Begin and the Sinai Bedouin

Found here:

When Menachem Begin returned the Sinai peninsula to Egypt in 1982, Israel thought it was getting not only peace but, in exchange, a buffer zone that would protect it from a hitherto intractable foe. The northern coastal plain connecting Africa to Asia was too scrubby to sustain much life. Its largest town and provincial capital was called El Arish, Arabic for palm huts. Arid inhospitable mountains dominated the center and south. And the Camp David Accords that Egypt and Israel signed in 1978 required Egypt to keep its soldiers and tanks away from the Sinai; the eastern half was turned into a demilitarized zone monitored by a US-dominated multinational force.

All that is changing as new forces pile in. Egypt has a new ruling party that sees Israel more as a threat than an ally...

... rapid population growth has turned Sinai’s indigenous population of Bedouin people into a power to contend with, particularly in the corner of North Sinai where Egypt, Israel, and Gaza meet.

The Bedouin people are descendants of the nomads who crossed the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries. They consider themselves Egypt’s only real Arabs, and view other Egyptians as Arabized Africans. Their numbers have grown eightfold in forty years; today, several of their twenty tribes are tens of thousands strong. And though many are moving to new sprawling cities like El Arish, the tribes have established separate suburbs and have yet to settle down...

...Ostracized by the Mubarak regime, which viewed them as a potential fifth column and denied them a share of the tourism industry on Sinai’s coast, Sinai’s Bedouin tapped other sources of finance and support. To the north, they found a ready partner in Hamas, which was under siege by Israel and anxious to find alternative supplies of food, fuel, and sometimes arms. Together, Sinai’s Bedouin and Hamas dug—sometimes with Egyptian government collusion—hundreds of tunnels under their common border. Their cross-border clan networks, intimate knowledge of the terrain—“I can tell a man’s tribe from his footprint,” a Bedu told me—and contempt for twenty-first-century controls make the Bedouin expert traffickers. Fancy villas, with roofs fashioned as pagodas and garages for Lexuses, in North Sinai’s once dirt-poor villages testify to the extent of their success...

Incidentally, Caroline Glick emphasized that development at the February 2011book launch of Peace in the Making:

Over the past 20 years or so, the power of Egypt's central authority in its hinterlands has weakened. The strength of the Bedouin has grown. And over the past decade or so, the Bedouin of Sinai, like the Bedouin from Saudi Arabia to Jordan to Israel have become aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and its al Qaida and Hamas spinoffs.

The Bedouin attacks on Egyptian police and border guard installations in al Arish and Suez over the past three weeks are an indication that the fear of a strong state, which was so central to Israel's thinking in during the peace process with Egypt, is no longer Israel's most urgent concern. Transnational jihadists in the Sinai are much more immediately threatening than the Egyptian military is. But the peace treaty - signed with a military dictator -- provides neither Israel nor Egypt with tools to deal with this threat.

AS ISRAEL moves into the uncharted territory of managing its relations with the post-Mubarak Egypt, it is imperative that our leaders understand the lessons of the past.

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Background to the Saison Period

From this article

The Haganah and SOE: Allies and EnemiesIrregular Warfare & Politics in Mandatory Palestine
Jacob A Stoil

Moshe Dayan, an officer during the Saison, explained the Haganah in 1944-45 was continuing to cooperate with the British in the fight against Nazi Germany. The Haganah was therefore anxious to stop the independent actions of the dissident paramilitary organizations such as the Irgun Zvai Le’ummi and the Lehi (Stern Group).’91 The Palestine Government employed the Haganah in this role as the Security Service found it extremely difficult to obtain information on the Irgun Zvai Le’ummi (IZL) and LEHI and the Palestine Police ‘singly failed to penetrate these two organizations.’92 The Haganah provided some of its best forces to the efforts of the Saison, including those who formerly made up some of the special units trained by the SOE.93 Some veterans of the special units began working in the Saison soon after the dissolution of their units.94 Some began as bodyguards for senior Haganah figures while others put their skills in infiltration, covert operations, and attacking high value targets directly to use. The primary skills employed by SOE- trained personnel during the Saison were those required for following and ambushing a high value target and then disappearing again into the general population.95 In these activities, the SOE-trained personnel were most certainly successful. Polish intelligence verified that much of the lull in militant activities during the Saison was due to the Haganah ‘seizing (it is said with the tacit approval of British authorities) the more active members of the terrorist group, and banishing them for a convenient period of time from the arena of political life.’96 It was not just the British and Poles who believed that the Haganah units were effective. According to former members of the IZL, the Haganah was effective and a greater threat than the British, primarily because of its ability to act covertly, swiftly and decisively. These were the very skills that SOE training had emphasized.97

