1. Reuters（http://www.reuters.com）
Yitzhak Shamir, hawkish Israeli premier, dies, 30 June 2012
by Dan Williams, JERUSALEM
(Reuters) - Yitzhak Shamir, the hawkish Israeli leader who two decades ago first balked at U.S. calls to trade occupied land for Middle East peace, died on Saturday after a long illness. He was 96.
The second longest-serving prime minister after Israel's founder, David Ben-Gurion, Shamir clung to the status quo. Admirers saw strength and resolve in his position, while critics called him an intransigent naysayer who allowed Arabs to cast Israel as obstructing reconciliation.
"Yitzhak Shamir belonged to the generation of giants that founded the State of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its own land," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said in a statement after his death.
Shamir professed a commitment to peace, calling it "the only prize ... that can justify any war," but insisted Israel never be rushed into a deal or lose its nerve.
"Big countries, I told myself, can afford to make mistakes; small ones cannot," he wrote in his memoir "Summing Up".
Born in Poland with the surname Yezernitzky, Shamir moved to British-ruled Palestine before the Holocaust, in which his family died. Steely and secretive, he ran missions against British and Arab targets for the hardline Jewish underground group Irgun, taking his Hebrew name from an alias used to evade police dragnets.
He later became a leader of another underground group, the Lehi, or Stern Gang. Captured and deported to Eritrea in 1946, the diminutive, beetle-browed Shamir missed much of the fighting that led to Israel's founding two years later. Upon his return, he found himself out of step with the country's left-leaning political leadership of the day.
The Mossad spy service provided Shamir a back door to power. Recruited in 1955, Shamir clambered up the Mossad's ranks during shadow wars with regional foes and international hunts for Nazi fugitives.
He credited a posting in France with lending some refinement to his style - "the scenery, the way people looked, the food, the wine, Piaf," he reminisced - and prepared him for his 1980 breakthrough as foreign minister for the rightist Likud party.
Shamir was a mistrustful diplomat. Prime Minister Menachem Begin had signed a landmark peace accord with Egypt in 1979, yet Shamir bristled at Cairo's insistence that Israel make way for Palestinian independence.
"Judea and Samaria are an integral part of the land of Israel, neither 'captured' ... nor 'returnable' to anyone," he said, using biblical terms for the occupied West Bank, which, along with the Gaza Strip, the Israelis had extensively settled, and where the Palestinians seek statehood.
Ruined by Israel's 1982 Lebanon invasion, Begin resigned and was succeeded by Shamir, who would later enter an awkward coalition with Shimon Peres' left-leaning Labour party in which the two leaders rotated the premiership between them.
It was a turbulent time. Shamir was forced to crack down on challenges from a new Jewish underground made up of West Bank settlers, who attacked Arab notables and plotted to bomb a Jerusalem mosque, and from the first Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, which erupted in 1987.
Rather than seek accommodation with the Palestinians, Shamir championed new settlements and the immigration of hundreds of thousands of Soviet and Ethiopian Jews in a bid to keep ahead of the growing Muslim population under Israeli rule.
Although known as a hardliner, Shamir nonetheless showed teeth-gritting restraint during the 1991 Gulf War. At the urging of the United States, he held Israel's fire in the face of Scud missile salvoes by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein rather than retaliate and endanger the U.S. alliance with Arab powers battling to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
His forbearance on that occasion drove home Israel's subordination to Washington's Middle East interests.
"I can think of nothing that went more against my grain as a Jew and a Zionist, nothing more opposed to the ideology on which my life has been based, than the decision I took ... to ask the people of Israel to accept the burden of restraint," Shamir said later.
After the war, U.S. President George H.W. Bush called on Israel to accept multiparty peace talks with the Arabs. His administration hardened the demand by postponing $10 billion in U.S. loan guarantees that the Shamir government needed to absorb new immigrants.
