Masada or Modi’in: Menachem Begin and His Attitude towards the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

Abstract

I argue that Menachem Begin’s view of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was ideologically motivated by sharp disapproval of Jewish existence in the Diaspora and the belief that the struggle waged by his prestate National Military Organization (Etzel) for Israel’s independence was the beginning of a new Jewish history. This ‘new’ history merged Jewish blood and the historical homeland into an invincible, unified entity that constituted the reemergence of Jewish independence (that ended in the first century BCE with the last of the Hasmonean rulers). Begin compared the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt to the fall of Masada (73 AD), asserting that the defense of Masada was immoral because it culminated in suicide. On the other hand, Modi’in (the city where the Hasmonean Revolt broke out in the second century BC), and which Begin equated with Etzel’s revolutionary activity, was the beginning of the relentless struggle to regain national freedom. When Begin perceived the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising as a symbolic event that expressed the meaninglessness of life in the Diaspora and as an event that terminated in mass suicide by the Jewish defenders, he concluded that the uprising in Poland should remain outside the narrative of Israel’s liberation. I contend that once Begin decided to exclude the Warsaw Ghetto Revolt from his political party’s (Herut) narrative, the Beitar organization that had fought in the uprising was doomed to historical oblivion.