Menachem Begin did consistently object to Ben-Gurion's apartheid policies before 1966. And here, just in time for you, is Uri Avnery's latest column, "Kaya, the royal Dog ".

YEARS AGO, a leading French journalist came to me during an Israeli election campaign. I directed him to an election rally of Menachem Begin's.

When he came back he was bewildered. "I don't understand it," he exclaimed. "When he was talking about the Arabs, he sounded like a rabid fascist. When he was talking about social affairs, he sounded like a moderate liberal. How can this fit together?"

"Begin is not a great thinker," I explained to him. "All the ideology of the Likud goes back to Vladimir Jabotinsky."

Vladimir (or Ze'ev) Jabotinsky was the founder of the "revisionist" party, the parent of the Herut Party, which was the parent of the present-day Likud. He was born in 1880 in Odessa in the Ukraine. When he was young man he was sent as a journalist to Italy, a country that had attained its freedom not so long before.

The Italian liberation movement was an unusual mixture of extreme patriotism and liberal social ideas. This fixed the young Jabotinsky's political outlook for life.