Reply #109: Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin

[Jonathan50]

Were both leaders of terrorist organizations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_David_Hotel_bombing

The King David Hotel bombing (July 22, 1946) was a bombing attack against the British government of Palestine by members of Irgun — a militant Zionist organization.

Members of the Irgun, dressed as Arabs, set off a bomb in the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which had been the base for the British Secretariat, the military command and a branch of the Criminal Investigation Division (police). Ninety-one people were killed, most of them staff of the secretariat and the hotel: 28 British, 41 Arab, 17 Jewish, and 5 other. Around 45 people were injured.<1>

The attack was initially ordered by Menachem Begin, the head of the Irgun, who would later become Prime Minister of Israel. The attack was commanded by Yosef Avni and Yisrael Levi.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yitzhak_Shamir

In 1941 Shamir was imprisoned by British authorities. After Stern was killed by the British in 1942, Shamir escaped from the detention camp and became one of the three leaders of the group in 1943, reforming it as "Lehi". During his tenure, the Lehi was responsible for the 1944 assassination of Britain's minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne; an assassination attempt against Harold MacMichael, the High Commissioner of the Palestine in the same year (Kushner, 2002, p. 348), and the 1948 assassination of the United Nations representative in the Middle East, Count Folke Bernadotte who was seen by Shamir and his collaborators as an anti-Zionist and "an obvious agent of the British enemy" (Gazi, 2002, p. 32).