining democracy at home at the same time. While the left may have claimed that nationalism and anti-democracy were linked, they had no basis for that assertion.

Now the introduction of a series of laws that in their totality have the feel of restricting democratic values is making the early politicized criticisms of the left seem relevant.

From Our Files: Letter to Washington Post

2011-11-30T01:01:00.000-08:00

December 12, 2000
The Editor
The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.
USA

In a recent article, former President Jimmy Carter claims, in regard to UN Security Council Resolution 242, that “Prime Minister Begin ultimately acknowledged its applicability in all its parts”, ("For Israel, Land or Peace", Washington Post, Nov. 26,2000). He furthermore writes that violence in the Middle East continues, this due to “an underlying reason…that some Israeli leaders continue…building settlements in occupied territory”. The dispute between Mr. Carter and Mr. Menachem Begin over these issues is well-known. We wish to present a different picture of those diplomatic concerns.

As William B. Quandt makes clear in his volume, “Camp David: Peacemaking and Politics”, American officials were in dispute with Mr. Begin over the interpretation of 242 and its relevance to portions of the Jewish people’s historic homeland in Judea, Samaria and Gaza. Quandt, present at Camp David in 1978, notes quite plainly on page 246 that Mr. Begin, at Camp David, rejected the applicability of 242 and only accepted the position that while it could serve as an instrument for negotiations, it could not apply in an obligatory fashion to the results of any final agreement.

According to archival material reposited at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, Mr. Begin appeared before an audience of over 2,500 persons on September 20, 1978 three days after the end of the Camp David conference. Discussing the 242 resolution, he said, inter alia:

“‘We were asked to sign a document, in which at least four times the words appeared: “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war…we explained to them [the Americans] that these words are taken from the preamble to Resolution 242 of the United Nations Security Council of November 1967…And now you ask us to sign a document with those false and falsifying words: “inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory,” as a result of such a war, of legitimate self-defense, of saving a nation surrounded and attacked and threatened with annihilation?…for eight days, we heard from our American friends, that if that phrase is not included in the document, no agreement is possible…We refused. On behalf of the People of Israel, on behalf of the Jewish People, in the name of simple of human justice and dignity, above all, on behalf of truth, we refused to give this signature for those words.

“Ultimately, a talk took place between the President and myself on Wednesday night, the eighth day of our deliberations. I asked the President to lend me an attentive ear. I told him: “It is going to be, Mr. President, one of the most serious talks I have ever held with you since we met in July last year in the White House…[and]I concluded this passage of my words to the President of the United States with a simple statement, taken, yes indeed, from the Bible. And I told him: ‘Mr. President: Let my right hand forget its cunning before I sign such a document’.

Mr. Begin’s view is upheld also by a recent scholarly publication, “Heroic Diplomacy” by Kenneth W. Stein. Professor Stein records on page 253 that “the preamble mentioned Resolution 242 by name…but did not say that it applied to all fronts. If it had, Begin would never have signed”. On page 231, Stein writes that Begin opposed any allocation of Judea and Samaria to foreign sovereignty, as Carter understood Resolution 242 to dictate, and that the issue was “not on the negotiating table”.

As for the issue of settlements, Quandt on page 253, makes it clear that Mr. Carter made a mistake and, in fact, misinterpreted Mr. Begin’s position regarding any freeze. He quotes from Mr. Carters’ own book, “The Blood of Abraham”, page 169, that Carter had made a serious omission in not clarifying Mr. Begin’s position. Stein, too, on page 255, attests to the fact that Carter failed to adequately understand Begin’s lack of commitment on the settlement issue and left the matter in ambiguity. It should be emphasized that all Israel’s governments since have adopted Mr. Begin’s principled approach that Resolution 242 does not apply to the totality of all the territories Israel administers as a result of its defensive actions in 1967 against Arab aggression.

We trust these references will contribute to a more balanced view of diplomatic history and what transpired at the first Camp David conference.

Sincerely,

Harry Hurwitz,
The Menachem Begin Heritage Center,
Jerusalem

^

Moshe Arens on Democracy and Begin

2011-11-29T00:55:00.000-08:00

From

Of 'dictators' and Israeli democracy By Moshe Arens

Was Franklin Roosevelt, that great democratic president, who led America to victory over Nazi Germany, a dictator? That was the accusation leveled against him during his second term of office in 1937 when he tried to alter the composition of the Supreme Court that was declaring some of his New Deal legislation unconstitutional. The Judicial Procedures Reform Bill of 1937, the legislation he tried to pass through Congress, was referred to as the "Court-packing Plan" by his opponents.

The bill was intended to give the president the power to add additional judges to the court, whose conservative majority was striking down some of Roosevelt's legislation designed to bring the country out of the depression. U.S. Supreme Court judges are appointed for life, and the legislation proposed by Roosevelt was intended to give him the authority to appoint additional judges in case sitting judges had reached the age of 70 years and six months, thus overriding the conservative majority of the court. The legislation never passed Congress, and as it turned out was not needed after one of the Supreme Court judges retired.

As is well known, judges to the U.S. Supreme Court are appointed by the president for life, making it essentially a political process - conservative presidents appointing conservative judges, and liberal presidents appointing liberal judges. The composition of the court at any given time is the result of a rather random process depending on the results of presidential elections and the longevity of the sitting judges. Despite the political nature of the Supreme Court appointments the court is held in high regard by the public.

This comes to mind as we watch the attempts in the Knesset to influence the composition of the Israeli Supreme Court, and the charges by the left that the Knesset majority is tampering with the democratic nature of the State of Israel. Even the insult "fascist" is hurled at some of the MKs now and then in the frenzy of the political debate. It is no more appropriate than the charge at the time that Roosevelt wanted to be a dictator. Whether Jabotinsky or Begin would have supported the suggested changes we will never know and is hardly relevant to the issue in question.

Begin's Political Philosphy Manipulated

2011-11-24T06:05:00.000-08:00

In Haaretz:

By Begin's logic, the Palestinians should have a state

In "The Revolt," his seminal depiction of the Jewish resistance against British rule in Palestine, Irgun chief and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin often returns to his interrogation at the hands of the Soviets. These references apparently are intended to counter a contemporary communist argument raised during these interrogations, that the Zionist movement was a hoax, a "puppet show," meant to divert attention from the Jews' revolutionary role in Europe and turn them into a tool for British imperialism in the Middle East.

...Begin, of course, repeatedly balks at these claims, referencing centuries of Jewish craving to return to their historical homeland and flee from the kind of persecution and massacre made manifest at that time by the camps and furnaces of Europe.

Later, Begin repeatedly cites the deep chasm running between British imperialist objectives – for which, he said, they were more than willing to sacrifice the Jews – and the very real, heartfelt Jewish desire for freedom from both persecution and foreign rule.

In one famous metaphor, Begin tells his Soviet interrogator that the need to establish a Jewish state was not a purely theoretical ambition, one motivated by either a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary movement, but was like saving a family from a burning house. In other words, urgent and real.

Begin is asking his Soviet interrogator to disregard for a moment the political powers at play, undoubtedly necessary for the creation of Israel, and look the hopes and dreams of real people: People that care for their children, that cry out against injustice, that find life hard, if not sometimes impossible, when lived under the specter of constant foreign occupation, exile, and persecution.

Yet as convincing as Begin's arguments were, the tendency (typified here by the Soviets) to subjugate human needs with purely geopolitical considerations have far from disappeared from the Middle East. Indeed, they have become the official line of the State of Israel.

Objections to the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state often run the gamut of the kind of conspiracy theories realized by Begin's interrogator, opinions made strikingly evident since peace talks with the Palestinian Authority lost momentum (if indeed such momentum ever existed) late last year.

"A Palestinian state would function as an Iranian proxy," one version of this argument goes. In another: "A Palestinian state would in effect act as a place holder, allowing weapons and terrorist groups to flow uninterrupted, putting larger cities such as Tel Aviv in range of rocket fire and closing crucial buffer zones protecting central Israel from bombing attacks."

These arguments...have served to delegitimize the entire Palestinian quest for self-determination.

The actual argument, similar to the Communist claim, is that the Palestinian desire for a state is not genuine...The Palestinians, they say, seek a stronghold - one erected by faceless Arabs. And once completed, one which could be filled with the kind of faceless Arabs that seek Israel's destruction, if not the annihilation of the entire Jewish people.

The beauty of Begin's nuanced commentary on the criticism of Zionism, what I would term his turn toward the human, seems completely lost on proponents of the aforementioned positions. The consequence of this blindness to a facet of nationhood so close to our own is - as the unshakable leader of the dream of an Israel on both sides of the Jordan River must have understood - tantamount to a loss of humanity. It is a faceless doctrine that crushes individual lives.

...The dangers of foreign influence, whether Iranian or other, are of course real. They are, however, as real to us as the fear of Western imperialism and exploitation was real to every other country in our region over Israel's creation.

To understand that, finally, is to let go of the fears of an Iranian outpost. Not because those fears are unfounded, but because they are not what should determine how Israel treats its neighbors. To mistrust those who, in good times and bad, live alongside Israel and share its fate is to perpetuate those nefarious motivations for Israel's foundation, to prefer blind dogma over the real and the human.

This is something Begin understood, and his nearsighted followers of today do not. We must live with those who share our fate, not rely on a culture that while instrumental in establishing Israel, should have been discarded immediately after. And that is why the former prime minister remains the only Israeli leader to sign a peace deal that actually had substance, both in terms of Israel's integration in the region and its security.

Begin's vision should help us understand that as long as we refuse to come to terms with both our own desires and those of the people around us and among us, we shall never be fully here. That to be fully here is to sever the umbilical cord of dogma and start - as Begin himself did in 1979 - to live with our neighbors, whether they are truly the proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran or not.

Netanyahu: Begin My Mentor of Democracy

2011-11-24T02:40:00.000-08:00

As reported:

'As long as I'm in power Israel will be democratic'

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Monday defended a controversial amendment to the libel law that would raise the court imposed penalty on libel, saying "no one will tell the media what to write and what to investigate."

"I was raised on the values of [former prime minister Menachem] Begin and [Ze'ev] Jabotinsky... Israel will continue to be a strong democracy," Netanyahu said during the weekly Likud faction meeting in Jerusalem, adding, "Freedom of expression will exist in all parts of society."

Responding to criticism from the opposition that called recent legislation anti-democratic, the prime minister said he will ensure that Israel remains democratic.

"As long as I'm in power, Israel will continue to be a democracy," Army Radio quoted Netanyahu as saying.

BBC1 Interviews Former British Trooper in Mandate Palestine

2011-11-24T01:33:00.000-08:00

In the UK Chronicle, we find this:

THE conflict that raged in Palestine between 1945 and 1948 resulted in an unbelievable loss of British lives – a total of 784 died.

We were pleased to be allocated seven minutes in BBC1’s remembrance week programmes. The producer chose the very moving story of one veteran – a survivor of the mining of the overnight train to Haifa on February 29 1948.

The explosion, which killed 28 British servicemen and injured 31 more, was the responsibility of Menachem Begin’s Stern gang.

A survivor, Aircraftsman Charles Speight, who arrived in Palestine at the start of the Arab-Israeli war, escaped death in that incident by an amazing stroke of luck.

That was in the morning. In the afternoon, he was ambushed by armed Arabs, who took their weapons and rendered their vehicles immobile.

That was typical of the conflict at that stage. Begin wanted to kill Britons, the Arabs wanted our weapons.

Charles is a member of The Palestine Veterans Association and we are building an archive and constantly looking for more members.

If you were in Palestine during those turbulent years and would like more information, please make contact.

ERIC LOWE, 20 Treloar Road, Hayling Island, Hants. PO11 9SE. 02392 467181.

This comment was left there:

a) the attack of the troop train was an operation of the Lechi (or Stern Group). Menachem Begin commanded the Irgun.

b) the train was attacked near Rechovot, south of Tel Aviv, not near Haifa as could be implied from the wording.

c) Begin did not want to randomnly "kill Britons" and always warned of attacks as in the case of the King David attack and dozens of others, in a war waged for the liberation of the Jewish national home from what turned into an oppressive British Mandatory regime and I am specifically referring to the blockade on Jewish immigrants during and after the Holocaust.

d) the immediate reason for the attack was the car-bombing in Jerusalem's Ben-Yehuda Street by two British army troopers who had gone over to the Arabs for either pay or out of identification. Their bomb killed over 50 Jews and destroyed a building in downtown Jerusalem.

Here's the first page report from the Palestine Post of March 1:

Book Launch on The Likud Princes

2011-11-23T04:13:00.000-08:00

From Fay Greer Cashman:

They may be passé and no longer as representative of their legacy as they used to be, but the Likud princes, or at least the image they convey, still have a magnetic effect on Likudniks of the old school, who flocked to the Jabotinsky Institute for the launch of Gil Samsonov's book The Likud Princes. Among those present was Likud diehard Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, who said that the generation of revolt that brought in two prime ministers, numerous government ministers and people holding important positions had an undoubted impact on the development of the nation. But that generation has faded out, and the generation of the princes of Likud has dispersed. The new Likud is not committed to the ethos of Herut, Jabotinsky and Begin. Also present were Yehiel Kadishai, the longtime confidant and bureau chief of Menachem Begin; Arye Naor, who served as Begin's cabinet secretary; Eitan Haber, who was Yitzhak Rabin's bureau chief and other prominent figures. Samsonov said that there never was and never will be a generation more committed to the Zionist vision than that of the generation of revolt.

Begin Initiated Liberation of Jerusalem in 1967

2011-11-21T11:45:00.000-08:00

From a report in Israel Hayom:-

Dr. Yaacov Lozowick, the head of the Israel State Archives, addressed the cabinet to offer a report on the progress his department has made in its ambitious project to digitize the national archives, from cabinet minutes to documents dating back to pre-state Israel, including the British Mandate and the Ottoman era...Lozowick, a former history teacher and scholar, read the protocols from two high-stakes cabinet sessions: one from the War of Independence in 1949, and one dating 18 years later, from the Six-Day War.

...On Dec. 4, 1949, as the U.N. was about to take up the issue of Jerusalem, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion convened his cabinet to discuss Israel's reaction should the international community deny Israel sovereignty over recently captured parts of west Jerusalem. By then, Israeli forces had been fighting for almost a year against Arab militias at home and invading Arab armies from neighboring states who sought to frustrate the Zionist effort to establish a state in accordance with the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan.

In a cable to then Foreign Minister Moshe Sharet, Ben-Gurion informed his subordinate: "I shall convene the government tomorrow morning and propose that we issue a Knesset resolution that Israel will not accept any form of foreign government in the Jewish parts of Jerusalem and the severance of the city from the state."

Ben-Gurion then told his foreign policy chief, "If we are faced with a choice of withdrawing from Jerusalem or opting out of the U.N., we shall choose the latter." Israel would eventually hold on to west Jerusalem, but had to wait almost 20 years before seizing control of the walled Old City, home to the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.

Lozowick then went on to provide an inside look into the monumental decisions made during the early stages of the Six-Day War. On June 5, 1967, with Israeli forces already engaged in heavy fighting on the southern front with Egypt, the cabinet convened to discuss a possible maneuver to capture the Jordanian-occupied Old City of Jerusalem, after parts of it had been bombed.

"I suggest the government approves a resolution to liberate the city," then Minister without portfolio and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin said in the meeting. Begin, a fierce opponent of the ruling party, chose to enter an emergency unity government as war became imminent, putting aside differences during one of Israel's most challenging periods. But Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was wary of being embroiled in another front. "Before I left Tel Aviv for Jerusalem I talked with Maj. Gen. Yigal Yadin [a special adviser to the prime minister], and raised that option with him. He told me that this requires more thought and discussion. I suggest we put off a decision on this matter for now," Eshkol said, according to the archival material.

While calling an Israeli move against Jordanian forces morally just, then Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Immigrant Absorption Yigal Allon advocated that a small group, the Political-Security Cabinet, make a final decision on the issue. But Begin further implored his fellow cabinet members to endorse his proposal. "I whole-heartedly ask the prime minister to add this as an item on the agenda and make a decision. We are faced with an unprecedented window of opportunity for a redemption of the Old City," he said according to the documents...

Begin Reflected in Issues of the Day

2011-11-20T04:27:00.000-08:00

Several articles have appeared in today's Israel Hayom daily on Begin:

Begin, champion of the rule of law
by Aviad HaCohen

Menachem Begin did not fear the rule of law. He liked it and respected it. Perhaps because he was a leader who spent most of his days in the desert of the opposition, head of a minority that was persecuted and denounced by the regime (Ben-Gurion famously delineated the boundaries of legitimate political parties in the early years of the state when he said "without Herut or Maki," referring to two political parties of the day), until he eventually became prime minister.

Now, in our time, there are those who seek to recreate Begin in their own image, painting him as a fierce opponent of the Supreme Court and the principle of the supremacy of the law. They would be well advised to re-read his writings and the history books.

Begin knew very well, and made sure to emphasize whenever he could, in writing and in speeches, that the rule of law - unlike the rule of flesh and blood - is a guarantee of a properly functioning democratic regime, and a central factor in the protection of the rights of minorities.

It is no accident that after the High Court ordered the evacuation of an illegal settlement, it was Menachem Begin of all people who took it upon himself, although he clearly did not want to, to uphold the authority of the ruling. On his first visit to Alon Moreh, he uttered his unforgettable statement, which entered the national lexicon, that "there are judges in Jerusalem."

Former Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak's years as the government's legal advisor were turbulent. Barak was not deterred from the thunder breaking loudly around him, and used legal means to pursue the loftiest nobles, according to the famous "Buzaglo test" [which posited that the powerful and connected should receive the same treatment at the hands of government institutions as the simplest of people].

One of Barak's greatest supporters was Menachem Begin. While many in Begin's party sought to have Barak, who had been appointed by the previous Alignment [the precursor to the Labor party] government, removed, Begin not only left him in his position, but even made him a full partner in the diplomatic negotiations at Camp David (and not only on the legal side), when it was already clear that he was headed to the Supreme Court.

Later, Barak said of Begin that any time he would bring a legal matter before him, be it on an internal social matter or external diplomatic one, Begin would show himself to be someone for whom "the rule of law is in his blood and the supremacy of the law is in his soul."

Begin responded similarly when his government's first legal advisor, Y.S. Shapira, asked to attend cabinet meetings. By ordering that the government's legal adviser be present at all cabinet meetings, the first Likud prime minister did what no Mapai government had done before him. This did not prevent him from disagreeing with the legal adviser's position.

One of the famous disagreements between the two related to amnesty for Yehoshua Ben-Zion, the managing director of Israel-British Bank, who was convicted of embezzlement. Begin strongly supported granting Ben-Zion amnesty, while Barak objected to it.

Begin was one of the first to demand appreciation for "the supremacy of the law." Beyond the legal education he received at the University of Warsaw, Begin knew that were it not for fear of the government, men would swallow each other alive. Except for one exception when he led the masses against the reparations agreement with Germany, Begin always called for respecting the government's authority, the law and the court's judgements, even when he disagreed with them.

For this same reason, Begin also exhibited leadership during the traumatic Altalena crisis. Despite his considering it an act of tragic foolishness, Begin called on all of his colleagues to act with restraint and refrained from using force or violating the law against the government's actions. This is also how he acted during the decades that he spent as part of the opposition. His words were harsh, but always within the framework of the law.

Longing for Jabotinsky and Begin
by Yaakov Ahimeir

It is doubtful that all Likud voters have studied Vladimir Jabotinsky's doctrine. It is likely that in the eyes of the current generation of Likud adherents, "Menachem Begin" is just a name, just like the names of streets in Israeli cities. But these two, Begin and Jabotinsky, would probably turn over in their graves if they heard the rumors that their names have become a symbol and a paradigm for democracy and liberalism.

Reading the statements of contemporary political rivals, you would think that Jabotinsky is no less than "Montesquieu No. 1" and Begin "Montesquieu No. 2," after the French Enlightenment-era political thinker famous for his theories on class division and the separation of power. In short, we have been overcome with nostalgia; but it is nostalgia for two names that were once, and still are, abhorred. Politicians and commentators who once cursed Jabotinsky and Begin are today praising their names. How did Israeli television anchor and documentary filmmaker Haim Yavin put it? A revolution!

Some of today's politicians have even been named as the successors of Jabotinsky and Begin, starting with Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin and continuing with Ministers Dan Meridor, Benny Begin, Limor Livnat, Gideon Sa'ar and Michael Eitan. How can that be? After all, they themselves remember how in their parents house, throughout their youth, these two names were synonyms for poor management of the state. But even when those two names were slandered, they were the same Jabotinsky and Begin that today are showered with praises.

Few truly remember the invectives hurled at the two: Jabotinsky's "insufferable" militarism or Begin, who until the electoral revolution in 1977 was a "war instigator," for example. That is just the tip of the iceberg of negative characteristics associated with the two. Today, if their ears are perked up in heaven, if they are listening to the complimentary descriptions of them, there is no doubt that the two, experienced with fierce struggles, are soberly saying to themselves: "After all, we know from our own experience in public life that our names are only used down below at times when there are political quarrels between two rival camps."

These two names are certainly invoked to gain points in the struggles over proposed legislation. Any serious historian could examine Jabotinsky and Begin and find both light and shadows in their intellectual and political personalities. Indeed, such is the case with anyone who truly made history. Even Thomas Jefferson, an enlightened liberal who designed the American spirit, was also a slave-owner.

How Begin's legacy was distorted
ny Giora Goldberg

The dispute over the judiciary's authority has increasingly been the subject of public debate, now more so than in the past. The recent proposed legislation over the issue has deepened the controversy. Among the various arguments that have been raised, particularly fascinating are those based on former Prime Minister Menachem Begin's legacy. Begin's name has been invoked in a manipulative manner without anyone knowing exactly what "supremacy of the law" -- a concept the former prime minister wrote about when he was part of the opposition in the 1950s -- actually is.

Begin's political wisdom, coupled with his strong sense of justice, is what inspired him. As an oppositionist, he was well aware that the strengthening of the courts may indeed sometimes make for short-term political gains. However, as a parliamentarian and long-term national leader, he knew that judicial activism could also lead to the weakening of the state, the destruction of its democratic rule and a distortion of the people's will.

All those who connect Begin with judicial activism either do not know a thing about his legacy or simply distort it. In that same essay on the "supremacy of the law," Begin opined that judges are appointed "either by the executive branch or by the legislative branch, or by both of them together." There is no mention of involvement by judges or lawyers in the body responsible for the appointment of judges.

It was possible to oppose the recently proposed legislation according to which supreme court judges should undergo a parliamentary hearing before being appointed, but it is impossible to argue that this legislation goes against Begin's legacy. His position is closer to the proponents of this idea rather than to its opponents.

It is important to deepen our understanding of Begin's doctrines regarding the relationship between the different government authorities. Begin expressed support for granting the Supreme Court authority to interpret laws passed by the Knesset, based on the principles contained in the Basic Laws of Israel. If the court, for example, finds that a law passed by the Knesset contradicts a provision within the Basic Laws, the court has the authority to reject it.

That is, the Knesset, not the Supreme Court, is the sole constitutional authority. After the Knesset creates an official constitution, in which it will be established that the court has the authority to interpret laws according to this constitution, only then will the court have the authority to do so.

A "constitutional revolution" -- in the style of former Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak -- in fact, collides with Begin's legacy.

Judicial activism and even a constitutional revolution can be supported, but the invocation of Begin's legacy to promote these concepts constitutes a distortion of his legacy.

Those who are not convinced by this argument, are invited to read Begin's article on the "supremacy of the law," which is stored with dignity and honor in the website of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center.

^

On the Begin Ethos

2011-11-17T02:16:00.000-08:00

Rivlin: New Likud not committed to Herut ethos

Knesset speaker joins politicians, leftists calling out against legislation aimed at limiting ability of non-profit groups to raise money from foreign bodies. Labor leader says Likud distancing itself from 'enlightened world

Speaking at a Jabotinsky Institute event on Sunday, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said that "the generation of Herut princes is divided. The new Likud isn't committed to the ethos of Herut, (Ze'ev) Jabotinsky and (Menachem) Begin."

Rivlin was criticizing a ministerial committee's decision to approve legislation aimed at limiting the ability of non-profit organizations in Israel to receive foreign funding.

The legislation is expected to mainly hurt leftist Israeli groups, which rely heavily on donations from abroad. "The Likud princes are isolated in their homes. When a Likud prince goes out to defend freedom of expression, he is seen as detached from reality," the Knesset speaker said.

The right-wing Herut movement, which was founded by the late prime minister Begin in 1948, was the ideological standard-bearer of the Revisionist movement. It formally merged into the Likud party in 1988.

Addressing the social protests in Israel, Rivlin said, "If Likud strays from (Israel's deep-rooted principles), it will not endure."

