The Immovable Object
His country is changing, but Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir refuses to soften a lifelong commitment to his vision of the land of Israel
Although he is trailing in the opinion polls, it is difficult to imagine Yitzhak Shamir donning sunglasses and playing a saxophone on a late-night TV talk show while the host pumps his hand in the air and shouts, "Woof, woof."
Politics is serious business in Israel, where the paramount issues are war, peace and the nation's survival, and no Israeli politician would dream of clowning around like Bill Clinton. But Shamir's conservative Likud Party is not immune to the global forces that are making politics a branch of show business. The Likud has embraced the dubious art of negative campaigning with gusto, this year suggesting that Shamir's opponent, hawkish Labor Party leader, war hero and former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, has a drinking problem, a charge Rabin heatedly denies. The members of the Likud's younger generation, its so-called young princes, are far more adroit at presenting both themselves and their ideas to the media.
Shamir, however, belongs to an earlier age: To him, the land of Israel is a principle to be defended, not an issue to be negotiated or a political position to be packaged and sold. He says he admires Lenin and Mao Zedong, not for their goals but for their tenacity. "You must stick to the goal" is his credo, and his goal is the creation of an indivisible Israel that includes the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights. In pursuit of what he considers his people's survival, he has fought against both the British and the Arabs as a member of the underground and repeatedly risked both his life and his political career. He is short and square-jawed, with bushy eyebrows and thick, muscular hands. Although, at age 76, he has lost some weight, he still looks as if he has approximately the same specific gravity as uranium.
Changing Israel. But if Shamir is an immovable object, history is an irresistible force, and next week's Israeli election is in some respects a contest between the two. The Israel that was born in blood, and that shaped Shamir's hard-nosed principles, is slowly giving way to a modern, cosmopolitan consumer society. While he hopes that Israel will prosper, Shamir is also worried by the changes. His son Yair, who heads one of Israel's most successful high-tech companies, Scitex, and often serves as his father's confidant, says his father thinks Israel is growing too comfortably middle-class and losing its Spartan edge. "My father thinks that people who have too much are not willing to sacrifice," Yair says. "If you don't have anything, you don't have anything to give up. In this sense, he does not believe we can afford to compare ourselves to a normal Western society."
Shamir taps into Israelis' deepest suspicions and fears about Arab intentions. The less reasonable the Arabs are, the more popular Shamir is. When the Arabs sounded reasonable at the peace table, Shamir tumbled in the polls, but a recent wave of attacks on Jews has made the election too close to call.
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