Shamir hinted darkly that Bush, leader of the country's most important ally, was an anti-Semite, but relented on attending the Madrid peace conference, where he became the first Israeli leader to sit opposite Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese delegates.
The event was short on reconciliation - Shamir spoke of peace with only "self-government" for the Palestinians - but paved the way for the bilateral negotiations pursued by Labour's Yitzhak Rabin, who rode a wave of Israeli optimism to defeat Shamir in a 1992 election.
The White House said in a statement: "Yitzhak Shamir dedicated his life to the State of Israel. From his days working for Israel's independence to his service as Prime Minister, he strengthened Israel's security and advanced the partnership between the United States and Israel. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and the people of Israel."
Shamir was infirm and withdrawn from public life in later years. With Likud back in power and his former deputy foreign minister Netanyahu as premier, Israel remains at loggerheads with the Palestinians, with many disputes still festering.
"The truth is that, in the final analysis, the search for peace has always been a matter of who would tire of the struggle first, and blink," he wrote in his autobiography.
(Editing by Roger Atwood and Doina Chiacu)
2. The Jerusalem Post （http://www.jpost.com）
Former PM Yitzhak Shamir passes away at age 96 in Tel Aviv, 30 June 2012
by GIL HOFFMAN
Israel's seventh prime minister passes away in Tel Aviv nursing home, scheduled to be laid to rest in state funeral on Monday; receives praise from across political spectrum for uncompromising loyalty to Israel.
Former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir died at the age of 96 on Saturday, at the nursing home in which he lived in Tel Aviv, after a long illness.
He will be buried in Jerusalem’s Mount Herzl Cemetery in a state funeral on Monday after his son Yair returns from abroad. The procession will begin at the Knesset, where the public will be invited to pay its respects.
Shamir lived in a nursing home since 2004 because of his poor health and Alzheimer’s disease.
He left behind two children and five grandchildren. Shamir’s wife, Shulamit, died last year at the age of 88.
Shamir was the state’s seventh prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992, the longest-serving premier after David Ben-Gurion. He was known for resisting international pressure to make concessions, yet initiated a peace process in Madrid that led to many diplomatic overtures by his successors.
“The truth is that, in the final analysis, the search for peace has always been a matter of who would tire of the struggle first, and blink,” he wrote in his autobiography.
Shamir also served as foreign minister, Knesset speaker and opposition head, and was an agent in the Mossad. He was among the leaders of the Stern Group (Lehi) in the Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine.
President Shimon Peres, who fought bitterly with Shamir in the 1980s, issued a statement in which he described Shamir as a courageous fighter both before and after the establishment of the state. Peres said Shamir had left a lasting legacy of bravery.
“He remained true to his beliefs, was a great patriot of his people and a great lover of Israel who served the nation loyally and with great dedication for many years,” Peres said.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants that established the State of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land.”
He said Shamir, whose family died in the Holocaust, fought in the Stern Group and as prime minister to build up the security of the state and ensure its future out of concern for its citizens.
“We lost a great man who was a great leader, who was fundamentally a man of the people,” Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said.
“To really understand him and his refusal to be enticed by diplomatic overtures that would have weakened Israel, you had to have heard him speak on Holocaust Remembrance Day,” he continued.
Shamir was a symbol of Israel’s rising from the ashes of the Holocaust to strength and staying power. Out of this developed his personality as an enlightened realist and a stiff ideologue who withstood internal and external pressure and fought to prevent a situation in which the people of Israel will not have their own land and state.”
By contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who served as a minister in Shamir’s cabinet, praised Shamir for negotiating with the Palestinians, initiating peace talks in Madrid and resisting pressure to attack Iraq after Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel during the First Gulf War.
Defense Minister Ehud Barak expressed sorrow at Shamir’s death, saying he acted all his life as an “uncompromising and focused granite rock.”
“In the underground, in the Mossad, in the governments of Israel and as prime minister, Yitzhak Shamir always strove to ensure Israel’s freedom,” Barak said.