Reuters on the "Begin Doctrine"

2011-11-10T02:48:00.000-08:00

In an INSIGHT report:

Has Iran ended Israel's Begin Doctrine?

Menachem Begin did not pull his punches. In 1981, as work neared completion on an Iraqi nuclear reactor that Israel believed would produce plutonium for warheads, the Israeli prime minister dispatched eight F-16 bombers to destroy the plant. Begin later said that the raid was proof his country would "under no circumstances allow the enemy to develop weapons of mass-destruction against our people".

The event defined a strategy that became known as the "Begin Doctrine" and is best summed up by the phrase "the best defence is forceful preemption."

...The spin of the Islamic republic's uranium centrifuges stirs mortal fear in the Jewish state. In defiance of western pressure to curb the project's bomb-making potential, Iran has pushed on with its nuclear programme, saying it has no hostile designs. The International Atomic Energy Agency will say this week that Iran now has the ability to build a nuclear weapon, the Washington Post has reported. Israeli officials have long hinted they may launch a preemptive strike.

That threat has taken on fresh intensity in the two years since Netanyahu -- a right-wing ideologue like Begin -- assumed office. Media speculation that Israel might launch a unilateral strike has surged again in the past two weeks.

...Interviews in recent months with government and military officials -- most speaking on condition of anonymity -- and independent experts suggest that Israel prefers caution over a unilateral strike against the Iranians...Netanyahu's own circumspection is instructive.

...As opposition leader in 2005, he told Israel Radio that in dealing with Iran he would "pursue the legacy" of Begin's "bold and courageous move" against Iraq. But as prime minister he has been less explicit -- both in public and, to judge by leaked U.S. diplomatic cables dated as recently as 2010, in closed-door meetings he and aides held with visiting American delegates. Instead, Israel has pushed its demand that world powers stiffen sanctions on Tehran and that the United States provide the vanguard of any last-ditch military move.

"The military option is not an empty threat, but Israel should not leap to lead it. The whole thing should be led by the United States, and as a last resort," Deputy Prime Minister and Strategic Affairs Minister Moshe Yaalon told Israel's Army Radio.

The Prime Minister's Office declined to comment directly on whether Netanyahu felt bound by the Begin Doctrine regarding Iran...

...it was [Minister Dan] Meridor who recommended "defence" as a fourth pillar of Israeli national security in a secret memorandum he authored on behalf of the government in 2006. That report added to the three doctrinal "D's" set out by Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, soon after the country's founding in a 1948 war with neighbouring Arabs: detect enemies' threats, deter them with the promise of painful retribution and, if hostilities nonetheless ensue, defeat them quickly on their own turf.

"This was something counter-intuitive for Israel, especially for the military. Israelis like to be on the attack, not on the defensive," Meridor said.

While he declined to discuss the prospect of military action against Iran, Meridor distanced himself from the idea that the Begin Doctrine commits Israel to such a course.

"I am not sure what people mean when they use this term. In any event, there is no contradiction between any attack doctrine and a defence doctrine. They are complementary. If the attack doesn't does not solve the problem, then you need to be able to defend yourself."

...Like Meridor, [INSS scholar and retired Israeli general Shlomo] Brom dismissed the suggestion that the Iraqi reactor strike set a precedent for a potential Israeli strike on Iran. He notes Israel's decision not to take military action against suspected chemical weapons programmes of Syria and Iraq has already undermined the Begin Doctrine.

...Keeping the world guessing as to how -- and if -- a confrontation might happen is in itself part of Israel's strategy.

"I hope that the Iranians see an Israeli conspiracy in this," said Yaalon...

YouTube Clip on Betar Jerusalem Football Team Visit

2011-11-06T03:21:00.001-08:00

It's here.

^

The Historical Menachem Begin in An Egyptain Newspaper

2011-11-06T01:37:00.000-07:00

Opinion: The Gazette and the 1952 revolution (222)

By Sami El-Shahed - The Egyptian Gazette
Saturday, November 5, 2011

The partition plan was a compromise position based on two other plans, giving more or less land to each state. Political pressure by proponents of partition was used to get the UN to pass the partition proposal. Most of the Jews accepted the proposal, in particular the Jewish Agency, which was the Jewish state-in-formation.

The more extreme nationalist Jewish groups like Menachem Begin’s Irgun Tsvai Leumi and Yitzhak Shamir’s LEHI (known as the Stern Gang), which had been fighting the British, rejected it. They were so fanatical in their demand for a Jewish state (from the Nile to the Euphrates) that in the 1940’s, they came up with a novel idea about foes of the Jews.

Hitler was a ‘persecutor’ of Jews, but the ‘enemy’ of Jews was the power that occupied Palestine, the British. There would always be persecutors until Jews vanquished ‘the enemy’ and took over their rightful turf.

However, numerous records indicate the joy of Palestine’s Jewish inhabitants as they attended to the UN session voting for the division proposal. Up to this day, Israeli history books mention November 29 (the date of this session) as the most important date in the Israel’s acquisition of independence. However, Jews did criticise the lack of territorial continuity for the Jewish state.

The Arab leadership opposed the plan, arguing that it violated the rights of the majority of the people in Palestine, which at the time was 67% non-Jewish (1,237,000) and 33% Jewish (608,000). They criticised the amount and quality of land given to Israel. The Jews had been offered 55 per cent of the land when they only owned 7%.

The population for the proposed Jewish state would be 498,000 Jews and 325,000 non-Jews. The population for the proposed Arab State would be 807,000 non-Jews and 10,000 Jews. The population for the proposed International Zone would be 105,000 non-Jews and 100,000 Jews.

Arabs also feared that the Jewish state would be a stepping stone for further advancement; this view is supported by statements from David Ben Gurion and other leaders recently discovered by Israel’s New Historians and other independent scholars.

As early as 1938, David Ben-Gurion declared: “After we become a strong force, as a result of the creation of a state, we shall abolish partition and expand into the whole of Palestine”. In 1948, Menachem Begin said, “The partition of the Homeland is illegal. It will never be recognised. The signature of institutions and individuals of the partition agreement is invalid. It will not bind the Jewish people. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel (the land of Israel) will be restored to the people of Israel, All of it. And forever”.

Subsequent events had shown Israel expanding primarily through land conquered in successive wars which, it alleged, were intended ‘to eliminate Israel’, and thus there was a ‘military necessity, to create a buffer zone against future invasions.’

Begin and Jerusalem

2011-11-05T13:40:00.000-07:00

From a Haaretz story by Shay Fogelman:

What Israeli, U.S. leaders of 1977 hoped would be Jerusalem's fate

A previously unpublished transcript of a meeting between Israeli and U.S. leaders in Washington on December 17, 1977, offers a surprising revelation: Prime Minister Begin's suggestion that autonomous international religious councils would oversee Jerusalem's holy places.

A Jewish legend from the Middle Ages tells about a great rabbi, named Amnon. Rich, handsome and of distinguished lineage, he lived in Magenza (now Mainz, Germany). According to the story, which is probably apocryphal, the city's archbishop and other officials pressed Rabbi Amnon to forsake his religion and convert, but were rebuffed time after time. But one day, the tale goes, he could no longer withstand the pressure: In order to get them off his back, he said yes - but asked for a three-day extension to consult and consider the matter. Barely had the rabbi finished speaking when he grasped the depth of his sin. He went home tormented and abashed. "Because of this I shall descend to the netherworld," he apparently told his confidants, whereupon he wept and began to fast.

Three days went by, but the rabbi did not come to the archbishop's quarters, as he had promised. When cajoling and threats did not help, he was brought there by force. What is it, Amnon, asked the archbishop. Why didn't you come to me? To which the rabbi replied: I should have my tongue cut out for not having refused to do so immediately.

But the bishop thought otherwise. In his view, the rabbi's tongue had spoken well, but his legs, which had not arrived at the appointed time, were fated to be cut off. The bishop ordered first that each of the rabbi's toes be cut off at the joint; each time, his torturers asked whether he was now ready to convert. But even at the last toe, Rabbi Amnon clung to his faith.

Not long afterward, on Rosh Hashanah eve, the bleeding rabbi asked his assistants to carry him to the synagogue, and before the shofar was sounded said he wished to recite a prayer. With his last remaining strength, Rabbi Amnon uttered what is known as "Unetaneh tokef" ("Let us tell how overwhelming is the holiness of this day") - and died. Since then, this prayer has been central to the liturgy of the Days of Awe and is recited in the afternoon prayers of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

A few weeks before Rosh Hashanah in September 1978, the legend of Rabbi Amnon from Mainz apparently acquired renewed significance. All the biographies of Prime Minister Menachem Begin relate how, during the negotiations that took place then over the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty at Camp David, he told the story of Rabbi Amnon to U.S. President Jimmy Carter.

According to his biographies, Begin was reacting to the pressure that Carter was exerting on him about the future status of Jerusalem. In testimony to the Begin Heritage Center, Yehiel Kadishai, who was Begin's personal aide and his bureau chief as prime minister, stated that Carter later told the legend to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance and to Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. "After that story, no one talked to him about Jerusalem again," Kadishai said, adding unequivocally: "The subject did not come up for discussion."

Begin's ideological followers and politicians who see themselves as his successors claim that the mention of the legend of Rabbi Amnon demonstrated to President Carter that Begin was unshakable when it came to the status of unified Jerusalem as Israel's capital and that the subject, now as then, was not negotiable. In the Knesset session held in November 2007 to mark the 30th anniversary of Sadat's visit to Jerusalem, MK Gideon Sa'ar (Likud ) told the story anew. This was at the time of the Annapolis peace conference. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had put forward a secret and far-reaching plan for the internationalization of the holy places in Jerusalem, and MK Sa'ar, who was then in the opposition, saw fit to draw a connection between the two episodes. Concluding his remarks linking Rabbi Amnon and Begin, Sa'ar said, "There is a moral to the story: When you espouse a worldview, with 'red lines' and values, the other side respects them and knows that there are things you cannot be induced to forgo."

In fact, Begin's decision to use this legend in order to rebuff American pressure about Jerusalem is not self-evident. Begin was known as a wizard with words and images, a master of rhetoric and dialectic. He had a deep knowledge of Judaism, of the legends of the Jewish sages and Hasidic tales. According to Shlomo Nakdimon, who was Begin's media adviser at the time, the Americans dubbed him "the preacher" because of his frequent recourse to biblical imagery.

So it's not clear why Begin chose a story that was intended as inspiration for acts of martyrdom by German Jews during the Crusades; a story that deals mainly with regret for words of heresy, with soul-searching and matters that undermine faith. The premier could easily have come up with better examples to illustrate the strength of the Jewish people's bond to the holy city. He certainly could have found more potent allegories to demonstrate his firmness of resolve on this issue.

Some Begin biographies say that he related the legend only because Carter asked him to think about the matter and give him an answer in three days. This is not supported by the testimonies given over the years by some of those present during the talks. Indeed, several of them rejected this theory outright in interviews for this article.

A top secret document that was recently uncovered in the Israel State Archives raises a different possibility: The transcript of a conversation held between Prime Minister Begin and President Carter a few months before the Camp David meeting raises the possibility that Begin's choice of the legend of Rabbi Amnon was highly relevant - and perhaps better suited to subsequent developments than any other story.

Sensational visit

On November 9, 1977, President Anwar Sadat stunned the Egyptian People's Assembly when he announced he was ready to go to Jerusalem and discuss the terms of a peace treaty with Israel. No less stunned were the leaders of Israel and the United States, who had been looking for ways to narrow the gulf between the sides, ahead of a planned international peace conference at Geneva. Sadat's sensational visit to Jerusalem took place 10 days later. The two sides decided to launch direct negotiations, and Israel was invited to send a delegation to Ismailia for the start of the talks.

This unexpected development first prompted an urgent visit to the Middle East by Secretary of State Vance. Shuttling between Cairo and Jerusalem, he heard the leaders' impressions from the historic meeting, and offered Washington's help in advancing the peace process. In a report to President Carter summing up his meetings with Sadat and Begin, he wrote that Israel would have to moderate its positions, notably on the future of the West Bank, and with respect to the Palestinian issue.

In Vance's opinion, Begin's approach was largely unacceptable to the Egyptians. Carter was not surprised. He was well aware of the abyss that separated the sides and was concerned that the embryonic peace process would be aborted. At a meeting with Vance in Jerusalem on December 12, 1977, Begin surprisingly suggested that he visit Washington urgently in order to present to Carter new ideas which he had formulated as part of an Israel plan. The Ismailia talks were scheduled to start a week later and the Israeli leader needed American support. Vance went on to Amman, where he briefed King Hussein about this optimistic development. The American media noted this was the first time in a long while that movement toward compromise had been felt in Jerusalem.

Begin's trip to Washington was kept secret for three days, during which the prime minister held marathon meetings with cabinet ministers and advisers to formulate the Israeli blueprint for negotiations. Rumors spread rapidly after the Prime Minister's Bureau canceled Begin's participation in a number of events he had been scheduled to attend later in the week. There were also reports that Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan had held a secret meeting in a foreign country. The Prime Minister's Bureau kept mum even after the foreign media reported Begin's impending visit to Washington. On the day of his departure, December 15, 1977, the headline in Haaretz was, "Begin off to U.S. this morning; likely to meet with Sadat."

Carter tried to dampen expectations. In his previous meeting with Begin, four months earlier, he had detected no sign of compromise in the then-newly elected prime minister. At a press conference he held a day prior to the premier's arrival in Washington, Carter said that if Begin's proposals "should be far short of what I think President Sadat could accept without very serious political consequences and serious disappointment in Egypt, and the rest of the world, I would have no reticence about telling Prime Minister Begin privately, 'I just don't think this goes far enough.'" Carter added, "I have no idea what proposals, if any, Prime Minister Begin will bring to me tomorrow morning" - but noted that the prime minister had requested the meeting, so he assumed there was an important reason for it.

Haaretz wrote the next day, "Spokesmen of the White House and the State Department put an end to the persistent rumors that Mr. Begin was actually coming for a summit meeting with Sadat. But in a period of abundant surprises, no one takes denials at face value."

A senior Israeli diplomat who was part of the Begin entourage noted in his diary, "December 16, 1977: Prime minister concerned that passengers flying to New York arrive before the Sabbath."

Because of the suddenness of the visit and the tight timetable, the diplomat wrote, Begin and his entourage took a regular El Al flight to New York. The plane landed first in Washington, and only afterward, very late and very close to Shabbat, proceeded to New York with the regular passengers.

Begin arrived in Washington on the morning of Friday, December 16. Carter's diary states that after a reception held at 7:46 [A.M.] the two met privately for 53 minutes in the Oval Office. Afterward, an hour-long meeting was held with the aides of both leaders in the Cabinet Room.

Begin declared his intention to execute a withdrawal in Sinai. He was vague about the future of the settlements there, and also offered no definitive answer about his stance regarding Sharm el Sheikh, which Israel considered a strategic site. He proposed the establishment of a civil autonomy regime in the West Bank, in stages that would take place over a number of years. He also had some surprising comments about the Gaza Strip.

Following the meeting, short statements were given to the media. The messages were positive. The atmosphere was optimistic. President Carter's diary notes that an hour later, he held a four-minute phone conversation with President Sadat.

Modeled on the Vatican?

The delegations met again the next day, immediately after the end of the Sabbath. According to the transcript of that meeting - which is being made public here for the first time - Carter began by noting that the public response to the previous day's declarations had been enthusiastic. He told Begin that Sadat, too, had expressed satisfaction in the brief conversation they'd had.

Begin opened his remarks by congratulating Carter in Hebrew on the occasion of his wedding anniversary that day. Carter thanked him, and the prime minister went on to relate that he had met with a number of senators, who were pleased by the progress in the negotiations. He added that support for the peace process had also come from the Jewish community in the U.S., even from Rabbi Alexander Schindler, a leader of Reform Judaism, whom Begin said espoused dovish views. Carter replied jokingly that Begin apparently saw the rabbi from a very different angle than the Americans did. Similarly good-natured banter followed in the next few minutes.

The transcript indicates that the atmosphere was simultaneously pleasant and very constructive. There were also some sarcastic remarks. At the same time, the impression is that the leaders chose their words carefully. The positions were explicated clearly. "It was diplomacy at the height of its glory," recalls one Foreign Ministry official who attended several such meetings.

Begin soon got down to business. He said he had consulted by phone with Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, and wanted to add some new ideas to the plan he had put forward the previous day. According to the Jewish tradition, the premier explained, anyone who makes a declaration and quotes its sources brings redemption to the world. He then mentioned, on Dayan's behalf, two procedural issues.

But before going on to discuss his own plan, Begin - without any preliminaries or any connection to what had been talked about - said out of the blue: "Our paper made no mention of Jerusalem but, of course, we have been considering it. We didn't overlook it at all. The matter refers to the holy shrines of the Muslim, Christian and the Jewish world. Indeed, it is of interest to the whole world.

"My idea, and I wish to emphasize that is still only an idea - I still, of course, have to discuss it with my colleagues - is to have an international religious council that would take care of the holy shrines of each of the respective religions. Thus, with regard to the Muslim shrines, I would suggest that a council be set up of our neighbors: Jordan, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon and, in addition, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Morocco, which is very friendly. Such a committee would take care of the shrines in complete autonomy, and of course there would be free access for everybody. There are, of course, other problems which we need to dwell upon now.

"With respect to the Christians' holy shrines, the same principle would apply: an international committee composed of the Vatican, the Pravoslavs, and the Protestants, including [he added jokingly] the Baptists."

President Carter (jocularly ): Mr. Prime Minister, I am hardly inviting you to name a chairman. [Laughter]

Prime Minister Begin: With regard to the Jewish shrines, the committee would be headed by our Chief Rabbinate and also sages from the Diaspora.

Carter: Would it be patterned after the Vatican?

Begin: It is not for me to say, Mr. President. I am a Jew.

Ambassador Dinitz: The president means will it be modeled on the pattern of the Vatican.

Begin: We will have to consider it; what I mean is that each denomination would take care of its shrines.

Secretary Vance: Would there be three different groups?

Begin: That is correct.

Vance: Would there be interchange, exchange, liaison between them?

Begin: Maybe.

The prime minister then turned to a different subject; the issue of Jerusalem did not come up again at the meeting.

'I'm in shock'

Reactions to the transcript of the December 17 meeting from people who were close to Begin 34 years ago range from "Check the text again," to "That is a total surprise." The most stunned among them declared, "I am in shock," at Begin's idea of establishing autonomous international religious councils to look after the holy places in Jerusalem.

Yehuda Avner, who was present at the meeting, says he does not remember this proposal. All the other members of Begin's bureau from that period, and from the period of the Camp David Accords less than a year later - Shlomo Nakdimon, Dan Pattir, Dan Meridor and Aryeh Naor - also say they have no recollection of any such suggestion or anything close to it being made by Begin. Benny Begin, the son of the late prime minister and currently a cabinet minister in the Netanyahu government, says he too never heard the idea; like most of the others, he declined to comment on it or offer an interpretation.

A senior diplomatic figure who was a member of Begin's bureau during those years says, "That was apparently one of the discussions whose minutes were destroyed." He explains that all of Begin's meetings during the negotiations were documented meticulously, "either by stenographers or by recordings which were later transcribed ... At least six copies of every transcript were kept and classified top secret. However, in regard to a small number of conversations, in which extremely sensitive matters were raised, an order was issued to destroy the stenographic copies and only one copy was kept, in the Prime Minister's Bureau."

This may explain why Begin's proposal about the holy places in Jerusalem remained unknown.

In response to a query from Haaretz on this subject, President Carter replied that he remembers the proposal, and added, "I was surprised that he initiated the subject of Jerusalem and, in effect, proposed that all the holy places - Jewish, Muslim and Christian - would in effect be autonomous and with free access for worshippers."

Begin's suggestion is general and vague, and does not touch on fundamental issues such as the sovereign status of Jerusalem or the civil status of the city's inhabitants. Nor does he clarify the character of the proposed committees, their legal status or territorial jurisdiction. He refers to them as an "international religious council," "committee," or "international committee"; furthermore, it is not clear whether the idea was for the three different religious bodies to be headed by a single, supreme one.

Even though Begin starts by citing reservations, it is apparent that he was not speaking spontaneously: The principles he mentions attest to profound thought and factual analysis. For example, Morocco is mentioned as a potential member of the council overseeing Muslim shrines - but not because it is a "very friendly" country, as Begin put it. The king of Morocco then headed a body called the Jerusalem Committee, which acted via the Arab League and Islamic organizations to preserve the welfare of the shrines in the city holy to Muslims. Saudi Arabia, too, was not a random choice, since it was then one of the main countries opposed to the Israeli peace agreement with Egypt.

According to a Begin confidant from that period, "Aharon Barak appears to have had a hand in this. There is a structure here that resembles a legal model...Begin, a lawyer by training, found plenty of common ground with Barak on that basis. They held lengthy discussions, and to me it sounds like an idea which could only have emerged from the encounter between the two."

In response, retired Supreme Court president Barak said he does not give interviews about the peace process.

Another Begin aide linked the idea to Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan who, he said, had spoken "in a similar vein a number of times about the future of Jerusalem." Dayan, this source noted, "conducted the [talks on the] cease-fire agreements with the Jordanians in the city after the War of Independence. He was well acquainted with the legal sensitivities in connection with Jerusalem, and always looked for pragmatic solutions. Moreover, unlike Begin, he had no interest in the city's holiness."

Supreme Court Justice Elyakim Rubinstein, who was an adviser to Dayan and his bureau chief during this period, said in response, "I have no recollection of these specific matters from that time."

Origins in Etzel?

Another, and more surprising possibility, is suggested by current Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor. Meridor, himself raised in a Revisionist and Herut home, recalls the "declaration of revolt" by Etzel (the pre-state underground group headed by Begin; also known as the Irgun ). In January 1944, when the war in Europe seemed to have reached a turning point, Begin declared a revolt against the British Mandate administration. In practice, this meant the end of the restraint Etzel had shown in its operations against the British forces in Palestine, so as not to interfere with the war against Nazi Germany.

In his declaration, Begin called for the establishment of a provisional Jewish government to replace the British authorities, and added nine more basic principles that would underlie the nascent state. The ninth said that the government "shall confer extraterritorial status on the holy places of the Christian and Muslim religions."

In the view of Prof. Aryeh Naor, who was Begin's secretary: "Begin might have been influenced by the doctrine formulated by Ze'ev Jabotinsky...which contained a very similar idea about the future of Jerusalem. In a document listing 'main points for a provisional plan of government in the Land of Israel,' Jabotinsky stipulated that the city would be headed by a 'special international committee.'"

Also in the background was the 1947 United Nations partition plan. It declared Jerusalem a separate body under a special international regime that it would administer. Ben-Gurion accepted this idea and therefore made no mention of Jerusalem in the Declaration of Independence. Begin rejected the idea, but in the meantime the disputed status of Jerusalem allowed the Etzel forces under his command to continue operating there autonomously for more than 10 months after Israel declared independence.

Beyond the difficulties concerning the proposal's ideological underpinnings, Begin's aides are still perplexed by some of the ideas raised in the meeting by President Carter and Secretary of State Vance: The possibility that the Vatican would serve as a model - and that there would be close relations between the religious committees - these accord Begin's proposal unprecedented implications.

"He meant what he said," asserts one source, who was close to the premier for many years. "If he raised the idea, he meant it. Begin was not a man of 'spins.' He possessed rare political integrity."

Begin's other close aides express similar opinions and find it difficult to explain the Jerusalem proposal.

Begin's short trip to Washington in December 1977 was relatively successful. The Americans backed part of his peace plan. They had reservations about certain points, notably in connection with his ideas about the solution of the Palestinian question. Carter told the media that Begin's suggestions constituted a positive basis for the continuation of talks. Sadat said he had been optimistic since his visit to Jerusalem, but that after the phone call he received from President Carter, he was "more optimistic" than ever.

Ze'ev Schiff, reporting for Haaretz from Cairo, wrote that large crowds in Ismailia were shouting "Long live Begin." On the day Begin returned, 120,000 people gathered in what is now Rabin Square in Tel Aviv "for an evening of the 'Song of Peace'" on December 18. According to press reports, police reinforcements were called in to control the large and unruly crowd. Several people were injured.

As far as is known, Begin's proposal for the future of Jerusalem was not raised again during the peace negotiations with Egypt. In his recent response to Haaretz, Carter says: "I made a similar proposal at Camp David that was accepted by both Begin and Sadat for a few days. In effect, the holy places would be administered autonomously by each religion, there would be unimpeded access by worshippers, and that Jerusalem would be undivided and its secular issues would be decided by a central governing body. This would relate to transportation, water, waste disposal, electricity, etc. During the final drafting stage, however, all three of us decided it was too politically sensitive for consideration on a global basis."

