ABSTRACT
The leader of the ultranationalist Likud Party, Menachem Begin led Israel to its first peace treaty with the Arab state of Egypt. Begin worked tirelessly for the Zionist youth group Betar, part of Vladimir Jabotinsky's Zionist Revisionists, becoming its Polish leader in 1938. Betar sought increased immigration to Palestine, declared illegal by the British authorities who administered Palestine for the League of Nations when the Ottoman Empire lost the territory after World War I. At the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Begin fled Poland to Lithuania. Arrested by the Soviets as a spy in 1940, then released in 1941, he enlisted in the Free Polish Army and was sent to Palestine in 1942. In 1948 Begin formed the right-wing Herut (Freedom) Party. He then spent two decades building it into a strong opposition party to Ben-Gurion's Labor Party. In 1982 Begin ordered the invasion of Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian Liberation Organization.