Notes

91 Dayan, Moshe (1976) p. 57

92 Extract from Summary Middle East No. 2 by S.I.M.E. Cairo – 5.12.1941 In KV5/29, Extract from Mr. A.J. Kellar’s Report on his visit to the Mid-East in KV5/29
93 Interview with Avigdor Cohen

94 Interview with Hayim Miller

95 Interview with Hayim Miller 2, Interview with Avigdor Cohen

96 Report from Polish Security, Middle East, 17.4.45 In KV5/29

97 Interview with Eli Shitrit, Interview with Yehuda Lapidot  

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November 26, 1948 - Menachem Begin in New York's City Hall

From the Radio WNYC site:-

1948: Israeli Menachem Begin, leader of the Irgun, is honored by Mayor William O’Dwyer at City Hall. The Police Glee Club sings the Star Spangled Banner and Hatikva. Begin is greeted with a standing ovation. O’Dwyer jokes about Begin’s reputation with the police and the fact that the British have a price on his head. Begin thanks the United States for support. O’Dwyer also introduces a young man named Samuel Tamir, a survivor of several concentration camps and the commander of the Irgun’s Jerusalem troops. The program ends with the Police Glee Club singing Marching Along Together.

and from this book:

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But Is Herut There? Or Begin?

Excerpts from a book review of

Orit Rozin's The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel: A Challenge to Collectivism. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2011. xxi + 254 pp. 

by Adi Gordon, University of Cincinnati, October, 2012.

The book revisits Early Israeli Collectivism in the Age of Privatization.

The transition from Zionist Yishuv to a Jewish state, Rozin shows, was also a shift from voluntary collectivism (embodied by the halutz [the pioneer]) to centralized collectivism (“personified by David Ben Gurion,” p. xvi). This later type of collectivism, however, was collectivism from above, made possible by the establishment of the state and arguably rendered necessary by the immense challenges of mass immigration. Israel’s austerity program, for example, though intended to achieve concrete, practical economic goals rather than ideological ones, could be seen by the uncritical eye as a natural continuation of the Yishuv’s collectivist ethos, especially due to what Israelis initially made of it once it was put into practice: “According to the rhetoric of the political Left and part of the Right, austerity was a way not only of lowering the cost of living but also of constructing the collective identity based on the principle that the strong should sacrifice some of their pleasure to help the weak” (p. 6).

...this is probably the book’s main argument--the seminal moment of the early Israeli “individualization process” was in response to such paternalistic policies: a reaction to this type of state-centralized collectivism in Ben Gurion’s Israel, with its ostensible disregard for the individual Israeli citizen and his or her rights. Increasingly, both ordinary Israeli citizens and the political opposition spoke in defense of individual civil rights of Israelis. Rozin understands this trend as part of Israel’s embrace of Western liberal values (p. 197). Interestingly, however, she does not locate this transformation in the distinctive worldviews and political traditions of the newcomers, but rather she focuses on the changes in the veteran society. And even when examining veteran Israeli society Rozin does not look for these new trends primarily among the “bourgeois” and conservative opposition. Indeed, she stresses that “[t]he most important of these [trends], the weakening of voluntary collectivism and the strengthening of individualism, took place within the labor movement” (p. 194). Even though the book’s drama is clearly set in early statehood, I wish it made greater effort to locate the discourses of collectivism and of individual rights (and even the discourse of hygiene) also in Jewish history beyond 1950s Israel.

The Rise of the Individual in 1950s Israel is a work of a cultural, social, and to an extent, political history...[in] Part 2, “In the City Square,” explores the cracks in Israel’s collectivist ethos as further manifested in two election campaigns: the municipal elections of 1950 and the second general (Knesset) elections of 1951. Though Mapai’s hegemony was confirmed, these elections--with the remarkable success of the General Zionists, who almost tripled the numbers of seats in parliament and became Israel’s second-largest party--must be understood in the context the opposition’s “well-planned … campaign, which played off citizens’ anger, frustration, and resentment at the austerity regime” (p. 119). Indeed, in Ben Gurion’s age of Mamlachtiut (statism), the General Zionist platform stood out for its foremost commitment to individual civil rights (“We view individual freedom as a fundamental condition for the development and prosperity of nations” [p. 101]). The shift, then, was not only in voting patterns, but in generating “a discourse of rights” which transcended party lines, and as result “Mapai had to change in order to adjust to the harsh state of the economy, as well as to the demands of … the middle class” (p. 130). Rozin concludes that “In the face of the difficulties of daily life at the time [Israeli] citizens felt that they were not free to live their lives as they wished...” (p. 135).

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Begin on Meet the Press in ... 1948

Found, an exchange between Begin and Lawrence Spivak on Meet The Press from December 12, 1948.

