Remembering Rabin and Shamir, correctly and for good purpose

...Things that Netanyahu should keep in mind as he faces Obama next week: 1. The clap-happy advocacy of unfettered Palestinian statehood which we hear today from Obama, Peres and the like does not accord with the “Rabin heritage” at all. 2. Heed the bitter lesson learned by Yitzhak Shamir in his dealings with President George H.W. Bush: Stick to your policy goals, and don’t let Israel be wedged off-course for ersatz, temporary relief from presidential pressures.

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
06 November '15..

This week, Israel marked the twentieth anniversary of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, as well as what would have been the 100th birthday of Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir.

There are lessons to be learned about the way we remember these two great leaders, both of blessed memory. This is especially true for Prime Minister Netanyahu, who next week once again enters the lion’s den – meeting US President Barack Hussein Obama in the White House, after a long period of US-Israel conflict regarding policy towards Iran and the Palestinians.

Rabin’s true legacy is Israel’s struggle for secure and defensible borders and a unified Jerusalem, and great wariness of Palestinian statehood. The use of Rabin’s name to support a galloping-forward two-state-solution peace process – is left-wing historical revisionism.

Like the majority of Israelis, then and now, Rabin was willing to take risks and give the peace process a chance. But he remained suspicious of his Palestinian partners, skeptical about the outcome, very wary of a full-fledged Palestinian state, and insistent on maintaining defensible borders for Israel.

In fact, Rabin may have been close to calling-off the Oslo process – according his closet advisors and family members, and scholars.

His daughter Dalia told Yediot Ahronot in 2010 that “Many people who were close to father told me that on the eve of the murder he considered stopping the Oslo process because of the terror that was running rampant in the streets, and because he felt that Yasser Arafat was not delivering on his promises.”

“Father after all wasn’t a blind man running forward without thought. I don’t rule out the possibility that he was considering a u-turn, doing a reverse on our side. After all he was someone for whom the national security of the state was sacrosanct and above all,” said Dalia Rabin.

Last week, Dalia Rabin similarly told The Times of Israel that “As the waves of terror hit the peace process… I have the feeling that he (Yitzhak Rabin) wouldn’t have let it continue. There would have been a stage where he would have decided: We’re in a phased process. Let’s evaluate what we have achieved and what the price has been. He wouldn’t have stopped Oslo, but he would have done what Oslo enabled him to do: to look at it as a process and assess whether it was working.”

In his 2008 book The Long Short Way, Moshe ‘Bogie’ Yaalon wrote that a few weeks before the assassination, Rabin told Yaalon (who was then chief of IDF Military Intelligence) that after the next Israeli elections “he (Rabin) was going to ‘set things straight’ with the Oslo process, because Arafat could no longer be trusted.” And this was before the murderous Second Palestinian Intifada!

Yitzhak Shamir, the man who said no

Shamir led with a deep, intrinsic belief in the righteousness of his views, with tenacity and without overemphasizing how his decisions would be construed by others. All that was important to him -- and nothing was more important -- was the welfare of the Jewish people and the unity of the Land of Israel.

MK Ofir Akunis..
Israel Hayom..
09 July '13..

"When people talk to me about something that will be taken away from this land, I become ill; I physically can't take it," the late former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir once said. Today we mark one year (30 June '12, 10 Tammuz 5772) since his passing.

The seventh prime minister of Israel, Shamir is generally not considered one of the country's most charismatic leaders, and he is usually not described as someone who enraptured audiences. But still, he served in the post for seven years, during which he led Israel to some impressive accomplishments.

Shamir led with a deep, intrinsic belief in the righteousness of his views, with tenacity and without overemphasizing how his decisions would be construed by others. All that was important to him -- and nothing was more important -- was the welfare of the Jewish people and the unity of the Land of Israel.

In the last several years of his life, I had the opportunity to meet Shamir several times. He lived relatively close to me, and he insisted on his daily walks even in old age. My conversations with him were piercing. Shamir shared with me his earnest concerns over the concessions made by former prime ministers Ehud Barak (whom he had initially appointed IDF chief of staff) and Ariel Sharon (his longtime rival in the Likud Party). "I never relinquished a single grain of sand from Israel's soil," he used to boast.

The same sea: One for whom reality was not an unwelcome intruder.

Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
20 July '12..

One of US President Barack Obama’s few admitted regrets is his inability to conjure up an instant resolution to our vexing dispute. This seems a tad odd considering that during her recent whirlwind visit to our troublesome midst, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had waxed ecstatic about this being a time of “great change and transformation in the region.”

If things are so upbeat, why are they so intractable?

