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.
His grandfatherly demeanor, modest lifestyle and heartfelt beliefs appeal to many Israelis. But Shamir is unlikely to trim his sails in order to boost his popularity, either at home or in Washington. He thinks recent events--the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Madrid Mideast peace conference--have vindicated his belief in hanging tough. He thinks his policy of continuing to build Jewish settlements in the occupied territories has helped encourage the Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza to begin negotiating with Israel for a measure of control over local affairs. He has showed he can be a pragmatist on tactical issues, allowing the Palestine Liberation Organization to play a backstage role in the peace process, something he had long vowed he would never do. Still, he believes the current softening of Arab attitudes toward Israel is merely tactical and that any territorial compromise with the Palestinians would eventually be filled by an irredentist Palestinian state that would become a launching pad for another Arab attempt to destroy Israel.
His steely determination sometimes has served Israel well. During the gulf war, he sat tight as Israel endured 39 Scud missile attacks--and his refusal to retaliate prevented the anti-Iraq alliance from unraveling. Shamir's biggest fear now seems to be that a successor will not be tough enough to fend off pressure from the United States to compromise with the Arabs. There are reports that he does not believe his protege, Defense Minister Moshe Arens, possesses the necessary mettle. "It's not that others in the Likud are not as devoted to the land of Israel as Shamir, it's that they don't have the guts to fight for it," says an aide to the prime minister. Without mentioning any names, Yossi Achimeir, Shamir's top personal aide, recalls the premier's saying, "Did you hear how this cabinet minister reacted to such and such an event? Just not tough enough." Shamir has told interviewers that if he stood back and sympathized with the plight of the Palestinians, it would weaken his resolve on behalf of his own people.
Shamir's single-minded devotion to his vision of the land of Israel is one of the main reasons that his relations with President Bush and Secretary of State James Baker have deteriorated sharply. One Shamir adviser says, "You could not be talking about two more different people than Bush and Shamir. While Bush was growing up in an aristocratic family and the U.S. was on its way to becoming the pre-eminent world power, Shamir was being stalked by Nazis and his people were stateless."
Bush and Baker may be hard bargainers and crafty negotiators, but Shamir is a master at the bazaar art of refusing to budge until the last possible moment and of not budging at all if he thinks the deal is bad. Read his lips: He will either make a deal that assures Israel strategic control of the West Bank and the Golan Heights and closes the door on any possibility of a Palestinian state's taking shape in Judea and Samaria, or he will not make a deal. He abstained from the 1978 Knesset vote on the Camp David Accords, and his definition of Palestinian autonomy forecloses the possibility of any Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories. "I think the relationship is hard for Shamir because he has a core of set beliefs, while I think Bush wants to deal," says Michael Dekel, the premier's adviser on settlements in the occupied West Bank and one of his few personal friends.
U.S. officials thought Shamir would have a hard time turning down $10 billion in housing loan guarantees to ease the way for up to 1 million Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union in the next few years, immigrants that are vital to Israel's future. He didn't, and he has brushed aside questions about why he chose settlements over the paramount Zionist goal of immigration. "Settlements are only an obstacle to one thing, a Palestinian state," Shamir declared.
Instead of slowing settlements, Shamir's government accelerated them, but without the fanfare that Shamir's Likud predecessor, Menachem Begin, used to open new settlements. Shamir thought he could avoid a confrontation with the United States by building settlements quietly. He has an almost mystical belief that if one does not make noise, issues will slide out of sight and Israel will be saved by events.
Underground past. Shamir's belief that things are best done decisively but quietly comes naturally to him. He was born Yitzhak Yzernitsky in 1915, in the Belarussian town of Rozhnoi. His father, Shlomo, was a member of the anti-czarist underground, and Yitzhak joined a socialist-Zionist youth movement, only to become disillusioned at a young age, saying Jews needed to fight if they were to obtain a state. At 20, he immigrated to Palestine, and in 1937 he joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the Jews' underground national military organization, which was attacking both Arab and British targets in its effort to free Palestine from British control. It was in the underground that Shamir met his future wife, Shulamit.
When Britain went to war with Nazi Germany in 1939, the mainstream Zionist underground stopped its attacks against the British. Shamir, however, joined the more violent Lehi, the Lohamei Herut Israel (Fighters for Israel's Freedom), which continued the war against the British. Shamir's nom de guerre in the Lehi was "Michael," which he took from Michael Collins, an Irish revolutionary who also fought the British but agreed to the partition of Ireland in 1921. Collins was killed by his colleagues, who considered him a traitor for allowing the partition of Ireland. As a member of the Lehi's ruling triumvirate, Shamir ordered the execution of one of his own colleagues, Eliyahu Giladi, for alleged recklessness. Shamir later named his only daughter Gilada, but he refuses to discuss the incident.
"Michael's" orders. One old Lehi comrade privately explains Shamir's style as a leader of the underground, where among other things he helped plan the 1944 killing of Lord Moyne, the head of the British Foreign Office's Middle East bureau. "'Michael' was tough and at the same time took no chances. When he planned the assassination of Lord Moyne, he reviewed every detail thoroughly. The two assassins were caught because they flouted 'Michael's' instructions." Shamir himself was arrested two times during his years in the underground, but he escaped each time.
While he was imprisoned by the British in Eritrea, he met Vietnamese revolutionary Doung Bash-Mai, who taught him about Marxism. But there is no indication that Shamir ever embraced communism or any other political philosophy. He remained partial to the Soviet Union during the first years after the founding of Israel, but that was because of Moscow's anti-British outlook, not its ideology.
Shamir's involvement in the Lehi put him at odds with Israel's more moderate political establishment; he was finally allowed to join the Mossad spy agency in 1956, and he spent nine years based in Paris. In some respects, Shamir has yet to emerge from the underground. He spends much of the night in his study reading raw intelligence and diplomatic cables. He detests big meetings and maintains tight control over U.S.-Israeli and peace issues, shutting out his more dovish foreign minister, David Levy. He works with a handful of trusted aides, keeps information strictly compartmentalized and summons his advisers to his office separately or phones them at home late at night. He hardly ever appears in the Knesset, let alone answers parliamentary questions. He seldom convenes press conferences and makes sure that his office keeps tight control of the state-run Israel Television and Radio.
But Shamir's passion for control does not extend to domestic issues. A much needed plan to liberalize Israel's economy died a sudden death because Shamir was unwilling to antagonize some Likud cabinet ministers. Although unemployment is 11 percent and rising and the education budget is so tight that children attend school for half days in overcrowded classrooms, Shamir began to immerse himself in economic issues only after sustained prodding from American Jewish fund-raisers. "If you wake up my father in the middle of the night, he won't ask about the exchange rate," says Yair Shamir.
But with Israel now sitting at the peace table with all its Arab neighbors and the country itself changing almost as fast as the world around it, Israelis next week will have to decide whether Shamir is capable of leading Israel into the future by looking ahead and not just over his shoulder.
This story appears in the June 22, 1992 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.