Former Israel PM Yitzhak Shamir served his state in many ways

YITZHAK Shamir, Israel's long-serving PM, started his public career as a politician after log cloak-and-dagger service for his nation.

Yitzhak Shamir

YITZHAK Shamir, Israel's long-serving Prime Minister, was also a senior leader of the terrorist Stern Gang responsible for the assassination of Lord Moyne, the Minister of State for the Middle East, and Count Folke Bernadotte, the UN representative in the region. Shamir started his public career as a politician and statesman late in life after long cloak-and-dagger service for his nation.

In a statement on Saturday, Binyamin Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, said that Shamir "belonged to the generation of giants who founded the state of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people". Shimon Peres, the President of Israel, described him as "a brave warrior before and after the founding of the Israeli state".

By force of habit, perhaps, Shamir retained his low profile when he surfaced as a parliamentarian and later as a cabinet minister. As Speaker of the Knesset after Likud attained power in 1977, his position required him to be above politics but he provided a glimpse of his hardline stance by abstaining in the vote on the Camp David accord negotiated by Menachem Begin, then Prime Minister, and President Sadat of Egypt. When he moved to the cabinet in 1980 to succeed the dashing Moshe Dayan as Foreign Minister, he seemed content to be overshadowed not only by the charismatic Prime Minister but also by Ariel Sharon, the volatile Defence Minister. He seemed to play a very minor role in the controversial Lebanese adventure, the main international event of the period.

A government inquiry sharply drew attention to this situation. The Kahan Commission investigating the Phalangist massacre of Palestinians in West Beirut refugee camps in September 1982 heard evidence that a cabinet colleague had telephoned the Foreign Minister with an early report that the Phalangists were running amok. "The Foreign Minister did not make any real attempt to check," the commission found. "It might have been expected that the Foreign Minister, by virtue of his position, would display sensitivity and alertness to what he had heard."

When he was made Prime Minister after Begin's sudden resignation in 1983, Shamir inherited a crumbling coalition of nationalist and religious parties, staggering economic difficulties and a decline in public support for the government. He hoped to hold the coalition together by compromise or defending decisions on controversial matters, but after six months it broke up and new elections were held.

Like most of his contemporaries in Israel's founding generation, Shamir was raised in Eastern Europe. His family name was Yezernitsky. Shamir was one of the aliases he used in the Palestine underground and he kept it when he surfaced. He was born in Ruzino, Poland, to parents once active in the Russian revolutionary movement in 1905 who became thorough Zionists when they grew older. They instilled Zionist ideals in their son, who at the age of 14 joined the right-wing Revisionist youth movement, Betar. He enrolled in the Warsaw University law school but discontinued his studies in 1935 at the age of 20 to emigrate on a student's visa. He studied literature and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and held various jobs. When an accounting firm where he was employed transferred him to Tel Aviv, he dropped out of school.

In 1936 the Palestinian Arabs launched a campaign of murder, arson and sabotage against the Jewish community. The Zionist Establishment ordered the Haganah, its illegal self-defence organisation, to exercise restraint. This was rejected by the right-wing Irgun Zvai Leumi, which planted bombs in Arab market places. Shamir joined the Irgun, participating in what he later called "retaliatory actions".

When the British Government published the White Paper of 1939 declaring its intention to grant Palestine with an Arab majority independence in a decade, Irgun turned its attention to British targets in Palestine, but then proclaimed a ceasefire to co-operate with the British in fighting Hitler. A faction under Abraham Stern favoured continuing the fight against the British "occupiers" of the historic Jewish homeland, the war against the Nazis notwithstanding. In contrast to the Irgun which sabotaged institutions symbolising British authority, the Sternists went in for assassination. Again Shamir went with the hardliners. He was arrested in 1941 and sentenced to three months' imprisonment for possession of a forged government seal. After completing his sentence, he was sent to Mizra internment camps.

He was there in February 1942 when British police trapped Stern in his rooftop hideout in Tel Aviv and an officer shot him dead. The organisation tapped Shamir for a position of leadership and arranged his escape from Mizra. A Polish army officer's uniform was smuggled into the camp. Shamir put it on and walked coolly past the British sentry to a waiting taxi. In Tel Aviv, disguised in black rabbinical clothes and a full beard, he became one of the triumvirate that replaced Stern. Shamir was in charge of operations.

He was thus directly involved in the decision to assassinate Lord Moyne in Cairo in October 1944. In a subsequent interview, he was unrepentant. "Forty years later it's difficult for a person not familiar with the circumstances at the time to understand such things properly," he said. He claimed that Moyne in 1942 had persuaded the Turkish government to turn back a 180-ton cattle boat crowded with 769 Jewish refugees who had escaped the gas chambers and reached Istanbul hoping to proceed to Palestine, in defiance of the British blockade. Returned to the Black Sea, the shop sank a mile off the Turkish coast. There was one survivor.

Shamir was arrested a second time in 1946 during a four-day house-to-house search in Tel Aviv. He was banished with other terrorists to Eritrea. This time he escaped with others, crawling through a tunnel they had dug under the fence of the internment camp. Travelling eight days with three others crammed in a specially prepared compartment in a tanker truck, he reached Djibouti via Ethiopia. The French in Djibouti recognised the fugitives as political refugees, and sent them to France abroad a warship.

Shamir came home to a sovereign Israel, but again he went underground when the government outlawed the Stern Gang after members of the organisation assassinated Count Folke Bernadotte of Sweden. A United Nations mediator, the count had outraged Zionists by proposing that the Negev and Jersualem should be detached from the newly created Jewish State. Shamir contacted officials close to Ben Gurion, then the Prime Minister, and persuaded them that he had no intention of operating underground against the Jewish State that he had helped to create. He was allowed to surface and he became a businessman.

After a few unhappy years in business, he joined Mossad in 1955. He was reticent about his activities but confirmed that he had operated overseas under various aliases and often carried a gun. Iser Harel, the first director of Mossad, recalled: "Shamir was one of the most central figures in the Mossad. He was involved in daring operations."

Shamir retired in 1965 and entered another frustrating interlude in the business world. He began his relationship with the Herut Party in 1967 as a volunteer in the department for Soviet Jews. In 1973 he was elected to parliament and two years later was chosen as chairman of the party's executive committee. He was thrust on to the world political stage when his party became the ruling party.

As Prime Minister, Shamir promoted continued Jewish settlement of the West Bank and increased the Jewish population in the occupied territories by nearly 30 per cent. He also encouraged the immigration of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel.

In December 1987 he and his defence minister Yitzhak Rabin deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories to crush the Palestinian Intifada. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Shamir, at the request of the United States held Israel back from attacking Iraq even though Iraqi Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv. Later that year, under pressure from President George H.W. Bush, Shamir agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid. It was Israel's first summit meeting with the Arab states but he proved as unyielding as ever in the negotiations.

Shamir retired from politics at the age of 81 after stepping down as the Likud party leader, effectively ending his 20-year political career. He suffered from Alzheimer's disease for the last six years of his life.

Shamir's wife, who acted as a courier in his underground career, died last year. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

Yitzhak Shamir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1983-84 and 1986-92, was born on October 15, 1915. He died on June 30, 2012, aged 96

The Times