Menachem Begin – The Absent Leader

Strategic Research and Policy Center, National Defense College, IDF, 2007

Winner of “Menachem Begin Heritage Center Research Prize.”

Menachem Begin – The Absent Leader is the first complete biography of Menachem Begin, the man who always thought and spoke in terms of “we” rather than “I,” the man who thought of himself as a simple Jew and escorted the Jewish People on its path from the Holocaust to rebirth as a sovereign nation.

This book reminds us that in the Second Lebanon War we learned nothing from the first. In both we cheered for battle without having a clear picture of our final goal and what exactly we wished to achieve.

Most arrestingly, the extensive evidence examined here contradicts the standard view that it was the Lebanon War and its attendent difficulties that brought on Begin’s depression. Instead, for the first time, an opposite truth emerges: it was the depression, that already held Begin in its grip, which led to the escalation of the Lebanon War.