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THE INTEGRITY OF ‘NO’: VANISHING ‘GREEN LINE’ TESTAMENT TO SHAMIR’S UNWAVERING RESOLVE

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir died on Saturday at a nursing home in Herzliya at the age of 96.

 

Born Yitzhak Jazernicki in Poland in 1915, he moved to mandatory Palestine in 1935 and joined Lehi, the most hard-line of three Jewish movements resisting British authorities.

 

After Israel’s independence in 1948, Shamir pursued a career in the Mossad, before entering politics in the mid-1960s as member of the Herut party, which evolved into the present-day Likud.

 

Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin as prime minister in 1983. Known for his uncompromising stance towards the Arab Palestinians, he served as prime minister for seven years, second in length only to David Ben-Gurion, from 1983-84 and 1986-92.

May his memory be for a blessing.

 

THE INTEGRITY OF ‘NO’
Danny Danon

Jerusalem Post, July 2, 2012

The people of Israel lost a true leader on Saturday with the passing of Yitzhak Shamir. Before assuming the reins as our seventh prime minister, Shamir dutifully served his people and his country first as head of the underground Lehi, then in the Mossad where he was responsible for tracking down and eliminating some of our worst enemies including Nazi war criminals who had fled to Egypt, and finally in the political arena where he served as a member and then speaker of Knesset, foreign minister and finally prime minister after the resignation of his mentor Menachem Begin.

Upon the death of a loved one, we often take the time to look through the memory book of their life and search for the lessons their legacy can teach us. In the case of Yitzhak Shamir, a multi-volume set of thick-bound tomes might be more a appropriate metaphor. These books are filled with the earth of the whole land of Israel, and immersed in values and an understanding of our unique place in history. His spirit and his values are an inspiration to all of those who love this land and…strive to stay true to Shamir’s teachings: You do not negotiate on your core ideology.

This is what guided Shamir in his steadfast defense of the rights of the Jewish people to their historic homeland. In the years he guided Israel’s foreign policy, he would not compromise on this basic tenet. In 1992, under intense pressure from the American administration, Shamir stood fast and made clear to the world that money cannot buy values. He bravely rejected the US demand that he stop building in Judea and Samaria in return for loan guarantees.

This money was very much needed to absorb our brothers who were then coming home from the former Soviet Union, but Shamir knew that such an act on his behalf would be a slippery slope that would set a terrible precedent for the future leaders of Israel. Such a move would have endangered his…settlement enterprise which he knew was invaluable for the future wellbeing of the state.

Shamir’s decisions and policies were not always popular or politically correct. There was no end of criticism both in Israel and from the international community. In fact, there were times when his refusal to abandon his core values probably cost him at the ballot box, such as when he lost to Yitzhak Rabin in the 1992 elections. Nevertheless, over time, his steadfastness disproved today’s assumption that you must be guided daily by opinion polls to obtain power, and then govern.

Without ever abandoning his beliefs, Shamir was able to not only reach the highest office in the land, but he also ended up serving in office longer than any other prime minister since David Ben-Gurion.… We must all strive to fulfill the legacy of Prime Minister Shamir. He starkly proved that sometimes in history, saying “no” is the best possible way to achieve “yes.…”

(Danny Danon is Deputy Speaker of Israel’s Knesset.)

ISRAEL’S GRITTIEST FOUNDER
Daniel Gordis

Tablet, July 2, 2012

About a year ago, I was standing with Yitzhak Shamir’s son at a reception in the Tel Aviv area. Yair Shamir looks a great deal like his father; blink and it’s easy to imagine that you’re speaking with the former prime minister, who died this past Saturday at 96. I don’t recall everything Yair and I discussed at that reception, but I do recall how the conversation ended. We were both standing there, glasses of wine in hand, and Yair said to me: “People ask, ‘Must the sword devour forever?’ And the answer is ‘Yes, it will.’”

I was dumbstruck. I was moved, first, by the ease with which some secular Israelis still glide into biblical idiom. After all, Yair could have said, “People ask, ‘Will peace never come?’” But he didn’t. He cited the verse, ha-lanetzach tochal cherev, a verse from Samuel II in which Abner, the commander of King Saul’s army, calls out to Joab, who led David’s forces, begging him to bring the fighting between them to an end.

But I was no less struck…by the ease with which Yair simply answered “yes.” In the American, suburban home in which I was raised, we were taught that war was an aberration. Conflict is solvable.… It was one of the great principles of liberal Jewish American life, and I believed it with every fiber of my being. At least I did when we moved to Israel some 14 years ago.

