What follows is largely impressionistic, since most of the factual info is available from Wikipedia.

1. Ze'ev Jabotinsky, (1880-1940)

Native of Odessa, Ukraine. Immigrated to Palestine in WW1 after years of wandering in Europe and organizing defensive Jewish militia in Russia. Organized successful mule corps in support of the British war effort against Turkey in WW1, later returned to wandering and polemics. Avidly pro-British, but British did not allow him to return to Palestine after 1925 because of virulently anti-Arab essays.

Although Jabotinsky died 8 years before the formal creation of Israel, he was a participant in the political counsels of the Zionist and the Jewish community of Palestine. As such, he participated as a pariah: his movement was so violent in its rejection of any Palestinian rights of any kind, and openly threatened the Hashemite Kingdom of Transjordan (an important British regional ally, and one that the mainstream Zionists wanted to cultivate). However, Jabotinsky also called for a liberal bourgeois government and a market economy. This set him on a collision course with the Histadut (General Federation of Jewish Labor).

Allow me to digress a moment on the agenda of the Histadrut. Imagine for a moment that history had turned out differently; imagine that the French Mandate in Syria-Lebanon and the British Mandate in Palestine-Jordan-Iraq, instead of being divided further, were united (as were British and Italian Somaliland after 1964). We can imagine, therefore, a weak central government in, say, Damascus or Beirut. There is no Palestinian state. There is no Jewish state. There is no Maronite state in Lebanon. There is no Shi'a state. There are, however, strong city governments and perhaps even leagues of city governments, and there are associations of landowners (allied with regional religious leaders). This would have been a plausible thing to expect for anyone living in the years 1920-1936. True, there were two monarchies, but many of the contemporary African nations have at their core a hereditary ruler with honorific privileges; it might have been reasonable to expect the Hashemites to eventually become leaders of political movements rather than states, rather like the Buganda monarchy in Uganda, or the Asanti in Ghana. As long as they continued to govern states, they were highly vulnerable to professional militaries.

The unlikelihood of any Arab nation in Southwest Asia to "work" (given the demographics and complicated social identities of Arabs) made this scenario of an ephemeral territorial polity seem more plausible. In such a region, the bourgeois state would never form, and hence, neither would bourgeois capitalism. Lacking the institutions to defend massive individual accumulations of capital, an anarcho-communal society would have emerged instead. The Jewish labor organization, and Zionism itself, would be counsumated not with a sovereign state ruling over a majority-minority polity, but an association of kibbtzim and urban yeshiva. In the fullness of time, the Jewish community would be the industrial laborforce and socialist vanguard, while Arabs would be direct beneficiaries of peaceful development of Southwest Asia (and remain in full possession of their liberties). Unfortunately, in practice, Arabs were usually employed either as manual labor or excluded entirely from the kibbutzim economy, and there was little prospect of widespread industrialization in Palestine.

However, the dream persisted of a meta-state, lacking the familiar class structure implicit in state power. The Histadrut was a union that also sought to serve many of the social functions of contemporary socialist states. Finally, the Histadrut sought to reconstitute the Jewish community at all levels into a wholly cooperative, mutually beneficial and supportive relationship. This meant all decisions (including fairly personal ones) were to be made, for example, by committee. Needless to say, the great majority of Jews did not chose be part of this, but were compelled to reside in Palestine because of armed violence in Europe or Russia. Even those predisposed to radical or Communist thinking, were unlikely to appreciate having their personal family live thrown into the uproar of neighborly scrutiny and supervision. Moreover, the incentives of socialist management were a disaster. And finally, many powerful Arab organizations saw Zionism as just another scheme to pre-empt their hard-won freedom (from Ottoman rule) with European colonialism.

Indeed, the period 1920-1936 saw many campaigns and pogroms against the Jewish population in Palestine. During the 1920's the Jewish population actually declined; with the advent of fascist movements in Germany and Romania, however, and the adoption of new organizational methods, the Jewish population rebounded in the '30's. This culminated in the most determined battle against settlement ever seen, with a full-scale coordinated guerrilla war pitting fedayin against both the British authorities and Jewish settlements, and the Jewish Haganah (defense force).

All the while, the clash between the two rival notions of Zionism—mainstream vs. revisionist—seemed like a weird parody of the battle between Stalin and his exiled rival, Trotsky. Like Trotsky, Jabotinsky was exiled. Like the clash between rival visions of the socialist state, the two partisans were intensely acrimonious, to the point of Stalin (Ben-Gurion) accusing the loser Trotsky (Jabotinsky) of assassinating a high-ranking member of the ruling party (Kirov/Arlosoroff). In both cases, the "winner" rapidly adopted the policies of the "loser" as his own failed to achieve the desired results. Even before Trotsky/Jabotinsky was exiled, however, it was clear that the Soviet state apparatus was going to become an all-powerful state capitalist, and that Israel would in most respects immitate the development of Central European states created after WW1.