Both Obama and Clinton would be a lot less frustrated and much wiser had they turned to the late Yitzhak Shamir for clues.

He was endlessly mocked by members of our chattering classes when he stated outright that “the sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs.” He plainly harbored no illusions in a wishy-washy world of wishful-thinking, where reality often becomes a most unwelcome intruder.

Political vogue decrees that disagreeable facts shouldn’t inconsiderately interfere with uplifting fantasy, but Shamir didn’t mind being denigrated as insular, intransigent and above all terminally uncool.

With both his feet solidly on the ground, he had no patience for pipe-dreams about a phenomenal sea change in the Arab mind-set. Continuity appeared more plausible, especially given the depth and duration of virulent Arab enmity toward the Jewish state. Hardhearted hate is unlikely to wondrously dissipate overnight.

(Video) Latma - The Dour old Man

LatmaTV
06 July '12..





Latma present the tale of the Dour Old Man, we should be blessed with many of them. In memory of an Israeli giant, Yitzhak Shamir 1915-2012.



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Glick - Yitzhak Shamir's good, great life

Caroline Glick..
carolineglick.com..
05 July '12..

There was something about Yitzhak Shamir, Israel's seventh prime minister who passed away last Saturday, that made you feel shy, in awe when you stood in his presence. In his eulogy at Sunday morning's cabinet meeting, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu noted that Shamir "didn't radiate charisma. He simply radiated inner strength."

Shamir, the diminutive, taciturn leader, was a strong man. And Netanyahu was absolutely right, Shamir's strength owed to his commitment to his convictions. What motivated him to act were not external conditions, but an internal compass, an internal call to devote his life to the Jewish people and our freedom and safety in our land.

Netanyahu began his eulogy to Shamir on Sunday morning by placing him in the context of his generation. Netanyahu said, "Yitzhak Shamir was from the generation of giants that founded the State of Israel."

There is much truth in this statement. The generation of Jews that came of age in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s and established the State of Israel confronted challenges unmatched in human history. They survived the European Holocaust. They stood down and bested the British Empire. They withstood massive terror from the Arabs and repression and betrayal from the British. They defeated the invading armies of five Arab states with a ragtag force of Holocaust survivors and farmers, with little access to arms, and almost no money.

They carved a beautiful, modern country out of the rocks and sands of a long-desolate land.

They absorbed massive waves of aliya from all over the world. They brought together Jews with diverse customs, traditions and languages and reforged a unitary Jewish people bound to one another by our common heritage, faith, resuscitated language and land - all stronger than what divided us.

They suffered agonizing losses at every turn.

But they kept moving forward, sometimes in giant leaps, usually in tiny steps. But they kept moving forward.

Operation Solomon: Shamir’s Greatest Legacy?

Stephen Spector..
Tablet Magazine..
03 July '12..

As prime minister, the late Yitzhak Shamir authorized and oversaw one of the most dramatic mass rescues in recent history: the airlift of over 14,000 Ethiopian Jews from Addis Ababa to Israel in less than a day and a half in May 1991. The Israelis plucked the Falashas from imminent danger in that operation, flying them out of the Ethiopian capital at the climactic moment of a civil war, with rebel forces surrounding the city.

But the mission, which came to be known as Operation Solomon, was not a simple matter of rescuing Jews in peril. Less than two years earlier, the Ethiopian Jews faced no grave risk. To the contrary, they were safe in their villages in the Gondar region of the Ethiopian highlands, living much as they had for generations as tenant farmers and artisans. The Ethiopian aliyah had reached a crescendo with the secret Israeli airlift of the Falashas from camps in Sudan in 1984-85. But the Sudanese halted that mission after it was revealed publicly. Since then, the aliyah had slowed significantly, and by the late 1980s, the Ethiopian Jewish community was split in two. Almost every Jewish family in Gondar had relatives who had reached Israel and whom they had not seen in years. There seemed to be little prospect of reviving the immigration movement.

Then history took a turn. The Soviet Union was in the process of collapsing, and Mikhail Gorbachev told the brutal Ethiopian dictator Mengistu Haile Mariam that he would drastically cut back weapons shipments to the African nation. For Mengistu, this couldn’t have come at a worse moment: He was facing increasingly successful rebel advances against his army. In desperation, Mengistu turned to Israel, and in November 1989, he dispatched a trusted official to meet with Shamir in Jerusalem with the aim of renewing diplomatic relations.

The True Legacy of Yitzhak Shamir

David Bedein..
The Times of Israel..
03 July '12..

