Yitzhak Shamir
Yitzhak Shamir was an Israeli politician who served as the seventh prime minister of Israel, serving two terms. Before the establishment of the State of Israel, Shamir was a leader of the Zionist terrorist group Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang.
Yitzhak Shamir grew up in interwar Poland. Shamir joined Betar, the paramilitary wing of Revisionist Zionist Ze'ev Jabotinsky's Hatzohar political party. In 1935, Shamir emigrated from Białystok to British Palestine, where he worked in an accountant's office. Shamir joined the Revisionist Zionist Irgun paramilitary group led by Menachem Begin. During World War II the Irgun split over the question of whether to support the Axis powers against the British Empire. Avraham Stern and Shamir sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and formed the breakaway militia group Lehi. Lehi was unable to persuade the Axis powers to lend it support. Shamir led Lehi after Stern's assassination in 1942. In 1944 Shamir married Lehi member Shulamit Levy. During the 1948 Palestine war, Lehi and the Irgun committed the Deir Yassin massacre of over 100 Palestinians.
After the establishment of the Israeli state Shamir served in Mossad between 1955 and 1965. Shamir directed Operation Damocles and resigned from Mossad after Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered an end to the program. In 1969 Shamir joined Menachem Begin's Herut Party. Shamir was first elected to the Knesset in 1973 as a member of the Likud alliance of parties. Shamir served as Speaker of the Knesset after Likud became the first right-wing Israeli government after winning the 1977 Israeli legislative election against Prime Minister Shimon Peres' Alignment. Shamir was named Foreign Minister by Prime Minister Begin in 1980 and would serve in this post until 1986. Shamir was Foreign Minister during the 1982 Israel invasion of Lebanon.
Shamir won the 1983 Herut leadership election to succeed Begin as party leader, which made him Prime Minister and leader of the Likud after a merger. Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir lost the 1984 election to Peres. Peres and Shamir entered into a grand coalition deal where Peres became prime minister while Shamir remained foreign minister until 1986, when Peres and Shamir traded jobs. The First Intifada began in 1987 and Shamir resisted a two-state solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Shamir unified the Likud alliance into one party in 1988. Shamir reluctantly restarted the Israeli–Palestinian peace process at the behest of the United States and Soviet Union which culminated in the Madrid Conference of 1991. Shamir lost the 1992 Israeli legislative election to Yitzhak Rabin and in 1993 Benjamin Netanyahu replaced him as Likud leader.
Early life
Yitzhak Yezernitsky was born in the predominantly Jewish village of Ruzhany, Bialystok-Grodno District of Ober Ost, shortly thereafter incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland, as the son of Perla and Shlomo, owner of a leather factory. Shamir later moved to Białystok and studied at a Hebrew high school network. As a youth, Yezernitsky joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. Yezernitsky studied law at the University of Warsaw, but cut his studies short in order to emigrate to what was then Mandatory Palestine in 1935. Shamir was the surname Yitzhak Yezernitsky used on a forged underground identity card. Once in British Palestine, Yitzhak Yezernitsky changed his surname to Shamir. He later said Shamir means a thorn that stabs and a rock that can cut steel. Shamir initially worked in an accountant's office.Lehi leadership
Shamir joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist paramilitary group that opposed British control of Palestine. During World War II the Irgun split over the question of whether to support the Axis powers against the British Empire. Avraham Stern and Shamir sought an alliance with Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany and formed the more militant breakaway militia group Lehi.Lehi was unable to persuade the Axis powers to lend it support and became widely known as the Stern Gang. Yitzhak Shamir was imprisoned by British authorities in 1941. A few months after Stern was killed by the British in 1942, Shamir and Eliyahu Giladi hid under a stack of mattresses in a warehouse of the detention camp at Mazra'a, and at night escaped through the barbed wire fences of the camp. Shamir became the leader of the Stern Gang, and, together with Giladi, Anshell Shpillman and Yehoshua Cohen, reorganized the movement into cells and trained its members. In his memoirs, Shamir admitted in 1994 what had long been suspected: that the killing of Giladi in 1943 was ordered by Shamir himself, allegedly due to Giladi advocating the assassination of David Ben-Gurion, and arguing for other violence deemed too extremist by fellow Stern members.
Lehi leadership consisted of a troika of Yitzhak Shamir, Nathan Yellin-Mor and Israel Eldad. Shamir sought to emulate the anti-British struggle of the Irish Republicans and took the nickname "Michael" after Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Shamir plotted the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, British Minister for Middle East Affairs, and personally selected Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri to carry it out. Moyne had been targeted due to his perceived role as an architect of British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, and in particular, the Patria disaster, which was blamed on him.
