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"The King David Hotel"

Excerpt from The Revolt, first published in 1964

"That was the worst of it: no water. I had gone without food in Lukishki and elsewhere. Here for the first time I learnt what it mean to go without water. Hunger and thirst—it is best to know neither. But if I had to choose between them, I would unhesitatingly choose hunger. Prolonged thirst is terrifying."

In the spring of 1946, Menachem Begin (1913–) was the leader of a Jewish underground movement called the Irgun Zvai Leumi. The organization was fighting to establish a Jewish state in Palestine, a region in the Middle East that was ruled by Great Britain since the end of World War I (1914–18), when the Ottoman empire, which governed much of the Middle East for centuries, was dismantled. World War II (1939–45) had ended, and Jews who had survived the Holocaust, the period before and during the war in...