Revolt: The Story of the Irgun.

BEGIN, Menachem .

Item Number: 81227

New York: Nash Publishing, 1951.

Revised edition of Begin’s classic first book. Octavo, original leatherette boards, original slipcase. Signed by Menachem Begin on the half-title page. Translated from the Hebrew by Shmuel Katz. Edited by Ivan M. Greenberg. Fine in a fine slipcase.

Revolt traces the development of the Irgun from its early days in the 1930s, through its years of violent struggle in the Palestine Mandate against both British rule (the "revolt" of the title) and Arab opposition, to the outbreak of the Israeli War of Independence in 1948. It is also part autobiographical, tracing Begin's own political development. The political scientist John Bowyer Bell who studied both the Irgun and the Irish Republican Army recalled that many of the IRA men whom he interviewed in the 1960s had read The Revolt and admired it as a manual of guerrilla warfare. It was also studied by African National Congress Nelson Mandela after he went underground in 1960, and credited it as being among the books he used a guide in planning the ANC's guerrilla campaign against the apartheid government of South Africa.