Menahem Begin's Struggle

Since his very arrival in Palestine, Menahem Begin was clearly a marked man. A Haganah intelligence operative who listened to one of his talks in the autumn of 1942 excoriated him as ‘a demagogue’.

Begin admired and emulated the post-1933 Jabotinsky who had dismissed the Revisionist Executive at the Katowice conference. This was the Jabotinsky he knew – not the ‘Revisionist’ Jabotinsky. The selective Jabotinsky was adopted as ‘the father of the Revolt’.

Significantly, in August 1944, when the Irgun was at a low ebb, having suffered numerous reverses, there was still a military parade of the Irgun to commemorate Jabotinsky's death. Begin had also declared the Revolt before the end of the war against Hitler. The Irgun was fighting the war against the British, who were fighting the Germans, who were deporting the Jews en masse from Budapest. In this sense, he was following Stern's path at the beginning of the war, but Begin was also discerning. He forbad an attempt to bomb the Iraqi pipeline and argued that it would harm Britain's war effort.

When the Revolt commenced, there was little public support and the Irgun's demands that the Yishuv declare a general strike and refuse to pay taxes fell on deaf ears. The sheet newspaper, Herut, periodically pasted on walls, was ignored. Perhaps more important, the official Revisionists – ostensibly unfurling the dead Jabotinsky's standard – were adamantly opposed. Both Ben-Gurion and Arieh Altman, the Revisionist leader, feared British military reprisals and a reversal of any political progress. In October 1943 Churchill indicated to Weizmann that partition was a potential solution and that the Zionists might even receive part of Jordan.

Begin, however, saw the Revolt as enhancing the political process in securing an eventual British withdrawal from Palestine. The Revisionists and the labour movement generally were more disposed towards achieving a diplomatic solution through negotiation – although military action was not ruled out. Military force, Ben-Gurion reasoned, should be mobilised against a future Arab threat, not expended on the British, whose control of the Empire was being challenged daily in the post-war world. Begin believed that the Arab world would accept minority status for their brethren in Palestine and even supported the idea of transfer to Iraq when it was momentarily mooted in 1944.