After this, Begin refused to discuss Jerusalem again and hardened his position on the subject. "For a while," recall some members of the entourage, "this was the most complex issue [under discussion] in the peace process."

The 1979 peace treaty was ultimately accompanied by letters concerning the city's status: Begin declared that Jerusalem would not be divided and would remain Israel's capital; Sadat stated that Arab Jerusalem is part of the West Bank and must be restored to Arab sovereignty.

A year and a half after these events, Begin supported the Basic Law on Jerusalem, which stipulates, "Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel." In 2000, amendments were made to that law, declaring that the city's boundaries would incorporate its eastern section, and that, "No authority that is stipulated in the law of the State of Israel or of the Jerusalem municipality may be transferred either permanently or for an allotted period of time to a foreign body, whether political, governmental or to any other similar type of foreign body."

In 2007, the Knesset passed another amendment, which stipulates that a majority of at least 80 MKs will be required to cede officially any territory or jurisdiction in Jerusalem. A motion recently submitted by MK Zevulun Orlev (Habayit Hayehudi ) to amend the law yet again in order to stipulate that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and of the Jewish people is still pending on the government agenda. Also in the works is a bill prohibiting negotiations to be held on the city's future.

On the 'Begin Doctrine'

2011-11-03T05:24:00.000-07:00

By Uri Heitner in Israel Hayom:-

Stick to the Begin Doctrine

Former Prime Minister Menachem Begin received a surprising letter after the Persian Gulf War. The letter, signed by a group of Knesset members, thanked Begin for his decision to destroy the Iraqi nuclear reactor at Osirak a decade earlier.

The surprise in the letter was that among those who signed it were MKs who had been firmly opposed to the decision before the strike, and critics of it afterward. In retrospect they had all realized the justification of Begin's decision. They understood the grave significance of having weapons of mass destruction in the hands of a radical tyrant like Saddam Hussein, and appreciated the leadership, bravery and decision-making skills that Begin displayed. Begin arrived at his brave decision to bomb Osirak despite opposition from many officials, among them members of the security establishment. In hindsight, they too realized his justified belief: A prime minister's ultimate and utmost priority is to ensure Israel's existence.

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According to the Begin Doctrine, as it has since been coined, Israel will make every effort to ensure its enemies do not procure nuclear weapons. It is according to this doctrine that then Prime Minster Ehud Olmert made, "according to foreign reports," the all-important decision to destroy the Syrian nuclear reactor.

This doctrine is all the more relevant today concerning Iran, which is ruled by Islamic fanatics. Letting Iran get its hands on nuclear weapons constitutes a threat to world peace, but first and foremost a perilous risk to Israel's security. An Israeli prime minister who does not stick to the Begin Doctrine - who does not do everything in his power to prevent a nuclear Iran - is a prime minister shirking his duties.

The question is how to prevent it. It does not necessarily mean an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear reactors. Military action is the last resort, and so as long as crises can be averted diplomatically and through sanctions, they should be. The Iranian threat is global, and as such it should be the free world, spearheaded by the U.S., that leads the fight in preventing a nuclear Iran. And if it still remains that the only viable solution is Israeli military action, no government has the moral right to avoid such a course, despite the risks.

Of course it is imperative to ensure that military action would be effective, as well as to take into account the price Israel might pay as result. But such discussion should not be held in a public forum, as media speculation dilutes Israeli deterrence and gives Iranian leaders the feeling that Israel has eschewed the military option. If Iran comes to the conclusion that Israel will not strike then nothing will stop the ayatollah's regime in its quest for nuclear arms.

The public debate raging in Israel over a possible attack on Iran is rash and irresponsible. Thanks to reckless leaks of information, the Israeli public is being worked into a frenzy that delegitimizes military action against the Iranian nuclear project. Israel's highest duty, which is to defend its citizens, is being depicted as an adventurous game being played by two irresponsible men who must be reminded not to play with fire.

In Iran, it would be easy to see the nature of the debate as Israel's renunciation of military action, thus dealing a harsh blow to Israeli deterrence. Such damage could cement Iran's procurement of nuclear weapons as a done deal.

Iranian nuclear weapons are an existential threat to Israel. Even if not used, their very existence could change the balance of power in the Middle East, effectively turning the region into the Iranian regime's hostage.

Public debates that cause a delegitimization of Israel's highest duty to protect its citizens only play into Iran's hands and strike hard at Israel's security.

IDF Unit Program at the Center

2011-11-03T03:25:00.000-07:00

A special IDF educational program was held for the office-level staff of a tank unit and here's how the entrance to the Center appeared last Sunday:

An Appreciation: Knitting and Recalling Begin

2011-11-03T00:43:00.000-07:00

Altalena: An Evenstar for Jabotinsky and Begin

...I briefly tried to do some mindless knitting...I went through my stash of yarn; I had bought some half-and-half cashmere and silk laceweight, but that wasn’t satisfying. For winter, I wanted something more substantial...

...I always block on Shabbat because finishing lace is an act of Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world. What we put into the world, we put into the world and there is more of. Then I named it for Zeev Jabotinsky, the founder of the Jewish Legion, and Menachem Begin. The more you look at them, particularly Begin, the better they look. Ben Gurion does not. Now I find myself reading Begin’s The Revolt: The Story of the Irgun (Steimatsky, Jerusalem, 1972). The frontispiece, a formal photo of Begin, is incredibly interesting. He has that strange mouth, that in a woman we would call sensuous and sardonic, and then those eyes: calm, clear, driven by a vision of his country and its place in the world, eyes that are sane and reassuring even though they have seen hell. By contrast, Ben Gurion’s face and eyes are those of a madman. Gradually, reading his writing, you realize that this Polish Jew little removed from the shtetl had made himself not only into a man capable of preventing a Jewish civil war (at real personal risk), making peace with Anwar Sadat, integrating marginalized Sephardi Jews into Israel and helping open up the economy, but also a British gentleman. And by that, I mean the real thing, not an artifact of good tailoring. “Unlike Arthur Koestler,” Begin wrote, I believe that sobriety is one of the happy characteristics of our people… [W]hile I believe that there are many things we ought to learn from other peoples, drinking is not one of them. Preferably, others should learn abstinence from us.”

Lovely.

But it is his chapter, “The Floggings,” that we realize we are indeed dealing with a gentleman, of a man who while waging war against the British always attempted to spare those who could be spared, a man who fought a total war with limited means. “In the development of certain British colonies the whip has been made to serve an educational purpose.

“While Eretz Israel was ruled as a British colony, it could not logically be denied the educational privilege of the whip.” The British captured two young Irgunists and sentenced them to 15 years and 18 lashes for bearing arms without permission. The Irgun high command decided, virtually without discussion but in instinctive revulsion, that if the British were going to flog captured soldiers, they would capture British officers and flog them. The reasoning was this: “The relations between soldiers and their officers are not particularly affectionate.” Indeed, “on one of the posters containing our warning, a British soldier scrawled in big letters, ‘Please don’t forget my sergeant major.’ … [T]his particular Tommy thoughtfully added his full name, unit, and regimental number.”

In the event, the British did publicly flog young Kimche; the Irgun retaliated by flogging one British major and three British non-commissioned officers. That left young Katz, and the British, warned that this time a flogging would be met by fire, cancelled the flogging on young Katz. Writes Begin, in full memory of Arab massacres of Jews, “A young Arab of sixteen who had also been sentenced to lashes was included in the ‘amnesty’. Respecting the honour of others as we did our own, we rejoiced for him, too.’”

There are roads not taken in politics as in the lives of individuals. One is, what would Israel be like if this measured, proud, dignified voice–Begin was known to listen in silence to abuse at political meetings, until his abusers wearied, then tell a joke–were the normal tone of public life? Indeed, what would America be like if that were how we Americans normally addressed each other? No, manners are not policy, but how we speak to people indicates our opinion of them, just as how we dress indicates what we think of ourselves.

Which somehow brings us back to lace: its making and its wearing.

Akiva Eldar Needs Menachem Begin

2011-10-31T07:11:00.000-07:00

Akiva Eldar uses Menachem Begin for his own political/ideological ends:

Israel needs a new Menachem Begin

As far back as 1956, Begin suggested that the Knesset 'not legislate any law that limits freedom of expression, orally or in writing.' It's horrifying to realize that after more than 50 years, even this self-evident principle of democracy is now held in doubt by the Knesset.

A few years before the killing of two Palestinians who had hijacked Bus No. 300, I wrote an article about a Palestinian jounalist from East Jerusalem who had complained that when he was in administrative detention, he had been tortured by Shin Bet security service interrogators.

They didn't kill him, nor did they break any bones. It was just the garden-variety shaking, humiliation and sleepless nights (the allegation, incidentally, was "membership of a hostile organization" - Fatah).

In contrast to Shimon Peres, a member of the "peace camp" who abetted the cover-up of the Bus 300 affair, the prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, the head of the "national camp," ordered a thorough investigation of the young Palestinian's claims. The investigation, carried out by then-State Prosecutor Gavriel Bach, ended with the dismissal of two Shin Bet investigators and strict directives that banned the use of torture in the questioning of security prisoners.

It would be easy to imagine what a tumult there would be in the Knesset if someone in the political or judicial echelons would dare today to touch a hair on the head of any security officer for hurting an Arab.

Actually, it's doubtful whether Menachem Begin would even be offered a place on the Likud benches today. Begin, the godfather of MK Yariv Levin (Likud) - who ridicules the Supreme Court and sponsored the bill to increase compensation in libel cases - probably wouldn't find his place anywhere in the 18th Knesset, whose winter session opens today.

He would be considered weird even by many members of Kadima, including party chairwoman Tzipi Livni and leadership contender Shaul Mofaz. Nor are the struggles Begin conducted to reinforce the rule of law, and to preserve human rights and freedom of expression, particularly attractive to Labor Party chairwoman Shelly Yachimovich. She prefers to leave such "left-wing" agendas to Zahava Gal-On and Meretz.

Those who have sponsored anti-democratic laws - both those that have been enacted and those still pending - present their supporters as "patriots," while opponents are described as "bleeding hearts" who care nothing for state security.

A position paper published by Prof. Mordechai Kremnitzer and attorney Amir Fuchs of the Israel Democracy Institute examines Begin's doctrines and demonstrates that one can have a broad perception of democracy while still remaining a patriot and committed to security. Although the quotes they bring are taken from Begin's Knesset addresses when he was leading the opposition, he was generally true to his principles even after rising to power.

No one can question Begin's concern for the safety and security of Israeli citizens. Yet here is Begin, during a debate in the Knesset plenum on February 20, 1962, on a bill to cancel the (Emergency ) Defense Regulations:

"The existence of these regulations raises a question about the basic rights of every Israeli citizen... We've heard the argument that the British did us a favor by leaving us these 1945 regulations when they left the country. This is a very strange argument... If it isn't fitting for the State of Israel to legislate such a law or something like it, is it fair for the State of Israel to maintain this law?"

During the same address, Begin rejected the argument that Israel's Arab citizens should not be given full and equal rights because they do not serve in the army.

"This is an unusual argument," he said. "We are the ones who decided not to obligate Arab residents, as opposed to the Druze, to serve in the army... We believe that in the Jewish state, there must be, and must always be, equal rights for all citizens, regardless of religion, nationality or ethnic origin."

Even earlier, in a Knesset speech in 1959, Begin said, "We don't accept the semi-official notion, which we heard during the third Knesset, that a state grants rights and thus a state is allowed to retract rights. We believe that there are human rights that predate the human way of life known as the state."

As far back as 1956, when Israel's democracy was still in diapers, Begin suggested that the Knesset "not legislate any law that limits freedom of expression, orally or in writing."

It's horrifying to realize that after more than 50 years, even this self-evident principle of democracy is now held in doubt by the Knesset.

Menachem Begin, where are you when we need you?

Shimon Peres on the Altalena Affair

2011-10-25T12:22:00.000-07:00

Excerpted from his new autobiography at Tablet, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life by Shimon Peres in conversation with David Landau:

It was a reinvigorated IDF that took to the field when the battle was rejoined on July 8. This was the case in more than just the logistical sense. For while the Arab guns had been silent, Ben-Gurion faced his sternest test—from within his own side.

The Provisional Government had issued an ordinance on May 26 establishing the Israel Defense Forces and prohibiting “the establishment or maintenance of any other armed force.” On June 1, Menachem Begin, the Etzel (also known as the Irgun) leader, signed an agreement with the government whereby Etzel units would join the IDF in battalion formations and take an oath of loyalty. The Etzel’s separate command structure would be disbanded within a month, and the organization would cease buying arms abroad.

Nevertheless, on June 11, the Altalena, a ship that the Etzel had purchased, set sail from southern France with a large quantity of arms and explosives on board as well as some 850 immigrants. As it approached the shores of Israel, Begin informed the government that 20 percent of the arms would be sent to Etzel units in Jerusalem. Since Jerusalem was not yet formally under Israel’s jurisdiction, Yisraeli Galili, negotiating for the IDF, agreed. Begin then proposed that the remaining weaponry go first to equip Etzel units within the IDF. Whatever was left could then be allocated to other units. Galili balked. He reported to Ben-Gurion on June 19 that the danger of a “private army” was evolving. Ben-Gurion convened the cabinet. “There are not going to be two states,” he declared, “and there are not going to be two armies. And Mr. Begin will not do what he feels like. … If he does not give in we shall open fire!” The cabinet resolved unanimously to “authorize the defense minister to take action in accordance with the law of the land.”

Ben-Gurion feared that Begin might use the arms aboard the Altalena to equip Etzel units outside the sovereign jurisdiction of the state—thus ostensibly not violating his commitment—in order to extend the war with the Arabs into the West Bank (Judea and Samaria), thereby defying government policy.

The Altalena anchored off Kfar Vitkin, a moshav, or settlement, between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and hopefully far from the prying eyes of U.N. observers, and began off-loading the weapons with the help of hundreds of supporters who had gathered at the site.

Galili and Yigael Yadin, chief of operations for the IDF, deployed troops to surround the beach and ordered Begin to surrender. Some of the troops with Etzel sympathies crossed the lines and lined up with the Altalena crew and its enthusiastic sympathizers. The ship, with Begin and other Revisionist leaders now on board, weighed anchor and put out to sea, chased by IDF craft. It sailed south toward Tel Aviv and eventually ran aground close to the shore. At army headquarters in Ramat Gan, I spent that night with a rifle in my hand in Ben-Gurion’s office, in case the headquarters compound was stormed by demonstrators.
Off the Tel Aviv boardwalk, a traumatic scenario unfolded the next day. Etzel soldiers and civilian sympathizers streamed to the site. Some waded into the sea and swam out to the ship. At military headquarters, Ben-Gurion paced back and forth, fuming.

Eventually he issued written orders to Yadin to concentrate “troops, fire-power, flame-throwers, and all the other means at our disposal in order to secure the ship’s unconditional surrender.” Yadin was then to await the government’s instructions.

Ben-Gurion then convened the cabinet again. Some colleagues suggested possible compromises, but he was of no mind for any such weakness. “This is an attempt to destroy the army,” he thundered. “This is an attempt to murder the state. In these two matters there can be no compromise.” The cabinet backed him. Small-arms fire broke out between shore and ship. The government evacuated homes and shops in the line of fire. The Palmach commander Yigal Allon, now a senior IDF general, was put in charge of the operation. He ordered a cannon deployed. Yitzhak Rabin was in command of it. The first shell fell wide, but the second struck the vessel. Fire broke out in the hold. Those on board began to abandon ship. (It stood barely one hundred yards from the beach.) But before they could all do so, an explosion tore through the ship, destroying it. Sixteen Etzel men and three IDF soldiers died in the episode; dozens more were wounded.

Begin delivered a two-hour broadcast live on Etzel radio that night, roundly cursing Ben-Gurion who, he claimed, had been out to kill him. For his part, Begin said, he would continue to restrain his men and thus prevent the outbreak of civil war: “We will not open fire. There will be no fraternal strife when the enemy is at the gate.” Ben-Gurion spoke at the People’s Assembly, the transitional parliament. He said that since the arms had not been destined for the IDF, he was glad they had been destroyed. He added a line praising “the blessed cannon” that had fired at the Altalena—a phrase the Revisionist stalwarts never forgot nor forgave.

The Egyptian-Israel Peace Treaty

2011-10-24T09:01:00.000-07:00

Results from arecent opinion poll conducted by Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies

By Abdel Monem Said
Al Arabiya News
Monday, 24 October 2011

4% favour recourse to war for various reasons
7% for abolishing the peace treaty
12% for expelling the Israeli ambassador from Cairo
11% for recalling the Egyptian ambassador from Israel

62% would like to see the peace agreement to continue, but with amendments intended to enhance Egyptian security (and which are currently being reviewed).

23% want the peace treaty to remain exactly as it is for fear of renewed tension and conflict at a time when Egypt needs to rebuild itself amidst a host of other formidable challenges.

Menachem Begin On Jerusalem

2011-10-18T07:08:00.000-07:00

YouTube

Nobel Prize Awardee Dan Schechtman at Begin Center

2011-10-09T04:42:00.000-07:00

Israel's latest Nobel Prize winner, Prof. Dan Schchtman, conducted a press conference here at the Begin Center and graciously posed with the members of this years participants of the Israel Fellows Program:-

as well as conducting a short discussion with Begin Center president, Herzl Makov:-

New Documentary To Be Screened

2011-09-22T00:50:00.000-07:00

A new film is to be screened on a supposed back-door channel to Israel-Arab contacts:

More info at this site.

NYTimes report:

“Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace” is a well-reported history of the Camp David talks, the events that led to them, and the difficult negotiations that followed to forge the peace treaty that was signed the next spring. Directed by Harry Hunkele and using interviews with more than two dozen involved parties, including Mr. Carter, the film pays particular attention to the behind-the-scenes communications among nongovernment officials who helped the peace process along when official representatives could not. Leon Charney, for example, an American adviser to Ezer Weizman, the Israeli defense minister, practically jump-started the final round of talks when he learned from an Austrian businessman with ties to Egypt that Sadat would approve a deal that simply returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt...

The film also focuses on the interplay among the leaders and the pressures they faced from powerful factions within their camps, and it reminds us what it takes to resolve the seemingly unresolvable: a total commitment from heads of state willing to put themselves at risk...the film is not congratulatory. The treaty, it notes, was supposed to be a first step toward a comprehensive peace settlement for the Middle East. More than 30 years later that larger task remains undone.

When Begin Was Profiled

2011-09-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

From this Voice of America item:

Spies Probe the Mental State of Foreign Leaders Pt II

When world leaders speak publicly, as many will do at the U.N. General Assembly, the CIA will be poring over not only what they say, but how they say it. Intelligence agencies devote considerable resources to ferreting out not only the physical well-being of presidents and prime ministers but their mental health as well. The two are closely linked, but mental health is more difficult to determine from afar...

The concerns are strong enough that the CIA maintains a special unit to look for clues as to the mental stability, as well as the physical health, of world leaders. Dr. Jonathan Clemente, a physician who is researching a book about medical intelligence, says the goal of the CIA’s Medical and Psychological Assessment Cell, MPAC, is to determine how a leader will act.

...“In the late ‘50s and early 1960s, CIA decided that they had expertise to look more carefully and in a more rigorous analytical way at the health of foreign leaders in order to help give policymakers some forewarning of the transition in a government, stability of foreign governments, and also looking for potential points of diplomatic leverage,” Clemente said.

Dr. Jerrold Post, a clinical psychiatrist and political psychologist, put together the CIA’s major systematic effort to analyze the physical and mental state of world leaders. He says the turning point for the effort was the psychological profiles he did for President Jimmy Carter for the 1978 secret peace talks at Camp David with then-Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Dr. Post says the three profiles drawn up - one each of Begin and Sadat, and a third on how they might interact - were of enormous help in reaching the eventual Camp David Peace Accords.

“The third was quite interesting. It had a terrible title in retrospect - something like “Contrasting Cognitive Styles of Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat, Problems and Implications for Simultaneous Negotiations” - in which we described that in the way their minds were built, even if they totally agreed they would be talking past each other, and the importance of the president in playing an intermediary role,” Post said.

Analysts say the physical and mental states are deeply intertwined. A terminal illness, they say, can push a leader like Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez into impulsive decisions in order to preserve their legacy. Dr. Post points out that Menachem Begin made two critical decisions - the pronouncement of Jerusalem as the eternal capital of Israel, and the application of Israeli law to the captured Golan Heights - from a hospital bed.

“These two issues are two of the central issues now in the Middle East crisis and stumbling blocks in the negotiations. And my way of seeing it is that it was the imminence of death which led him to make these extreme actions,” Post said...

6th Session of the IGF Started Last Week

2011-09-11T02:36:00.000-07:00

The sixth session of the Israel Government Fellows Program started this week. Twenty-one fellows from seven different countries began their 10-month adventure in Israel. We have fellows from the US, Canada, Spain, France, Russia, Brazil and one with dual citizenship of South Africa and Australia. This is the first time we will have Fellows from Spain, Brazil and South Africa.

The first month of the program is spent in intensive orientation seminars and immersion Hebrew classes preparing the Fellows for their experience in Israel. The seminars introduce the Fellows to the history, politics and culture of Israel. The Hebrew courses meet the student at their level of Hebrew from knowing only a few words to polishing fluent speakers.

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The Location of the Begin Center as Photographed Almost A Century Ago

2011-08-30T05:33:00.000-07:00

As photographed from the Jaffa Gate:

Having difficulty?

Follow the arrow to the plot of land under the Scottish Church and the building that was a Turkish tower that became the British Consulate:

An Incident At Sadat's Funeral

2011-08-27T23:29:00.000-07:00

Dunsmore: Ambiguous Ending

Ccommentator Barrie Dunsmore recalled a dramatic and potentially dangerous moment - that ultimately ended in ambiguity.

(DUNSMORE) I'm Barrie Dunsmore, and this is about "The Anwar Sadat Funeral Mystery."

On October 7th, 1981, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat was assassinated by a group of Islamic fundamentalists serving in the Egyptian Armed forces. I greatly respected Sadat and was personally touched by his murder. Many times over the years I had met with him - sometimes for formal interviews, often just for casual chats.

I was covering the State Department at the time he was murdered. Because of security concerns it was decided President Reagan would not attend the funeral but a unique American delegation was formed - and I was chosen to be one of three pool reporters that would accompany that delegation to Cairo.

On October 10th, former Presidents Jimmy Carter, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford walked slowly a few feet behind the casket of Anwar Sadat. I was about twenty, twenty-five paces behind the three presidents, in a line that included former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and then Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin.

Suddenly members of the Egyptian Presidential Guard stepped in front of the Kissinger/Begin line, forcing us all to stop. The guards un-slung their rifles and assumed the high ready position - that's barrels pointed slightly upwards and directly toward us. Immediately, American and Israeli security agents tensed up and began barking into their radios.

Picture this: Less than seventy two hours before, another Egyptian military unit had killed Sadat because he had dared to make peace with Israel . Now the Prime Minister of Israel and the famous American diplomat who had helped bring about that peace were virtually in their gun sights - not to mention numerous other notables and yours truly. For a few moments, probably no more than thirty seconds, I truly thought that my fifteen years of reporting on the Middle East was about to come to a very dramatic end.

But just as suddenly as they had blocked our passage, the guards re-slung their rifles to their shoulders, moved to the side and allowed us to continue. None of the officials or the security people I spoke to then or since knew what had happened. There were theories but no explanations. Now, it could be that the guards were simply trying to control the speed of the procession. Perhaps. But it's hard to escape the suspicion that the real story might have had a much more ominous ending.

And you can listen, too.

^

Historical Photograph

2011-08-21T01:40:00.000-07:00

British troops during the Mandate period marching along Hebron Road just under where the Begin Center is located:

On nRemembering the Altalena

2011-08-21T01:35:00.000-07:00

The Altalena Remembered

By Jerold S. Auerbach

Ever since 1836 Texans were taught to "Remember the Alamo," the San Antonio siege where two hundred fighters for freedom and independence from Mexico (the legendary Davy Crockett among them) defended their mission fortress to the last man.

Now Israelis of a certain persuasion are remembering the Altalena, the ship packed with more than nine hundred fighters and tons of desperately needed munitions that arrived six weeks into the Independence War in 1948. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, hallucinating a putsch to overthrow the government by his despised Irgun political enemies, ordered the ship destroyed. In two days of fighting nineteen Jews were killed by fellow Jews, bringing the fledgling nation to the brink of civil war.

One year later, after a memorial commemoration on the beach, in full view of the burned hulk 150 meters off shore, Ben-Gurion ordered the ship towed out to sea and sunk. It disappeared from sight and, for decades, from Israeli memory. But at a recent annual memorial ceremony, Prime Minister Netanyahu declared his intention to raise and display the Altalena wreckage. A memorial to the slain Jewish fighters, it would also celebrate the firm command from Irgun leader Menachem Begin (who would become prime minister in 1977) not to return fire. Jews must not kill Jews.

