Menachem Begin

Origins and early life

Menachem Begin was born in Brest-Litovsk, in the Russian Empire, on 16 August 1913, the youngest child of Zeev-Dov and Hassia Begin. His father was secretary of the town's Jewish community, he was named Menachem, comforting, because he was born on Shabbat Nachamu, and as a schoolboy he fought for his Jewish identity, refusing to sit exams on Saturdays even when punished. He took a law degree at Warsaw University in 1935 and rose through Betar, the Zionist youth movement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, to become its head in Poland in 1939.

Work and career

Arrested by the Soviet secret police in Vilna in September 1940 and sentenced to eight years in the camps of Pechora, he was freed in 1941 as a Polish citizen and reached Palestine in 1942 with the Polish army of General Anders, while his parents and his brother Herzl were murdered by the Germans. In December 1943 he took command of the Irgun, which fought British rule from the underground, and after Israel's founding in 1948 he created the Herut party and sat in the Knesset from its first election.

After eight elections in opposition he led the Likud to victory on 17 May 1977 and became the sixth Prime Minister of Israel; his first decision in office was to take in sixty-six Vietnamese refugees picked up by an Israeli ship. He welcomed Anwar Sadat to Israel in November 1977, negotiated with him and Jimmy Carter at Camp David from 5 to 17 September 1978, and signed the peace treaty between Israel and Egypt on the White House lawn on 26 March 1979.

Recognition

The 1978 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to him and to Sadat for jointly having negotiated peace between Egypt and Israel in 1978, and he gave the prize money to a scholarship fund named for his wife Aliza.

Later years

He resigned in 1983, the year after her death, and died in Tel Aviv on 9 March 1992; at his own wish he was given a simple Jewish funeral and buried beside her on the Mount of Olives.