2. Menachim Begin, (1913-1992)

Native of Brest-Litovsk (then part of Russian Empire; later, part of Poland, Lithuania, and today, Belarus). Defected to Palestine in 1942 while deployed there with the [Allied, gov't-in-exile] Polish Army. After 1936, as I have mentioned above, the Zionist movement in Palestine was under full-scale war from the Palestinian Arab population (Great Uprising); it was also under attack from the British authorities, who feared Jewish refugees from European fascism would massively aggravate the tensions already out of control. In '39, Colonial Secretary Malcolm MacDonald submitted a "white paper" to Parliament (which passed it), declaring Palestine now fulfilled its functions as a "Jewish homeland" with the 450,000 Jewish residents already there, and immigration was hereafter to be limited to 75,000 over the next five years (i.e., 15,000 per year). The paper was, of course, intolerable to both Jews and Arabs. However, while the Haganah cooperated with the British war effort (against the Vichy French government in Syria), several organizations also organized the smuggling of refugees into Palestine.

One of the more extreme of these was Menachim Begin, whose Irgun Zvei Leumi (Wiki) represented a revisionist Zionist faction of the Haganah. The IZL acknowledged Jabotinsky as its moral authority, but the IZL really became active in '43 after Menachim Begin became its commander. The IZL rejected socialism (presumably because the mainstream Zionist emphasis on a socialized community clashed with religious orthodoxy), but also restrictions on the immigration of Jews into Palestine or attempts to placate the British authorities. After 1943 it attacked the British Armed forces in Palestine; a faction, the Lehi (Stern) faction (see below), went to far as to hang two British sergeants it had captured in reprisal for the British authorities hanging three "terrorists."

Begin's explicit war on the British authorities put it into direct conflict with the Haganah, which helped track down and arrest/deport IZL members. After the war, however, the IZL, the Lehi, and the Haganah restored cooperation against the British, culminating in the King David Hotel Bombing. According to my sources, Ben-Gurion ordered the bombing, and the British were warned in advance (this was later confirmed, despite British official denials). In effect, the tactics are strikingly similar on all sides to the behavior of traditional IRA activities. After the bombing, the Jewish Agency, et al., condemned the bombing (91 killed). Hereafter, there was a guerrilla war between the British and Arab Palestinians (on the one side) and the Unified Resistance (i.e., the Haganah, IZL, and Lehi).

This, then, was the climate which Menachim Begin helped to create and under which he operated. Begin was determined to fight the war as a total war, with a view to the complete defeat of all resistance, regardless of the cost. His group actually carried out the bombing of the KDH, and also the Deir Yassin massacre (i.e., the killing of 94 people in a captured Palestinian village).

The acrimony between the revisionist movement (now led by Begin) and Ben-Gurion was unabated. In June '48, fearing that Ben-Gurion's Mapai (Labor) would purge the IZL, Begin organized the shipment of weapons from Europe via a vessel known as the Altalena (a pseudonym of Jabotinsky). The Haganah leadership evidently was openly cooperating with the IZL to land the weapons in defiance of a UN weapons embargo, but Ben-Gurion then arranged to seize the weapons for the Haganah upon arrival. This was done in a rather clumsy way, with a shootout that killed 16 IZL men and 3 Haganah troops. Ironically, the Haganah commander in this operation was himself a member of the Lehi faction (i.e., more hardline than the IZL was), future PM Yitzhak Rabin.

Shortly afterwards, the UN recognized the State of Israel as the result of extensive arm-twisting; at the time, it was a popular idea with the USSR as well as US Democrats. Hostility towards Jews, then as now, was frequently confused with opposition to the Jewish state, and hence Israel's creation was widely regarded as an unalloyed victory for progressive forces. Arab opposition to the creation the Jewish state was usually presented in the form of a potentate, like King Farouk (the subtext being that the Arab leaders merely wanted to retain a monopoly on political authority in their shockingly backard dominions). Begin now entered political life as the leader of the Herut ("Freedom") Party, an extreme grouping that was considered beyond the pale politically until around 1965.

In 1965, Herut began a series of mergers with other parties on the right, culminating ('88) in its complete absorption into Likud.

Begin won power in '77 after a dozen years of reversing fortunes. At the age of 52, he was still in the political wilderness; at the age of 64, he was PM; the President of the USA was begging him to accept a peace plan with Egypt that reflected near-total victory from the Israeli's point of view: a separate peace, a shattering of Arab unity against the Zionist entity, at the cost of an uninhabitable region (the Sinai Peninsula). In 1981, he ordered the attack on the Osirak Nuclear Reactor (in Iraq), destroying what was beyond question an Iraqi nuclear weapons program. Later, in 1982, he approved a plan by Ariel Sharon to invade Lebanon (Operation Peace for Galilee), which Sharon used as a personal project to conquer the entire country. Hence, the huge military quagmire that destroyed international sympathy for Israel and wrecked many of its strategic advantages, was begun in large measure as the result of character defects of Begin. He remained defiant towards even US President Reagan, who seethed but caved into Begin's appeals to the most hawkish Usonian conservatives.

