By Amotz Asa-El

 

HAVING survived his ship’s bombardment and emerged bewildered from the Mediterranean into which he was thrown, Menachem Begin resolved to salvage moral victory from military defeat .

The consequent twisting of the confrontation’s events, from who provoked the Altalena War to who waged it, was discussed here last week. Yet Begin twisted another fact, concerning the size and significance of the cargo on the arms ship he led to Tel Aviv in June 1948.

Emerging that evening in the Irgun’s radio station, Begin delivered the famous address in which he ordered his men not to join a prospective civil war. While at it, he claimed that his crippled vessel had carried “10,000 aerial bombs.” Had those bombs joined the Independence War along with the cargo’s rifles and machineguns, “we might have been standing today on the Jodan, and maybe even beyond it,” claimed Begin.

In fact, that number was farfetched, and so was the strategic claim attached to it, a sequel to Begin’s earlier claim that “the ship of salvation” would “decide the fate of the war.” (Avi Shlion, Begin: 1913-1992, Am Oved 2007, pp. 127, 135).)

In fact, Begin’s cargo was but a fraction of what David Ben-Gurion had already secured half-a-year earlier, through an extensive arms deal with Czechoslovakia which included 50,000 rifles, 6,000 machineguns, and also 20 fighter planes. This was besides 14,000 submachineguns and mortars that the Hagana had obtained and manufactured before 1948.

Begin’s twisting of the facts came to mind this week, as Sara Netanyahu – whom this column has generally refrained from discussing – made an even more preposterous quip about one of her husband’s rivals, The Democrats’ Yair Golan.

 

“YOU claim you fought on October 7,” said Mrs. Netanyahu on Channel 14, referring to Golan, suggesting he did not fight. “Early in the morning,” she continued, “you were already there dressed and ready at a very early hour, while others, like the prime minister, didn’t know.” Asked whether there was treason that day, she didn’t say “God forbid,” or “let’s not get carried away,” or “are you out of your mind?” but “I don’t want to talk.”

Yet talk she did, and her insinuation was as transparent as it was nefarious, nauseating and flabbergasting. Yair Golan, according to this conspiracism, had advance information of the enemy’s invasion, and was part of it.

Golan is no political genius. He made some outrageous statements, seems clueless about his party’s domestic agenda, and also of its history as the engine of Zionist pioneering. That is why most voters don’t consider him a suitable candidate for prime minister. But this does not mean he is a villain, let alone a traitor. In fact, Golan is a major-league patriot.

In contrast to Mrs. Netanyahu’s hallucination, Yair Golan rushed to the western Negev once news of Hamas’s massacre broke out. There are testimonies of people he personally saved and of others who fought alongside him, like Oz Davidian of Moshav Patish, who attested that he and Golan jointly rescued people from the Nova Music Festival’s bloodbath.

No one can rob Golan of these heroic credentials. And so, the question arises: why did Sara Netanyahu utter the libel that Golan did not deserve, and the swing vote will not reward? And the answer is that she twisted the facts of 2023 for the same reason Menachem begin twisted the facts of 1948.

 

LIBELS are invented when the facts are impossible to refute, and their results are impossible to bear.

Begin could not justify his reckless refusal to unconditionally hand the Altalena’s arms to the sovereign Jewish state. He therefore tried to shift the blame from those who made the provocation to those who responded to it. Similarly, the lie that his unsolicited arms shipment could have changed the course of the war was meant to change the subject, from his reckless misjudgment, to the war’s results.

Now Sara Netanyahy and the rest of the October 7 conspiracists cannot explain Benjamin Netanyahu’s misjudgments en route to that catastrophe. That is why they, and the entire ruling party, twist the facts and invent libels.

Likud’s denialism did not start with Begin’s lies in 1948.

 

BEGIN’S mentor, Zeev Jabotinsky, made two disastrous moves that his followers would never admit were fateful mistakes. First, in 1923 he resigned from the Zionist Organization’s executive, thus leaving its leadership for others; and second, in 1935, he made his Revisionist Party secede from the Zionist Organization itself, in order to establish a competing outfit, the New Zionist Organization.

It was a separatist mindset that culminated in the creation of a separate militia that challenged the Jewish Agency and its military arm, the Hagana. Jabotinsky thus condemned himself and his followers to history’s margins, where they remained for 37 years after his death.

Admitting that their irrelevance was their leader’s fault was mentally impossible for his followers. He was infallible. Begin never admitted that his mentor’s legacy of going it alone was catastrophic to himself, to his followers, and to the Zionist cause.  Now that same spirit of “we can’t be wrong” and “it’s us or them” is governing the Netanyahu couple’s treatment of the past three years’ events.

That is why Sara Netanyahu, her husband, and the ruling party refuse to assume responsibility for what happened in Gaza: not his funding of Hamas, not his rejection of pleas to attack Hamas, and not his vote for the unilateral retreat from Gaza, an idea which was conceived and executed not by Yair Golan or any other Lefty, but by a government led by the Likud.

Repenting for any of this does not cross their minds. Like Begin before them, they will finger anyone but themselves. Yet Begin had a good excuse for his denialism and lies: his enemies had aimed a cannon at him, and fired. What’s your excuse, Sara?

Jerusalem Post 4 September  2026