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Israel's quintessential hard man,
Yitzhak Shamir, dies quietly at
96
Yitzhak Shamir never lost his stoic,
hardline stance against the Palestinians in favor
of a "greater Israel", and held a deep antipathy
towards the kinds of negotiations with the
Palestinians that his longtime rival, the
assassinated Yitzhak Rabin, came to champion. J
BROOKS SPECTOR looks back over Shamir's life
and career.
Yitzhak Shamir, a man who
had emerged from the Stern Gang, the most militant
wing of the Irgun, eventually served as Israel's
prime minister longer than anyone but the
near-legendary David
Ben-Gurion. Throughout
his career, Shamir was a proponent of a
particularly muscular Zionism and expansive
settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza
Strip.
He was born Yitzhak Jazernicki in
Poland, but changed his name to Shamir, or "thorn"
in Hebrew, after he emigrated to the British
mandatory territory of Palestine. (The UK became
the mandated authority there following the end of
World War One and the collapse of the Ottoman
Empire.)
Before he emigrated to Palestine
on a student visa, ostensibly to enter the newly
established Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he had
studied law at Warsaw University after World War
One. But in 1935, when he was 20, he came under
the political and philosophical influence of the
extreme militant Zionist Zeev Zabotinsky and
emigrated to Palestine. The rest of his family
remained in Poland and were exterminated by the
Nazis during World War Two.
Once he was
inside Palestine, he joined the underground
paramilitary group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, which
was led by yet another future Israeli prime
minister, Menachem Begin. The Irgun was dedicated
to fighting for an independent Jewish state, using
militant, violent means against the British. But
Shamir felt that even the Irgun was insufficiently
activist enough and he moved over to (and later
led) the Stern Gang in 1940. During that period,
the British Foreign Office described Shamir as
"among the most fanatical terrorist leaders". His
group blew up the King David Hotel in 1946 while
that structure was serving as the British
headquarters in Jerusalem. The explosion killed 88
people, including 15 Jews, and also took the life
of the United Nations mediator, the Swedish Count
Bernadotte.
Many of his friends and
colleagues said Shamir's character took shape
during his years in the underground when he sent
Jewish fighters out to kill British officers, whom
he saw as occupiers. Given his pursuit of the
intifada (uprising) later, it might well be seen
as ironic that the British rulers of the Palestine
mandate had also labelled him a terrorist and an
assassin. In those Stern Gang years, he appeared
in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic
rabbi. Years later, Shamir told friends that those
were "the best years of my life."
To the
Jewish public, and even other Jewish underground
groups, Shamir's gang was "lacking even a spark of
humanity and Jewish conscience", Israel Rokach,
the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern
Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on
the streets of his city. Years later, Shamir
insisted it had been more humane to assassinate
specific military or political figures than to
attack military installations and possibly kill
innocent people, as other underground groups did.
He argued, "a man who goes forth to take the life
of another whom he does not know must believe only
one thing: that by his act he will change the
course of history."
Some historians argue
that he and his group were behind a failed attempt
to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold
MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain's
minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne.
Asked about these events many years later,
Shamir's denials seemed to carry a certain evasive
tone, observers noted.
During this period,
too, the British managed to arrest Shamir twice,
including a deportation to Eritrea, but he escaped
both times, eventually returning after Israel's
declaration of independence in 1948. For the next
seven years he worked in law and business, but
probably found his true calling in 1955, when he
joined Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service,
where he worked for a decade. After Mossad, he
joined the campaign to support the right of
Russian Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Summarising these parts of his life before
entering formal politics, the Jerusalem Post wrote
of him that "Captured and deported to Eritrea in
1946, the diminutive, beetle-browed Shamir missed
much of the fighting that led to the state's
founding two years later. Upon his return, he
found himself out of step with the country's
left-leaning political leadership of the day. The
Mossad spy service provided Shamir a back door to
power. Recruited in 1955, he clambered up Mossad's
ranks during shadow wars with Middle East foes and
international hunts for Nazi fugitives. He
credited a posting in France with lending some
refinement to his style - 'the scenery, the way
people looked, the food, the wine, Piaf,' he would
later say - and prepared him for his 1980
breakthrough as foreign minister for the Likud."
Following these formative experiences,
Shamir entered politics with Menachem Begin's
Herut Party, a predecessor to Likud. He rose
through the ranks to become parliamentary speaker,
foreign minister and then his first of two tours
as prime minister in 1983 when Begin retired.
Shamir's political opponents said his
laconic style played into his handling of the
massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps
in West Beirut in September 1982, during Israel's
war in Lebanon. On September 16, Phalangists -
Lebanese Christian militiamen - entered the camps
and began killing hundreds of Palestinians while
the Israeli Army, largely unaware of the killings,
stood guard at the gates. The resulting deaths
caused a major international uproar.
Much
later, Shamir said of the incidents: "You know, in
those times of the Lebanese war, every day
something happened. And from the first glance of
it, it seemed like just another detail of what was
going on every day. But after 24 hours, it became
clear it was not a normal event."