However, no Begin policy was more decisively destructive than open support for the scheme of settlements on Arab land. In 1967, Israel enjoyed widespread diplomatic recognition within borders won during the 1948-49 war; after '67, it occupied about 5,000 Km² (in addition to the virtually uninhabited Sinai), and IDF looked the other way as orthodox fanatics built illegal settlements. In '78, Begin began an official policy of building settlements in violation of international law; the object was to force the Palestinians to either capitulate or be compelled, at some future date, to cede still more land. This gambit failed, but like other similar approaches, it locked the Israeli state into perpetuation of still more settlements, tougher demands on the Palestinians, and gradual elimination of any possibility of demographic coexistence. Since the 1970's, while some 2 million Palestinians have emigrated from the Occupied Territories, world-beating population growth rates have threatened to overtake the Jewish population.

3. Yitzhaz Shamir, (1915-living)

Born in Różana, Poland (now in Belarus). Relocated to British Mandate in Palestine in 1935, joined Irgun [Zvei Leumi] (IZL). Later, when IZL split, he joined the hard-line, fascist Lehi (Stern) faction. While the Haganah was socialist, and saw the Jewish state as a sort of trade union-stiftung, the revisionist Zionists of the IZL say the Jewish state as a miniature Netherlands or Denmark; the Lehi (pronounced "lee-chee") identified the Jewish state as a totalitarian (literally; the word "totalitarian" was at one time a fantasy of imposing a "total vision" of reformed social order on a country by controlling EVERYTHING IN SIGHT). The Lehi was notorious for proposing, in the 1930's and 40's to collude with the 3rd Reich against the British in (a) forcing non-Zionist Jews—the vast majority—to relocate to Palestine, and (b) establish Jewish control over Arabs. The Lehi, while the most terrifying and irresponsible of the movements in Palestine (countered rather neatly by the similarly pro-Nazi Grand Mufti of Jerusalem), was also the most candid about the challenges facing actual Zionism. The Haganah, as it succumbed to reality, fought the IZL even while embracing its vision of an Israeli state. However, the perky College Republican idea espoused by Jabotinsky could not relocate 11 million European Jews, or even one million, to Palestine; it could not restructure and industrialize the Palestinian economy after a Jewish state was created, and it would not resolve the issue of mass unemployment among displaced Arabs. The Lehi acknowledged that the vision of a Jewish state in Palestine would eventually require fascism, if for no other reason, to mobilize an historically non-militarist Jewish yeshuv.

Shamir was hence an early adopter of Zionism as a totalitarian movement. As a fanatic, Shamir was a natural. Not only did his group actually contact the Nazis with a plan to collaborate with diplomatic rehabilitation, it assassinated Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish diplomat credited with saving the lives of 21,000 Jews from the Final Solution. Bernadotte's offense was to negotiate a ceasefire between the Haganah and the various Arab forces fighting the Zionists. This was two months after commanding a deadly and treacherous attack on the Altalena crew. In other words, Shamir was prepared to collaborate with the [socialist] Haganah against a rival splinter group, Begin's IZL, then murder a Swedish diplomat for successful negotiations with the Haganah! After the creation of Israel, Shamir was pardoned for his crimes and joined Mossad.

Shamir entered politics after his career in Mossad ended. He appears to have been pacified by the fait accompli of an Israeli parliamentary republic, and in office lacked the sort of icy haughtiness of Begin. Unlike Begin, Shamir seemed more circumspect about confronting major allies. Indeed, duirng his first term as PM, his most spectacular failure was failing to stop hyperinflation.

However, it was after entering a coalition government with Mapai [Labor-Shimon Peres], he was confronted with two challenges: one was the appearance of a prominent, Arab-hating fanatic named Meir Kahane, head of the frankly murderous Kach ["Thus," or "By Mass Murder of Arabs"]. Kahane, assassinated in 1990, is a singularly sordid thug about whom nothing good may be truthfully said. It is quite ironic that Shamir, whom I dare say is a psychopath, was challenged on his right by another, younger psychopath. His life history is extremely interesting; one of his organizations is outlawed by the FBI (for advocating murder and racist terrorism), while the other (the Jewish Defense League, or ADL) actively spreads terror threats against critics; and while both the Israeli and US governments list Kach as a terrorist organization, for which donating funds is a felony offense, both the FBI and Mossad have retained Kahane's services as an informant and agent-provacateur.

