Menachem Begin

Menachem Begin (1913–1992) was a Polish-born Israeli politician who led the country from 1977 to 1983 and reshaped both its domestic politics and its regional posture. Before statehood he commanded the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist paramilitary organization active during the British Mandate; the group's 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel and 1948 actions at Deir Yassin remain points of historical controversy. After Israel's independence he founded the Herut party, later the anchor of the Likud bloc formed in 1973.

Begin's 1977 election victory ended nearly three decades of Labor-aligned governance, a shift Israelis call the mahapach ("upheaval"). His most consequential foreign-policy achievement was the Camp David Accords of September 1978, negotiated with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and brokered by U.S. President Jimmy Carter. Those accords produced the Egypt–Israel Peace Treaty signed in Washington on 26 March 1979, under which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula in exchange for diplomatic recognition. Begin and Sadat shared the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize.

Other defining decisions of his tenure include:

• The 1980 Jerusalem Law, declaring a "complete and united" Jerusalem the capital of Israel.
• The 1981 Israeli air strike on the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq, articulating what became known as the Begin Doctrine of preventive counter-proliferation.
• The 1981 Golan Heights Law, extending Israeli law to the territory captured from Syria in 1967.
• The 1982 Lebanon War, launched to expel the PLO from southern Lebanon, which became deeply controversial after the Sabra and Shatila massacre.

Begin resigned in 1983, citing exhaustion and personal grief following his wife Aliza's death and mounting Israeli casualties in Lebanon. He withdrew almost entirely from public life until his death in 1992. His legacy frames much of contemporary Israeli right-wing politics, particularly Likud's identity as both a nationalist and treaty-capable movement.