Researching this tragic story for the first history of the Altalena to be published in more than thirty years (and the first to be written by a historian), I encountered poignant testimony from fighters on both sides of the political divide expressing the acute pain of Jewish brothers at war.

With Ben-Gurion's approval, the Altalena arrived at Kfar Vitkin, north of Tel Aviv, on June 20th. The fighters disembarked for transportation to a nearby village to prepare for their induction into the Israel Defense Forces.

One of them, Dov Shilansky, was halted by an Israeli soldier. "I spoke to him in Hebrew," he recalled. "It was my first speech in Israel." Shilansky (who would become Speaker of the Knesset forty years later) said: "We've just arrived. We survived the Holocaust. We've come here to fight by your side. The homeland is in danger. We will join the army."

But Shilansky was instructed to go no further. He replied: "We have no other way. I won't go back to Dachau." If we can't come to Israel, we'll go back to the sea." The soldier bluntly responded: "I don't care. Go back to the sea."

When Israeli soldiers opened fire on the Altalena fighters, the ship pulled away, with Irgun leaders on board. It sailed down the coast to Tel Aviv, where Begin hoped for negotiations with Ben-Gurion's representatives to deter further tragedy. At an urgent 4 a.m. meeting, Ben-Gurion's navy commander assured him that the Altalena could be disabled without gunfire. But Ben-Gurion, "upset and angry," paced back and forth, "talking and yelling." He would not relent.

Twelve hours later came the order to open fire on the ship. Hilary Dilesky, the cannon crew commander, had arrived in Israel from South Africa only two months earlier. "I suddenly was struck with a heavy, deep feeling that I didn't want to shoot." He told his corps commander -- in English, for he could not yet speak Hebrew -- that he had not come to Israel "to shoot Jews." The commander shouted back that his job was to obey orders. Dilesky realized that "following orders was the right thing to do."

Three cannon shells passed harmlessly over the ship. The fourth slammed into the Altalena, igniting a blazing fire as tons of munitions exploded. Passengers and crew abandoned ship to swim ashore, while some Israeli soldiers on the beach shot at them. A young soldier long remembered: "Before my eyes was waged a war between brothers, Jews are shooting Jews -- in order to kill!" Nearly fifty years later Dilesky, in evident anguish, recalled: "My heart was broken when we began firing. This has been a burden all my life, and still is." To Ben-Gurion, however, it was a "holy cannon."

Soon after the battle, 21-year-old Altalena fighter Rafael Khirs, a Zionist Orthodox refugee from Transylvania, expressed his anguish and rage: "We brought you revolutionary courage and an arms-ship to liberate you. . . Of brothers-in-arms we dreamt but encountered the cannon blast." Less than four months later, Khirs (along with sixteen other Altalena fighters) was killed in battle defending the State of Israel.

As the recollections of Shilansky, Dilesky and Khirs reveal, Altalena memories were irrepressibly painful. To be sure, there are Israelis - largely on the political left - who prefer forgetfulness. But that would obliterate memory of Ben-Gurion's ruthless determination to suppress his political opposition by any means necessary and Begin's unrelenting insistence that his fighters not shoot other Jews.

Sprinkled throughout the biblical text is the injunction to remember (zachor). In its Proclamation of Independence, the new Jewish state remembered: "The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious, and national identity was formed." Since 1948 Israel has been the community of Jewish memory. It is appropriate for the Altalena to be remembered as a warning against sinat hinam, the ancient Jewish admonition against brothers at war with each other.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena (Quid Pro Books), published in June.

When Begin Toasted Ben-Gurion

2011-08-06T23:39:00.000-07:00

From the December 1, 1948 issue of The Palestine Post:-

Menachem Begin was on his first visit to the United States which began at the end of November, 1948.

The rest of the quotation includes Begin's remark that Ben-Gurion "granted me an exit visa to come to the US and whom we hekped to become Prime Minister".

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The Enduring Power of The Altalena

2011-08-06T23:14:00.000-07:00

The Altalena’s Enduring Power

Matthew Ackerman

The Forward reported today the Israeli government has set in motion plans to raise the Altalena, an armed Jewish ship sunk by Palmach troops in the early days of Israel’s independence. The incident has long been recalled as the moment of potential civil war for the new state, when a challenge to its authority by the independent-minded (and terrorist to boot) Irgun led by Menachem Begin was forcibly put down by David Ben-Gurion, who understood that to function properly a state must have a monopoly on arms.

The current fight, though, has less to do with the Altalena itself than the more potent battle over historical memory.

That may sound like a fight about the past, but it is really a fight about the future. In that Forward article, the Israeli left-wing writer Gershom Gorenberg is quoted comparing arguments Ben-Gurion (and not Begin) was to blame for the 19 deaths in the incident to attempts to cast the American Civil War as the South’s effort to preserve the Union. That’s really just his way of saying he doesn’t want the issue reopened, because the narrative that suits his politics has won the day. Any aspersions at hand (raising the wreck is a waste of money, the matter is settled and there’s nothing new to know) will do, for Gorenberg and those who think like him are dedicated most to defending their political camp’s continued monopoly over history.

Interestingly enough, something similar has been happening of late in the United States in the efforts of a school board in Texas to dramatically revise many sections of public school American history texts. As repeatedly reported by the New York Times, the board has particular weight because the size of Texas’ population means the textbook publishers generally use the edition they make for that state for the entire country. Just as the Israeli left will likely be upset by the effort to revisit “settled” history, so too has the American left become upset about the efforts of that Texas school board to inject into the text less secular interpretations of the ideas of the Founding Fathers and more sympathetic interpretations of conservative philosophers.

The truly interesting story then is–in America and elsewhere–the political right has in recent years woken up to the tremendous victory the left won in recent generations over education and history and come to understand the incredible power this has handed to their political opponents. Though the left today may still see itself as a revolutionary force, it really is mostly made up of partisans to the established order and its 80-year dominance over the assumptions of government and public debate.

For Israel, it may all add up to only one more sign of the entrenchment of the right’s political dominance. It would be foolish, though, to believe the question of the rights and wrongs of the Altalena is an unimportant one.

NY Sun Editorial On The Altalena

2011-08-04T12:12:00.000-07:00

Raising the Altalena
The New York Sun Editorial
August 4, 2011

Just when one wonders what sort of teaching moment is available for Israel and, for that matter, for those betting on the so-called Arab awakening comes news that Israel plans to raise the Altalena. That is the hulk of a World War II-era transport ship that has lain at the bottom of the Mediterranean just off the coast of Tel Aviv ever since it was sunk in June 1948 in a conflict between two Jewish armies.

The combat lasted only hours, but the event looms large in the tale of how Israel, even though its factions were bitterly divided, turned away from civil war and toward long-lasting democracy. Though parallels are dangerously inexact, it holds lessons for those participants in the Arab spring who also have their eye on democracy. Its most important lessons obtain for the Israelis themselves, which is no doubt why the plan is underway to raise the vessel.

The Altalena, once an American Navy landing craft, was purchased by backers of the Irgun, the fighting organization that had led the revolt against the British. Its leader was the young Menachem Begin. The vessel was given the pen name used by one of Zionism’s most visionary figures, Vladimir Jabotinsky. The boat was loaded at the port of Marseille with some 940 refugees and volunteers and, with the help of the French government, tons of arms and explosives. Then it sailed for Israel to help in the defense of the newly formed Jewish state.

According to a new book about the Altalena, “Brothers at War,” by Jerold Auerbach, Begin tried to get word to the Altalena not to come ashore at Israel, which was still under a British blockade. Begin’s secretary sent a message warning the vessel to stay away. In the event, the vessel did come ashore, following negotiations between Begin’s followers and the provisional government of Israel led by Ben-Gurion.

The landing spot was north of Tel Aviv, at Kfar Vitkin. The vessel deposited its passengers. It took on several members of the Irgun, including, Begin. An already nigh-mythic figure, Begin had only recently emerged from underground and had already placed the Irgun under the command of Israel’s Defense Force. Yet Begin, a rightist, was despised by Ben-Gurion and the Labor-oriented leadership of the new state.

So with hindsight it is not surprising that the Altalena’s passengers were, when they came ashore, arrested, and those unloading the vessel discovered they were surrounded by Israeli soldiers. It turns out that while the vessel was being unloaded, Ben-Gurion’s government had decided to demand that Begin surrender the vessels, its arms, and its passengers. When the ultimatum was sent, Begin was given 10 minutes to decide whether to obey.

Begin, seeking to avoid a clash between Jewish factions, ordered the vessel to move away from shore and proceed to Tel Aviv, where, according to an account by a former defense minister of Israel, Moshe Arens, he reckoned Ben-Gurion would be reluctant to attack. He turned out to have misjudged. The fight that ensued involved not only Ben-Gurion and Begin but two other future prime ministers. One, Levi Eshkol, was an aide to Ben-Gurion; another, Yitzhak Rabin, led the military attack on the Altalena.

[Here is a short clip with Rabin and with a Palmachnik admitting shooting at unarmed Irgunists:

One of weapons that fired on the Altalena was dubbed, by Ben-Gurion, the “holy cannon.” Within minutes the vessel was engulfed in flames, and there is a famous photo of the thick plumes of black smoke pouring into a breeze that carried them up the coast as a knot of gawkers watched from the beach. Those on board the boat plunged into the Mediterranean, though it is said that in Begin’s case the future premier was so reluctant to abandon ship that he had to be manhandled into the sea by his own supporters.

Begin had ordered his forces not to return fire. Ben-Gurion showed no such restraint; his forces fired even at those who were swimming for their lives. It was a ghastly slaughter. At the end of the day, the fight cost the lives of 16 men, and even to this day there are those who reckon that they had been “murdered” by their own government. The following day, in remarks in the Knesset, Ben-Gurion made it sound as if he’d averted a coup against the new state.

Others reckon Ben-Gurion’s real aim had been to destroy what might have been his opposition. If so, he failed. Begin did go into the opposition. In the Knesset, Ben-Gurion refused to acknowledge him by name. A generation and a half later, the man who had to be wrestled off the burning Altalena acceded to the leadership of the country and won the Nobel Prize for Peace. Only later would the same prize be awarded the man who’d commanded the forces that fired the “holy cannon,” Yitzhak Rabin.

* * *

No wonder the scramble is on now to raise the Altalena. The remains of the vessel were long since been towed out to sea and sunk, possibly, according to a dispatch in Haaretz, having been cut into pieces. In Brothers at War, Jerold Auerbach, a former Wellesley professor who is a scholar of both American and Israeli history, contrasts the brutality of Ben-Gurion with the restraint shown by George Washington in the most important challenge to the new American republic, the Whiskey Rebellion. The story reminds that sometimes those who appear to be the losers in the short term, as Menachem Begin appeared to be in the sinking of the Altalena, turn out to be the winners in the long run. By refusing to fire at the new Jewish state, he placed a bet on democracy that, for his own career, took him decades to redeem. It’s an example to inspire that is needed now more than ever.

^

Criticism in The Forward on Raising the Altalena

2011-08-03T12:06:00.000-07:00

Here:

...Today, the Israeli right is politically stronger than ever, and it is determined to put this narrative to rest once and for all...Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said at a recent memorial ceremony for the 19 passengers who were killed...“It was a rash order, a mistaken order.” His plan is to present the nation with the ultimate monument to his historical narrative — and in doing so, challenge not only Ben-Gurion’s attack, but also what the former prime minister did next...
...so central is the Begin legacy to the project that it is actually being carried out by the Jerusalem-based Menachem Begin Heritage Center...With the wreck, “we will have a monument that will tell the important story of how Israel was almost on the brink of civil war and how this was prevented,” said Moshe Fuksman-Sha’al, deputy director of the Begin Center.

This logic leaves [Gershom] Gorenberg incredulous. “The idea that Begin is the hero of this story is a total rewrite,” he said. Gorenberg likened the Israeli government adopting this narrative to the American government “endorsing Confederate History Month as a celebration of the South’s role in preserving the Union.”

The Begin Center is spending $60,000 — which is being subsidized by the government — on the initial exploration to locate the wreck, which it hopes to achieve by mid-August. It then expects additional government cash to raise the wreck from the seabed.

Fuksman-Sha’altold the Forward that the issue is deserving of public funds. “The general public knows about [the Altalena] and cares about it,” he said, adding that the incident “just doesn’t leave the public discourse.”

But Hebrew University historian Israel Bartal, chair of the Historical Society of Israel, believes that there is little public consciousness of the Altalena and that there is nothing in the plan “beyond a political intention to strengthen today’s right in the eyes of potential voters.” He said, “For an Israeli who is 40 today, Begin and Ben-Gurion are the same person — people don’t know the difference.”

...He considers the plan “like a bad joke,” saying that it will fall flat even with those it is aimed to impress. “The message of this raising will be that the government is wasting millions on something that’s irrelevant to today’s problems,” he said, “Many will say, ‘Why not pay for more doctors?’ Even the right will say: ‘What do we need that for? Use the money to build another settlement.’”

Arye Naor, Cabinet secretary to Begin during the latter’s premiership, and an emeritus Ben Gurion University professor whose research focuses on the Israeli right, disagrees. While not passing judgment on the plan to raise the ship, Naor said: “I think that right now, there’s a serious message [from the Altalena] of unity looking backwards, because a lot of problems are still ahead of us. There is the issue of settlements, and the issue of withdrawal or evacuation will come sooner or later, so it’s important to remember the message of unity and saying no to civil war.”

^

Read more:

A Program for Tisha B'Av Eve

2011-08-02T08:05:00.000-07:00

Lectures by Dr. Michah Goodman on the Book of Psalms and Personal and National Crisis and by Aharon Horowitz on the recently discovered golden bell (in Hebrew):

Moshe Arens' Book on Warsaw Ghetto To Be Published

2011-07-30T22:07:00.000-07:00

Professor Moshe Arens' study on the chronicles of the Warsaw Ghetto revolt and the role played by members of the Revisionist movement and especially of the Betar youth movement, Flags over the Warsaw Ghetto. The Untold Story of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, will be published by Gefen Publishing House and will be available within two months.
From the press release:

Groundbreaking Work Brings to Light New Details of Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising has become a symbol of heroism throughout the

world.

On the eve of Passover, April 19, 1943, German forces entered the Warsaw ghetto equipped with tanks, flame throwers, and machine guns. Against them stood an army of a few hundred young Jewish men and women, armed with pistols and Molotov cocktails. Who were these Jewish fighters who dared oppose the armed might of the SS troops under the command of SS General Juergen Stroop? Who commanded them in battle? What were their goals?

In this groundbreaking work, Israel’s former Minister of Defense and Ambassador to the USA, Prof. Moshe Arens, recounts a true tale of daring, courage, and sacrifice that should be accurately told—out of respect for and in homage to the fighters who rose against the German attempt to liquidate the Warsaw ghetto, and made a last-ditch fight for the honor of the Jewish people. The generally accepted account of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is incomplete. The truth begins with the existence of not one, but two resistance organizations in the ghetto. Two young men, Mordechai Anielewicz of the Jewish Fighting Organization (ZOB), and Pawel Frenkel of the Jewish Military Organization (ZZW), rose to lead separate resistance organizations in the ghetto, which did not unite despite the desperate battle they were facing. Included is the complete text of “The Stroop Report” translated into English.

Report on The Ethiopian Jewry Evening

2011-07-27T22:49:00.000-07:00

Rivlin: Begin Ended Israel's Injustice to Ethiopian Jewry

- Knesset Speaker at event marking 20 years since Operation Solomon: "The Zionism of Ethiopian Jews began long before Operation Solomon." -

The Menachem Begin Heritage Center held a special event on Tuesday marking 20 years since Operation Solomon, which brought over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel in 1991.

This event was also an evening of appreciation for former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, who served as Prime Minister at that time and initiated the whole operation. Representatives from the Shamir family were in attendance, as well as the Ethiopian community's spiritual leaders, who are called Kessim, and members of the Ethiopian community.

The event was also attended by Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, Education Minister Gideon Saar, IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz, former Chief of Staff Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, and the head of the Begin Heritage Center, Herzl Makov. It featured videos of Operation Solomon and of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, as well as an original humorous performance about the operation.

In his remarks, Rivlin said, “Operation Solomon is one of the stories that shaped the Ethiopian immigration to Israel but this is also largely an injustice that has been done to the historical and cultural heritage of this Zionist Jewish community.

“The Zionist ideology of the Ethiopian Jews did not begin nor was it designed during Operation Solomon and Operation Moses that preceded it,” added Rivlin. “The Ethiopian Jews longed for Israel already in the 19th century. We must not forget that the Ethiopian Jew for centuries was ready to give up his life for his religion.”

Rivlin added: “The immigration story of Ethiopian Jews to Israel was full of obstacles and struggles. It is a story about leadership. It is a story of courage and heroism of the Beta Israel community which reveals the ignominy of the State of Israel that locked its doors to one of the oldest Jewish communities in the early decades of its existence. Begin and Shamir put an end to this, and it started after Begin cried out: ‘Bring me my brothers, the Jews of Ethiopia.’”

Rivlin praised the “resourcefulness and leadership of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, together with the other planners of the operation,” and noted the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces soldiers and other security service personnel who took part in the huge operation.

Chief of Staff Gantz noted during the event, “Today when I review the ranks of the IDF I see the kids who were brought to Israel during Operation Solomon serve in a variety of roles across our army. This shows the great success of the operation; those who needed the IDF’s protective hand twenty years ago now serve as defenders for the entire nation.”

Ethiopian Jews who were brought to Israel in Operation Solomon and Operation Moses and thousands of others whose Jewish identity was in question, have been brought out of the backward, poverty-stricken country and have gone through orthodox Jerwish conversion procedures. They have already reached the Knesset.

Special programs were set up to smooth their transition into Israeli society at a cost of millions. American Jewish philanthropic organizations, Israeli youth villages, and the national religious school system played a Herculean and major part in the ongoing integration of a community who had to be introduced to Western society as well as much of Jewish Law from scratch and whose children were all registered automatically in the religious school system.

Report on the Ceremony at the President's Residence

2011-07-26T22:50:00.000-07:00

PM, Peres honor Ephraim Katzir and Menachem Begin

Netanyahu: Begin was a great statesman, whose leadership was evident even before Israel came into being, was a great believer in social justice.

At an annual ceremony on Sunday honoring deceased presidents and prime ministers, President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu emphasized the importance of remembering national leaders, their deeds, and their legacies.

Both men spoke at the gathering at Beit Hanassi. The ceremony is usually held in the spring, on the first day of the Hebrew calendar month of Nissan...This year the ceremony was deferred because of incomplete renovations at Beit Hanassi.

Looking back more than three decades, Peres said that he still remembered the unforgettable image of Katzir and Begin striding across the red carpet on the airport tarmac to greet Egyptian president Anwar Sadat.

“It was like a fable from another world,” Peres recalled. “It was an unprecedented development in relations between the two countries.”

Although he and Begin did not come from the same political camp, Peres said, it did not prevent him from recognizing Begin’s greatness, integrity and commitment to peace. Even when people in his party were against him, Peres continued, Begin stood firm for what he believed in declaring that war was preventable, but peace was inevitable.

Both Peres and Netanyahu also underscored Begin’s uncompromising respect for the rule of law. It was very important to him, each of them noted, to uphold the law and serve the nation. Even when he was in the opposition, Peres said Begin was fond of saying that he was proud to be a servant of the people.

...When discussing Begin, Netanyahu said that he was so multi-faceted that it was difficult to describe him. Begin, he said, was a great statesman, whose leadership was evident even before Israel came into being, said Netanyahu.

The prime minister also lauded Begin for preventing a civil war after the Altelana ship – which carried hundreds of Holocaust survivors and armaments – was fired upon by Yitzhak Rabin on David Ben-Gurion’s orders.

Begin, Netanyahu added, also sought to improve the economy, eradicate poverty and provide equal opportunities for all citizens. Indeed, he was a great believer in social justice, said Netanyahu.

In this context, Netanyahu turned to Israel’s housing problem and said: “The housing market suffers from cartels, with no equal in the developed world.”
He also doubted that any other country rivaled Israel’s bureaucratic red tape strangling the planning aspect of housing.

“We must change this, and we will introduce dramatic legislation in order to do so,” he said.

Arye Naor, who was Begin’s first cabinet secretary and one of the winners of prizes and citations at Sunday’s ceremony, said that Begin had come to office with a clear social agenda.

“He didn’t achieve everything that he wanted, but he did change the course of history,” Naor said.

On The Altalena

2011-07-25T21:22:00.000-07:00

From Makom Blog: Complex lessons from the Altalena

A few weeks ago we marked the 63rd anniversary of the sinking of the Altalena . A complicated event, which culminated in the newly formed IDF receiving a direct order from Ben-Gurion to open fire on a ship of armaments arriving from Europe and into the hands of the supposedly disbanded Etzel (the revisionist Irgun fighters).

In Israel at her most incestuous, Moshe Dayan opened fire on the ship carrying Menahem Begin at Kfar Vitkin… Dayan would, thirty years later, be the loyal Foreign Minister to Begin in the role of Prime Minister.

The Altalena provides for endless analysis and soul-searching, and this year provided even more rich pickings as the announcement came that there would be an effort to locate and maybe even surface the sunken wreck. A great piece of analysis came from Dr. David Dery in Haaretz: He asked the question if we were to raise the Altalena how would we ritualize its wreckage and what morals would we learn from its remembrance?

He gave the poetic example of the Quebec bridge, which collapsed at the cost of many lives, twice, once in 1907 and again 1916. Instead of shying away from a moment (or even two) of great failure, the organization of Professional Engineers ritualized this disaster by building around it a secret initiation ceremony and bestowing on each new Professional Engineer a ring made from the steel of the ill- fated bridge, so that they should never forget the responsibility of their profession.

Impressive stuff. This led me to thinking of answers to Dery’s question, what are the lessons we need to be carrying from the Altalena?

An answer began to crystallize while reading another, and equally impressive, analysis of the Altalena affair, by Shlomo Nakdimon – who has authored a book on the subject. Nakdimon revealed the role of Yisrael Galili, chief of staff of the Hagana and the official government representative in dealings with the Etzel, who twisted facts and exaggerated circumstances to make the Etzel seem worse and more of threat than they actually were.

It is possible that the Altalena affair might not have reached its tragic conclusion had Galili not sent it in that direction. The Etzel had long been hated by the Hagana and the Israeli establishment, and there was already a precedent of exaggerating the Etzel’s fanatical elements in order to disenfranchise them from power. But Galili wanted to paint them black as black.

There have been several incidents of similar exaggerations of intent in Israel in the last month. Politically minded entities who play to a certain agenda by tarring organizations and groups in society as threats or fanatics; and it's happened on both sides of the spectrum.

Only a few days prior to the Boycott Law, there was a storm brewing over a complicated story surrounding a fanatical text known as Torat HaMelech (The Torah of the King) and Rabbis who have been summoned by the police to discuss their endorsement of it. So far, two prominent Rabbis – Dov Lior of Kiryat Arba’a (settler figurehead) and Yaakov Yitzchak (the most powerful Sefardi Rabbi: Rav Ovadia Yosef’s son) – have been summoned, refused to appear and arrested.

The Rabbis claim that in order to endorse a new religious book and add a letter of support, they do not read the book, merely accept what others have said. This line of defence for the Rabbis who have added a letter of support in Torat HaMelech is consensual with everyone up to the Chief Rabbi of Israel, agreeing that this is the accepted wisdom.

Since Torat HaMelech rationalizes Jewish civilians committing acts of violence against Arabs, the Rabbis may be best advised to rethink their peer review system. However the fact that there is a plague in the Israeli rabbinate of turning a blind eye to statements that incite violence and hatred, does not mean that they are all actively doing it. We can agree that something needs to be done about a population which is drifting, rather speeding, apart from the mainstream of Israeli society.

Torat HaMelech was hijacked in order to expose top Rabbis as the fanatical threats they are to the State of Israel, and when the Rabbis did not appear to the Police station (as we knew they wouldn’t) the Police (and media) seized the opportunity to arrest them and create a publicity circus. This lead to demonstrations by their followers, public outcry and debate about who is above the law.

This is a highly nuanced fault-line in Israeli society. There is no doubt that there are powerful tensions between these Rabbis and their communities’ support of the State and their lack of respect for the primacy of the state’s institutions. But there is someone, somewhere who is looking to aggravate this festering sore, to demonize the orthodox and gain political mileage. Someone is pulling a Galili.

The more we demonize threats to our society, the more we delegitimize the valid criticism they have to bring.