Shamir happened to have peace talks fall into his lap after his turn came to be PM; he was battling the US-based Kahane for control of the Likud, even when the Likud rank-and-file regarded Kach as utterly monstrous, and a disgrace to Israel (to say nothing of ordinary Israeli citizens). Shamir's response was to stall the negotiations, even as the Second Intifada (1987-1993; usually called the 1st) raged. The 1987 Intifada is now largely forgotten, probably because the al-Aqsa [2000] Intifada swiftly eclipsed it. It involved crude weapons, mostly rocks, but also molotov cocktails and booby traps. The IDF responded with snipers, shootings and beatings. Gradually, the IDF became more innured to routine applications of torture, while the Western media began to drift away from its heretofore uncritical coverage of Israel.

At the same time, attitudes in Israel shifted. On the one hand, the Likud's policies were widely seen as deadend; doomed to failure, provocation, and diplomatic isolation. At the same time, factions within Israeli society emerged that were increasingly open about calling for "transfer" (forcible removal of Palestinians) and the totalitarian transformation of the Jewish state. Likewise, the Palestinian movement became more bureaucratized and violent against Palestinians also. The mood of popular rage against the Israeli state made Palestinian Arabs accept a more invasive and violent PLO than before.

4. Ariel Sharon, (1928-living)

Born in Kfar Malal, Palestine [?]; parents were German-Polish and Russian, according to Wikipedia. Sharon's rise to power is in some respects the ugliest episode of all; as an IDF officer, he was personally involved in a disastrous military action (Mitla Incident). However, the worst came in 1982, when Sharon proposed to launch a military incursion into Lebanon in "hot pursuit" of the PLO . The PLO had relocated to Lebanon and had a major role in stimulating its civil war (Maronite fascists also played a role). In 1978, Israel had intervened to thwart a Maronite-Syrian peace deal, then left. In 1982, Sharon proposed a larger invasion that would destroy Syrian airpower and prevent the PLO from turning Lebanon into an armed camp. This invasion, as presented to the Cabinet, was to be limited in scope; Sharon, however, planned to conquer and occupy the entire country, and soon this became obvious.

Begin supported Sharon even though the latter deceived him about the objectives of Operation "Peace for Galilee." The invasion was a stupendous and shocking event, that jeopardized Israeli-US relations (According to Robert Fisk, the invasion and key operations in it were planned in Washington. As we shall see, this does not necessarily contradict what I just said). The conquest of Beirut was to turn into a bloodbath, of which the famed Sabra and Chatila massacres are just a part.

Sharon's political career was set back by the Kahan Commission Report, which held he was "personally responsible" and needed to be dismissed. However, Sharon faced no punishment and remained an important political force. He was the leader of perhaps the most destructive political movement in Israel's history, Gush Emunim, which called for mass settlement in the Occupied Territories. The Gush Emunim Movement paved the way to eternal desperate warfare for the whole of Israeli society, complete with vast cohorts of the population becoming consumed with ineffable hatred for both their Palestinian victims and their less convicted fellow Israelis. After his dismissal as Minister of Defense, Menachim Begin loyally (or fanatically) kept him on as "minister without portfolio," then minister for trade & industry and minister of construction.

This points to a growing and disturbing trend in contemporary Israel: the domination of the country's administration by the military. In order to be considered for high office, one has to be a high ranking military officer with a stellar record; that, or an orthodox rabbi. Since ministers are drawn from Knesset members, usually party leaders, the effect is to ensure that all parties must be led by either a military man with a suitably hawkish record, or else an orthodox rabbi. There are exceptions, but the country is increasingly martialized, and civilian administration has ceased to enjoy the honor it proverbially enjoys in the Jewish community. Another problem is, of course, that usually the only thing one knows about a politician is his/her stand on the Palestinians. Herut, for example, evolved out of neoliberal economic rhetoric, with Sharon, it has embraced a paternalistic economic policy, being led by the jingoistic nose.

I blame the protracted "wars" with almost entirely civilian adversaries. It's hard to believe that for almost 23 years Israel has been engaged in continuous warfare, almost never against regular armies. After destroying the Syrian Air Force in the Beqa'a Valley, the closest thing the IDF has encountered to a professional army is Hizbullah. Hizbullah, of course, came at its professionalism the hard way, through Lebanese Shi'a living under conditions of permanent war from infancy onward. Hizbullah's hit-and-run tactics, the only ones possible, have since faded into memory; now Hizbullah is a regular political party in the Lebanese Parliament, and the main foe are kids who combine "gangsta rappa" pop culture with al-Qaeda visions of the apocalyse. Psychologically, the adversary of Israel is an anomaly very seldom understood in Western history: an ideology of armed struggle with no conception of ultimate redemption, except through literal self-destruction.