Menachem Begin:

“You know, this partition of the country was just imposed on our people. As a matter of fact, when Mister Ben-Gurion, who is now Prime Minister in our country, was in the U.S. during the World War in America, and visited the famous Baltimore Hotel, [he] came out with the so-called “Baltimore Program” which went now into oblivion. And according to that program the whole of Western Palestine, through the Jordan (river), should be turned into a Jewish State. So as a matter of fact, then I would like to remind you, that when the Balfour Declaration was issued by the British, and when the amendment was approved by the League of Nations, Palestine was considered to be the territory of both sides of the Jordan. I would like even to remind you that the English had an argument with the French when the French would like to take TransJordan for their amendment of Syria and Lebanon. The English told that TransJordan is an integral part of the Jewish national home. So as a matter of fact, this partitioning of our country is an illegal act! And we are not going to recognize it. If our government will acquiesce in the partition of her country, we are certainly not going to fight it by arms . . .we are not going to fight any government of our people by force. We will fight only on the political field.”
 

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Herut/Likud Book Launch

BOOK AHEAD:

A book commemorating four decades of Likud-Herut party activity by the United Kingdom's Jewish community will be launched at a reception in Jerusalem on Wednesday, October 3. "Days of Action: Likud-Herut 1970-2010" was written by 77-year-old British immigrant and veteran Herut-Likud U.K. organizer and activist Joe Gellert. It is a 625-page compendium of correspondence, photographs and press clippings reconstructing the community's efforts on behalf of Soviet Jewry, and it also follows the events surrounding the visits of former Prime Minister Menachem Begin, according to a statement by the book's publisher, Tel-Hai Fund of Great Britain.

The two-hour midday reception, to be held at the Begin Heritage Center, will feature a number of Israeli dignitaries and guests from the United Kingdom, including Natan Sharansky, chairman of the Jewish Agency; Andrew Balcombe, former chairman of the Zionist Federation of Great Britain; MK and Minister Benny Begin; Danny Danon, MK and deputy Knesset speaker; Herzl Makov, director of the Menachem Begin Center; and Yisrael Medad, also of the Menachem Begin Center.

The event is by invitation only. People interested in attending may contact Mr. Gellert at gellertjb@bezeqint.net (Mordechai I. Twersky )

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Begin's Imprisonment Commemorated in Vilna

Dror Eydar's report on

Lithuanians honor late former Prime Minister Menachem Begin

The day the Vilna ghetto was destroyed on Sept. 23, 1943, was declared Holocaust Day in Lithuania...This year, a new aspect was added to the ceremony. Seventy-two years after his arrest in Sept. 1940 by the Soviet Union's secret police, who were then known as the NKVD, a plaque was installed on the wall of the Lukiskes Prison commemorating Begin, who was sent to the prison for the "crimes" of leading the Zionist movement Betar in Poland and being a member of a "national bourgeois anti-revolutionary Zionist revisionist" party.

A dedication appears on the plaque in Hebrew, English and Lithuanian, saying: "Menahem Begin, the sixth Prime Minister of Israel (1977-1983), Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, Litvak [Lithuanian], in 1940-1941 imprisoned by the NKVD in the Lukiskes Prison, where he was deported to the Pechora Forced Labour camp in north Russia."

Begin's interrogation at the prison, which included conceptual arguments between Begin and his Jewish interrogator, and his ordeal at the Pechora work camp afterwards, to which he was sent for "re-education," were recounted in a book he wrote and titled "White Nights," which he published in 1953.

After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Begin's investigation file was disclosed and was found to corroborate the account he gave in his book. The book was published again in 1995 with the original investigation documents.

At a ceremony held at the outer wall of the prison in Vilna, Lithuanian Justice Minister Remigijus Simasius said Begin was sent to the prison at a time when the justice system fought against people who tried to uphold justice. It was mostly Jews who suffered at the hands of that regime, he said.

Emanuelis Zingeris, head of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the Lithuanian parliament and chairman of the Jewish-Lithuanian Committee, said the memory of Begin relates to the past Soviet rule in Lithuania and that it is important to deal with the country's Nazi past as well.

Representing Israel at the ceremony was Agriculture and Rural Development Minister Orit Noked and Ambassador Hagit Ben Yaakov.

Noked said that Begin inspired political prisoners throughout the world and that his legacy is a monument to liberalism, social justice and the struggle against tyranny and oppression. The minister thanked the Lithuanian government and pointed out the "excellent and courageous" relations between the two countries.

Herzl Makov, director of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, said Begin's story is part of the splendid and tragic past of Vilna's Jews and that the historical truth of that period must be the foundation of the countries' continuing good relations.

After the ceremony, the group made their way to the Ponary forest, where in the midst of the place where the massacre of Vilna's Jews occurred, another emotional ceremony was held in the presence of Lithuanian government leaders, Israeli diplomats and ambassadors from various countries.

...The ceremony ended with a song that became a partisan hymn during the war, which was sung...

Pictures from this Lithuanian report:

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