Yitzchak Shamir

Yitzchak Shamir (1980)

Yitzchak Shamir ( Hebrew יצחק שמיר; Born on October 15, 1915 in Ruschany, Grodno Governorate , Russian Empire , today Breszkaja Woblasz , Belarus , born Icchak Jaziernicki ; died June 30, 2012 in Tel Aviv ) was an Israeli politician ( Likud ). From 1955 to 1965 he worked for the Mossad foreign intelligence service . He was President of the Knesset from 1977 to 1980 , Foreign Minister from 1980 to 1986 and Prime Minister from 1983 to 1984 and from 1986 to 1992 .

Life

Early years and family

Shamir was born as the son of Schlomo and Perla Jaziernicki in the then mostly Jewish village of Ruschany. His father ran a leather factory. As a youth, Shamir joined the Zionist Betar organization under the impression of strong anti-Semitism in the Second Polish Republic . He graduated from the Hebrew School in Białystok and then studied law at the University of Warsaw until he interrupted his studies in 1935 to emigrate to Palestine .

Shamir stated that his father managed to escape from a deportation train during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. He then sought refuge in his home town of Ruschany, where he was stoned to death by the Polish villagers. According to Shamir, the perpetrators were friends from his childhood. His mother and sisters died in the German concentration camps. As a result of these circumstances and his experiences in Poland, Shamir acquired an anti-Polish attitude. He later claimed that every Pole had "sucked in anti-Semitism with their breast milk" .

Shamir was married to Shulamit, with whom he had two children ( Ja'ir and Gilada). His wife died in 2011. He named his son Ja'ir after the pseudonym of the Lechi founder Avraham "Ja'ir" Stern . Ja'ir Shamir is a member of the secular nationalist party Jisra'el Beitenu and was Israeli Minister of Agriculture from 2013 to 2015 .

British mandate period

Shamir around 1938

In Palestine, Shamir became a member of the Irgun , one of the Jewish underground military organizations in Palestine. In 1940, under Avraham Stern von Irgun, a radical splinter group called Lechi split off to continue the fight against the British mandate power , since Irgun had concluded an armistice with the British. Shamir joined Lechi, was imprisoned by the British in 1941, and escaped from an internment camp in 1942 after Stern's death. In 1943 he became one of the three leaders of the newly formed Lechi. In the following years this carried out, among other things, the attacks on the British Middle East Minister Lord Moyne and the UN Middle East mediator Folke Bernadotte .

In 1944 he met his future wife, Schulamit, in a British internment camp, who was stuck there because she had entered Palestine illegally. He had two children with her. She died on July 29, 2011.

Mossad

After the Israeli War of Independence , Shamir worked for the Mossad foreign intelligence service from 1955 to 1965 . He headed the unit responsible for Operation Damocles in 1962. The Mossad carried out several assassinations on Germans who worked for the Egyptian missile program . After the operation became public, the Ben-Gurion government urged Mossad director Isser Harel to resign and replace him with Meir Amit . Since Shamir couldn't stand Amit, he also said goodbye six months later. He then worked as the director of a rubber factory in Kfar Saba .

Political career

Shamir campaigned for the right of Soviet Jews to emigrate to Israel. In 1970 he joined the revisionist Zionist party Cherut, led by Menachem Begin , and headed its department for immigration policy. At 55, he got into politics unusually late. He was also considered an outsider in the Cherut, who was dominated by Begin and other former Irgun fighters, while Shamir came from the Lechi. Nevertheless, he was elected to the Knesset in 1973 on a safe list of the right-wing Likud alliance, to which Cherut belonged . After Likud's electoral victory in 1977 , Shamir was elected President of the Knesset. After Moshe Dajan's resignation , Shamir became foreign minister in Begin's government in March 1980 and retained the post in Begin's second cabinet after the 1981 election .

Shamir was not considered a polished author or rousing speaker, but his strength was assertiveness. Although he was known as a hardliner of Likud, Shamir presided over the visit of Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat in 1977 and the subsequent peace talks. In June 1981, Shamir, together with Prime Minister Begin and Chief of Staff Rafael Eitan, decided on Operation Opera , the Israeli air strike on the Iraqi nuclear reactor in Osirak . In 1981 and 1982 he led negotiations with Egypt aimed at normalizing relations under the treaty, and he also led negotiations in 1983 that led to an agreement with Lebanon (which, however, was never ratified by the Lebanese government).

Prime Minister

Shamir in 1988

After Menachem Begin's resignation, Shamir was appointed prime minister on October 10, 1983 .

Because he failed to stabilize Israel's inflationary economy, there were unscheduled new elections in 1984. A coalition of his Likud was formed with the Avoda led by Shimon Peres . Peres took over the post of Israeli Prime Minister for the first part of the term of office and was replaced by Shamir in September 1986 under the Israeli model . In 1987 the First Intifada (armed struggle of the Palestinians against Israel) began, against which the Shamir government cracked down on with a hard hand.

In 1988 the grand coalition was re-elected, after which Shamir and Peres formed a new coalition government. After the Labor Party left in 1990, Shamir headed a minority government.

In 1991 the Shamir government took part in the Madrid peace talks after strong American pressure . At the same time he had numerous Jewish settlements in the West Bank expanded or newly built; Unrelated allegations of murder on the part of Arab summit participants regarding his underground activities and increasing distrust on the part of the Americans in view of his rigid stance weakened his negotiating position considerably.

In the same year, he enabled the resettlement of thousands of Ethiopian Jews , Operation Solomon . After Israel was hit by a volley of Iraqi R-17 missiles during the Iraq war , the Shamir government decided against a counterstrike because the US saw the Arab-Western war coalition in danger. After the Likud was voted out of office in 1992, Yitzchak Rabin (Labor Party) was his successor.

Withdrawal from politics

Shamir resigned from the Likud presidency in March 1993 after being criticized by his successor Benjamin Netanyahu for his indecision on the Palestinian issue.

In 2001, Shamir was awarded the Israel Prize . He died on June 30, 2012 in Tel Aviv after a long illness of Alzheimer's disease .

Web links

Commons : Jitzchak Shamir  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Jitzchak Schamir in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Israel's former Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir is dead. Accessed June 30, 2012 . 
2. ↑ Yitzhak Shamir, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Dies at 96. Retrieved June 30, 2012 (English). 
3. ^ Ahron Bregman, A History of Israel , Palgrave Macmillan 2003, p. 205.
4. ^ [1] Adam Michnik : Poland and the Jews , in: The New York Review of Books , 1991.
5. ↑ ^{a b c d} David Landau: When Shamir revealed how his parents and sisters were killed in the Holocaust in The Times of Israel, May 1989.
6. ↑ Anshel Pfeffer: Shamir was right about one thing in: Haaretz , July 6, 2012.
7. ↑ Yossi Melman: Targeted Killings - a Retro Fashion Very Much in Vogue. In: Haaretz , March 23, 2004.
8. ↑ Thomas G. Mitchell: Likud Leaders: The Lives and Careers of Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. McFarland & Co., Jefferson (NC) 2015, p. 101.
9. ↑ Thomas G. Mitchell: Likud Leaders: The Lives and Careers of Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. McFarland & Co., Jefferson (NC) 2015, pp. 102-103.
10. ↑ Thomas G. Mitchell: Likud Leaders: The Lives and Careers of Menahem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon. McFarland & Co., Jefferson (NC) 2015, p. 103.