As Gidon Levi pointed out in a typically isolating piece, not everyone on the flotilla is a terrorist. There are serious people with impressive credentials onboard. However, we can’t deal with this analysis and will explain it away by delegitimizing Gidon Levi as a self- hating apologist.

Similarly, Gidon Levi and his colleagues will continue to paint the Orthodox Settler movement as a Jewish Jihad.

We need to acknowledge the complexity of our challenges and challengers.

At the very least we owe it to those who died on the Altalena.

A Passing Reference

2011-07-23T12:47:00.000-07:00

Found in a story on a fight in a HaShomer HaTzair kibbutz over relations with Germany:

...He reminded his listeners of how [Abba] Kovner had joined up with the despicable Menachem Begin, and how together they led demonstrations against the German ambassador-designate. If joining up with Satan was wrong, Ephraim asked, how could it be permissible to join with Begin?

It Happened This Week

2011-07-22T01:41:00.000-07:00

This Week in History: The King David Hotel bombing

By bombing J'lem hotel, Irgun believed it could send strong message to British, whom it actively fought to end Mandate, establish Jewish State.

On July 22, 1946, three phone calls were placed to the King David Hotel, an adjacent building and to The Jerusalem Post (then The Palestine Post), warning of an imminent bombing. Minutes later, a blast ripped through the historic hotel and then-headquarters of the British Mandate for Palestine’s civilian and military authorities, killing 91 people and injuring nearly 50.

In 1946, the King David Hotel was the headquarters of the British Mandate government, housing much of its intelligence apparatus and top military, intelligence and civilian officials. Several weeks earlier, British authorities had raided the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem and seized a massive amount of secret documents containing sensitive information about Jewish resistance fighters and operations. The documents were believed to have been brought to the British intelligence offices at the hotel for analysis.

The Irgun Zva’I Leumi (Irgun), led at the time by Menachem Begin, was furious about the British raids. The organization feared that details of its operations and the identity of its operatives would be compromised when the seized documents were examined. The Irgun also wanted to retaliate for the arrest of some 2,500 Jews – mostly fighters – in the raids the month before.

By bombing the hotel, the Irgun believed, it could destroy the seized documents and at the same time send a strong message to the British, whom it was actively fighting as part of the Zionist bid to end the Mandate and establish a Jewish state.

On the morning of July 22, Irgun members disguised as Arab hotel workers managed to sneak into the basement kitchen of the King David Hotel carrying milk cans filled with nearly 800 lbs of explosives. The cans were placed near support columns in the hotel’s southern wing, which housed the British military headquarters. Soon after placing the bombs, the Irgun operatives detonated a small explosive outside the hotel, with the intention of clearing the vicinity of civilians.

Shortly after noon that day, a teenage Irgun member made three phone calls in a matter of minutes, warning that a bomb had been placed in the hotel. The first call, placed to the hotel’s switchboard was received but most likely ignored and not passed on to the relevant authorities. The second call was to the French Consulate, situated across the street from the hotel. The final warning call was placed to The Palestine Post, whose employees passed along the warning to British authorities. The final warning call did lead to a search of the hotel in which the bombs were discovered, but it was too late.

Minutes after discovering the suspect milk cans in the hotel’s basement, at 12:37 p.m., a massive blast rocked the King David’s southern wing, causing immense structural damage and killing 91 people, including British military and civilian authorities as well as local Jews and Arabs who were in the hotel at the time.

Following the attack, the British authorities launched a massive wave of arrests targeting Jewish fighters throughout Mandate Palestine. Thousands were rounded up and arrested.

The bombing was nearly universally condemned by both Jewish and British authorities. David Ben-Gurion, in one of many clashes with the rival Irgun, called the organization an “enemy of the Jewish people” in the blast’s aftermath. Relations between Ben-Gurion’s Hagana and Begin’s Irgun never recovered, ultimately resulting in the end of the Irgun as an operative military organization two years later with the Altalena incident.

Despite the target of the bombing being the British Mandate military headquarters, the attack was widely considered an act of terrorism at the time due to the high number of civilian casualties it caused. To this day, the British refer to the bombing as a terrorist attack. Most recently, the British protested a 2006 ceremony commemorating the 60-year anniversary of the bombing held at the hotel, attended by now-Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

The bombing, which remains the deadliest to have taken place in Israel since, is rarely called an act of terrorism today in Israel. Part of the long campaign for independence against the ruling British Mandate government at the time, it is thought of as one of several key events that led the British to reevaluate their long-term presence in then-Palestine. Although not directly, it would be difficult to diminish the importance of role that the King David Hotel bombing played in ending the Mandate, helping lead to the establishment of the State of Israel less than two years later.

The Altalena and the Founder of J Street

2011-07-21T10:11:00.000-07:00

In a story on J. Street's founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami:

...His father served as a commander for Betar, the youth arm affiliated with Irgun, the fervent nationalist movement that fought the British to gain Israel’s independence. Ben-Ami’s father [Yitzhaq "Mike" Ben-Ami] was tasked with purchasing the Altalena, a naval vessel left over from World War II that was then filled with arms and was on its way to Palestine when David Ben-Gurion declared the independent state of Israel and ordered all fighters to accept the authority of the state. After Menachem Begin, the head of Irgun, refused to turn back the Altalena, it was sunk by Ben-Gurion’s forces, led by Yitzhak Rabin. Ben-Ami, who was born in New York, says, “I grew up with my father spending his entire life arguing with his friends about the Altalena and Ben-Gurion and what a schmuck he was and how could Begin give back the Sinai.”

Altalena - Unity

2011-07-20T23:42:00.000-07:00

National unity, democracy and the heritage of the Altalena

By SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF

Faith in democracy prevented civil war 63 years ago. Will it do the same in the future?

For the 63rd anniversary of the sinking of the Altalena on David Ben-Gurion’s order, the Prime Minister’s Office and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center have announced plans to initiate a search for the remains of the ship, which might be used to construct a memorial for those killed during the event.

The Altalena still evokes strong emotions in Israeli society. Until the 1977 upheaval, when Begin’s Herut Party beat out the long ruling Mapai, it was the Labor Movement’s narrative about the event that dominated.

This narrative presented the IZL as an organization having difficulty accepting the reality of an independent Jewish state led by its enemy of old – Labor – and the principle that in a sovereign state, it is the state, by means of its democratically elected government, that monopolizes all military forces and all decisions concerning national issues. The right-wing narrative claimed that this description was misleading, and that the event was the result of blind hatred.

It was inevitable that following Menachem Begin’s assumption of power, the official narrative would undergo change.

Within a year, two books about the Altalena affair appeared – one presenting the position of the Right, and the other the position of the Left. Nevertheless, Begin himself refrained from officially reopening the Altalena issue. Magnanimity and political wisdom undoubtedly guided his decision.

The Prime Minister’s Office stated last week that “we wish to preserve the heritage and story of the Altalena, and especially the values around it. It is especially important to thus preserve the value of preventing civil war, and preserving unity among the people.” This is indeed a noble cause, but the question is whether the Prime Minister’s Office and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center have the will and power to ensure that this intention is in fact realized, and that a reopening of the issue will be used to foster national unity and – more importantly – strengthen democracy.

How can this be done, especially when one is dealing with an issue that is still the basis of deep disagreement? The Altalena affair ended without civil war because Menachem Begin bowed to the superior power of the then-majority, accepted the rules that it laid down (largely because he was a true democrat), and abhorred the thought of civil war. For the following 29 years, he worked tirelessly worked toward a change in the political balance of power in the country, and was finally victorious.

IS THIS still a message that is acceptable to some of the disaffected Jewish minority groups in Israel, who pose a threat to national unity and democracy today? I’m not so sure. For example, Rabbi Dov Lior and his followers reject a basic principle accepted by the majority to the effect that everyone is equal before the law, including a revered (and controversial) rabbi, and that anyone summoned for a police investigation must turn up.

Whether or not the police acted wisely on Monday when it set an ambush for the rabbi and detained him is debatable. However, no police act forcing Lior to attend the investigation would have been considered legitimate by him and his followers. They simply do not accept the rules of democracy, and no matter how the heritage of the Altalena is presented, that will not change.

The same applies to the prospect of Israel voluntarily relinquishing parts of Judea and Samaria within the framework of an Israeli-Palestinian political settlement.

Should a majority finally approve such a move (and the right wing in the Knesset is doing its best to place as many legal obstacles as possible on the road), the hard core of ideological settlers and their supporters will not accept this lying down. Once again, the Altalena heritage concerning national unity and democracy will have no effect on their views and actions. As Harold Auerbach stated in his article last week, for the settlers, the part of the Altalena heritage that is relevant is that there were some soldiers who refused to cooperate with the attack – the forefathers of today’s soldiers who have been permitted by their rabbis to disobey orders on ideological grounds.

In other words, “heritage” is in the eyes of the beholder, and it is questionable whether the Altalena affair can be mobilized to promote national unity and democracy among those who pose a threat to them.

Haaretz Compares the Altalena to the Marmara

2011-07-18T14:19:00.000-07:00

From its June 27th edition.

^

Further Info on UK Entrance Denial of Begin

2011-07-13T23:36:00.000-07:00

British documents reveal: Begin refused entry to U.K. in 1950s

Declassified documents refer to Menachem Begin as 'leader of notorious terrorist organisation Irgun'.

Britain refused to allow Menachem Begin, "leader of the notorious terrorist organisation Irgun," to visit London in the 1950s, documents released by Britain's National Archives this week reveal.

During the British Mandate in Palestine, when he headed the right-wing underground militia the Irgun, Begin was a bitter opponent of Britain. But in the first half of the '50s, as head of the Herut faction in the Knesset, he sought to open a new leaf with the U.K. He intended to visit the country, meet Prime Minister Winston Churchill and even recommend that Israel be added to the British Commonwealth.

His plan had only one flaw - the British objected. The wounds were still fresh, Begin was still blacklisted as a dangerous terrorist, and the British had no intention of helping him legitimize his position vis-a-vis the governments of David Ben-Gurion and Moshe Sharett.

The 34-page file released by the National Archives documents two of Begin's attempts to obtain a visa to Britain. The first, between 1953 and 1955, was rebuffed contemptuously. The second, after Begin had served as a minister in Levi Eshkol and Golda Meir's governments for three years, succeeded in 1972, five years before he became prime minister.

Back in 1946, Begin's description in his file resembled something out of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion," as if it had been re-written by Charles Dickens - "Journalist. Thin faced, bad teeth, long hooked nose, may wear black horn-rimmed spectacles."

Later Begin had advocates such as "British lawyer" Max Seligman (as he was described in the documents), who represented the captain of the Altalena, the Irgun ship that was sunk by Israeli government forces in 1948. Seligman's successors at the law firm are defending former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in his corruption case today.

Seligman asked British Ambassador Francis Evans about the answer Begin would receive if he asked for a visa to lecture at Herut branches in Britain, meet officials and public figures, and most importantly - meet Prime Minister Churchill.

Another associate urged that the episode be closed - "not dissimilar to other episodes in British history ... which have frequently ended up in happy and fraternal relations."

The query raised a procedural controversy between the British Home Office - which is in charge of visas, aliens, the MI5 counterterrorism service and police - and the Foreign and Colonial Office.

The latter described Begin as "the leader of the extremist right wing party in Israel, which advocates an aggressive policy towards the Arabs .... [A] visit by him would not do anything to improve our relations with the present moderate government of Israel."

MI5, under the official guise of "Box No.500, telephone no. Regent 5050," said Begin "is also the well-known former leader of the notorious terrorist organisation Irgun Zvei Leumi, some of whose members have now become the Heruth Party."

According to the MI5, "If there is any likelihood of Beigin being admitted to the United Kingdom, we consider that Special Branch [security service] should be informed immediately since the security responsibility responsibility for the Jewish terrorists in the United Kingdom rests with them."

Both ministries agreed - no entry.

At one stage the paperwork regarding Begin was stored away, to be discovered only months later. The visa was still denied.

There are no indications that Begin's case, which was handled by mid-ranking ministry officials, had reached the political leadership. The officials had precedents dealing with visa applications of three Knesset members who had taken part in anti-British activity. One of them - Lehi leader Natan Yelin-Mor - was denied entry. Haganah head Moshe Sneh and Herut activist Esther Raziel-Naor were granted visas.

A decade and a half later, after Begin had already served as a minister, he would visit British Ambassador Ernest John Ward Barnes at his Ramat Gan residence. Barnes wired to London that Begin was talking about Britain "in terms of friendship and admiration." He said times had changed and urged the government to allow Begin to visit the country.

MI5 replied that while Begin himself was no longer considered a security risk, "we cannot guarantee that either militant Arabs or British subjects, who still remember his activities, might not make him a target if they happen to hear of his visit." That weekend, for example, supporters of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine were to gather in London, MI5 said, implying that the reason for denying Begin a visa was related to his safety, as well as public safety.

In 1971, this argument worked. In 1972, almost 25 years after the British Mandate had ended, the British grew tired of the battle and granted Begin his coveted visa.

Altalena Search Project To Begin

2011-07-11T04:54:00.000-07:00

Undersea search for 'Altalena' to begin this week

Menachem Begin Heritage Center says remains expected to be found within two weeks; Katz: "A Jew will never lift a hand against his brother."

An attempt to lift the remains of the Altalena from the Mediterranean Sea will begin this week, the Knesset House Committee was told on Monday.

The Altalena was a ship carrying Irgun weapons and fighters, many of whom were Holocaust survivors, to Israel in June 1948. Former prime minister Menachem Begin, then the Irgun's commander, boarded the ship as it approached Israel, and the Altalena was fired upon by Yitzhak Rabin's Palmach unit near Tel Aviv's shore and later sunk on a command from David Ben-Gurion.

The ship is seen by many Israelis as a symbol of the dangers of violence between Jews in Israel.

A representative of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center said that the search for the ship would begin this week, and that remains are expected to be found within two weeks.

MK Ya'acov Katz (National Union), who attended the meeting said that "lifting the ship and making it a memorial is important in order to perpetuate the national consensus that a Jew will never lift a hand against his brother."

"There will never be a civil war," Katz exclaimed, repeating a well-known Begin quote from after the Altalena affair.

More Concern in Haaretz Over the Altalena

2011-07-01T06:28:00.000-07:00

The latest thorny legacy of 1948

Israel's battle against wayward right-wing rabbis summons up a recollection of the fledgling Israeli government's handling of the Altalena affair.

By Amir Oren

The Altalena's heavy burden

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is also toadying to the extreme right on the issue of the Altalena, the right-wing Irgun militia's weapons ship that was sunk by the new Israeli government in 1948. The Prime Minister's Office and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center are expected to carry out an underwater search for remnants of the vessel in the coming weeks. The context is encouragement from above of rebels against the state, with the aim to thwart a diplomatic solution that would involve the evacuation of settlements.

Netanyahu has yet to evacuate a single settler. In 1997 he fulfilled his predecessor's commitment to evacuate Hebron in the sense that he divided the city. But he did not remove the settlers. In 2005 he resigned from Ariel Sharon's government so as not to be a partner to evacuation of settlements in Gaza and the northern West Bank.

When there is peace, there is no sign that he will have the courage to carry out what he has undertaken - uprooting settlers who refuse to leave of their own free will. In Netanyahu's world, in the choice between a quarrel with the world and a struggle with the extreme right, which influences Likud's internal elections, U.S. President Barack Obama doesn't stand a chance against Lior and right-wing Likud firebrand Moshe Feiglin.

It's worth recalling what David Ben-Gurion said about the Altalena. On the day of the battle, Ben-Gurion was absolutely determined to overpower the ship. "All those who fell in Kfar Vitkin and its surroundings [the site of an earlier clash between the army and the Irgun] will be buried in that area," he ordered Yigael Yadin, who would become the Israel Defense Forces' second chief of staff. "By no means is the Irgun to be allowed to have its dead buried in Tel Aviv."

Ben-Gurion had no compunctions about making clear the means to be employed in Tel Aviv. "You must," he wrote to Yadin, "take every step: concentrating an army, firepower (cannons, machine guns ), flame-throwers and all the other means at our disposal to make the ship surrender unconditionally. All these forces will be put into action - if the government gives an order."

The following day, June 23, 1948, at the fifth meeting of the Provisional State Council, he spoke about "the attempted attack by the organization known as the Irgun on the unity and sovereignty of the state, the State of Israel's military capability and its international status." He used terms such as "the bitterest test of blood the state has faced" and "a gang of terrorists."

"Had the weapons fallen into their hands, the terrorists would have been able to do away with the state all at once .... The burning of this ship [is] a tremendous thing because this is a ship that carried a danger of destruction for Israel .... The army acted intelligently. It could have destroyed those gangs, and did not do this because it knew that destroying them was not the aim but rather the prevention of a crime. I am very afraid of an armed minority," he added.

"To what end is it armed? Weaponry - this is a means for killing people. When there is an armed minority, it is inevitable that blood will be spilled, and Jewish blood has been spilled by them - more than once! And there is a danger that non-Jewish blood will be spilled by them - and non-Jewish blood must also not be spilled. We must prevent this danger, and it is impossible to prevent it with kid gloves, but rather only by force."

Ben-Gurion continued: "Alas, we must use force against Jews, but 70 times alas, Jews are compelling us to use force against them. In keeping the arms ship from the Irgun, a terrible disaster looming over us has been prevented, and never has the burning of a ship been such a devoted mission for the peace of the Yishuv [Jewish community] as the burning of this Irgun ship.

The Irgun people are in the army, but at the same time they have special weapons. For what? Against Arabs? After all, they have weapons from the government, clearly then, for continuing the internal terror. When there is not a sole authority, a sole army ... a sole discipline, when every terrorist gang can openly do what the Irgun people have done, the war effort is endangered ....

"The government did not succumb to erroneous pity, which might have led to far more horrendous bloodshed than what there was now. It's better that the ship was burned than for it to have supplied private arms to the separatists. In the government's hands the arms could have been a blessing, but they refused to hand them over to the government, so it's better the arms drowned in the sea or were burned."

And in a foreshadowing of future events, Ben-Gurion added, "We do not want to go around the country accompanied by bodyguards. I am embarrassed by bodyguards, and I know that a bodyguard will not help. If someone wants to assassinate you, he will assassinate you."

The intelligence service of the Haganah - the pre-state underground militia associated with the labor movement - had moles in the Irgun leadership. According to reliable testimonies, at least one became a top man in the right-wing Herut party and reported to the Shin Bet security service until the mid-1950s.

Three weeks after the Altalena affair, Ben-Gurion wrote to Interior Minister Yitzhak Greenboim: "According to the reports I have received, the Irgun was planning, with the help of wealthy people in the Yishuv, to establish 'an army of 5,000 people.' The aims: 1. Occupation of part of the land (Jerusalem or some other place ) under its total authority, and to defend this occupation against both aliens and Jews. 2. Preparations for achieving rule in the entire State of Israel by force. The loss of the ship the Altalena thwarted its plans, but after hesitations and wavering it now intends to continue with its previous plan, though by other means. It is now planning: 1. The occupation of Jerusalem, or at least separate occupations of Jerusalem. 2. The establishment of a large front abroad. To this end it is sending its most gifted commanders there, who will set up an army there to operate at the opportune moment here. 3. The acquisition of arms aboard and arrangement of hidden storehouses here."

Israel has witnessed the Jewish underground in the territories, Baruch Goldstein - who committed the Hebron massacre in 1994 - and Yigal Amir - who assassinated Rabin the following year. All of them were graduates of select units in the IDF. We must not take lightly the ability of national religious leaders to deploy their people at the next major evacuation.

Affairs like those of rabbis Dov Lior and Ya'akov Yosef test the determination of both sides. The politicians, headed by Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak (who dozens of times promised in vain, in the name of law and order, to evacuate rogue outposts ), have been deterred. The Israel Police, with the support of the State Prosecutor's Office, finds itself fighting alone.

JPost Article on the Altalena

2011-06-26T12:27:00.000-07:00

This Week in History: The sinking of the ‘Altalena’

Decision to send Jewish soldiers against fellow Jews has never been forgiven by some who view it as betrayal of the purpose of a Jewish army.

On June 20, 1948, just over a month after the State of Israel was established and shortly after the first cease fire in the War of Independence, Israel's first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, gave one of the country's most controversial orders ever - to take the Altalena by force.

Prior to the establishment of the state, several armed Jewish militias protected early Jewish settlers and fought against the British and hostile Arab forces. The largest of these groups were the Hagana and the Irgun Zva’I Leumi (Irgun or IZL). The Hagana, led by Ben-Gurion, became the Israeli Defense Forces once the state was declared in May 1948 and the Irgun was under the command of Menahem Begin.

In mid-May 1948, during the War of Independence, Ben-Gurion ordered the various militias disbanded and integrated into the IDF in order to create one army under a unified command. While some of the militias willingly sent their fighters and weaponry to the IDF, others were unwilling to relinquish the established paramilitary organizations they had built. Notably, the Irgun, for both ideological and political reasons, was unwilling to put itself under Ben-Gurion’s command.

Begin and other Irgun commanders were still attempting to ship significant amounts of weaponry and fresh immigrant fighters into Israel in the last days of the British Mandate. The Irgun organized a large ship carrying weaponry and fighters from France, scheduled to arrive on Israel’s shores in mid-May. Due to logistical and operational factors, however, the departure of the Altalena was delayed.

By the time the ship was ready to sail, loaded with nearly 1,000 immigrant fighters and thousands of tons of materiel, the first ceasefire in the War of Independence had already been reached and importing weaponry would have constituted a violation of it. The Jewish state, however, was in need of weaponry and ammunition, so when Begin approached Ben-Gurion to inform him of the shipment, the two attempted to negotiate a deal that would see the ship’s cargo safely unloaded.

In order to evade detection by United Nations observers overseeing the ceasefire, the Irgun and the newly anointed leaders of the state and its army decided that the Altalena should be offloaded at Kfar Vitkin, near Netanya.

Negotiations between the Irgun and Ben-Gurion were complicated by Begin’s insistence on transferring most of the ship’s cargo to Irgun units operating within the newly established IDF, a condition to which Ben-Gurion could not agree. The new leader of Israel was already wary of having non-state controlled armed forces operating independently of the army and believed that directing the weaponry to IDF units from the Irgun would lead to an “army within an army.”

The fighting begins

As the ship began its final approach to Kfar Vitkin, IDF forces were ordered to surround the area in order to seize the payload. Following failed negotiations, the government decided to issue an ultimatum. The military commander on scene sent Begin a clear message: “I shall use all the means at my disposal in order to implement the order and to requisition the weapons which have reached shore and transfer them from private possession into the possession of the Israel government… You have ten minutes to give me your answer.”

Small-scale fighting between the two sides broke out at Kfar Vitkin, but Begin and the Irgun, aware of their numerical and tactical disadvantage, decided to send the Altalena south to Tel Aviv where more fighters could be assembled and the army was not yet situated to intercept the ship. Irgun fighters who had already joined the IDF began defecting from their commands and headed to Tel Aviv to fight for their weaponry.

As the two forces descended on Tel Aviv, fighting erupted along the shore and throughout the city, “mainly in the center and the south,” The Palestine Post reported in the aftermath of the clashes. The Israeli navy and artillery pieces on shore fired warning shots at the ship in a last-ditched attempt to force a surrender, but eventually hit the ship, setting it ablaze. Ultimately, over 20 Irgun fighters and more than a handful of IDF soldiers were killed in the fighting between the two Jewish forces. The Altalena was eventually brought out to sea and sunk.

Ben-Gurion has been both praised and disdained for his decision to take the Altalena by force. Fearing a civil war and a lack of government legitimacy based on the concept of a monopoly of force, Ben-Gurion ultimately decided that he could not tolerate Begin’s brazen refusal to put himself, his fighters and weaponry under the state’s command. Following the Altalena incident, however, Irgun and other militia forces were integrated into the IDF and the non-democratic challenges to the state’s legitimacy came to an end.

Nonetheless, the decision to order Jewish soldiers to act against fellow Jews – who too were fighting for the infant state’s survival – has never been forgiven by some who view it as a betrayal of the very purpose of a Jewish army. Until this day, the Altalena is invoked at times when state security forces are pitted against Jews, albeit not with the deadly consequences of June 1948.

Yossi Sarid on Begin and Shamir

2011-06-26T01:18:00.000-07:00

Yossi Sarid asks

Are Begin and Shamir also considered terrorists? and writes:-

Amir Oren's glance rested for a moment on the press release published by the Defense Ministry that the people who fell on the Altalena were to be defined as "murdered." But there are no murdered people without murderers, and in this case they are David Ben-Gurion (who gave the order ) and Yitzhak Rabin (who commanded the Haganah unit that sank the Irgun ship off the Tel Aviv coast in June 1948 ).

