Yitzhak Shamir

Yitzhak Shamir יִצְחָק שָׁמִיר
7th Prime Minister of Israel
In office October 20, 1986 – July 13, 1992
Preceded by	Shimon Peres
Succeeded by	Yitzhak Rabin
In office October 10, 1983 – September 13, 1984
Preceded by	Menachem Begin
Succeeded by	Shimon Peres
Personal details
Born	Icchak Jaziernicki (1915-10-15)October 15, 1915 Ruzhinoy, Russian Empire
Died	June 30, 2012(2012-06-30) (aged 96) Tel Aviv, Israel
Political party	Likud
Spouse	Shulamit Shamir (1944–2011; her death)
Children	2
Signature

(Hebrew: יצחק שמיר, born Icchak Jaziernicki; October 15, 1915 – June 30, 2012) was an Israeli politician, and the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, in 1983–84 and 1986–92. Before independence, he was a member of the Irgun, a breakaway from the Haganah. After the assassination of Stern, Shamir commanded the Lehi. He also served in the Mossad.

Early and personal life

File:P.M. Yitzhak Shamir and his wife lighting Hannuka candles.jpg

Yitzhak and his wife, Shulamit, lighting Hanukkah candles

Icchak Jeziernicky (later Yitzhak Shamir) was born in Ruzhany (Yiddish: Rozhinoy), Russian Empire (now Belarus), the son of Perla and Shlomo, who owned a leather factory. He studied at a Hebrew High School in Białystok, Poland. As a youth he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He studied at the law faculty of Warsaw University, but cut his studies short to immigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine.

In 1935, he settled in Palestine. His parents and two sisters were murdered in the Holocaust. He later adopted as his surname the name he used on a forged underground identity card, Shamir. He told his wife this was because Shamir means a thorn that stabs and a rock than can cut steel. In 1944 he married Shulamit Shamir, whom he met in a detention camp, and she migrated to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria by boat in 1941 and was sent to prison because she entered the territory illegally. They had two children, Yair and Gilada. Shulamit died on July 29, 2011.

Zionist activism

Shamir joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist paramilitary group that opposed British control of Palestine. When the Irgun split in 1940, Shamir joined the more militant faction, National Military Organisation in Israel, also known as the Stern Gang, headed by Avraham Stern.In 1941 Shamir was imprisoned by British authorities. A few months after Stern was killed by the British in 1942, Shamir and another prisoner hid under a stack of mattresses in a warehouse of the detention camp and at night they escaped through the barbed wire fences of the camp. Shamir took charge of reorganising the movement into cells and training its members. In 1943, he became one of the three leaders of the group, serving with Nathan Yellin-Mor and Israel Eldad. The group was renamed Lehi. Shamir sought to emulate the anti-British struggle of the Irish Republicans and took the nickname "Michael" for Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. In the summer of 1946 he was caught, exiled and interned in Africa by British Mandatory authorities. In January 1947 he and four Irgun members escaped through a 200-foot tunnel they had dug. Shamir and some of the others hid in an oil truck for three days as it was driven over the border to French Somalia. They were arrested by the French but he was eventually allowed passage to France and granted political asylum. His underground sent him a forged passport, with which he returned to Israel after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.

During the war, most of Lehi's members served in the army but the Lehi group in Jerusalem distanced itself from government control. Shamir, Eldad and Yellin-Mor authorised the assassination of the United Nations representative in the Middle East, Count Folke Bernadotte during a truce. Lehi feared that Israel would agree to Bernadotte's peace proposals, which they considered dangerous, unaware that the provisional Israeli government had already rejected a proposal by Bernadotte the day before. The Israeli provisional government reacted by forcibly disbanding Lehi.

Israeli intelligence career

Wanted Poster of the Palestine Police Force offering rewards for the capture of Stern Gang members: Jaacov Levstein (Eliav), Yitzhak Yezernitzky (Shamir), and Natan Friedman-Yelin

In the first years of Israel's independence, Shamir managed several commercial enterprises. In 1955, he joined the Mossad, Israel's external intelligence service, serving until 1965. During his Mossad career, he directed the assassinations of former Third Reich rocket scientists working on the Egyptian missile programme, known as Operation Damocles.

He ran a unit that placed agents in hostile countries, created the Mossad's division for planning and served on its General Staff.

Political career

In 1969, Shamir joined the Herut party headed by Menachem Begin and was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 as a member of the Likud. He became Speaker of the Knesset in 1977, and foreign minister in 1980, before succeeding Begin as prime minister in 1983 when the latter retired.

Prime Minister

Shamir with Caspar Weinberger

Shamir had a reputation as a Likud hard-liner. In 1977 he presided at the Knesset visit of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. He abstained in the Knesset votes to approve the Camp David Accords and the Peace Treaty with Egypt. In 1981 and 1982, as Foreign Minister, he guided negotiations with Egypt to normalize relations after the treaty. Following the 1982 Lebanon War he directed negotiations which led to the May 17, 1983 Agreement with Lebanon, which did not materialize.

His failure to stabilize Israel's inflationary economy and to suggest a solution to the quagmire of Lebanon led to an indecisive election in 1984, after which a national unity government was formed between his Likud party and the Alignment led by Shimon Peres. As part of the agreement, Peres held the post of Prime Minister until September 1986, when Shamir took over.