The defense minister added that Shamir “asked himself only what is good and right in the struggle for Israel’s security, what is good and right for the people of Israel, and thus he acted.”
Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman referred to Shamir as “a man who had a major role in forming the state.” He said Shamir had served as an example of a man of principle.
“I had the honor of knowing Shamir personally and I will always remember him and his great contribution to the country,” Liberman said.
Opposition leader Shelly Yechimovich called Shamir “a determined prime minister who dedicated his life to his country in his own ideological fashion, with integrity, humility and with a modest way of life worthy of a leader.”
Yechimovich praised Shamir for exercising restraint during the First Gulf War, keeping Israel from unnecessarily becoming entangled in a war with Iraq despite his hawkish beliefs.
Born in Ruzhany, then part of Poland in the Russian Empire and now part of Belarus, with the surname Yezernitzky, Shamir moved to British-ruled Palestine in 1935. Steely and secretive, he ran missions against British and Arab targets for the Irgun, taking his Hebrew name from an alias used to evade police dragnets.
He joined the Stern Group when it split from the Irgun in 1940.
Captured and deported to Eritrea in 1946, the diminutive, beetle-browed Shamir missed much of the fighting that led to the state’s founding two years later. Upon his return, he found himself out of step with the country’s left-leaning political leadership of the day.
The Mossad spy service provided Shamir a back door to power. Recruited in 1955, he clambered up the Mossad’s ranks during shadow wars with Middle East foes and international hunts for Nazi fugitives.
He credited a posting in France with lending some refinement to his style – “the scenery, the way people looked, the food, the wine, Piaf,” he would later say – and prepared him for his 1980 breakthrough as foreign minister for the Likud.
Although known as a hardliner, Shamir nonetheless showed teeth-gritting restraint during the 1991 Gulf War. At the urging of the United States, he held Israel’s fire in the face of Scud missile salvoes by dictator Saddam Hussein rather than retaliate and endanger the US alliance with Arab powers battling to expel Iraq from Kuwait.
His forbearance on that occasion drove home Israel’s consideration for Washington’s Middle East interests.
“I can think of nothing that went more against my grain as a Jew and a Zionist, nothing more opposed to the ideology on which my life has been based, than the decision I took... to ask the people of Israel to accept the burden of restraint,” Shamir said later.
After the war, US president George H.W. Bush called on Israel to accept multi-party peace talks with the Arabs. His administration drove home the demand by postponing $10 billion in US loan guarantees that the Shamir government needed to absorb new immigrants.
Shamir hinted darkly that Bush, the leader of the country’s most important ally, was an anti-Semite but relented on attending the Madrid peace conference, where he became the first Israeli leader to sit opposite Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese delegates.
The event was short on reconciliation – Shamir spoke of peace with only “self-government” for the Palestinians – but paved the way for the bilateral negotiations pursued by Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin, who rode a wave of Israeli optimism to defeat Shamir in a 1992 election.
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3. New York Times (http://www.nytimes.com)
Yitzhak Shamir, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Dies at 96, 30 June 2012
by JOEL BRINKLEY
Yitzhak Shamir, who emerged from the militant wing of a Jewish militia and served as Israel’s prime minister longer than anyone but David Ben-Gurion, promoting a muscular Zionism and expansive settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, died Saturday at a nursing home in Tel Aviv. He was 96.
Mr. Shamir had Alzheimer’s disease for at least the last six years, an associate said. His death was announced by the prime minister’s office.
A native of Poland whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust, Mr. Shamir was part of a group of right-wing Israeli politicians led by Menachem Begin who rose to power in the 1970s as the more left-wing Labor Party declined, viewed as corrupt and disdainful of the public.
Stubborn and laconic, Mr. Shamir was by his own assessment a most unlikely political leader whose very personality seemed the perfect representation of his government’s policy of patient, determined, unyielding opposition to territorial concessions.