The memorial for the Altalena fallen was held this week in the presence of former members of the Irgun militia and those who followed in their footsteps. Not one word of reservation was voiced, not even by the prime minister. Only two weeks previously, they had been agitated by a comparison I had made - during a Shavuot study session at Tzavta in Tel Aviv - between Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, and Yasser Arafat. Then I said that they, like him, had been contaminated by terrorism. "This guy, Sarid, has gone berserk," was what they said.

I do not particularly like historical analogies. The one who makes them suffers in the same way as the one who made the changes - he loses out because there will always be differences that can be highlighted.

However, my methodological mistake does not alter their biographies. Many people who headed movements of national liberation adopted violent and indiscriminate methods of resistance that brought death and injury to the innocent and the wicked alike, to civilians as well as soldiers, and which deliberately sowed panic among the public. We have to be sorry but not to deny this, and those who do the rewriting should not be hopeful. Later on, the terrorists became legitimate leaders, presidents and prime ministers; and Begin and Shamir are among these.

At one stage, B. Michael drew attention to the book, "The History of the War of Liberation," which was written by people who had been involved in the Irgun and the Lehi prestate right-wing underground movements. It is based on documents from the archives of the Israel Defense Forces and of the Irgun, of the Jabotinsky Institute and the Betar Museum. In their dedication, the authors thanked Uri Zvi Grinberg, Abba Ahimeir, Arthur Szyk, Shmuel Schnitzer and Shmuel Tamir; the prologue and summary were written by Israel Eldad.

There is no room here to mention all of the activities for which these organizations took responsibility, but here are a few typical cases: On 4.11.1937 - five dead and eight wounded in shooting at a bus in the Jerusalem suburb of Romema; 16.7.38 - 10 killed and three wounded including four women, a boy and young girl, by a bomb hidden in a basket of vegetables; 26.7.38 - 27 killed and 46 wounded when a bomb exploded in Haifa's Arab market; 29.5.39 - five killed and 18 wounded when mines were detonated in the Rex Cinema in Jerusalem, and among the seriously wounded were a Jewish man and woman; 20.6.39 - 78 killed by a bomb in the Haifa vegetable market.

And we have not mentioned the best known incidents - the explosion at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, the massacre at Dir Yassin, the executions of Jews who were suspected of cooperating with the foreign occupier (at least 10 cases ), and the assassinations of some of the representatives of His Majesty's government and of the international community in the region or in the country.

From the end of 1937 until the middle of 1939, in less than two years, the terrorist activities of the Irgun and Lehi claimed 232 victims with another 370 wounded - men, women and children. All of this was detailed in the semi-official book, that was republished in 1981 with the assistance of the Defense Ministry.

I had difficulty calculating the exact number of the hundreds of fatalities from the period of terror between 1946 and 1948. Anyone interested in the figures can find them in the book and do the calculations themselves.

The acts of the fathers served as a lesson for the sons, and even after 1948 and 1967, the acts of Jewish terrorism did not stop. Many of these terrorists walk among us, free, today and those who were caught and sentenced were pardoned.

Every nation holds its own terrorists close to its heart and considers them heroes. And even if there is someone who feels revolted, he too does not oppose forgiveness because even though they have sinned, they are part of the people of Israel.

However, there is still a very small minority in whose eyes all the terrorists in the world - irrespective of race or religion - are considered outcasts, no matter what their motives may have been. And the aim does not, in their opinion, justify the means: instead, the means defile the aim.

Haaretz Op-ed On Altalena Search

2011-06-26T01:13:00.000-07:00

Motti Golani, professor in the Department of Land of Israel Studies at the University of Haifa, writes in Haaretz that the operation to recover the remains of the Irgun-controlled ship the Altalena represents a golden opportunity to refine the dispute over the dangers currently lurking for Israeli democracy.

Raising the Altalena

It can be assumed that those seeking to recover the remains of (Irgun-controlled ship ) the Altalena, which was sunk off Israel's coast in June 1948, would be followers - at least in this instance - of the heritage of Revisionist Zionism, which holds that speaking about something is an act in and of itself. Whether advocates of the operation are successful or not, this represents a golden opportunity to refine the dispute over the dangers currently lurking for Israeli democracy. This includes the growth in power of those who view democracy as a burden, and an Education Ministry that is openly hostile to dealing with democracy.

It is essential today that we show support for then-Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion's decision to sink the ship in the most central location possible, off the coast of Tel Aviv, so that it served as an example. Whom and from what was Ben-Gurion seeking deterrence? Bloody civil warfare has been the fate of many nation states that have been established over the past 150 years. It did not happen, however, in Israel. Why? Was there no such danger from the military forces beyond the new Israeli army, notably the Irgun?

Truth be told, Ben-Gurion was not afraid of the Irgun, whose power was limited and where, at the time, interest in integrating into the new state had taken preeminence over refusal to recognize Israel's sovereignty. In any event, the outbreak of a civil war was not dependent on a decision by the Irgun. That's a baseless story that Irgun leader and later prime minister Menachem Begin and his followers have cultivated. The Irgun's refusal to turn its arms over to the new Israel Defense Forces, i.e. to the state, was a rebellion that was suppressed by force within a matter of hours, even though the Irgun fought back.

It is not hard to predict what would have happened if the Irgun members had expanded their revolt after the ship was sunk. Begin understood this well. He even managed to turn his weakness into a positive force to attract followers and as a means to subdue those within the Irgun who opposed integration. This incident is to his credit.

Ben-Gurion had a different reason to shell the Altalena. Precedents were being set in the newly-born State of Israel that would last for generations. The superior authority of the civilian government over those in arms and in uniform was not at all clear. The prime minister was actually concerned about trends that were widespread at the time among activist leftists, particularly the two factions of the Mapam party, Ahdut Haavoda and Hashomer Hatzair. In addition to its hostility to Ben-Gurion's Mapai party and to Ben-Gurion himself, Mapam had extraordinary influence over the Palmach (the central fighting force of the IDF at the time ). In addition, many senior IDF commanders came from these circles or had sympathy for them.

There was a high level of awareness within Mapam about the political significance of the apparent high-quality military power at the party's disposal. They never used it and their discipline was exemplary, but Ben-Gurion couldn't have known this in June 1948. During that period, he had to solidify his standing and the standing of his government opposite the IDF General Staff. The controversy over which party the commanders of each front would come from disturbed him and his government a great deal more than what the Irgun would do.

The mortar shell fired on the Altalena was therefore of the highest fundamental importance. It decided the question, once and for all, of who commanded the army in Israel, who had the authority to bring arms into the country, who gave orders to open fire, and when and where. The Palmach command was dismantled a matter of months after the Altalena incident, and the two developments were not unconnected.

There is no doubt that the deaths from the ranks of the IDF and of the Irgun in the Altalena incident were senseless. It is difficult for their families and friends to come to grips with their losses, particularly under such circumstances.

It is some consolation, however, for us to understand that the mortar shell fired on orders from Israel's sovereign, civilian government headed off other future civil wars, the cost of which we can only imagine.

When Begin Was Barred From Britain

2011-06-26T00:02:00.000-07:00

Why 'hook-nosed' Begin was denied entry to UK
By Marcus Dysch
Created 23 Jun 2011 - 1:10pm

UK newsExtremismTerrorism
Menachem Begin was refused a visa to enter Britain in 1955 after the Foreign Office warned that his admission could damage relations with the Israeli government.

The detail was revealed for the first time in documents released by the National Archive this week. They included a 1946 British passport control card for Mr Begin describing him as "thin faced, bad teeth, long hooked nose, may wear black horn-rimmed spectacles".

In 1955 Mr Begin was leader of the revisionist Herut Party and hoped to travel to Britain to meet supporters. It would be another 30 years before he became Israeli Prime Minister.

A file on Mr Begin, reviewed by MI5, recommended barring from the country because he was a "member of the extremist anti-Arab Herut Party and a fervent member of the Irgun". It would be "impolite to allow admission to a former head of the terrorist movement" states one document.

A Passport Control Department official at the Foreign Office wrote to the Home Office in 1954 stating: "It is the view of the Levant Department that Menachem Begin should not be allowed to enter the United Kingdom and I would be grateful for your authority to instruct the visa section to refuse a visa."

Max Seligman, a British lawyer in Tel Aviv, had written to the British Embassy in Israel to ask whether a visa would be available. Mr Seligman defended several Irgun members in the final years of British Mandate Palestine.

But the Foreign Office believed Mr Begin "should not be allowed to come here as he is the leader of the right-wing extremist party in Israel which advocates an aggressive policy towards the Arabs". In the Foreign Office view, "a visit by him would not do anything to improve our relations with the present moderate government of Israel."

MI5 said that he was "an extreme nationalist and chauvinist right-wing [sic] and is well-known as the former leader of the notorious terrorist organisation Irgun Zvei Leumi".

The Home Office had suggested that if Mr Begin were admitted, then Special Branch should be "informed immediately, since the security responsibility for Jewish terrorists rests with them".

Abraham Abrahams, chairman of the Zionist Revisionist Organisation in Britain, also wrote to the Foreign Office with a potential itinerary for Mr Begin's visit including a suggested meeting with Winston Churchill.

The files contain a clipping of a story from a 1971 edition of the JC, detailing plans for Mr Begin to visit Britain that year. A Home Office note suggested that Mr Begin was not considered a security risk by that point.

Mr Begin became Israeli Prime Minister in 1977 and later came to Britain to meet Margaret Thatcher, who found him the "most difficult" man she had to deal with in the early years of her premiership.

Source
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Searching for the Altalena

2011-06-22T22:47:00.000-07:00

Reported:

Underwater search for sunken Altalena ship set to begin

Altalena was a ship belonging to the Irgun, a prestate Jewish militia, which was shelled and sunk by Israeli government forces when it tried to land an arms cargo shortly after the state's establishment.

The Prime Minister's Office and the Menachem Begin Heritage Center are expected to carry out an underwater search for the remnants of the Altalena in the coming weeks.

The Altalena was a ship belonging to the Irgun, a prestate Jewish militia, which was shelled and sunk by Israeli government forces when it tried to land an arms cargo shortly after the state's establishment.

At Sunday's annual memorial service for those who died on the Altalena, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that a commemoration of its story will be included in the government's national heritage sites program.

A source in the Prime Minister's Bureau said the proposal to try to locate the remains of the ship came from the Begin Center. Reuven Pinsky, who heads the government office in charge of the heritage sites program, and Cabinet Secretary Zvi Hauser were thrilled with the idea and brought it to the prime minister, who embraced it.

The initial funding for the project will be NIS 200,000, to cover the underwater search team and the equipment needed to locate wrecks underwater. The initial aim is to determine where the ship is lying.

At a later stage, various possibilities for commemorating the Altalena, its crew and the story will be considered. Currently, there is a small memorial for the Altalena on the Tel Aviv promenade.

"We want to preserve the Altalena's heritage and story, and especially the values it represents," said a source in Netanyahu's bureau. "It is especially important to preserve the value of preventing a civil war and preserving the unity of the nation."

In June 1948, the Irgun tried to smuggle a large quantity of arms for its own use into Israel aboard the Altalena. Since the Irgun would not agree to surrender the weapons to the newly formed Israel Defense Forces, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered the ship shelled and sunk when it tried to dock near Tel Aviv.

In the ensuing exchange of fire, 16 Irgun members and three IDF soldiers were killed. The ship went up in flames. But Begin, the Irgun's leader, refused to let Irgun members retaliate, saying he didn't want a civil war.

The Altalena lay on its side in shallow water off the coast of Tel Aviv for several months, but then Ben-Gurion ordered the navy to drag it out to sea and sink it. Some say he ordered the ship broken into pieces before it was sunk.

People involved in searching for the ship believe it lies some 10 kilometers from the coast at a depth of 60 to 70 meters.

New Peace Documentary Produced

2011-06-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

Newly minted Fisher Klingenstein Films has acquired worldwide rights to the documentary "Back Door Channels: The Price of Peace" [which] focuses on the interplay between the official government channels and the men who acted largely behind the scenes of the peace process between Egypt and Israel, tracing the confluence of factors that led to the Camp David Accords and ensuing peace treaty of 1979.

The film examines the personalities -- Menachem Begin, Anwar El-Sadat, and Jimmy Carter -- who drove the peace process along with the secret liaisons, communications, and third-party world leaders who played roles in forging the agreement.

CEO Danny Fisher, former CEO of City Lights Media, noted that "Channels" is the first theatrical release of the new company. "The film is incredibly timely given the current upheavals in Egypt, Libya, Syria and literally all over the Middle East and delivers a powerful message about value of diplomacy," he added.

Source

Menachem Begin and the New X-Men Film

2011-06-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

Found here:

...Devin Faraci, once a fellow writer for CHUD.com, recently posted an opinion piece (linked here) that analyzed X-Men: First Class’ portrayal of Magneto (*) from the point of view as a mirror to Israel. In it, he traces the history of the Jewish nationhood’s establishment from Holocaust to modern day, focusing mainly on the various wars they have participated in.

He connects the mutant’s actions in the aforementioned film to Meir Kahane and the Jewish Defense League, a fringe group among the nation of Israel’s many viewpoints. No one can deny the connection between Kahane and Magneto, which comes down to the use of the phrase “Never Again” in both the recent X-Men film and it being the JDL’s own slogan (Magneto even started his own JDL in the comics- the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants). This is a stark departure from the comic version of Magneto, it should be noted, who in 1964’s X-Men #4 used the phrase “Never Forget”- the slogan of holocaust remembrance from the point of view of education and peace. Magneto’s character is inherently that of a 20th century Jew, whether by his holocaust origins or (in the comics) his will to establish an independent nation for his own kind, where they could be at peace. But as in real life, that peace has consistently been demolished by attackers, whether from inside or outside the nation.

The producer of the initial X-Men films, Avi Arad, himself an Israeli, said of Magneto: “I would look, ideologically, more to Jabotinsky and Begin… Magneto to me is not a villain. But he becomes more like Kahane the more frustrated he is with the way the world is approaching the ones who are different.” In Rabbi Simcha Weinstein’s book Up, Up ,and Oy Vey!,which traces the very real influence Judaism had on the creators of many comic book superheroes, he quotes writer Chris Clarement, who was responsible for creating Magneto’s holocaust back-story. “It allowed me to turn him into a tragic figure who wants to save his People… I then had the opportunity over 200 issues to attempt to redeem him, to see if he could start over, if he could evolve in the way that Menachem Begin had evolved from a guy that the British considered ‘shoot on sight’ in 1945… to a statesman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976.”

Looking to the life of Menachem Begin to try to understand Magneto, from his early life of opposing the Zionist leadership’s bowing to British colonialism (much as one could say Xavier does in X-Men), to fighting for independence through any means necessary with the Irgun, one can see the connection. But as Claremont himself said, over the course of decades Begin’s role changed. In 1977 Begin lead the Likud party to take control of the state’s government and allied himself with many smaller fractions of the multi-party system that makes up Israeli politics. Ultimately, peace between Israel and a neighboring Arab state was reached for the first time in 1978, under Begin’s control, when the Camp David accord was struck with Egypt...

The film's website. A trailer.

(*)

Magneto was ranked number 1 by IGN's Top 100 Comic Book Villains list,[9] was listed number 17 in Wizard's Top 100 Greatest Villains Ever list,[10] and was ranked as the 9th Greatest Comic Book Character Ever in Wizard's list of the 200 Greatest Comic Book Characters of All Time, the second highest villain on that list.[11]

View From Mt. Zion Ascent

2011-06-09T00:38:00.000-07:00

Photo credit: YMedad

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INN report on Shavuot Learn-in

2011-06-08T23:38:00.001-07:00

Shavuot Study with Sign Language at Begin Center

A unique Shavuot study session is scheduled to take place Tuesday evening at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem. The topic of the learning session will be social justice and all the speakers will be accompanied by sign-language translators. The rest of the year, electronic means are used to serve the hearing-impaired public.

The all-night session starts at 11:00 p.m.

JPost report on the Bombing Raid Exhibition

2011-06-08T23:37:00.000-07:00

Former colleagues of PM mark Osirak anniversary

To commemorate the 30-year anniversary of the Israel Air Force strike on Saddam Hussein’s Osirak nuclear reactor, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem unveiled an exhibit about the June 7, 1981, raid on Monday evening.

David Ivry, who commanded the IAF at the time of the mission; Maj.-Gen. Ido Nechushtan, the present IAF commander; Arye Naor, the cabinet secretary in 1981; and Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who succeeded Naor as cabinet secretary, spoke at the opening. Some of the pilots who participated also attended.

The exhibit will remain at the Begin Center for a month before moving to IAF bases around the country.

Code-named Operation Opera, the mission required IAF planes to fly more than 1,600 kilometers across Jordanian, Saudi and Iraqi airspace, and success was not assured. Prime Minister Begin gave the order despite opposition from then- Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Yadin, Minister of Interior Affairs Yosef Burg, Mossad chief Yitzhak Hofi, military intelligence head Maj.-Gen. Yehoshua Saguy, opposition leader Shimon Peres and others.

Meridor noted that exactly 44 years ago, he was fighting in a tank division during the Six Day War, when Israel’s military might was at its peak intensity for the time.

Some of Israel’s enemies, such as Egypt, came to accept the existence of Israel and chose peace, said Meridor, while Iraq did not, pursuing nuclear weapons because it knew Israel could not be defeated on the battlefield.

“We must identify opportunities to make smart decisions that require courage and vision,” said Meridor, who praised the decision to bomb Osirak as well as Begin’s pursuit of the peace treaty with Egypt. “Begin was such a leader. He was unique.”

After the raid, Begin stated that Israel would never allow its enemies to acquire weapons of mass destruction, a concept that later became known as the “Begin Doctrine.” The doctrine is the backbone of the argument for a preemptive military strike against Iran. Israel also reportedly bombed a nuclear reactor in Syria in September 2007.

“In my view an operation should correspond with the target,” Naor told The Jerusalem Post before he spoke at the exhibit opening.

“We want them not to have nuclear capability – that is the target. The target is not to send the air force to bomb Iran.”

The raid on the Iraqi reactor was very risky, and the risks involved with an attack on Iran would be more numerous, said Naor, adding “That’s why a strike perhaps is not the right answer to this threat. We should find something [else], and perhaps we are doing it.”

Israel was reportedly behind the Stuxnet computer virus which caused significant set-backs to Iran’s uranium enrichment program, as well as several assassinations of nuclear scientists working on Tehran’s nuclear program.

Moshe Arens, who served three terms as defense minister and held that position during the First Gulf War, said there can be no comparison between Operation Opera and a possible strike against Iran because the Iranian program includes multiple facilities, some of which are underground.

When asked if Iraq could have fired a nuclear weapon instead of Scud missiles at Israel during the Gulf War in 1991 had it not been for the 1981 strike, Arens, who did not attend the opening, responded, “It’s a possibility.”

Uri Avnery Recalls A Chance Meeting

2011-06-04T23:37:00.001-07:00

In recalling his wife, Rachel, who just died:

Once we went to see a film set in a small Slovak town during the Holocaust. A solitary old woman did not understand what was happening when the Jews were summoned for deportation to the death camps; neighbors had to help her to the assembly point.

We arrived late and found seats in the dark. When the lights came on at the end, Menachem Begin got up in front of us. His eyes, red from weeping, locked with Rachel's. Oblivious to everybody around, Begin walked straight up to her, took her head in his hands and kissed her on the brow.

Irgun History

2011-06-04T23:28:00.000-07:00

From a Haaretz story:

..."The British managed to penetrate deep into the [underground] organizations in an astonishing manner," says [Dr. Eldad] Harouvi [who today heads the Beit Hapalmach center]. "They knew a lot about the happenings in the underground movements."

...After reading thousands of documents, hearing testimony from police officers and Mandatory officials and perusing additional documents at the Imperial War Museum in London, Eldad Harouvi concluded that the CID had a senior and very reliable agent in the top echelons of the Haganah and various national Zionist institutions. This agent provided reports about secret meetings at the Haganah's highest level, in which David Ben-Gurion, Jewish Agency political department head Moshe Sharett and others participated. One of the reports, by that senior agent, concerned meetings at the home of Dr. Chaim Weizmann (later Israel's first president) in Rehovot with some 10 of the Yishuv's leaders.

The documents do not give the agents' names, but rather refer to them by nicknames or code names like Y21 or P85.

...The book contains a few documents and testimonies about the explosion of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946 by the Etzel, and about the escape of Etzel and Lehi prisoners from the prison in Acre. The Etzel people had blown up the King David, which housed the British Mandate administration in one of its wings. On July 22, they hid explosives in milk containers delivered to the hotel's kitchen. Ninety-one people - British, Jews and Arabs - were killed in the blast; the attack is considered a historic event.

According to Harouvi's book, an Irgun agent provided the CID with reliable information about the organization's intention to blow up the hotel using milk containers. [that would be, perhaps, Yannai, Heinrich Reinhold, see below]

About six months before the attack, the Palestine police commander, Brig. John Murray Rymer-Jones, met John Shaw, the chief secretary of the British government in Palestine, commander of the British forces, Gen. Evelyn Barker, and the high commissioner, Sir Alan Cunningham, and demanded increased security around the hotel. The three ignored his warnings, telling Rymer-Jones that life in the country was in any event dangerous.

Rymer-Jones left his post and returned home some two months before the Irgun attack.

About a year after part of the King David was destroyed in the blast, the Irgun's intelligence and operations specialists organized a daring escape operation of prisoners from a British jail in Acre. A report about the plans for a jailbreak reached one of the wardens in November 1946. As an Irgun prisoner walked one morning in the prison yard, a piece of paper fell from his pocket. On it were drawings depicting a planned escape route to be dug under the prison walls. The warden forwarded the drawing to his superiors and it was then passed to the CID, which stepped up security in and around the jail for a few weeks. When nothing happened, they returned to the regular routine.

The documents show that in the 1940s there were contacts between the Irgun and the CID that led to an understanding and even a "cease-fire." One of the liaisons between the two organizations was David Rosenthal, a Tel Aviv customs broker who in the 1960s published his own book, "Besherut Hamahteret" ("In the Service of the Underground" ). Catling himself initiated a few of the meetings. He even met, twice, with Ya'akov Meridor, who became commander of the Irgun after David Raziel joined the British Army and was killed in Iraq, in 1941.

In one of those meetings, in September 1943, Meridor asked Catling: "Why do you arrest Etzel people who are not operating against you?"

Catling answered: "Why do you kidnap rich Jews, rob and extort them? If you stop, I shall see to it that your people [detained in the British facility in Latrun] will be released," referring to the Irgun practice of financing its operations by committing robberies.

In 1944 Meridor himself was arrested and sent, along with hundreds of other Irgun people, to a detention camp in Eritrea in 1945. That followed the announcement by Menachem Begin, Meridor's successor as commander, in February 1944, of a "revolt" against the British authorities. At the end of 1945 the British offered to release the Irgun leaders in Eritrea if the organization would agree to end its terror attacks. The talks, which were secretly taped, were mainly held with Ya'akov Meridor and attorney Eliyahu Meridor (no relation; later a member of Knesset, and the father of Minister Dan Meridor ). In his book "Aruka Haderekh Leherut" ("Long Is the Path to Freedom" ), Ya'akov Meridor boasted of his ability to remain tight-lipped during his interrogation. According to the documents, however, Meridor answered most of the questions almost without protest.

While talking to Etzel, the CID continued to operate agents in the organization. Two of them, "Yanai" (Heinrich Reinhold) and Yaacov Chilevich, were the subjects of books and many articles. Both fled the country with British help after their deeds were exposed. Chilevich handed over to the British dozens of members of the Irgun, including such senior figures as Eliyahu Meridor, Aryeh Ben-Eliezer and Shimshon Unichman. Harouvi discloses in his book that Chilevich was also given the assignments of tracking down Menachem Begin.

"From the British perspective, says Harouvi, "Begin was a mystery. They never detained him, never interrogated him, and did not have his fingerprints. Even the picture they attached to an announcement declaring him a wanted person did not quite look like him. The operational compartmentalization in the Etzel was quite high, especially with everything that had to do with Begin. That was the biggest failure of British intelligence."

Chilevich did manage to get the address of Begin's hideout in Jerusalem, at 23 Alfasi Street, as well as an old photograph of him. These he obtained when he went to congratulate Begin on the birth of his son Benny.

The CID managed to recruit agent-informers in the Lehi underground too. One of the documents talks of an agent code-named "Levine." In 1940 the Lehi (an acronym for Lohamei Herut Yisrael - Israel Freedom Fighters ), in contrast with the Haganah and the Irgun, continued to consider the British the greatest enemy. The British declared a battle to the end against the Stern Gang, as they referred to the organization. In October 1940, agent "Levine" turned over 40 of his comrades, including all of the organization's top echelon excepting leader Avraham (Yair ) Stern. The people who drafted the document ordered the interrogators to free one of the detainees if he presented himself as "Levine."