Yair’s off-handed but startling comment, one his father surely would have made, was a reminder of what has undoubtedly been the single most difficult dimension of making aliyah—learning to accept, however grudgingly, that the moral assumptions of my old life are wholly inapplicable to the place my family now calls home. The Middle East is not a Hebrew-speaking version of the comfortable, safe, conflict-free suburban Baltimore in which I’d been raised. I had moved, Yair unintentionally reminded me, from the land of Jeffersonian optimism to the land of hard-edged biblical realism. “Yes,” this scion of Israeli royalty said to me in a way that no American probably ever would, “the sword will consume forever.…” Shamir would probably have [agreed]; he simply wasn’t willing to pay the price of self-delusion.

Shamir lived a life that left no room for anything but a brutally honest assessment of his surroundings. Born in Ruzhany (today Belarus), he joined Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s Zionist Betar movement in his youth and cut short his law studies to make his way to Palestine. His parents and siblings were murdered during the war.

Once in Palestine, Shamir commanded the extreme, sometimes violent Lehi underground group. He was hunted by the British, arrested, and then he escaped. Post-independence, Shamir eventually joined the Mossad and entered politics relatively late in life. When Menachem Begin unexpectedly resigned as prime minister in August 1983, Shamir ascended and served, in total, longer than any other premier besides David Ben-Gurion. Though Shamir attended the Madrid Peace Conference, acceded to American requests not to respond to Iraqi attacks during the First Gulf War, and oversaw Operation Solomon, which brought thousands of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, his reputation today is primarily that of a hard-liner, a member of the underground in his youth and unyielding with the Arabs later in life.…

It’s good that many Jews struggle with the choices that leaders like Shamir and Begin and Ariel Sharon made. Yet a bit of humility is in order as we assess those who devoted their lives to building the Jewish state. Ours is not the world that Shamir and his generation inherited. Ours is a world in which the Jews are secure, and largely safe, in no small measure as a result of what those men and women did. Are we foolish enough to imagine that the British relinquished their hold on the colonies because early colonial Americans signed petitions? American Revolutionary heroes knew exactly what Shamir and others knew: The British would leave when the costs became too high.…

Ben-Gurion, Begin, Shamir, and their generation, like Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and theirs, believed that freedom would come only with sovereignty and that sovereignty would come only with victory. No matter Labor or Likud, they all shared that belief—and they were all right.

For all the misgivings many now have about Shamir’s intransigence or his specific policies, part of his legacy is that Jews ought not to pretend not to know what, deep down, they know. Yitzhak Shamir knew what he had seen, both in Europe and then in the Arab world, and he knew what it meant. He was no less ambivalent about the Arabs than he was about the Poles and refused to vote for Begin’s peace treaty with Egypt. Presumably in deference to Begin, he abstained, but he made it clear that he thought Israel was paying far too high a price. Today, three and a half decades later, with the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power in Cairo and with Israel now missing the Sinai as a buffer, who was wiser? Was it the Nobel Prize-winning Begin who’d turned peacemaker, or Shamir, who had not? Will the sword devour forever? Yes, Shamir sadly believed, it will. Is it possible that he was right?

ISRAEL’S LEAST APPRECIATED PRIME MINISTER
Shmuley Boteach

Huffington Post, July 1, 2012

I’m not sure which is sadder, that Yitzhak Shamir died or that people didn’t really know that he was still alive. For Shamir certainly was Israel’s least appreciated Prime Minister amid presiding over some of the state’s greatest achievements.

And what was that principal achievement? He kept the people safe. Few died under his watch. He resisted international pressure for Israel to make concessions that would have led directly to buses blowing up.

As a Yeshiva student in Jerusalem, for two years of Shamir’s premiership, I remember how safe the streets were. This was a time before security guards were posted at the door of most restaurants and department stores which largely continues till today. Why? Because Shamir was adamant. He would make no territorial compromises that would endanger Israel’s security. He would sign no Oslo agreements where the Jewish state would agree to arm some of its most lethal enemies. He would not even speak to Yasser Arafat let alone countenance bringing him back to the West Bank with a small army, disguised as a police force, to set up a terror regime with Israel’s assistance.…

I came to know Mr. Shamir quite well when I hosted him at the University of Oxford in the mid-90’s. He seemed all but forgotten even then and told me that…[this] had been due to the euphoria over the Premiership of Yitzchak Rabin and his dramatic overtures for peace. He told me this with a touch of resignation. It seemed he did feel underappreciated.

More importantly, he seemed to divine the catastrophe coming. It would take the murder of some 1500 Israeli civilians (demographically equivalent to about 70,000 Americans) and the rise of countless suicide bombings for the Israeli people to realize that Shamir’s ironclad commitment to hold on to vital security territories and not allow the PLO and Hamas to set up shop in Gaza and Ramallah was what kept terrorists out.…

There is one story about Shamir that I will never forget. As we were driving from his hotel in North Oxford, through the ancient city center, I turned to him and asked him, “Had you remained Prime Minister, and now seeing how excited the Israeli people are about peace, would you have ceded any land?” He turned to me with a sudden jerk of his head and said quietly but ferociously, “Not one inch.”

