Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin was a Polish-born Israeli politician who served as the 6th Prime Minister of Israel from 1977 to 1983, leading the right-wing Likud bloc to its first national-level victory in Israeli politics and signing the Camp David Accords with Egypt that earned him the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. He was born on August 16, 1913, in Brest-Litovsk, then in the Russian Empire and now in Belarus, the son of a Jewish community leader.

He earned a law degree from the University of Warsaw in 1935 and became a leader of Betar, the youth movement of Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Revisionist Zionism. After the German and Soviet invasions of Poland in 1939, he was arrested by the NKVD in Lithuania in 1940 and sentenced to eight years in a Soviet labor camp; he was released in 1941 under the Sikorski-Maisky agreement, joined the Polish Anders' Army, and reached British Mandatory Palestine in 1942. From 1943 to 1948 he commanded the Irgun underground organization, directing the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, an attack that killed 91 people and remains one of the most-debated actions of the pre-state Zionist underground.

He founded the Herut party in 1948 and led the parliamentary opposition for nearly three decades before forming Likud in 1973 and winning the May 1977 Israeli election in the political earthquake known as HaMahapakh ("the Upheaval"). His government signed the September 1978 Camp David Accords with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat under the mediation of U.S. President Jimmy Carter, leading to the March 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty and the joint 1978 Nobel Peace Prize for Begin and Sadat. His government also ordered the June 1981 Israeli airstrike on the Iraqi Osirak nuclear reactor and the June 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

He resigned the premiership in October 1983 amid grief over the Lebanon War and his wife Aliza's death, retiring into nine years of near-total seclusion in his Jerusalem apartment. He died on March 9, 1992, in Jerusalem, aged 78, and was buried on the Mount of Olives.

His name Menachem is from the Hebrew Menaḥēm, meaning "comforter" or "consoler" — a name given to the Messiah in some rabbinic traditions and borne by a 8th-century-BCE king of Israel. He carried it as one of the most-traditional Jewish-Polish given names of his generation and made it a marker of Revisionist-Zionist political identity.