As he prepared to reclaim the office of prime minister, which he had held previously from October 1983 to September 1984, Shamir's hard-line image appeared to moderate. However Shamir remained reluctant to change the status quo in Israel's relations with its Arab neighbors, and blocked Peres's initiative to promote a regional peace conference as agreed in 1987 with King Hussein of Jordan in what has become known as the London Agreement. Re-elected in 1988, Shamir and Peres formed a new coalition government until "the dirty trick" of 1990, when the Alignment left the government, leaving Shamir with a narrow right-wing coalition.

During the Gulf War, Iraq fired Scud missiles at Israel, many of which struck population centers. Iraq hoped to provoke Israeli retaliation and thus alienate Arab members of the United States-assembled coalition against Iraq. Shamir deployed Israeli Air Force jets to patrol the northern airspace with Iraq, but recalled the jets and decided not to retaliate after the United States urged restraint, claiming that Israeli attacks would jeopardize the delicate Arab-Western coalition.

During his term, Shamir reestablished diplomatic relations between Israel and several dozen African, Asian and other countries. He continued his efforts, begun in the late 1960s, to bring Soviet Jewish refugees to Israel. In May 1991, as the Ethiopian government of Mengistu Haile Mariam was collapsing, Shamir ordered the airlifting of fourteen thousand Ethiopian Jews, known as Operation Solomon. Shamir was dedicated to bringing Jews from all over the world to Israel and said he expected even American Jewish youth to realize that "man does not live by bread alone" but to "learn and understand Jewish histry, the Bible....and reach the only conclusion: to come on aliya to Israel."

Relations with the US were strained in the period after the war over the Madrid peace talks, which Shamir opposed. As a result, US President George H.W. Bush was reluctant to approve loan guarantees to help absorb immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Finally, Shamir gave in and in October 1991 participated in the Madrid talks. His narrow, right-wing government collapsed as a result over the participation of Palestinians from the West Bank and Gaza, and new elections were called.

Electoral defeat and retirement

Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir

Shamir was defeated by Yitzhak Rabin's Labour in the 1992 election. He stepped down from the Likud leadership in March 1993, but remained a member of the Knesset until the 1996 election. For some time, Shamir was a critic of his Likud successor, Benjamin Netanyahu, as being too indecisive in dealing with the Arabs. Shamir went so far as to resign from the Likud in 1998 and endorse the right-wing splinter movement led by Benny Begin, Herut - The National Movement, that later joined the National Union during the 1999 election. After Netanyahu was defeated, Shamir returned to the Likud fold and supported Ariel Sharon in the 2001 election. Subsequently, in his late eighties, Shamir ceased making public comments.

Illness and death

In 2004, Shamir's health declined, with the progression of his Alzheimer's Disease and he was moved to a nursing home. The government turned down a request by the family to finance his stay at the facility.

Shamir died on June 30, 2012, at a nursing home in Tel-Aviv where he had spent the last few years as a result of the Alzheimer's disease he had suffered since the mid-1990s. He will be given a state funeral, which will take place on July 2 at Mount Herzl, Jerusalem, and he will be buried beside his wife, Shulamit, who died the previous year.

Reactions

Israeli President Shimon Peres said that "Yitzhak Shamir was a brave warrior for Israel, before and after its inception. He was a great patriot and his enormous contribution will be forever etched in our chronicles. He was loyal to his beliefs and he served his country with the utmost dedication for decades. May he rest in peace." Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement upon hearing of his death that read: "[Shamir] led Israel with a deep loyalty to the nation. [The Prime Minister] expresses his deep pain over the announcement of the departure of Yitzhak Shamir. He was part of a marvelous generation which created the state of Israel and struggled for the Jewish people." This was despite previous feuds between the two once-Likud members. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman added that Shamir "contributed greatly to the foundation of the state, which he served his entire life with loyalty and unwavering dedication. He set an example in each position that he held. I had the privilege to be personally acquainted with Shamir, and I will always remember him and his great contribution to the state;" while Defense Minister Ehud Barak said: "His whole life, Shamir was as stable as granite and maintained focus without compromises. He always strived to ensure Israel's freedom. His devotion knew no bounds [and he] always sought what's right for the people of Israel and for the country's security." Leader of the Opposition and Labor Party head Shelly Yachimovich offered her condolences to Shamir's family saying that "he was a determined prime minister who dedicated his life to the state. He followed his ideological path honestly and humbly, as a leader should. The citizens of Israel will always remember the wisdom he demonstrated during the First Gulf War. He showed restraint and saved Israel from undue entanglement in the Iraq War. This decision proved to be a brave and wise act of leadership." His daughter, Gilada Diamant, finally said of her father "belonged to a different generation of leaders, people with values and beliefs. I hope that we have more people like him in the future. His political doing has undoubtedly left its mark on the State of Israel. Dad was an amazing man, a family man in the fullest sense of the word, a man who dedicated himself to the State of Israel but never forgot his family, not even for a moment. He was a special man."

Awards and recognition

In 2001, Shamir received the Israel Prize, for his lifetime achievements and special contribution to society and the State of Israel.

In 2005, he was voted the 29th-greatest Israeli of all time, in a poll by the Israeli news website Ynet to determine whom the general public considered the 200 Greatest Israelis.

Published works

He wrote Sikumo shel davar, a book which was published in English by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London, as Summing Up: an autobiography (1994).

See also

• List of Israel Prize recipients

Further reading

• Brinkley, Joel (August 21, 1988). "The stubborn strength of Yitzhak Shamir". New York Times. Retrieved July 9, 2008.
• The Last Revisionist Zionist By Meron Benvenisti, Foreign Affairs January/February 1995

External links

• Yitzhak Shamir on the Knesset website