Menachem Begin, the sixth prime minister of Israel, who set the course for Israel's hard-line policies toward the Arabs but who won the Nobel Peace prize for making peace with Egypt, died early today at the age of 78.
The government announced on Israel Radio that Mr. Begin died in Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, where he had been treated following a heart attack last Tuesday. The government planned to convene a memorial meeting to determine funeral arrangements.
Mr. Begin had lived in virtual seclusion since Sept. 15, 1983, when he abruptly resigned the premiership after six years in office. His election in 1977 brought a stunning end to the center-left labor movement's dominance of Israeli politics since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948.
And though he had been away from the political scene for almost a decade, his militant ideology nurtured by his experiences in the Holocaust still prevails in the ruling Likud bloc that he formed. As prime minister, Mr. Begin led Israel to its first peace treaty with an Arab state, Egypt, and into its fifth major war by invading Lebanon in June 1982, a conflict that created political and social divisions within Israel that have never completely healed.
He left the political stage in despair, physically and spiritually exhausted, offering as his only public explanation, "I can't go on." Friends said that this despair had begun in 1982, with the death of his wife and lifelong companion, Aliza. But the manifest hopelessness of Israel's adventure in Lebanon and the toll of Israelis who died in that war had an equal impact.
As prime minister, Mr. Begin invoked the promises of the Old Testament to claim for Israel the right to the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and he displayed messianic fervor in trying to impose his view of a "Land of Israel" living securely from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Mr. Begin's last years in isolation were a striking contrast to his youth as an active Zionist in his native Poland, his years as leader of an underground guerrilla army in Palestine, his leadership of the right-wing opposition in Israel's Parliament and, finally, as premier.
He was the first leader of his country to represent Zionism's "revisionist" branch, a movement that from its inception in Eastern Europe in the 1920s was more militant than the mainstream Zionism advanced by David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister, and his successors.
As founder of the Herut (Freedom) Party, Mr. Begin was known for decades as Israel's chief hawk and seemed destined to remain in the political wilderness. He surprised critics when, as leader of the newly organized Likud bloc, he won election as prime minister in 1977. As premier, his aggressive support for the establishment of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza Strip fulfilled the hopes of his supporters and the fears of his opponents.
His willingness to negotiate a peace treaty with President Anwar el Sadat of Egypt confounded supporters and foes alike. The Camp David peace accords negotiated in 1978 and the formal treaty concluded in 1979 won Mr. Begin and Mr. Sadat the Nobel Peace Prize and led to Israel giving back to Egypt the Sinai peninsula, territory Israel had won during the Six-Day War of 1967.
But Mr. Begin created the ideological and political framework necessary for Israel to hold on indefinitely to the West Bank. That land was Judea and Samaria in his lexicon. For Mr. Begin, the West Bank, home for almost a million Palestinians, was the land bequeathed by God to Abraham and his descendants and a rightful part of the modern state of Israel.
"If anyone wants to take Judea and Samaria from us," Mr. Begin declared in 1982, "we will say Judea and Samaria belong to the Jewish people to the end of time."
His personality was full of distinct contradictions. His obsessions were the best and worst manifestations of an older European order into which he was born, in Brest-Litovsk, Poland, in 1913. He observed brutal examples of anti-Semitism and the helplessness of Europe's Jews. His chief ambition became to rescue his people from the tragedy of the Nazi Holocaust that wiped out most of his family and to build for them an invincible homeland.
"The Holocaust is the prime mover of all that we have done in our generation," he once reflected. "For instance, our fight for liberation is a result of the recognition that we, in our time, must create conditions so that never again will the Jew be defenseless. Our scourge was the defenselessness of the Jewish people."
Mr. Begin's political experiences began at an early age. He was captivated by the militant Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky, who split with the World Zionist Movement in 1935 over its failure to declare the creation of a Jewish state as its immediate aim. By the time Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Mr. Begin was head of Betar, a militant Jewish youth group that trained under a rigid military discipline.
Mr. Begin's lack of interest in creature comforts -- he lived for years with his wife in the same three-room apartment in Tel Aviv -- appears to have been the product of the year he spent in the Soviet gulag from 1940 to 1941.