In many studies of that period, and especially in the memoirs of the Irgun and Lehi people, there is a widespread assumption that the Haganah turned in members of the other underground organizations to the British. In his book, Harouvi says it was the Irgun that handed over many Lehi people - in part because Yair Stern had broken away from the Irgun and created a separate organization. "The Haganah did not turn in Lehi members," he stresses.

One of the most important and most fascinating items published by Eldad Harouvi is something called "The Jerusalem Agreement." This is a document composed by Stern, and dated September 15, 1940, describing a sort of friendship accord with fascist Italy. With 22 clauses, the agreement was to be signed between the "official representative" of side A - that is, the Italian government - and the "Temporary Hebrew government, "hereafter side B," which was the Lehi.

The full text of the agreement appears in a comprehensive study from 1967 by Irgun historian, David Niv, entitled "Ma'arkhot Ha'irgun Hatzva'i Haleumi" ("The Etzel's Campaigns" ). In a parenthetical clause in his research, Niv noted that Yair's agreement was reached with the help of "the agent" or "the mediator." Dr. Harouvi discloses that person's identity: Moshe Rothstein, an agent who worked with the British but also helped the Irgun.

The agreement, it should be noted, was no fabrication. It was designed to reach representatives of the Italian government, and accurately reflected the sentiments of Stern, who sought understandings with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, in keeping with the concept that "My enemy's enemies are my friends." The Irgun's intelligence division got its hands on the agreement and turned Rothstein into a kind of agent provocateur and persuaded Stern that he was representing Italy.

What was fabricated in the agreement was the supposed Italian side. "My argument," says Eldad Harouvi, "is that Moshe Rothstein was managed by the Irgun people for the purpose of slandering Avraham Stern and presenting him and his group as a fifth column and quislings. That is how they were referred to by both the British and the Irgun. It was only more than a year after the operation was launched that a British report, in a secret internal account, said that they were partners to it, that actually it was all fictitious."

A representative of the Irgun's intelligence division, Yitzhak Berman, who was later a minister in Menachem Begin's government and a speaker of the Knesset, was in on the sting operation.

Several years ago Harouvi and Haran invited Berman to visit the Haganah archives. When they showed Berman the British report about the Jerusalem Agreement he smiled and said, "That was me."

When Lehi found out that the Irgun had trapped them, they retaliated with vengeance. Some three years later, in September 1943, at midday, in a Tel Aviv street, they fired dozens of submachine-gun bullets at Israel Pritzker, one of the Irgun's intelligence commanders, and killed him.

Book Review of "Brothers At War"

2011-06-01T04:42:00.000-07:00

A book researched, in part, at the Begin Center, has been published and here are exceprts from a book review:

EXCLUSIVE: BROTHERS AT WAR: JEROLD AUERBACH, A REVIEW BY RAEL JEAN ISAAC

Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena by Jerold S. Auerbach (Quid Pro Books, 2011)

...The Altalena was a ship bringing nine hundred young fighters (most of them survivors of Nazi camps) and a large arsenal of weapons (most of them supplied by France) to newly-established Israel, attacked by five Arab states and desperate for arms to defend itself. The entire project was the work of the Irgun, the underground organization whose attacks on British forces in Palestine had a major role in Britain’s decision to throw in the towel. Ben-Gurion’s then provisional government gave orders to destroy the ship and its armaments. Sixteen Irgun members were killed as the ship went down, its munitions ablaze, with Irgun leader Menachem Begin himself narrowly escaping the fire aimed at fleeing survivors. (Most of the passengers had disembarked earlier in the two-day showdown.)

Begin was the hero in this squalid story. As Auerbach writes: “Begin commanded his loyal fighters not to return fire. His insistence upon restraint demonstrated his unyielding determination to prevent civil war from once again dividing the Jewish people and shattering Jewish sovereignty, as it had done nineteen centuries earlier.”

...If the hatred that destroyed the Altalena lacked a cause (in the sense of a justifiable ground for the action against the ship), it was not without background, and this Auerbach recounts. The first deep fissure in the Yishuv (as the Jewish community of Palestine was known) grew out of the 1933 murder of Labor leader Chaim Arlosoroff, as he strolled with his wife on a Tel Aviv beach. Arlosoroff had been harshly attacked by the rival Revisionists for making a “transfer agreement” with the Nazi government that brought money and Jews to Palestine, but at the cost of undermining a global anti-Nazi boycott. The Labor movement was convinced at the time (wrongly as subsequent investigations have concluded) that the Revisionists were responsible for his murder.
Hostility was fanned by divergent approaches between Labor and Revisionist factions on how to deal with the violence and terror accompanying the Arab revolt of 1936 and how to react to British betrayal of the Mandate, even as the need for a Jewish refuge from the Nazis became stark...by 1944, when it was clear the Allies would win, the Irgun, now commanded by Menachem Begin, returned to its policy of resisting British rule.

...Ben-Gurion would insist (as Auerbach notes, without a scintilla of evidence) that the Irgun planned to use the weapons for a military putsch. On the contrary, writes Auerbach, Begin was confident that “the arrival of desperately needed weapons and munitions would be recognized as an exemplary demonstration of patriotism. Here, after all, was a significant Irgun military contribution to the struggle for statehood–anything but an attempt to overthrow the government.”
In fact the only genuine disagreement concerned the distribution of arms. Ben-Gurion insisted all the arms should be turned over to him unconditionally. Begin wanted 20% of the arms to go to Irgun forces in Jerusalem. While “what ifs” can never be certainties, it is likely the Altalena’s arms would have made it possible to unite the city under Jewish sovereignty in 1948, greatly strengthening Israel’s negotiating position in the years ahead.

...Nonetheless, ugly episode though it was, what was most important was that the Altalena did not serve as prelude to more fratricidal strife...in the wake of the Yom Kippur War of 1973, there began a new growth of sinat hinam, this time a groundless hatred by secular Israelis directed against religious Jews, especially the religious nationalists who settled outside the ceasefire lines of 1949. Auerbach’s subject is the Altalena so he does not go into the same detail on the growth of this new manifestation...

...In 1975, then Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, speaking to young people at seminary Efal, declared: “There is no more dangerous organization in this country than Gush Emunim.” (There were multiple ironies here. Efal was a project of the Hameuchad movement which had been dedicated to settlement throughout the land of Israel. And it was Rabin, as a young officer in the Palmach, who had been in charge of the destruction of the Altalena.) Less than a year later the famous writer A.B. Yehoshua sent a letter to Haaretz: “One should encourage them [the people of Gush Emunim] to settle more and more beyond the Green Line. Thus, when the hoped-for peace comes, and we shall be freed of the territories, we shall also be freed from them.”...

...“The Altalena episode, and the killing of Jews by Jews that accompanied it, remains a lingering self-inflicted wound from Israel’s heroic struggle for independence. If wisely used as historical memory, the Altalena might serve Israelis as a reminder of the ominous possibility that civil war could destroy Jewish national sovereignty. If not, Altalena memories may finally–and disastrously–be erased by an even more devastating tragedy.”

Begin Mobilized On Behalf of A Palestinian State

2011-05-26T02:12:00.000-07:00

By Begin's logic, the Palestinians should have a state

Those rejecting a future independent Palestinian state as an Iranian proxy must have missed the history lesson of the establishment of a strikingly similar small country not far away.

By Ron Ben-Tovim

In "The Revolt," his seminal depiction of the Jewish resistance against British rule in Palestine, Irgun chief and future Prime Minister Menachem Begin often returns to his interrogation at the hands of the Soviets. These references apparently are intended to counter a contemporary communist argument raised during these interrogations, that the Zionist movement was a hoax, a "puppet show," meant to divert attention from the Jews' revolutionary role in Europe and turn them into a tool for British imperialism in the Middle East.

"This talk of a State conceals the true purpose of Zionism - which is to divert the Jewish youth from the ranks of the revolution in Europe and put them at the disposal of British imperialism in the Middle East. This is the kernel of Zionism. All the rest is artificial shell, deliberately made to deceive."

Begin, of course, repeatedly balks at these claims, referencing centuries of Jewish craving to return to their historical homeland and flee from the kind of persecution and massacre made manifest at that time by the camps and furnaces of Europe.

Later, Begin repeatedly cites the deep chasm running between British imperialist objectives – for which, he said, they were more than willing to sacrifice the Jews – and the very real, heartfelt Jewish desire for freedom from both persecution and foreign rule.

In one famous metaphor, Begin tells his Soviet interrogator that the need to establish a Jewish state was not a purely theoretical ambition, one motivated by either a revolutionary or a counter-revolutionary movement, but was like saving a family from a burning house. In other words, urgent and real.

Begin is asking his Soviet interrogator to disregard for a moment the political powers at play, undoubtedly necessary for the creation of Israel, and look the hopes and dreams of real people: People that care for their children, that cry out against injustice, that find life hard, if not sometimes impossible, when lived under the specter of constant foreign occupation, exile, and persecution.

Real people that crave real self-determination.

Yet as convincing as Begin's arguments were, the tendency (typified here by the Soviets) to subjugate human needs with purely geopolitical considerations have far from disappeared from the Middle East. Indeed, they have become the official line of the State of Israel.

Objections to the creation of an independent, viable Palestinian state often run the gamut of the kind of conspiracy theories realized by Begin's interrogator, opinions made strikingly evident since peace talks with the Palestinian Authority lost momentum (if indeed such momentum ever existed) late last year.

"A Palestinian state would function as an Iranian proxy," one version of this argument goes. In another: "A Palestinian state would in effect act as a place holder, allowing weapons and terrorist groups to flow uninterrupted, putting larger cities such as Tel Aviv in range of rocket fire and closing crucial buffer zones protecting central Israel from bombing attacks."

These arguments have been instrumental in the creation of several hardened positions, such as those lamenting the "indefensible" 1967 borders, a demilitarized Palestine, or "the need to retain an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley" (the latter two ostensibly to prevent the flow of weapons into the newly formed Palestine), and so on. But most importantly, they have served to delegitimize the entire Palestinian quest for self-determination.

The actual argument, similar to the Communist claim, is that the Palestinian desire for a state is not genuine, that the Palestinians do not truly seek self-determination, and, in some cases, might not even mind Israeli occupation that much. And let's not forget those who insist the Palestinian population is now "better off." (Whatever that might mean).

The Palestinians, they say, seek a stronghold - one erected by faceless Arabs. And once completed, one which could be filled with the kind of faceless Arabs that seek Israel's destruction, if not the annihilation of the entire Jewish people.

The beauty of Begin's nuanced commentary on the criticism of Zionism, what I would term his turn toward the human, seems completely lost on proponents of the aforementioned positions. The consequence of this blindness to a facet of nationhood so close to our own is - as the unshakable leader of the dream of an Israel on both sides of the Jordan River must have understood - tantamount to a loss of humanity. It is a faceless doctrine that crushes individual lives.

What proponents of such anti-human stances also apparently fail to see is that while it is possible that certain political powers have nefarious intentions regarding a Palestinian state, it is nevertheless true that the establishment of Israel may not have been endorsed solely by those with the Jews' best interests in mind. In fact, Western imperialism, expansionism, trade, religion and, perhaps above all, racism, played a significant part in the establishment of the State of Israel.
The dangers of foreign influence, whether Iranian or other, are of course real. They are, however, as real to us as the fear of Western imperialism and exploitation was real to every other country in our region over Israel's creation.

To understand that, finally, is to let go of the fears of an Iranian outpost. Not because those fears are unfounded, but because they are not what should determine how Israel treats its neighbors. To mistrust those who, in good times and bad, live alongside Israel and share its fate is to perpetuate those nefarious motivations for Israel's foundation, to prefer blind dogma over the real and the human.

This is something Begin understood, and his nearsighted followers of today do not. We must live with those who share our fate, not rely on a culture that while instrumental in establishing Israel, should have been discarded immediately after. And that is why the former prime minister remains the only Israeli leader to sign a peace deal that actually had substance, both in terms of Israel's integration in the region and its security.

Begin's vision should help us understand that as long as we refuse to come to terms with both our own desires and those of the people around us and among us, we shall never be fully here. That to be fully here is to sever the umbilical cord of dogma and start - as Begin himself did in 1979 - to live with our neighbors, whether they are truly the proxies of the Islamic Republic of Iran or not.

Tom Segev of Haaretz on the New Begin Center Map of Jerusalem

2011-05-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

In the footsteps of terror

Menachem Begin regularly rejected any comparison between the terrorist acts carried out by members of the Irgun (pre-state underground militia) and the actions of Palestinian terrorists; he claimed that in contrast to the Arabs, the Irgun - his organization - spared civilians' lives. Begin was even more angered when Irgun members were called "dissenters" and cast out from the pantheon of Israeli heroism. After he became prime minister, he frequently took the trouble to correct the historical narrative, and after his death, the Menachem Begin Heritage Center was founded, which operates by force of a special law, at the state's expense.

The center has just put out a map for travelers. The Begin Center takes pride in the terrorist acts that Irgun and Lehi (another pre-state militia) members carried out; the map it published leads travelers along a route of those attacks in Jerusalem.

It is a large and eye-opening map, lavishly printed on glossy paper. There are a total of 165 flag markers on it, the vast majority of them denoting terror attacks perpetrated by members of Irgun and Lehi, and a minority marking acts by members of the Haganah and Palmach. Contrary to Begin's claims, the map enumerates a long series of outright terror attacks, including bombings of places where civilians tended to congregate, such as buses, cafes, markets, a cinema, a post office and the like. The terror attacks are termed "acts of retaliation."

The chronology of terror attacks that accompanies the map strengthens the thesis that no less than they were intended to hurt the Arabs and the British, the actions of the various organizations were designed to bolster their standing, in anticipation of the struggle over the governing of the state about to be established, and it's hard not to get the impression from the map that this competition continues to this day.

As expected, the map shows that the Irgun did much more for the country than the Haganah. The number of Arabs the Irgun killed is almost quadruple the number of Arabs the Haganah killed (according to the map a total of around 250. In actuality there were more ). Some 60 British were also eliminated, nearly all of them by the Irgun and Lehi. The Haganah mainly ran interference: According to the map, one in every four actions it carried out was aimed at hurting the Irgun, by abducting its members and disrupting its activities. There is no mention of the Haganah's efforts to defend the Jewish Quarter, or of the Hish, the secretive field corps of the Haganah, or of the convoys that brought supplies to the besieged city, or of the Convoy of 35 ("Lamed Heh" ), or of other actions. On Mount Scopus a traveler relying on the map will find a marker for "the Haganah's failed attempt to conquer Augusta Victoria." The truly significant event that occurred nearby is not referenced on the map at all: the attack on the doctors' convoy in April 1948, in which 78 people, mostly personnel from Hadassah Hospital and the Hebrew University, were killed. One may speculate as to why this incident has no place in Begin's heritage. Perhaps it is because the convoy was traveling under the Haganah's protection; perhaps because Irgun and Lehi members did not rush to its defense; and perhaps because the attack came just a few days after the conquest of Deir Yassin by Irgun and Lehi members.

The Deir Yassin affair is described on the map at length; as expected, the text portrays the conquest of the village as a military operation in every way, and does not mention the death of more than 110 Palestinians, and states: "About a third of the Irgun's and Lehi's fighting force was hurt by the gunfire and sustained many dead and wounded." The map does not note the numbers: 35 wounded and five dead.

Our response will be forthcoming.

^

On The Altalena

2011-05-17T22:38:00.000-07:00

Prof. Jerry Auerbach conducted research at the Begin Center Library and Archives for his forthcoming book on the Altalena arms ship of June 1948. Here is his recent article from The Jewish Press:

Remember The Altalena
By: Jerold S. Auerbach

Why should anyone remember a notorious pariah ship from Israel's war for independence? If for no other reason (and there are many), because it is likely to resurface from the depths of memory should Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, if and when they ever begin, focus on Jewish settlements.

The prospect of expelling thousands of Jews from the biblical homeland of the Jewish people will surely widen, perhaps violently and irreparably, the deep chasm that already separates secular from religious Israelis. Such a dangerously polarizing conflict has not roiled Israel for more than sixty years. When it did, in 1948, it brought the fledgling Jewish state to the precipice of civil war.

During its first weeks of independence, Israel confronted a military invasion from five Arab nations that were determined to annihilate it. The new state was already battered from months of Palestinian Arab violence within its porously unstable borders, climaxing with the fall of the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem. Israel was desperate for an infusion of weapons and fighters to prevent its annihilation.

Enter the Altalena, with more than nine hundred Holocaust survivors, war refugees and fighters, and tons of desperately needed military supplies. It sailed for Israel from Port-du-Bouc in southern France on June 11, the day when a month-long United Nations ceasefire began. Inspired, funded, and provisioned by loyalists of Menachem Begin's Irgun, it would join the roster of ill-fated ships that had exemplified the Zionist struggle to rescue Jews from annihilation and return them to their homeland.

If the Exodus - popularized in the romantic novel by Leon Uris that became an iconic Hollywood movie - is still revered as the valiant ship, the Altalena instantly became the reviled pariah ship. It arrived with the permission of the Israeli government - meaning Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion - at Kfar Vitkin, north of Netanya, on June 21. While weapons were unloaded on the beach, fighters were taken to a nearby immigrant camp to prepare for induction into the army.

But Ben-Gurion, fearing a right-wing insurrection, ordered the beach surrounded. Altalena passenger Dov Shilansky encountered an Israeli soldier in a command car. "I spoke to him in Hebrew," he recalled. "It was my first speech in Israel." Shilansky (who, forty years later, became Speaker of the Knesset) told him: "We've just arrived. We survived the Holocaust. We've come here to fight by your side. The homeland is in danger. We will join the army."

The soldier instructed him to go no farther. Shilansky replied: "We have no other way. I won't go back to Dachau. If we can't come to Israel, we'll go back to the sea." The soldier replied: "I don't care. Go back to the sea."

Later that afternoon, Begin - disregarding a ten-minute ultimatum to surrender all weapons - spoke to his assembled fighters. Suddenly, Israeli soldiers raked the beach with machine-gun bullets. Yaacov Meridor, Begin's second in command, ordered: "Don't shoot back." An Irgun fighter realized: "I couldn't shoot. My brother was on the other side."

Another newcomer was uncomprehending: "Instead of welcoming us they were killing and wounding many of our men whose only purpose was to help." Six Irgun men died in the fighting.

The Altalena sailed south, running aground off the Tel Aviv shore. After a battle erupted on the beach, Ben-Gurion ordered the Israel Defense Forces to destroy it. Some IDF soldiers refused to obey.

An officer protested: "I'm here to fight the enemy. I won't fight another Jew." He instructed the soldiers in his squad: "Do what your conscience tells you." (He became one of eight soldiers to be court-martialed for their disobedience that day.)

An Irgun fighter remembered: "If Begin had told us to fight we would have, but he did not want war between brothers and we accepted his leadership." Irgun fighters obeyed his command not to return fire.

Ben-Gurion was convinced - without a shred of supporting evidence (then or since) - that the Irgun was launching a putsch to overthrow his government. Late that afternoon, he ordered cannons to open fire on the ship. Hilary Dilesky, a volunteer from South Africa who had arrived in Israel only two months earlier, commanded the battery that was chosen to fire the first shot. Receiving his orders, he recalled, "I suddenly was struck with a heavy, deep feeling that I didn't want to shoot."

Dilesky approached his corps commander, telling him - in English, for he could not yet speak Hebrew: "I hadn't come to Israel to fight Jews." The commander yelled back that his job was to obey orders. It was, Dilesky recalled, "a fateful moment" when he realized that "following orders was the right thing to do." But "my heart was broken when we began firing," he confessed nearly fifty years later. "This has been a burden all my life," he recalled, "and still is."

With the Altalena ablaze from a direct hit, and the explosion of its munitions imminent, Irgun leaders (including Begin) and members of the crew jumped overboard, filling lifeboats and swimming ashore. An astonished American crew member observed that "continuous small arms fire from shore ... was directed at everyone in the water."

A 17-year-old Haganah soldier on the beach never forgot that "there were people on our side who waited until they saw heads above water, and then they fired at them."

A Palmach soldier recalled, "Firing on each other: it seemed illogical, unbelievable." He confessed: "I had many doubts, when I pointed the gun at the approaching boat filled with Jews." But he overcame them. "You tell yourself, you are guarding Israeli democracy. And with this belief, you shoot."

Another Palmach soldier was stunned by what he saw: "Before my eyes was waged a war between brothers. Jews are shooting Jews - in order to kill!"

Ben-Gurion enthusiastically blessed the "holy cannon" that destroyed the Altalena. He denied as false rumors the eyewitness reports from soldiers and journalists at the site of the Tel Aviv battle that Israeli soldiers on the beach had fired on desperate swimmers. That day, ten more Irgun men were killed. In the months that followed, eighteen Altalena fighters died for their country during the War of Independence.

* * * * *

The Altalena marked a tragic climax to fifteen years of bitter acrimony between Zionists on the left and right that had plagued the Yishuv during the years of British Mandatory rule. To some, it was a sorrowful reminder of the groundless hatred (sinat chinam) that was said to have plunged Jews into their devastating civil war in 1st century Jerusalem.

By now, however, most Israelis have long since repressed any memory of the Altalena, while few Jews outside of Israel have even heard of it.

But within the past decade, members of the Israeli left, taking Ben-Gurion's order to sink the Altalena as a model for the proper treatment of political opponents, proposed it as the solution to Yasir Arafat's internal conflict with Hamas.

The Arafat-Altalena analogy quickly caught on as a teachable moment. A Palestinian Authority official told the Jerusalem Post that in confronting Hamas and Islamic Jihad, "we have to act like Ben-Gurion in 1948."

Not long after proposals for an Arafat-style Altalena had receded, a far more volatile analogy erupted. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's decision to remove 9,000 Jewish settlers from Gaza provoked wrenching and acrimonious debate over the future of Jewish settlements. The Israeli press, which enthusiastically supported the Gaza expulsion, vigorously defended Ben-Gurion's action in 1948 as a model to emulate.

To exercise its "sovereign duty," Yaron London wrote in Yediot Aharonot, Israel must once again use its "muscles" against those who violently opposed its decisions.

Moshe Negbi, legal commentator for the Israel Broadcasting Authority, complained (in Haaretz) that "Ben-Gurion's successors have demonstrated total limpness in imposing law and order on extremists.... It is this limpness that has brought down upon us the malignancy of the Jewish settlements" and their "fanatics."

On the political left, Ben-Gurion remained the inspirational leader who certainly could not be accused of "limpness."

The barrage of encouragement for an Altalena reprise roused 91-year-old Shmuel Katz, who had been a member of the Irgun high command at the time, and then a founder of the Herut party and Member of the Knesset.

These "pundits," Katz wrote in the Jerusalem Post, were "conjuring up the Altalena myth of a revolt that was never planned and never took place, a fiction woven by an unscrupulous politician at the cost of a score of innocent young lives and the loss of a valuable ship and an invaluable store of arms."

He claimed: "The memory of the Altalena is being manipulated for political purposes to facilitate the expulsion of the Jews from Gush Katif [Gaza]."

That same year, during the bitter Knesset debate over the expulsion of Orthodox settlers from the outpost of Yitzhar, Prime Minister Sharon was accused of wanting "a second Altalena" so that he, too, could "fire the 'holy cannon.' "

He was warned by settler groups: "You will not get a second Altalena from us. You will not get a civil war from us, because we - the citizens whom you wish to go to war against - will not fight against our brothers."

As national debate over settlements became increasingly acrimonious, some Israelis urged soldiers to refuse to obey orders for the forced evacuation of settlers. They cited the precedent of Palmach soldiers who had disobeyed orders to fire on the Altalena: "Refuse to obey the transfer order against your brothers, just as ... soldiers refused to shoot at their brothers in Ben-Gurion's day."

Recalling the tragic war between brothers in 1948, 82-year-old Yosef Nachmias, then a company commander on board the Altalena, recounted the refusal of his own brother, a Palmach fighter, to shoot at the ship because he knew that his sibling was on board. For Nachmias, killing brothers was not merely a metaphor.

During a military ceremony at the Western Wall in October 2009, two religious soldiers displayed a sign protesting settler expulsions. They served time in jail for their misbehavior; one of them was discharged from the army after refusing to express regret for his protest. Then, when Israeli security forces destroyed two Jewish homes in the settlement of Har Bracha, two religious soldiers displayed a banner from the roof of their military base opposing the expulsion of its residents. Sentenced to thirty days in military jail, they were demoted in rank and dismissed from command and combat duties.

Amid this simmering political and religious confrontation, Altalena parallels proliferated. Writing in Haaretz, Hebrew University political scientist Shlomo Avineri accused settlement defenders of attempting to undermine the "historic achievement of Zionism," the creation of "a single binding [national] authority" for the Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion's decision to attack the Altalena, he suggested, may have displayed "ruthless determination," but it assured to the Israel Defense Forces "a monopoly on the legitimate use of force." The pain and distress of settlement supporters was understandable, Avneri conceded, but "in the Jewish state only one legitimate body is authorized to enforce political decisions."

