Israel Fighter, First and Last: Menachem Begin (1913-1992)

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The life of every man who fights in a just cause is a paradox. He makes war so that there should be peace. He sheds blood so that there should be no more bloodshed.

-- Menachem Begin, The Revolt, 1949

There was a touch of the mystical, the messianic, about him. In starched white shirt and dark suit, tie tightly knotted at his throat, spectacles ever in place, he looked like a stern schoolmaster who had spent so many hours in lonely thought that he moved with an evident lack of ease among other people. From his earliest boyhood in a Polish ghetto, he was propelled by a determination to help bring about the birth of a Jewish state. It became the dream that motivated his life, first as leader of a bloody campaign against the British and the Arabs, finally as Prime Minister of Israel.

No leader proved so paradoxical to his friends or so confounding to his critics as did Menachem Begin in his stewardship of that office. He came to power in 1977 after a campaign in which he advocated continued Israeli rule of captured Arab territories. Abrasive and seemingly uncompromising, he talked incessantly of Israel's claim to Judea and Samaria, that part of Israel along the West Bank of the Jordan River that was taken from Jordan in 1967, a territory now inhabited by 1 million Palestinians.

Yet after Egyptian President Anwar Sadat made his extraordinary decision to go to Jerusalem in 1977, Begin found it a gesture so bold and imaginative that he signed a peace treaty with Egypt. In exchange for normal relations, Israel pledged to return the Sinai peninsula to Egypt and to participate in negotiations to determine the final status of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. It was a daring gamble that would ensure both men a place in history and a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978. But by the time Begin died last week at the age of 78, the magic of that moment had long since faded.

Indomitable and often unpredictable, Begin put an unprecedented strain on relations with the U.S. Ronald Reagan was caught off guard by the 1981 bombing of an Iraqi nuclear reactor, and a year later by Israel's bloody invasion of Lebanon. Such actions served to underscore a fundamental duality in Begin's nature: the peacemaker was not a pacifist, and never abandoned his dream of a Greater Israel.

Begin's government pursued a policy of aggressive territorial expansion. More than three times as many Jewish settlements were established in the West Bank territories during his six years as Prime Minister as in the previous decade of Labor governments. In 1980 he presided over the annexation of the Arab sector of Jerusalem. In December 1981 he pushed through a bill effectively annexing Syria's Golan Heights.