His education as a lawyer at the University of Warsaw made him an indefatigable stickler for legal detail that would serve him well at the negotiating table.
He could be a vitriolic speaker -- so much so that in 1952 he was suspended from Israel's parliament for three weeks for his outbursts -- but he revered parliamentary institutions and in his public behavior outside of the political arena could be as courtly as a 19th-century prince.
Mr. Begin came to what was British-Mandate Palestine in 1943 at the age of 30. He took over the Jewish underground Irgun Zvei Leumi (National Military Organization) and masterminded some of the bloodiest events in the history of that movement. British authorities labeled him a terrorist and offered a 10,000-pound reward for his head.
Of all the Irgun-led attacks, the most notorious occurred in 1948 at an Arab village known as Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem. In an action that was decried throughout the Arab world, and by many Jews, Irgun forces killed more than 250 Arabs, most of them unarmed, more than 100 of them women and children.
Mr. Begin never apologized for the incident. He contended that civilian inhabitants of the village had been warned to leave and that the Irgun suffered four killed and 40 wounded in the fighting.
He also masterminded the bombing of the King David Hotel in 1947, when it was the headquarters for the British mandate forces in Jerusalem. Scores of people were killed in the bombing, including Britons, Arabs and some Jews.
In his years in the underground, Mr. Begin never personally fired a shot and was never captured by the British, whom he eluded through a variety of disguises and hideouts.
After creation of the Jewish state, in May 1948, Mr. Begin quickly emerged into the political limelight, forming the Herut Party, which he led virtually unchallenged for the rest of his career.
For 29 years he was the leader of the opposition, with the exception ofthe period 1967 to 1970, when he joined a government of national unity. He resigned from that government over its acceptance of U.N. resolution 242 calling for Israeli withdrawal for the territories captured in the Six-Day War.
After four years as prime minister with a thin majority in Parliament, Mr. Begin led his party to a second victory at the polls in 1981.
One of his primary obsessions was the expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories -- a legacy that lives on today as a thorn in the side of Israel's relations with the United States.
Mr. Begin was willing to pursue his objectives without much concern for the sentiments of his allies or his enemies.
In 1980, the Knesset, Israel's parliament, passed a law declaring all of Jerusalem, including the Arab eastern part of the city, to be the unified capital of Israel -- infuriating the United States and the Arab world.
A year later, Israel effectively annexed the Golan Heights captured from Syria in the Six-Day War.
The same year, Mr. Begin authorized the bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor complex.
In July 1991, in a rare public statement, Begin pointed to the Persian Gulf war to answer the heavy international criticism he faced for that decision.
"In the days when the Scuds [missiles] fell on our heads, many understood . . . that they were not right . . . and we were right," Mr. Begin said.
The Palestine Liberation Organization eventually became his chief target. On June 6, 1982, Israel invaded south Lebanon, then under Syrian and PLO control, with the initially stated objective of driving the PLO and their guns out of range of Jewish communities in Northern Israel. But the invasion went much further, until Israeli soldiers besieged Beirut with the aim of driving the PLO out of all of Lebanon.
In that event, Mr. Begin led Israel into the first war that elicited protests from Israelis, and the first judged by many of his own countrymen as unnecessary.
The most drastic blow to Israel's image occurred in September 1982, when Israeli commanders, including then-Defense Minister Ariel Sharon, agreed to let the the Christian Phalangist militia enter Sabra and Shatilla, two Palestinian refugee camps in Beirut.
What followed was a massacre in which hundreds of Palestinian civilians, including many women and children, were slaughtered by the Phalangists with the knowledge of some Israelis.
An internal investigation eventually compelled Mr. Sharon to resign, although he now serves as housing minister responsible for the settlement program in the current government of Yitzhak Shamir.
In November 1982, Mr. Begin's wife, Aliza, died while he was on a visit to the United States. He emerged after the period of mourning as a man clearly broken in spirit. Cabinet colleagues said he suddenly became a very old man, dispirited and listless and confined to a wheelchair because of a hip operation.