In 1944 Shamir married fellow Lehi member Shulamit, Shamir had first met Shulamit in a detention camp where she was incarcerated after the ship on which she sailed to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria in 1941 was declared illegal. They would have two children, Yair and Gilada.
Shamir's parents and two sisters were murdered in the Holocaust. Shamir claimed his father was killed just outside his birthplace in Ruzhany by villagers who had been his childhood friends after he had escaped from a German train transporting Jews to the death camps, though this was never confirmed. His mother and a sister were murdered in the concentration camps, and another sister was shot dead. Shamir once told Ehud Olmert that when his father, living under Nazi occupation, had been informed that the extermination of the Jews was imminent, his father had replied that "I have a son in the Land of Israel, and he will exact my revenge on them".
In July 1946, Shamir was arrested. He had been walking in public in disguise and a British police sergeant, T.G. Martin, recognized him by his bushy eyebrows. Arrested, he was exiled to Africa, and interned in Eritrea by British Mandatory authorities. Lehi members subsequently tracked down and killed Martin in September 1946. On January 14, 1947, Shamir and four Irgun members escaped the Sembel Prison through a tunnel they had dug, 200 feet in length, and Mayer Malka of Khartoum subsequently arranged for them to be hidden in an oil truck for three days as it was driven over the border to French Somaliland. They were re-arrested by the French authorities, but Shamir with Malka's assistance was eventually allowed passage to France and granted political asylum. Lehi sent him a forged passport, with which he entered Israel after the Israeli Declaration of Independence in 1948.
1948 Deir Yassin massacre
During the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Lehi became most famous for the Deir Yassin massacre. From April 9 to 11, 1948 around 130 fighters from Irgun and Lehi violated a peace deal with the village of Deir Yassin and killed at least 107 Palestinian Arab villagers, nearly all civilians. Some villagers who had hidden or pretended to be dead were killed by Lehi men on April 10 or 11. News of the killings sparked terror among Palestinians across the country, frightening them to flee their homes in the face of Jewish troop advances and it strengthened the resolve of Arab governments to intervene, which they did five weeks later.Lehi met fierce resistance from the Labor Zionist establishment in Israel as well as the broader Jewish diaspora for emulating European fascism. When Menachim Begin visited New York City in December 1948 over twenty prominent Jewish intellectuals condemned the Irgun and Lehi for their part in the Deir Yassin massacre in an open letter to The New York Times. The letter was signed by over twenty prominent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Zellig Harris, and Sidney Hook.
File:Albert Einstein and others letter.jpg|thumb|right|An open letter to The New York Times describing the Deir Yassin massacre was signed by over twenty prominent Jewish intellectuals, including Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, Zellig Harris, and Sidney Hook.
A shocking example was their behavior in the Arab village of Deir Yassin. This village, off the main roads and surrounded by Jewish lands, had taken no part in the war, and had even fought off Arab bands who wanted to use the village as their base. On April 9, terrorist bands attacked this peaceful village, which was not a military objective in the fighting, killed most of its inhabitants and kept a few of them alive to parade as captives through the streets of Jerusalem. Most of the Jewish community was horrified at the deed, and the Jewish Agency sent a telegram of apology to King Abdullah of Trans-Jordan. But the terrorists, far from being ashamed of their act, were proud of this massacre, publicized it widely, and invited all the foreign correspondents present in the country to view the heaped corpses and the general havoc at Deir Yassin....
During the last years of sporadic anti-British violence, the IZL and Stern groups inaugurated a reign of terror in the Palestine Jewish community. Teachers were beaten up for speaking against them, adults were shot for not letting their children join them. By gangster methods, beatings, window-smashing, and wide-spread robberies, the terrorists intimidated the population and exacted a heavy tribute.... Within the Jewish community they have preached an admixture of ultranationalism, religious mysticism, and racial superiority.
After the backlash to the massacre, the Lehi troika of Shamir, Eldad, and Yellin-Mor formally disbanded most of the organization on May 29, 1948 but continued to lead a minority of the membership from Jerusalem. Lehi leadership continued to be outside of Israeli government control while most of its former membership joined the newly formed Israel Defense Forces. During a UN-imposed truce, Shamir, Eldad, and Yellin-Mor authorized the assassination of the United Nations representative in the Middle East, Count Folke Bernadotte, who was killed in September 1948, when Lehi gunmen ambushed his motorcade in Jerusalem. Lehi had feared that Israel would agree to Bernadotte's peace proposals, which they considered disastrous, unaware that the provisional Israeli government had already rejected a proposal by Bernadotte the day before. The Israeli provisional government drafted an ordinance for the prevention of terrorism and then invoked it to declare Lehi a terrorist organisation, consequently rounding up 200 of its members for "administrative detention". They were granted amnesty some months later and given a state pardon.