Following the indecisive election of 1984,
he formed an unlikely coalition with Shimon Peres
of the Labour Party. Their deal was that Peres
would be prime minister for the first two years,
then Shamir would re-assume the prime
ministership. Shamir was now a key part of a group
of right-wing Israeli politicians led by Menachem
Begin, who came to power in the 1970s as the more
left-wing Labour Party slowly declined,
increasingly seen as corrupt and disdainful of the
public it wished to lead.
Shamir strongly
opposed many - if not most - of Peres's policies,
especially the stalemated peace process and well
as the possibility of land returns or the
possibility of a Palestinian state. Instead, he
persistently advocated the creation of a "greater
Israel", encompassing all the land between the
Mediterranean and the Jordan river.
As
prime minister, Shamir therefore promoted
continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank and
the Gaza Strip, which Israel had conquered in
1967. As a result, in his time as prime minister,
the Jewish population in those occupied
territories increased by nearly 30%. He also
continued to encourage the immigration of many
thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, an influx that
has significantly altered the country's
demographic character as well as its political
balance.
During this second term as prime
minister, he first ordered a military solution to
the first Palestinian intifada, which had begun in
1987. By the 1988 election, the uprising in the
occupied territories was an ongoing reality and
the Israeli electorate was thoroughly split
between Labour and Likud in determining which set
of policies to support. As a result of the
inconclusive electoral results, the two
antagonists - Shamir and Peres - formed yet
another unwieldy coalition government that
survived until 1990, when the Labour party left
the government, leaving Shamir with a narrow
coalition, but still in the driver's seat.
In responding to the intifada, Shamir and
his defence minister, Yitzhak Rabin, deployed
thousands of Israeli troops throughout the
occupied territories to quash the rebellion. The
years of violence and death on both sides brought
criticism and condemnation from around the world.
In May 1991, Shamir ordered the airlift of
thousands of Ethiopian Jews in a rescue operation
code named Operation Solomon as one of the last
efforts to bring historically dispersed Jewish
communities to Israel.
Surprisingly,
during the first Gulf War that took place in that
same year, after Iraq began firing Scud missiles
at Israeli cities, Shamir held back from any form
of retaliation, presumably in response to serious
US pressure to adopt a policy of restraint, with
the view that any Israeli attacks would generate
major difficulties for the delicate Arab-Western
coalition that the George Bush administration had
cobbled together against Iraq in response to the
Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
By not
retaliating even as Scud missiles fell on Tel
Aviv, Shamir gained promises of financial aid from
the United States to help with the settlement of
all those new Israeli citizens from the Soviet
Union. Following the Gulf War and with the
collapse of the Soviet Union, nearly a
half-million Soviet Jews immigrated to Israel.
Shamir sought $10-billion in US-backed loan
guarantees to pay for their housing and
development projects. But he resisted American
demands that none of the money be used for Jewish
settlements in the occupied territories.
In the fall of 1991, under pressure from
Bush and secretary of state James Baker, Shamir
agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East
peace conference in Madrid, Israel's first summit
meeting with the Arab states. There, he was as
unyielding as ever, denouncing Syria at one point
as having "the dubious honour of being one of the
most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world".
However, his reluctant decision to bring
Israel into negotiations with its Arab neighbours
eventually led the way for the Israeli-Palestinian
peace process that became a more sustained motif
of Israeli foreign policy under his successors.
Israeli voters, now increasingly wary of a
confrontation with the country's one reliable
ally, the US, rejected Shamir in the June 1992
election and he was succeeded by Yitzhak Rabin.
Rabin then found himself in that historic
handshake with Yasser Arafat on the White House
lawn in the Bill Clinton administration, building
a reputation as a peacemaker.
Shamir left
office in 1992 amid charges that Likud was
becoming too conciliatory toward the Palestinians,
despite Shamir's near-legendary reputation as a
hardliner against Palestinian aspirations for
statehood as well as his refusal to countenance
land for peace-style negotiations. Shamir dropped
out of Likud's leadership in March 1993. He became
a sharp critic of his Likud successor, arguing
that Benjamin Netanyahu was being too indecisive
in dealing with the Palestinians, in spite of
Netanyahu's own reputation as a hardliner.
In a statement announcing the death,
Israel's current prime minister, Netanyahu, spoke
of Shamir's "deep loyalty to Israel". In that
statement, Netanyahu said Shamir "was part of a
marvellous generation which created the state of
Israel and struggled for the Jewish people".
A particularly telling portrait of his
personality came in 1988, when, at a meeting of
his political party, he sat quietly on a sofa,
gazing at the floor as party bigwigs continued to
praise him to the rafters. Hearing all this,
Shamir remarked: "I like all those people, they're
nice people. But this is not my style, not my
language. This kind of meeting is the modern
picture, but I don't belong to it."
One of
his advisors, Avi Pazner had said of him, "If he
wants something, it may take a long time, but
he'll never let go." Another close aide, Yossi
Achimeir, said of him: "He heard every whisper,
every small movement. His antennae were working
all the time."
Ultimately, "Shamir
believed only in Shamir." As a politician, Shamir
played his cards very close to his chest, like a
good intelligence operative should. Aides like to
tell that memos to him routinely were returned
without a mark on them.
By the time of his
death, Yitzhak Shamir was living quietly in a
nursing home near Tel Aviv, as he gradually
succumbed to Alzheimer's disease. DM
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