YITZHAK SHAMIR: WHEN YITZHAK Shamir became the prime minister of Israel in 1983, after the resignation of Menachem Begin, many saw the hardline leader of the Likud party as a compromise choice and predicted that he would soon be shunted aside.
They were to be proved wrong.
Shamir, who has died aged 96, became Israel’s second longest serving prime minister and perhaps its most right-wing leader.
Though he lacked the charisma of his predecessor, he grew into the job, maintaining Begin’s tough stance on the Palestinian issue and displaying patience, or at least the uncanny ability to postpone unpleasant decisions.
Days after Shamir became prime minister, the Tel Aviv stock market collapsed. His emergency measures only partly succeeded. The faltering economy, and disenchantment over the invasion of Lebanon, deprived him of a total victory in the 1984 polls and forced him into a coalition with Shimon Peres’s Labour party. Under a rotation agreement, Shamir served as foreign minister under Peres for two years, then resumed the premiership in 1986. Israel’s government was speaking with two voices, a farce to many Israelis and a wasted opportunity for those who sought real peace.
The 1988 election was fought against the backdrop of the intifada (the Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories). Another inconclusive result ensued, and Shamir headed an increasingly shaky coalition that rejected the putative peace overtures of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO). In 1989, his cabinet colleagues bullied Shamir into curtailing his plans for local elections in Palestine, but he regained prestige by championing the influx of Soviet Jews into Israel.
In 1990, the coalition broke apart in disagreement over US proposals for peace between Israel and Palestine, and months of unprecedented horse-trading followed. When Peres failed to form a Labour government, Shamir fashioned a right-wing coalition with support from religious parties. Unhindered by Labour restraint, he promoted Jewish settlements which he pointedly called Judea and Samaria.
During the Gulf war of 1991, Shamir was restrained in the face of Iraqi scud attacks on Israel – winning approval from the US for not retaliating against Iraq, and thereby potentially destroying the anti-Saddam coalition. In the same year, he reluctantly took part in peace talks in Madrid with Israel’s Arab neighbours and the Palestinians. Ironically, this most right-wing Israeli premier became the first to negotiate openly with Palestinians, and thus set in train a process which led to Israel’s historic recognition of the PLO and Palestinians’ right to autonomy.
Also in 1991, Shamir displayed rare flair in evacuating more than 14,000 Ethiopian Jews to Israel.
But at the 1992 election, Labour’s “land-for-peace” stance on the Palestinians struck a chord with voters and Yitzhak Rabin took office. The margin of Rabin’s electoral victory (35 per cent of votes compared with Shamir’s 25 per cent) surprised even the Labour leader. Shamir resigned as party leader and was succeeded, in 1993, by Binyamin Netanyahu. Within three years, Netanyahu was prime minister.
Shamir was born Yitzhak Yezernitsky in the small town of Ruzinoy, Poland (now Ruzhany, in Belarus). He attended a Hebrew secondary school in Bialystok, where his father was a teacher, and then studied law at Warsaw University. As a devoutly right-wing revisionist Zionist, he emigrated to Palestine, then under the British mandate, in 1935. He adopted the Hebrew surname of Shamir (which means “thorn”). In 1937 he joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi militia (later led by Begin). The group despised the liberal socialism of the dominant Labour Zionists and its goal was an “Iron Wall” to defend Jews against what they deemed would be an inevitable Arab backlash.
Shamir’s mother and sister were killed in the Holocaust. Despite this, he seldom invoked the Holocaust in his rhetoric, and felt uncomfortable when his mentor, Begin, did so.
While most Palestinian Jews upheld a wartime ceasefire with British mandate authorities, Shamir helped found an extreme Irgun breakaway faction called Lehi. He joined its leadership troika after Lehi’s chief, Avraham Stern, was killed in 1942.
Shamir plotted the assassinations of Lord Moyne, British minister for Middle East affairs, in Cairo in 1944, and of UN negotiator Count Folke Bernadotte, in Jerusalem in 1948. He was also implicated in the King David hotel bombing, British HQ in Jerusalem, in 1946. Shamir was arrested that year and interned but escaped and returned to Israel in 1948, the year it achieved independence.
From 1955 to 1965 he served as aide to the chief of Mossad. His Mossad career ended after he led an abortive rebellion against its leadership. He joined the Herut party (later merged into Likud) in 1970 and won a seat in the Knesset in 1973. After Likud secured power for the first time in 1977, Begin, the prime minister, made Shamir speaker of the Knesset. Shamir opposed the Camp David accords with Egypt and treaty in 1979, but later changed his mind.
He was a member of the inner cabinet coterie that planned Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Evidently, he had qualms but never spoke out decisively.
The Kahan commission of inquiry into the massacres of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps that year gave Shamir little more than a rap over the knuckles, while defence minister Ariel Sharon resigned from his position.
When an exhausted Begin resigned in 1983, leaving no obvious successor, it was Shamir and not Sharon who carried the hardliners’ banner.
In 1944, Shamir married Shulamit Levy. She died in 2011. He is survived by his daughter, Gilada, his son, Yair, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.
Yitzhak Shamir: born October 15th, 1915; died June 30th, 2012 – (Guardian service)