Many of his friends and colleagues ascribed his character to his years in the underground in the 1940s, when he sent Jewish fighters out to kill British officers whom he saw as occupiers. He was a wanted man then; to the British rulers of the Palestine mandate he was a terrorist, an assassin. He appeared in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi. But Mr. Shamir said he considered those “the best years of my life.”
His wife, Shulamit, once said that in the underground she and her husband had learned not to talk about their work for fear of being overheard. It was a habit he apparently never lost.
Mr. Shamir was not blessed with a sharp wit, a soothing public manner or an engaging oratorical style. Most often he answered questions with a shrug and an air of weary wisdom, as if to say: “This is so clear. Why do you even ask?”
In 1988, at a meeting of the political party Herut, he sat slumped on a sofa, gazing at the floor as party stalwarts heaped praises on him. Shortly thereafter, he said: “I like all those people, they’re nice people. But this is not my style, not my language. This kind of meeting is the modern picture, but I don’t belong to it.”
Rather than bend to them, Mr. Shamir often simply outlasted his political opponents, who were usually much more willing to say what was on their minds, and sometimes to get in trouble for it. To Mr. Shamir, victory came not from compromise, but from strength, patience and cunning.
“If he wants something, it may take a long time, but he’ll never let go,” Avi Pazner, his media adviser, once remarked.
In a statement on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Mr. Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants who founded the State of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people.”
“As prime minister,” he added, “Yitzhak Shamir took action to fortify Israel’s security and ensure its future.”
Prime Minister Begin appointed Mr. Shamir as foreign minister in 1980. When Mr. Begin suddenly retired in 1983, Mr. Shamir became a compromise candidate to replace him, alternating in the post with Shimon Peres for one four-year term. Mr. Shamir won his own term in 1988. He entered the political opposition when Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party was elected prime minister in 1992. Mr. Shamir retired from politics a few years later, at 81.
A Hard-Line Approach
As prime minister, Mr. Shamir promoted continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel conquered in 1967; the Jewish population in the occupied territories increased by nearly 30 percent while he was in office. He also encouraged the immigration of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, an influx that changed the country’s demographic character.
One of the most notable events during his tenure was the Palestinian uprising against Israeli control that began in December 1987, the so-called intifada. He and his defense minister, Mr. Rabin, deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories to quash the rebellion. They failed; the years of violence and death on both sides brought criticism and condemnation from around the world.
The fighting also deepened divisions between Israel’s two political camps: leftists who believed in making concessions to bring peace, and members of the right who believed, as Mr. Shamir once put it, that “Israel’s days without Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone and will not return.”
The intifada dragged on year after year as the death toll climbed from dozens to hundreds. Israel’s isolation increased, until finally the rebellion was overshadowed in 1991 by the first Persian Gulf war.
During that war, at the request of the United States, Prime Minister Shamir held Israel back from attacking Iraq, even as Iraqi Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv. For that he won new favor in Washington and promises of financial aid from the United States to help with the settlement of new Israeli citizens from the Soviet Union.
Then in the fall of 1991, under pressure from the first President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Mr. Shamir agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid, Israel’s first summit meeting with the Arab states. There, he was as unyielding as ever, denouncing Syria at one point as having “the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.”
Yitzhak Shamir was born on Oct. 22, 1915, in a Polish town under Russian control to Shlomo and Perla Penina Yezernitzky. He immigrated to the Palestine mandate when he was 20 and selected Shamir as his Hebrew surname. The word means thorn or sharp point.
Members of his family who remained in Poland died in the Holocaust; his father was killed by Poles whom the family had regarded as friends. Memories of the Holocaust colored his opinions for the rest of his life.
In the British-ruled Palestine mandate, Mr. Shamir first worked as a bookkeeper and a construction worker. But after Arabs attacked Jewish settlers and the British in 1936, he joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground Jewish defense league. In 1940, the Irgun’s most militant members formed the Lehi, or Stern Gang, named for its first leader, Abraham Stern.
