Menachem Begin always viewed his years as the commander of the Irgun as the years that he achieved his greatest accomplishments. Those were the years leading up to the formation of the State of Israel. In those tumultuous years, millions of Jews were killed in Europe by the Nazis and their collaborators while the rest of the world displayed a deafening silence. Even after the Holocaust, hundreds of thousands of European Jews were poor refugees with nowhere to go.
There was a Land where the Jewish people should have been able to return to, but the Jewish State had not yet been formed. That would only happen in May 1948. It was still a disputed Land that was under the British Mandate that had begun at the end of World War I. It was not clear at all that there would be a Jewish State at all in the Land of Israel. The Arabs all over the Middle East were dead set against accepting any form of Jewish sovereignty. The British Empire was struggling to hold on to all of the vestiges of its fast-crumbling empire.
But most of all, the Jewish people simply did not have sufficient weapons, manpower, or fighting experience to turn back the inevitable – an all-out onslaught on the Jewish State whenever it would be declared. Despite support in the UN from the US and Russia, Israel did not receive weapons from either superpower. General Marshall, who was the leading force in foreign policy in the Truman administration at the time, rightfully assessed the situation of the Jewish people as hopeless against the myriads of enemies that surrounded her. He understood that only a miracle would allow for the State of Israel to last more than a few weeks.
In addition, most of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel were scared of the British who displayed a callous ruthlessness to the plight of the Jewish people during and after the Holocaust. The idea of fighting the British Empire seemed completely disconnected from reality. It was in this impossible situation that Menachem Begin declared war against the British Empire in order to achieve the goal of a Jewish State in the Land of Israel.
With no more than a few thousand brave young men and women who were willing to give their lives to create the State of Israel, they aimed to obsessively disrupt all aspects of the British Empire’s domination over the Land of Israel and lead to its downfall. This was to be done via violence that targeted the prestige of the British Empire. Irgun fighters who were placed on trial refused to accept the authority of the British courts. Any time an Irgun fighter was killed, the Irgun replied in kind by killing a British soldier. The small rag-tag group of Irgun fighters were labeled as “terrorists,” by the British. But they succeeded in bringing the British to their knees.
The State of Israel was formed due to the bravery of hundreds of thousands who fought to help create the State of Israel and defended the fledgling State against the attacking Arab countries and irregulars. But the most pivotal role of all may have been fulfilled by Menachem Begin who led the fight to chase the British Empire away and end the British Mandate period.