When six infantry soldiers refused to participate in demolitions in the settlement outpost of Negohot, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu - sounding very much like Ben-Gurion in 1948 - asserted ominously: "If you support this refusal, it will bring about the collapse of the state." Israeli leaders, claimed Defense Minister Ehud Barak, were confronting "the same fateful decision that David Ben-Gurion faced in the first days of the state."
* * * * *

Should Israel and the Palestinian Authority ever reach agreement on the terms of peace between peoples who have engaged in bitter conflict over the same land for nearly a century, it will likely require the forcible removal of many tens of thousands of Jewish settlers from their homes.

Yet few Israelis who argue passionately for this outcome are likely to realize that soldiers who refuse to force settlers from their homes would be responding precisely as did the Haganah and Palmach soldiers in 1948 who refused to shoot their Irgun "brothers."

Such a confrontation would expose the core of Israel's still unresolved national identity struggle: Jewish state, secular state, democratic Jewish state? It has the ominous potential to reduce the Altalena to historical insignificance by comparison.

At a crucial moment in 1948, David Ben-Gurion faced the urgent necessity to protect the fledgling Jewish state and defend its sovereignty. But did he decide wisely when he issued the command to shoot Jews on the Altalena who wanted only to fight for the independence of Israel?

In his unrelenting determination to concentrate authority in his hands, did Ben-Gurion undermine, rather than strengthen, legitimacy in the new nation? Did he set a dangerous precedent for battles between brothers that has haunted Israel ever since and may yet explode into a far more volatile internecine conflagration than anything that happened in 1948?

The confrontation over the Altalena, and the tragic killing of Jews by Jews that accompanied it, remains a lingering, self-inflicted, wound from Israel's desperate fight for independence. It cuts to the very core of the enduring Israeli struggle over political legitimacy - then, now, and in the foreseeable future.

It also braids themes that are woven into the biblical narrative. In the beginning, after Creation went awry, Noah's ark - the first ship to be mentioned in a Jewish text - transported a righteous man and his family from impending disaster to safety.

There is also the recurrent tragedy of sibling rivalry, even fratricide. Cain and Abel. Isaac and Ishmael. Jacob and Esau. Joseph and his brothers. And in 1st century Jerusalem, Zealots ruthlessly slaughtered their fellow Jews in a civil war that shattered national sovereignty for two thousand years.

Whether secular and religious Jews can live together in Israel without the groundless hatredthat retains the potential to destroy their nation from within remains an open question. If not, the Altalena may finally - but disastrously - be supplanted by a far more devastating Jewish tragedy.

Jerold S. Auerbach is the author of "Brothers at War: Israel and the Tragedy of the Altalena," from which this essay is adapted, to be published later this month by Quid Pro Books.

Copyright ©2011 JewishPress.com.

An Academic Conference on Ethiopian Jewry

2011-05-15T05:41:00.000-07:00

But the Begin Center was not invited:-

Symposium: Ethiopia and Ethiopians, Yesterday to Today – 1991 to 2011

A two-day symposium ' Ethiopia and Ethiopians, Yesterday to Today – 1991 to 2011: Regime Change and Operation Solomon' will take place this week on Tuesday May 17 and Wednesday, May 18 at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The first day, which will be conducted in English, will include sessions on 'Ethiopia: Economics and ethnicity', 'Aspects of Ethiopian culture at home and abroad', 'Islam in Ethiopia and Israeli-Ethiopia Relations', 'How Operation Solomon came to life' delivered by former Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia and coordinator of Operation Solomon, Uri Lubrani, 'The Zionism of Ethiopian Jewry and its influence on our sense of mission' and 'Aliyah through Addis Ababa: Legal but complex'. The first day will be held in Room 502, Maiersdorf Faculty Club, Mount Scopus campus.

The second day, which will be conducted in Hebrew, will include sessions on 'A comparative look at Jewish Ethiopian Aliyah', 'Health in the Israeli Ethiopian community', 'Learning Amharic in Israel', 'Containment and exclusion of Ethiopians in the education system', and 'Media and its accessibility in the Ethiopian Community'. The second day will take place n the Abba Eban Conference Hall, Truman Institute, Mount Scopus campus.

Speakers over the two days include Ethiopian ambassador to Israel, H.E. Helaw Yosef; former Israeli ambassador to Ethiopia and coordinator of Operation Solomon, Uri Lubrani; Deputy Director General, Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs and head of the Mashav Center for International Cooperation, Haim Divon; head Jewish Agency representative, Israeli Consul during Operation Solomon, Micha Feldman; Member of Knesset Shlomo Molla; executive director, Association for Ethiopian Microfinance Institutions, Ethiopia, Wolday Amha; former editor, Yediot Negat, Batia Makover; CEO, Israeli-Ethiopian Television Channel, Fasil Legassa; and national coordinator for the promotion of Ethiopian public health, Isaac Seffefe.

The symposium is being run under the auspices of the Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace and the Avraham Harman Institute for Contemporary Jewry.

New Historical Map Published

2011-05-14T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Begin Center announces the publication of a map of Jerusalem that marks places where Underground actions took place. The map contains 170 actions and operations conducted by the Hagana, Betar, Brit HaBiryonim, Irgun. Palmah and Lechi in Jerusalem between 1920-1948.

These actions include defense measures and reprisals against Arabs, attacks again st institutions and officials of the British Mandatory authority as well as against each other.

Each location is marked by number and has a correlating guide with a concise description of the event. This will allow history enthusiasts to go on self-guided tours through Jerusalem exploring the history of the Underground movements. At this time, the map is only available in Hebrew, but we hope to publish it in the future in English and possibly other languages. The map will be available for sale soon. The research of the historical material was done by Yisrael Medad, director of Information Resources at the Center.

The cover:

A section of the map:

When Begin Was Ill

2011-05-14T22:07:00.000-07:00

Yossi Sarid, leftist head of Meretz, writes following Ezriel Nevo's recollections in Maariv (here, in Hebrew) from when Menachem Begin became ill during the period of the Fist Lebanon War:-

In those days, there was no prime minister in Israel and the defense minister did what he felt was right. For the first time, one of the close aides has admitted his guilt: “[Begin aide Yehiel] Kadishai, [former cabinet minister Yaakov] Meridor and I spoke a great deal about it.

It is impossible to act as if there is a prime minister when there is not,” said the former military aide, Azriel Nevo, in an interview with Ben Caspit this week. “We should have been put on trial for hiding [Menachem] Begin’s condition and the public didn’t know that.”

Perhaps I have already recounted how one time another Begin aide came to me, locked the door, and confessed that Begin was ill and not functioning, Arik [Sharon] was going berserk, and the state was in danger. You are the only one who can break the conspiracy of silence, he said.

I did not. Were I to have raised the curtain then the other players would have acted dumb and recited: What do you mean sick and depressed? That’s just a wicked fabrication by someone opposed to the prime minister and his war.

nd the feelings of the public would have gone out to the tortured Begin, who was being forced to wage two wars at once, an internal and an external one. Who would have believed me?

This is the first time that a central insider has described the conspiracy. How Sharon was “purposely exhausting and killing Begin,” how “ministers and officers were dead scared of him,” how “information was hidden from the prime minister and the government,” and how the border of the war was being stealthily expanded. Even 29 years later, I was filled with dread and fury when I read this.

In those days of the shadow of death, I was a member of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. We too were taken for a ride. Arik did not lie, he merely spun misleading cobwebs around us. He left the dirty work of deception to people who were less sophisticated than he was, like Raful [former chief of staff Rafael Eitan], who lied without being aware of it. Nevo also testified to this.

Begin's Opinion on Jerusalem Recalled

2011-05-09T00:32:00.000-07:00

The Supreme Court and the Jerusalem Debate
By SETH LIPSKY

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin used to warn against deciding the political status of Jerusalem in the U.S. Congress. But what about at the Supreme Court? It's a pressing question because America's highest court might soon rule on whether, under American law, Jerusalem is or is not part of Israel.

The court has just agreed to hear a case in which Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is being sued by a 9-year-old American citizen named Menachem Binyamin Zivotofsky. M.B.Z., as the court refers to the youth, was born in Jerusalem and wants the American Embassy in Tel Aviv to issue him a certificate of birth abroad stating that he was born in Israel.

What makes the case so explosive is not only that it involves the question of Jerusalem, but that it also pits the executive branch against the Congress. In agreeing to hear the case, the court specifically ordered the lawyers to focus on whether the law "impermissibly infringes the President's power to recognize foreign sovereigns." The case also involves presidential signing statements. Can a president, in signing a piece of legislation, announce that he doesn't agree with part of it and doesn't intend to enforce the law?

Mrs. Clinton's lawyers argue that this case raises a political question of the kind that the Supreme Court has steered away from in the past. But it's not a dispute between, say, Democrats and Republicans. It involves a law passed in 2002, when the Senate was controlled by the Democrats and the House by the Republicans.

The relevant law is the part of the Foreign Relations Authorization Act of 2002 that deals with "United States policy with respect to Jerusalem as the capital of Israel." The Supreme Court will adjudicate the provision stating that, for "purposes of the registration of birth, certification of nationality, or issuance of a passport of a United States citizen born in the city of Jerusalem, the Secretary [of State] shall, upon the request of the citizen or the citizen's legal guardian, record the place of birth as Israel."

The bill passed the Senate, of which Mrs. Clinton was then a member, by unanimous consent. In other words, she's now refusing to carry out a law she helped pass. But when President George W. Bush signed the law, he issued a signing statement suggesting that he didn't intend to enforce that part of the law. The measure, he said, "impermissibly interferes with the President's constitutional authority to conduct the Nation's foreign affairs and to supervise the unitary executive branch."

Mr. Bush also complained that "the purported direction" would, "if construed as mandatory rather than advisory, impermissibly interfere with the President's constitutional authority to formulate the position of the United States, speak for the Nation in international affairs, and determine the terms on which recognition is given to foreign states."

Mr. Bush was challenged by the infant Mr. Zivotofsky—via his parents—not long after he was born. In the fight over whether the Supreme Court would take the case, Mrs. Clinton echoed Mr. Bush's concerns, citing her department's view that "any unilateral action by the United States that would signal, symbolically or concretely, that it recognizes that Jerusalem is a city that is located within the sovereign territory of Israel would critically compromise the ability of the United States to work with Israelis, Palestinians and others in the region to further the peace process."

So far, lower courts have agreed with Mrs. Clinton that this matter is a "political question" and not justiciable. But the young Mr. Zivotofsky's lawyer, Nathan Lewin, was able to convince the Supreme Court to hear the case by arguing, in part, that this matter is no longer a "political question" precisely because Congress has already acted.

Given all the other foreign affairs and political disputes in which Congress does act—from foreign aid to the United Nations to the Senate's ratification of treaties—it's illogical to suggest that the terms for issuing certificates of birth abroad are beyond the reach of the elected legislature.

Mr. Lipsky, editor of the New York Sun, is the author of "The Citizen's Constitution: An Annotated Guide" (Basic Books, 2009).

Will We Find Out the Historical Truth?

2011-05-08T13:51:00.001-07:00

Well, here's a new development:

Thousands of documents removed from former British colonies were regarded as a “guilty secret” and hidden, according to a damning internal review by the Foreign Office. The files were discovered earlier this year in connection with a legal case brought by four elderly Kenyans...After The Times revealed last month that 1,500 Mau Mau files had been discovered, William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, announced that 8,800 files from dozens of former colonies had been located. He ordered a full investigation into why such potentially incriminating material had not been released under the Public Records Act, and pledged to open it to the public. “It is my intention to release every part of every paper of interest subject only to legal exemptions,” Mr Hague said in a statement yesterday. The review was carried out by Anthony Cary, former British High Commissioner to Canada...

The “migrated archive” includes files secretly removed before independence from some 37 former colonies, including Cyprus, Aden, Palestine, Nigeria and Malaya because they “might embarrass HMG or other governments”. The files, covering 700 feet of shelving, are in Hanslope Park, the closed Foreign Office archive near Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire.

...A tantalising glimpse of the kind of secrets the archive’s documents might reveal is offered by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’s internal report...in 2007, staff recorded the presence of five boxes containing “files on the bombing of the King David Hotel” in Palestine. The attack occurred in 1946 when the hotel was the headquarters of both the British Military Command and Criminal Investigation Division.

On July 22, members of the right-wing Zionist paramilitary group Irgun, led by Menachem Begin, who went on to be Prime Minister of Israel twice, planted a bomb in the basement of the main building. Telephone warnings were not heeded and 91 people were killed and 46 wounded.

If one waits long enough, truth will out.

Photos of a Recent Visit of Yehiel Kadishai

2011-05-07T23:49:00.000-07:00

The Begin Center Archivesd are named in honor of Yehiel and Esther/Bambi Kadishai and Yehiel oftens visits.

Some photographs of a recent visit:

Begin and The Falkland Islands

2011-05-05T02:09:00.000-07:00

A new book has claimed that Menachem Begin's reason for authorizing a company to sell arms to Argentina had to do with a seemingly hatred of England and love for the hanged Dov Gruner.

Reported:-

New book claims late prime minister sent weapons to avenge death of Dov Gruner, who was hanged by British Mandatory Authorities in 1947..

...Begin agreed to cooperate against Britain fairly quickly, saying: "You've come to talk badly about the British. Is this going to be used to kill the English? Go ahead. Dov up there is going to be happy with the decision. Obviously, it must be all done perfectly."

Israel Lotersztain, a former salesman for Isrex Argentina who was present in the meeting, said: "He hated the British above anything else. Everyone had forgotten the British occupation, but not him."

While we are still researching the matter, we came across words spoken by Mr. Begin at a meeting of the Cabinet on June 5, 1982:

The United States is today supporting Mrs. Thatcher, who bases herself on Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, that is, the right of self-defense, 13,000 kilometers distance from England's shores and we cannot apply the right of self-defense against the bloodshedding when it happens on our doorstep? This is anarchy, an abandonment of principle. We shall not act?...

This was the meeting that authorized the commencement of Operation Peace Over the Galillee.

^

The Archaeological Garden at the Begin Center

2011-04-26T12:26:00.000-07:00

CITYsights: Buried treasure in Begin’s backyard

For the fifth episode of iTravelJerusalem’s CITYsights, we head westward into modern Jerusalem, to a surprising site located just to the west of the Old City, at Ketef Hinom, literally in the backyard of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center.
If in previous episodes we delved into the City of David to see what life was like inside First Temple-era Jerusalem, in this week’s video we take a look at a series of burial caves in the suburbs of the biblical city. These caves, which were excavated in the 1970s by archaeologist Gabriel Barkay, revealed a plethora of fascinating artifacts, including many fully intact earthenware jugs and jewelry.

However, the most important find was a pair of silver amulets with scrolls bearing biblical inscriptions, including the Priestly Blessing, which is recited in synagogues to this day. These tiny slips of parchment predate the Dead Sea Scrolls by some 700 years, making them the oldest biblical manuscripts yet uncovered.

Check out the video for the full story and stay tuned for more episodes of CITYsights.

Have the Camp David Accords Expired?

2011-04-25T22:51:00.000-07:00

Moussa: Camp David Accords have expired

The Camp David Accords signed between Egypt and Israel have expired, Arab League chief and potential Egyptian presidential candidate Amr Moussa has said.

According to an Egyptian news website, Masrawy, Moussa, who participated in the negotiations with Israel in 1978, gave these statements during a discussion with Egyptian youth sponsored by Masrawy.

The Camp David Accords have expired and they do not govern the situation now, he said.

"What governs the relationship between the two countries is the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002 and the Egyptian-Israeli treaty," he continued.

Saudi Arabia launched an Arab peace initiative in 2002 that called for the establishment of an internationally-recognized Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, the return of Palestinian refugees and Israel's withdrawal from the Golan Heights in exchange for Arab normalization with Israel.

Moussa was not clear about which treaty he referred to, but he most likely meant the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty signed on 26 March 1979 in Washington D.C., which is a development of the broader framework agreed upon in the Camp David Accords.

This peace treaty stipulates that each state recognize the other, that the extended war between Arabs and Israel should stop and that Israel withdraw its troops, machinery and settlers from the Sinai Peninsula.

Former President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin signed the Camp David Accords on 17 September 1978, 13 days after secret negotiations at the US presidential retreat in Maryland.

Egypt and Israel have since had what analysts describe as "cold peace."

And also this:

Poll: Over half of Egyptians want to cancel peace treaty with Israel

Only 36 percent of Egyptians are in favor of maintaining the treaty, according to U.S.-based polling company.

More than half of all Egyptians would like to see the 1979 peace treaty with Israel annulled, according to results of a poll conducted by the U.S.-based Pew Research Center released Monday.

According to the poll results, only 36 percent of Egyptians are in favor of maintaining the treaty, compared with 54 percent who would like to see it scrapped.

Egyptian leader Sadat raises a toast with U.S. President Carter and IsraeliPrime Minister Menachem Begin, March 26, 1979

The poll highlights the deep unpopularity of the three-decade-old treaty, which was scrupulously adhered to by former President Hosni Mubarak, who was ousted February 11.

The poll, based on interviews with 1,000 Egyptians around the country, was conducted between March 24 and April 7 as part of the Spring 2011 Pew Global. Attitudes survey that was conducted in 22 countries. The poll has a sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Opinions varied according to income, with 60 percent of lower income Egyptians supporting the treaty's cancellation while only 45 percent of the wealthier classes thinking it should be done away with.

Only 40 percent of Egyptians with a college education thought the treaty should be scrapped, as well.

Minister Vilnai Errs

2011-04-25T22:42:00.000-07:00

It was reported that

Homeland Security Minister Matan Vilna'i on Saturday called on Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to work towards the creation of a Palestinian state.

"The prime minister needs to behave like [former prime minister] Menachem Begin, who acted against the opinions of many in his party, and to [work towards] establishing a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel," Vilna'i said an event in Holon.

Even assuming Minister Vilnai's sentence structure and syntax are wrong and that Mr. Vilnai did not mean to assert that former Prime Minister Begin actually worked to establish a "Palestinian state", nevertheless it should be clear that Begin negated any political development that would establsih a "Palestinian state".

^

Book Review on New Book on the Herut Movement

2011-04-22T05:34:00.000-07:00

The Begin Center published a new book, in Hebrew, a collection of essays on the history of the Herut Movement.

Here is a review:

How the Likud Came to Be
By Elliot Jager

The party faithful who gathered in Tel Aviv on April 14 for a pre-Passover toast heard Benjamin Netanyahu announce that he would amplify Israel's security-and-peace principles at a joint session of the U.S. Congress next month. Surveying the crowd from the podium, the prime minister no doubt took comfort from a recent survey showing that 76 percent of Likud members opposed annexing all of Judea and Samaria. Yet he would also have known that 10,000 party recruits had been newly signed up by uncompromising settler leaders. How, then, to keep the Likud ("Union") together, and in the center of Israel's political mainstream?

In bridging the gap between ideological purism and political realism, the needs of security and the quest for peace, Netanyahu follows in the footsteps of the party's founder Menachem Begin. This much and more become clear in a new collection of essays on the evolution of Israel's Right, From the Altalena to the Present Day (Hebrew), edited by the political scientist Abraham Diskin.

Begin formed the Herut ("Freedom") party—the antecedent of Likud—on May 14, 1948, the day the state was declared. This in itself marked a victory of pragmatism over zeal. Historically, as Herzl Makov, chairman of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center, points out in the book's preface, competing underground factions—like, for instance, Begin's pre-state Irgun and David Ben-Gurion's Haganah—have gone on fighting each other long after the struggle for liberation is won. Yet even after the Haganah fired upon and sank the Irgun arms ship Altalena off Tel Aviv on June 6, 1948, Begin was determined that among Zionists, at least, there would be no civil war. From that day forward, he committed his movement to occupy the center-right position within Israel's parliamentary democracy.

From the first, the deck was stacked against him. Ben-Gurion's Mapai faction, a major element in the labor movement that dominated both the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency and the Histadrut workers federation, captured a 46-seat plurality in the first Knesset elections in January 1949; Herut won a total of 14 mandates. This radical imbalance remained essentially unchanged until 1977.

As for Ben-Gurion himself, not only did he rule out any political reconciliation between the Begin-led camp and his own Laborites; he pledged to ostracize Herut forever by keeping it out of any Labor-led coalition government. So deep did his personal animosity run that in Knesset debates he would refer to Begin only as "the man sitting next to Dr. Yohanan Bader."

Paradoxically, this campaign to blacklist him only further spurred Begin's resolve to keep Herut in the political mainstream. In doing so, he had to overcome the opposition of the Revisionist party, which claimed to be the true standard-bearer of the Zionist Right and the most faithful to the ideology of the Right's founding father and presiding genius, Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940). Ultimately, though, the Revisionists, like the even smaller Freedom Fighters for Israel (Lehi), would be absorbed into Herut.

The quarantine into which Ben-Gurion had placed Begin started to disintegrate as early as 1954 as a result of the political fallout from a botched Israeli intelligence operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. A decade later, with the Laborites bickering among themselves and Ben-Gurion himself out of power, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol permitted Jabotinsky's remains to be brought to Israel and interred on Mount Herzl, not far from the gravesite of Herzl himself.

In 1965, Begin orchestrated an alignment with the centrist Liberal party to form Gahal ("Herut-Liberal Bloc"), which garnered 26 mandates in that year's elections. It was the entry of Gahal into the Labor-led national-unity government just before the outbreak of the 1967 Six-Day war that permanently broke Begin free from his political isolation. As a cabinet minister without portfolio, he rejoiced over the IDF's liberation of Judea and Samaria.

In due course, however, Begin quit the government, now headed by Golda Meir, to protest its initial acceptance of a 1969 American plan that would have brought the Soviet Union into peace negotiations on the side of the Arabs. Four years later, after the devastating 1973 Yom Kippur war, with Labor's authority increasingly called into question, Begin joined forces with Ariel Sharon to mastermind the birth of the Likud out of Gahal and several smaller factions. His political savvy was vindicated in 1977 with the Likud's smashing electoral victory, overturning Labor's decades-long monopoly on power.

To accomplish this feat, Begin had pulled together settlers, security hawks, predominantly Ashkenazi proponents of a free-market economy, and working-class Sephardim tethered to the welfare state. He reinforced this amalgamation in 1981 by solidifying Orthodox backing for a second term.

The glue that held it all together was the electorate's overriding distrust of Arab intentions. But that did not translate into a corresponding rigidity on Begin's part. The prime minister, writes his former cabinet secretary Arye Naor in From the Altalena to the Present Day, was determined to stay in step with Israel's (shifting) political center, even if that required jettisoning down-the-line ideological purism. His maneuvering did not come without costs. In 1979, his former comrade-in-arms Shmuel Katz left the government over Begin's willingness to trade Sinai land in return for peace with Egypt; Geulah Cohen, another old colleague, broke away to help form the Tehiya party.

A seeming anomaly in this pattern was Begin's 1981 decision to have the Knesset suddenly annex the Golan Heights. But this may have been less the result of hard-line principle than of pique at the Reagan administration, then in the process of selling advanced military weapons to Saudi Arabia while threatening to embargo military aid to Israel over its destruction of the Iraqi nuclear reactor.

Begin resigned the premiership in the aftermath of the botched 1982 campaign in Lebanon, but the story of his years in power is the story of all subsequent Likud prime ministers. Under Yitzhak Shamir, Likud demonstrated far greater ideological steadfastness than under Begin, but even Shamir could not avoid being dragged by U.S. pressure to the 1991 Madrid talks, aimed at achieving a permanent resolution of the Palestinian issue. In the mid-90s, in his own first administration, Netanyahu not only failed to renounce Israel's commitments to the fatally flawed 1993 Oslo Accords but carried out a partial pullback from the West Bank city of Hebron. In 2003, in the midst of the second intifada, Ariel Sharon campaigned as a "Leader for Peace" and accepted the U.S.-backed Roadmap that foresaw the eventual establishment of a Palestinian state. In 2005, when the party rank-and-file repeatedly voted against Sharon's plan to disengage from Gaza unilaterally, he defected to form Kadima.

Netanyahu has now been back in power for two years, once again juggling the demands of his right-wing coalition against those of Israel's fickle international allies. If From the Altalena to the Present Day is any guide, he will continue to navigate the Likud toward the political center—where most voters are—by espousing strength through security along with pliability on the diplomatic front. Like his predecessors, he will strive to bridge the gap between purism and the pragmatic needs of the moment.

This moment, our moment, promises to be as difficult and as hazardous as any faced by any prime minister of Israel since the state's inception.