After the British police killed Mr. Stern in 1942, Mr. Shamir became one of the group’s top commanders. Under his leadership it began a campaign of what it called personal terror, assassinating top British military and government officers, often gunning them down in the street.
To the Jewish public, and even to the other Jewish underground groups, Mr. Shamir’s gang was “lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience,” Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on the streets of his city.
Years later, however, Mr. Shamir contended that it had been more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as the other underground groups did. Besides, he once said, “a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.”
Several histories of the period have asserted that he masterminded a failed attempt to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. When Mr. Shamir was asked about these episodes in later years, his denials held a certain evasive tone.
It was during his time in the underground that Mr. Shamir met Shulamit Levy, who was his courier and confidante, he wrote in his autobiography, “Summing Up.” The couple married in 1944, meeting at a location in Jerusalem and gathering people off the street as witnesses, said their daughter, Gilada Diamant. After a hasty ceremony in deep cover, each departed immediately for a separate city.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Shamir is survived by a son, Yair, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His wife died last year.
For a brief period after World War II, the three major Jewish underground groups cooperated — until the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. Scores of people were killed, and Mr. Shamir was among those arrested and exiled to an internment camp in Eritrea. But he escaped a few months later and took refuge in France. He arrived in the newly independent Israel in May 1948.
Entry Into Politics
Mr. Shamir was a pariah of sorts to the new Labor government of Israel, which regarded him as a terrorist. Rebuffed in his efforts to work in the government, he drifted from one small job to another until 1955, when he finally found a government agency that appreciated his past: the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. He served in several posts, including that of top agent in France, but returned to Israel and spent several years in business.
He joined Mr. Begin’s Herut Party in 1970 and was elected to Parliament in December 1973. When the Likud, or unity, bloc, which absorbed Herut, won power in 1977, Mr. Shamir was elected speaker. And when President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt visited Jerusalem in November 1977, Mr. Shamir and Israel’s president, Ephraim Katzir, escorted him to the speaker’s rostrum for his speech. But the next year, when the Parliament voted on the Camp David accords, which set out the terms for peace with Egypt, Mr. Shamir abstained.
In 1979, when Moshe Dayan resigned as foreign minister, Mr. Begin proposed appointing Mr. Shamir to replace him. Yechiel Kadishai, chief of the prime minister’s office under Mr. Begin, recalled that Mr. Shamir was chosen because the prime minister did not want or need a powerful figure high in his cabinet.
“Begin had already established himself,” Mr. Kadishai said. “But by 1980, he wanted no competitors for power and selected Shamir because he was not so known in political circles.”
The liberal members of Mr. Begin’s coalition objected, so Mr. Begin named himself foreign minister until 1980, when Mr. Shamir finally took the post. The Labor Party saw his appointment as an mistake, since it considered him an extremist.
Mr. Shamir’s political opponents said that his laconic nature played into his handling of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut in September 1982, during Israel’s war in Lebanon.
On the evening of Sept. 16, Phalangists — Lebanese Christian militiamen — entered the camps and began killing hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children while the Israeli Army, largely unaware of the killings, stood guard at the gates.
The next morning in Tel Aviv, Ze’ev Schiff, a prominent Israeli journalist, received a call from a military official who told him about the slaughter. He rushed to the office of his friend Mordechai Zipori, the minister of communications, and told him what he had heard. Mr. Zipori then called the foreign minister, Mr. Shamir.
Mr. Shamir was scheduled to meet with military and intelligence officials shortly, so with some urgency Mr. Zipori told him to ask about the report he had received that the Phalangists “are carrying out a slaughter.”
Mr. Zipori remembered that Mr. Shamir promised to look into the report. But according to the official findings of an Israeli government commission of inquiry, Mr. Shamir merely asked Foreign Ministry officers to see “whether any new reports had arrived from Beirut.” When the meeting ended, Mr. Shamir “left for his home and took no additional action,” the report said.
