Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: MONDAY, March 9, 1992                   TAG: 9203090092
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: TEL AVIV, ISRAEL                                LENGTH: Medium

MENACHEM BEGIN DIES OF HEART ATTACK FORMER ISRAELI LEADER MADE PEACE WITH

Begin died in Tel Aviv Ichilov Hospital, where he was on a respirator in the intensive Begin care unit following a heart attack on Tuesday. Doctors installed a pacemaker Thursday, but his condition took a turn for the worse Friday.

The hospital's director, Dan Michaeli, said Begin died at 3:30 a.m. (8:30 p.m. EST Sunday). Begin's two daughters and son were at his bedside, Israel army radio said.

Begin was a giant of the Jewish state.

A Polish Jew whose parents were killed by the Nazis, he came to political power labeled by many as a terrorist for his part in the underground that helped found the state of Israel.

Begin shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Egypt's President Anwar Sadat for leading his country to its first, and so far only, peace treaty with an Arab country.

For that 1979 treaty, he sacrificed the Sinai Desert, one of the most precious prizes of the 1967 Mideast War. But he clung tenaciously to other captured territories, annexing the Golan Heights of Syria and filling the West Bank with Jewish settlements.

He took an aggressive posture toward Israel's enemies, bombing Iraq's nuclear reactor to rubble in 1981. The following year, he sent the army into Lebanon to wipe out the PLO in what became Israel's most unpopular war. Then, after six tumultuous years, he resigned without explanation and spent his remaining years in virtual seclusion.

His 1983 resignation, some theorized, was driven by guilt over being abroad on state business when his wife died. Others thought he was depressed by the 1982 Lebanon war.

His manners were courtly, his policies combative, his soul lyrical, as illustrated in a letter he wrote to Sadat after suffering one of his heart attacks.

"So what is the human heart? Simply, it is a pump," Begin wrote. "And I thought, God almighty, as long as this pump is working, a human being feels, thinks, speaks, writes, loves his family, smiles, weeps, enjoys life, gets angry, gives friendship, prays, dreams, remembers, forgets, influences other people, is influenced by other people - lives.

"But when the pump stops - no more."