...People may say I am wrong. Let them. A nation that is not willing to fight for its Jerusalem will cease to exist as time goes by. True, there are some cities called Jerusalem in the U.S. True, many countries change their capitals. For example, Nigeria changed the name of its capital from Lagos to Abuja. For us, there is no other capital. Jerusalem is the capital of the entire Jewish people, not only those who live in Israel. It is our historical and eternal capital.
Shlomo Cesana..
Israel Hayom..
28 February '14..
Two photographs of former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir hang on the wall of the office of his son, Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir. Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's seventh prime minister, led the country for six years, and many people will recall him as the man who took a hard political line, dug in his heels, and stuck to the idea of Greater Israel.
"My father is my guiding light," says Yair Shamir. "Listen, he is my lighthouse. A lighthouse is not a particularly beautiful building. The stones are rough. Nobody will ever win a famous architectural award for building a lighthouse, but it is a massive structure. And where does one put a lighthouse? On rocks, where the waves break. Someone coming from a distance searches for its light. And it keeps on standing there and shining while other buildings fall. The beautiful thing about my father was that his beam was a narrow one. I can run in it, in his beam, and still find expression."
Shamir, a senior member of Likud-Yisrael Beytenu, has the his father's look physically and in his firm right-wing stance. He is almost never heard, but his positions are firm. He opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, does not believe that the talks have any chance of succeeding, and explains why the American efforts are superfluous.
"Considering how both sides are digging in their heels today, I do not see an agreement on the horizon. When you give a conflict that is more than a hundred years old nine months for a solution, as John Kerry has done, that is not serious," he says.
So what does he believe in, then?
"I believe in the Americans' good intentions," he says. "Looking at the regional conflict in American or Western terms includes a business approach, like the one that is used to solve conflicts between businesspeople. The problem is that this is not a business. For the Americans, everything looks solvable and logical. This is your position, this is my position, and in the end, we'll compromise. In our region, everything is a good deal more complex.
"I oppose the two-state idea. Let's start with Jerusalem. For me, Jerusalem comes under the heading of 'be killed rather than transgress.' I am willing to fight for it because it is the raison d'etre of the Jewish nation in the Land of Israel."
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