Years later, Mr. Shamir said: “You know, in those times of the Lebanese war, every day something happened. And from the first glance of it, it seemed like just another detail of what was going on every day. But after 24 hours, it became clear it was not a normal event.”
Mr. Shamir was certainly not the only Israeli official who failed to act, but the commission found it “difficult to find a justification” for his decision not to make “any attempt to check whether there was anything in what he heard.”
When Mr. Begin retired in 1983, Mr. Shamir was designated his successor largely because of his position in the Foreign Ministry.
Even many in his own party thought Mr. Shamir would lose the election. And even after he took office, many saw this low-key, colorless man as a caretaker. In some ways he was. Asked once what he intended to do in his second full term in office, he said he had no plans except to “keep things as they are.”
“With our long, bitter experience,” he added, “we have to think twice before we do something.”
・Ethan Bronner and Jodi Rudoren contributed reporting.
4． Haaretz（http://www.haaretz.com）
Yitzhak Shamir: An honest liar, one we can be proud of, 1 July 2012
Honest, a stone-waller, endlessly frustrating. But also a straight-shooter, a man of his word. In this, Yitzhak Shamir brought honor to the Jewish state and the Jewish people.
By David Landau
Yitzhak Shamir used to say of himself that his public career was entirely devoid of personal ego. He was one hundred percent devoted to the cause, to the national interest as he saw it. Zero percent to his own interests.
5. AlJazeera (http://www.aljazeera.com)
Former Israeli PM Yitzhak Shamir dies at 96, 30 June 2012
Born in Poland in 1915, two-time prime minister was in power during Palestinian uprising and 1991 Gulf War.
Israeli media have reported that former prime minister Yitzhak Shamir has died. He was 96.
Benjamin Netnayhau, the current Israeli prime minister, mourned Shamir's death on Saturday, saying in a statement that Shamir "led Israel with a deep loyalty to the nation".
Netanyahu "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", the statement said.
The funeral is to take place on Monday in Jerusalem, where he is to be buried alongside his wife, Shulamit, who died last July.
Born Yitzhak Jazernicki in Poland in 1915, he moved to Palestine in 1935.
After the creation of Israel, Shamir continued his clandestine activities in the Mossad, Israel's intelligence service, notably serving at the agency's European headquarters in Paris.
Shamir gave up spying in 1965 and entered politics five years later to become speaker of the Knesset after his right-wing Likud party won general elections in 1977.
Against territorial pullout
As head of Likud, which Netanyahu now leads, he served as premier from 1983 to 1984 and from 1986 to 1992.
His term as prime minister was marked by the Palestinian uprising and the 1991 Gulf War, when Iraq fired 39 Scud missiles on Israel.
Shamir never saw territorial pullout as a way to resolve the Middle East conflict, and was one of the few deputies to abstain during the 1978 vote to ratify Israel's historic peace agreement with Egypt.
In 1999 he left Likud, accusing Netanyahu of betraying his party's ideology by agreeing to limited Palestinian sovereignty over parts of the occupied West Bank. Shamir always believed the Jewish state should stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
Shamir had withdrawn from public life since the mid-1990s, silenced by Alzheimer's disease.
He made his final appearance on the international stage at the 1991 Madrid international conference which led to peace talks between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
Following Likud's defeat to Labour in 1992 elections, Shamir retired from political life in 1996.
6. Zionizm-Israel (http://www.zionism-israel.com/bio/Itzhak_Shamir_biography.htm)
Zionism and Israel - Biographies
Biography of Yitzhak Shamir
Yitzhak Shamir was Prime Minister and foreign Minister of Israel. - He was seventh Prime Minister of the State of Israel. Born Yitzhak Yzernitzky (or Yezhernitsky or Jeziernicky) in Ruzinoy (or Ruzhany), Poland in 1915. He may have attended Bialystok Hebrew secondary school and at age 14 joined the Betar youth movement.
