Begin Says Jews Can’t Forgive Britain

Former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin today said Jews will always be bitter at Britain for barring millions of them from what he termed their fatherland.

Begin, 76 and now a recluse, wrote a letter to mark Thursday’s anniversary of the 1917 Balfour Declaration.

The document, drawn up by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour, declared British support for setting up a national homeland for the Jews in Palestine.

“The Balfour Declaration, no doubt, was a turning point in the history of the Jewish people. The document was published for different reasons but over the years the British distorted its contents,” Begin wrote.

Britain, which ruled Palestine until Israel’s creation in 1948, interpreted the declaration so restrictively that millions of Jews could not realize their dreams of settling there, Begin said. Many were trying to flee the Nazi Holocaust.

Begin, a fiery guerrilla fighter during the last years of the British mandate, wrote: “The past kindness of the British, which we shall remember and be grateful for, is that they published the Balfour Declaration of 1917.

“But we won’t overlook the bitterness that resulted for the Jewish people from the distortion of its contents in the days when millions of Jews cried out for the fulfillment of the promise, and they cried out in vain.

“To our sorrow, relations developed this way with Great Britain, and we have to remember the good in their original intentions as well as the harshness of the closure of the gates to our fatherland.”

Begin’s letter, to a Balfour Day symposium at Israel’s Haifa University, was made public by his personal secretary, Yehiel Kadishai.

Begin led the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi in anti-British guerrilla operations, including the bombing of Jerusalem’s King David Hotel, headquarters of the military command, which killed 80 people.