KISS THE GREEN LINE GOODBYE
Michael Freund

Jerusalem Post, June 20, 2012

The announcement [in June] that a deal had been reached between the government and the residents of Beit El’s Ulpana neighborhood will hopefully bring a peaceful end to an otherwise painful episode. After months of wrangling, the two sides reached an accommodation that will bring about the relocation of the homes at the heart of the dispute along with additional building in other parts of Beit El.

This entire affair, which threatened to resurrect old wounds in Israeli society, was the opening salvo in a campaign by Israel’s Left to force the government to demolish Jewish homes in Judea and Samaria that it deems to be illegal. In the coming months, similar conflicts are likely to arise over other Jewish outposts such as those at Givat Assaf and Migron, as the Left seeks to turn back the clock and undermine Israel’s presence in the territories.

But the ideologues on the Left are missing the point. The battle over the future of a Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is over.…

Consider the following. According to an Interior Ministry census published at the start of the year, there are an estimated 722,000 Jews currently living in the areas that were liberated by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War. This includes over 300,000 who dwell in parts of eastern and northern Jerusalem that were taken back from Jordan, another 340,000 who reside in Judea and Samaria, as well as 60,000 people who live and study at various educational institutions in the area.

The significance of this statistic is enormous. It means that nearly one out of every 10 Israelis now lives beyond the so-called Green Line. That is more than the population of Tel Aviv and Haifa combined.

Hence, in just 45 years, since the miraculous victory of the Six Day War, the number of Jews living in Israel’s ancient heartland has gone from zero to 700,000 and it is still growing at a hefty clip. Indeed, in 2011, the Jewish population of Judea and Samaria grew at a pace of 4.3 percent, which is more than double the national average.

Needless to say, this number is even more remarkable when one considers the inordinate number of political, diplomatic and bureaucratic obstacles that have stood in the way of restoring the Jewish presence in the territories. Nowhere else in the world is so much attention paid to the pouring of concrete or the approval of blueprints. Whenever someone in Itamar or Kiryat Arba decides to enclose a porch or redo the kitchen, it inexplicably threatens to become an international incident, eliciting the most irrational of responses from the plenary of the United Nations to the halls of the US State Department. And Israel’s vaunted bureaucracy certainly does not make things any easier for our brethren in Judea and Samaria, who often have to obtain a dizzying array of permits to build their homes.

But despite it all, the Green Line is dead and buried.… It is no longer of any relevance, politically or otherwise. Jewish life in Judea, Samaria and eastern Jerusalem is growing and flourishing, and there is no human power on earth that is going to uproot or move hundreds of thousands of Jews from places such as Ariel, Tekoa or Hebron.

Even in the battle for Israeli public opinion, the Left’s failure has been colossal. Last [month], the results of an annual survey measuring the Israeli public’s views of the settlement enterprise were released.… The survey, which was conducted by Dr. Miriam Billig and Dr. Udi Lebel of the Ariel University Center, found that a whopping 64% of Israelis support Jewish settlement of Judea and Samaria. A similar percentage said that settling the territories is a “truly Zionist deed,” and 57% said they view Judea and Samaria as Israel’s security belt.

So despite years of demonization and delegitimization, the Jewish settlement initiative still commands profound respect and widespread support. And notwithstanding the media’s predilection to depict all Jewish settlers as bearded, gun-toting men with soup-bowl size yarmulkes on their heads patrolling barren hilltops, anyone who has visited Judea and Samaria knows better.

The population is as diverse as it is large, and it encompasses a broad array of people from a variety of religious, educational and socioeconomic backgrounds. There are secular farmers, observant hi-tech executives, female yoga instructors and Russian immigrant physicists. Some have chosen Judea and Samaria for ideological or religious reasons, while others have done so for convenience and quality of life. But whatever the motive, the repopulation of Judea and Samaria with Jews represents a remarkable triumph of the human spirit, and a validation of the pioneering ethos upon which this country was founded.

There are to be sure many challenges that still lie ahead, as pressure will continue to mount on Israel to draw boundaries and accede to some form of partial territorial retreat. The Palestinians and their allies will surely continue to insist on statehood and the expulsion of Jews.

But the Jewish people have withstood far greater threats in the past. We have overcome diplomatic disapproval, international hostility, and unjustified opprobrium to reclaim the land that is ours by history and by right.

When Jeremiah (31:4) foretold that “you will yet plant vineyards in Samaria,” and that the sounds of rejoicing would again be heard in the cities of Judea (33:10-11), he knew of what he spoke.… So to our critics and foes I have one small piece of friendly advice: you had better get used to it, because the Jewish people are here to stay.

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