He or his family apparently lived in Volkovysk, Belarus during his last years in Poland, but he also may have been studying law in Warsaw in the same period.
In 1935 he moved to Palestine and enrolled at the Hebrew University. In 1937, opposing the mainstream Zionist policy of restraint vis-à-vis the British Mandatory administration, Shamir joined the Irgun Tzeva'i Le'umi (Etzel) - the Revisionist underground organization - and in 1940 became a member of the small, but more militant, faction led by Avraham Stern, the Lehi (Lohamei Herut Israel - Fighters for the Freedom of Israel), that broke away from the larger body. There, as part of the leadership troika, he coordinated organizational and operational activities.
Twice arrested by the British - during and after World War II - Shamir escaped both times, the second time in 1947 from the British prison camp in Eritrea to neighboring French Djibouti. Granted political asylum in France, he returned to Palestine in 1948 and resumed command of the Lehi until it was disbanded following the establishment of the State of Israel.
After several years during which he managed commercial enterprises, Shamir joined Israel's security services in the mid-1950s and held senior positions in the Mossad. He returned to private commercial activity in the mid-1960s and became involved in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry. In 1970 he joined Menachem Begin's opposition Herut party and became a member of its Executive. In 1973 he was elected a Member of Knesset for the Likud party - a position he held for the next 23 years. During his first decade as a parliamentarian, Shamir was a member of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and, in 1977, became Speaker of the Knesset. In this capacity he presided over the historic appearance of Egyptian President Sadat in the Knesset and the debate over ratifying the Camp David Accords two years later. He abstained in the vote on the Accords, primarily because of the requirement to dismantle settlements. Yitzhak Shamir served as Minister of Foreign Affairs between 1980 and 1983. Among his achievements were closer ties with Washington - reflected in the Memorandum of Understanding on strategic cooperation with the United States and the agreement in principle on free trade between the two nations. Shamir also initiated diplomatic contacts with many African countries which had severed diplomatic ties during the 1973 oil crisis.
Following the resignation of Menachem Begin in October 1983, Yitzhak Shamir became Prime Minister until the general elections in the fall of 1984. During this year, Shamir concentrated on economic matters - the economy was suffering from hyper-inflation - while also nurturing closer strategic ties with the United States.
Indecisive results in the 1984 general elections led to the formation of a National Unity Government based on a rotation agreement between Shamir and Labor leader Shimon Peres. Shamir served as Vice-Premier and Minister of Foreign Affairs for two years, while Shimon Peres was Prime Minister. Peres managed to bring the rampant inflation under control. Subsequently, Shamir served for six years as Prime Minister - from 1986 to 1992 - first heading a National Unity Government, and then as head of a narrow coalition government. Like Begin, Shamir pursued a policy of energetic settlement in the West Bank occupied territories, and invoked the exasperation of US officials who were anxious to promote various peace plans. Shamir opposed a proposed plan for making peace with Jordan offered in 1987, which would have involved Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank. This precipitated the breakup of the unity government and also caused Jordan's King Hussein to give up his claims on the West Bank in favor of the PLO.
Yitzhak Shamir's second term as Prime Minister was marked by two major events: the 1991 Gulf War, in which Shamir - despite Iraqi missile attacks on Israel's civilian population - bent to American demands for restraint. In October 1991, The Middle East Peace Conference in Madrid, forced on Shamir by the United States, inaugurated direct talks between Israel and the neighboring Arab states as well as multilateral regional talks. Two momentous events overshadowed other issues on the public agenda. The first, beginning in 1989, was the victory in the long struggle for Jewish emigration from the USSR, which brought 450,000 immigrants to Israel in the next two years; the second was "Operation Solomon," in May 1991, in which 15,000 Ethiopian Jews were rescued and brought to Israel in a massive airlift.
After the Likud party lost the 1992 elections, Shamir stepped down from the party leadership and in 1996 also retired from the Knesset.
（End）
