Memories of Begin

Patrick O'Donovan

He was not a hero to his own people and to the British he was perhaps the most hated man in the world. He was once refused admission to this kingdom and now he is coming as an honoured guest. It is right and sensible to do almost anything to maintain peace and induce sanity, but it is hard to see what Dr Owen can achieve in entertaining the Prime Minister of Israel except to confer a measure of respectability on the name of Menachem Begin. That this should happen is unimaginable to a person of my age and memories.

Now it is an established custom for the British rapidly to forgive their enemies. After the little troubles that used to attend the game of decolonisation — the results of which were invariably foregone conclusions — it was usual for the two teams to walk back together to the Commonwealth Pavilion with at least a pretence of friendliness.

Israel was no exception in this. We withdrew in good order. I can remember standing on the quayside at Haifa as the last British troops marched away to their ships. There was a slight smell of vomit from Where a PR major had thrown up, and our Consul General had the Union Jack folded under his arm like a superfluous jersey. A Regimental Sergeant Major I had known some few years before had stopped and said, 'Good God, Sir, what are you doing here?' And Israel and Britain settled down, not to a special relationship, but to a civilised one in which the Israelis after a period of vicious in-fighting in which the Palestine Police had earned a reputation more suitable to the gendarmerie of a banana republic — recognised some of the real benefits in law and conservation and military training that we had conferred.

Ben-Gurion was in Britain quickly accorded the rank of elder statesman and the many British journalists who stayed behind were treated courteously and helpfully. The only exception to all this was Menachem Begin. We hated him. BenGurion hated him. The Israeli Foreign Minister of the time, Moshe Shertok, told me that he was a 'pathological phenomenon'. I am trying to write this from my memories of 1948 rather than from later research.

The fact is that Menachem Begin led a private war within a war and it was singularly and terribly effective. His group was known as Irgun Zvai Leurni and it was ruthless. Begin was a Jew with a single-minded mission not only to create a Jewish state but to give it its biblical frontiers — which if you chose your period in history included not only the West Bank but also what is now the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. To this end nothing was permitted to stand in his way, no life mattered, no convention, no compromise, no armistice.

Until the State of Israel was proclaimed in a Tel Aviv art gallery, with a grand piano getting in the way, he worked under cover and the British never came near to arresting him. It must be said that British counterintelligence in these late colonial situations was spectacularly amateur and ineffective.

They were abysmal in Cyprus and their inability to lay hands on General Grivas was almost laughable. It cannot be said that their present performance in the Six Counties is brilliant. But Begin led a powerful little military organisation scot free. The official Zionist force was Haganah which kept a curious relationship with the British, not collaborating but keeping a tenuous relationship with them and all the time preparing to be the official armed forces of the new state whose coming was certain and whose frontiers-to-be were the only uncertainty.

There was also a smaller terrorist group called the Stern Gang whose chief achievement was probably the murder of the Swedish UN Commissioner, Count Bernadotte. But the achievements of 1ZL are still remembered and there must be countless middle-aged Britishers who hate this man's name for them.

The first of those was the taking and hanging of two British sergeants in an olive grove. This is the sort of thing that happens in civil war and I can still recall the incredulous rage of the British forces.

There were also a number of fairly indiscriminate explosions, but the most famous was the blowing up of the King David Hotel. It did not wholly destroy the building which was being used as an administrative centre, but it catised ninety-one deaths. Begin says he had given ample warning of the attack and that, anyway, the place was a military target. He had British officers whipped in retaliation for the treatment of his men. And he had three clear objectives, to get the British to retaliate and so make the Zionists more militant, to get the British out, and to clear the country as far as possible of Arabs.

The most famous act in this last piece of policy was the attack on the village of Deir Yassin in which 250, men, women and children, died. He said the place was an Arab military centre and the attack certainly had the effect of inducing panic and causing a massive and, in retrospect, an unnecessary exodus of Palestinian Arabs which perfectly served his purpose. Then there was the Altalena incident. I remember one evening in Tel Aviv being told in a sea front bar that there was a ship at sea behaving oddly. We went out onto the front and there in the dusk was a ship, without lights, driving steadily toward the shore until it grounded perhaps a hundred yards off a bathing beach in the most prominent part of all that town's sea coast.

It stayed silent all night. Early next morning, boys in swimming trunks swam out to it or went out in those pedalos which tourists use. I sat and watched it, dead opposite on a balcony of a hotel called the Kate Daan so deserted that even the bar had been left open. No one knew what to expect. It was an IZL ship loaded with arms and some trained men in Marseilles to give help to the IZL. The IZL by this time had been integrated into the Israeli army as units, not as individuals. They were all then fighting for their survival against the Arabs of whom the most effective were the British-trained Jordanians. But at that time there was an armistice, a sort of pause which was not in accord with Begin's plans. This massive reinforcement was a clear breach of the armistice.

We knew nothing of the negotiations going on between Begin and Ben-Gurion until the Israeli forces began to mortar the ship and the holiday atmosphere of aquatic boys turned into a horror. Eventually the ship caught fire and was evacuated. But the IZL force was manning the line at a key position facing the Arabs only a few miles away, near what was then called Lydda.

Many of them left the line and raced back to Tel Aviv. They were in ecstasy of grief and anger. Many of them had literally torn their uniforms in a ritual gesture of Jewish grief. They raced through the hotel, but were looking for Haganah men to kill, not mere foreigners. For twenty-four hours Israel was in a state close to civil war. I got beaten up in a perfunctory way on the way home by an IZL patrol.

Next day Begin spoke on the radio. I did not of course understand a word he said. But every radio in Tel Aviv was tuned to his voice which sounded menacing and ponderous and tragic in the nobility of Hebrew. The streets were utterly deserted. Everyone was listening and his voice seemed to fill the whole town. But Ben-Gurion won and Begin became an extremist figure of very little news value and his forces lost their separate identity.

That the Israelis should choose him as Prime Minister came as an astonishment to me. And I cannot quite understand why the strong distaste remains. After all, plenty of other men have beaten us in unfair fight. Indeed, Makarios became almost popular here.

No one shudders now at the memory of Michael Collins, who was probably the most successful anti-British urban guerrilla of all time. I even read in the Observer that Begin's manners are exquisite. Yet the vast sympathy for Israel that exists at least among the middle-aged in this country, a sympathy that in my case merges into love, does not extend to Menachem Begin.