Within hours of the death of Yitzhak Shamir, before Israel’s seventh prime minister was even buried, Yediot Ahronoth ran a front page editorial, written by a former Israeli government official, that said that Shamir’s legacy would be “the restraint that he showed during the Gulf War in 1991… and the resultant respect that he earned from the US government” for not launching a counter-attack against the Iraq.

The article noted that “Shamir willingly withstood the pressures of irresponsible Israelis” who demanded that Israel launch attacks at Iraq while Iraq launched 39 scud missile attacks against us.

Upon reading this skewed tribute to Shamir, I could not help but think it was a shame that Shamir could not stop and send a letter to the editor, while en route to heaven, to set the record straight.

Shamir did not willingly restrain the IDF to earn brownie points with the US.

It was the US that boxed him in.

Eydar - The Shamir credo: This is my land

Dror Eydar..
Israel Hayom..
02 July '12..

After Yitzhak Shamir was voted out of office, the nightmare of the Oslo Accords and the so-called peace process began. Israel experienced the Oslo Accords, the Al-Aqsa Intifada, the destruction of the Jewish settlement enterprise in the Gaza Strip's Gush Katif, the Second Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead. For Israel's self-appointed Old Guard, which lost power in the 1977 elections, the ouster of the last remaining stalwart of the Land of Israel in the generation of giants that founded the state, created the impression, for a historical split second, that they had been granted a window of opportunity to realize their foreign policy aspirations, which entailed the destruction of the Jewish settlement enterprise in what has historically been the Land of Israel.

Yitzhak Shamir should be remembered as one of the land's greatest advocates; he truly believed in the miracle manifested in the renaissance of the Jewish people in their land; he was a Zionist who subscribed to maximalist aspirations. Yossi Ben-Aharon, his bureau chief, once told me that at the end of a long meeting, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker said his anti-settlement stance pales in comparison to U.S. President George Bush's position. Shamir listened to his guest and said, "This is my land." Period. That's it.

A shocked Baker stared at him with bewilderment and moved on to the next topic.

Weinberg - On Yitzhak Shamir, Settlements, and U.S. Policy Restraints

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
02 July '12..

In the course of working on my Master’s thesis in 1999, I had opportunity to interview the late, great Yitzhak Shamir at length regarding his decision not to retaliate against Iraq during the First Gulf War. (Shamir read almost every political column I published throughout the 1990s, and would often comment favorably and graciously. “Keep at it, keep at it, and keep at it!” he encouraged me).

Shamir’s reflections on the nexus between Iraq, Israeli settlement policy and relations with President George H.W. Bush are fascinating in the context of current Prime Minister Netanyahu’s policy dilemmas regarding Iran, settlements, and relations with President Obama.

Moshe Arens, who was defense minister under Shamir, alleges in his memoirs that Shamir thought he was buying preferential treatment from the US by acceding to US President Bush’s entreaties to stay out of the fighting in Iraq. Arens: “It was strange to see Shamir, who had been so tough in the disputes which had arisen in past with the Americans, bending so far in order to meet the expectations of the Americans in the current situation. It appeared that he had set for himself certain issues on which he had decided not to give even an inch, and to compensate for this he was prepared to show compromise on other issues. Settlements in Judea, Samaria and Gaza were, of course, in the first category, whereas avoiding angering the Americans regarding involvement in the Gulf war could serve as compensation for this.”Arens later told me that “Shamir was making a choice: settlements or responding to Iraqi attacks, and he chose settlements.”

From Shamir’s memoirs, it’s clear that the main reason Shamir rejected his cabinet majority in favor of an Israeli retaliatory strike on Iraq was the risk of political conflict with the US, and the assessment that Israel would be better placed to “make a stand on other issues” after the war if it bowed to American pressures. But what exactly was it that Shamir thought he was going “to make a stand for” after the war? Did Shamir have any basis for believing that he would have a freer hand on issues like settlements if he ‘gave-in’ to Bush during the war?

For Israel’s current generation as well as those who will follow: The Lessons of Yitzhak Shamir

Jonathan S. Tobin..
Commentary/Contentions..
01 July '12..

With the hindsight that comes from looking at history from a distance, the struggle to create the state of Israel can seem as if it was a process whose outcome was inevitable. The victory of the Zionist movement was, however, won despite long odds, desperate hardships and grievous costs in blood. The men and women who battled those odds did so in the face of the conventional wisdom of their day that told them they had no chance of forcing the British Empire to make good on its promise to create a National Home for the Jews or to defeat an Arab and Muslim world determined to crush the newborn State of Israel. They needed not only courage but also an iron will and the patience to bear great suffering while never losing sight of their goal. No person embodied those attributes more than Yitzhak Shamir, the underground resistance fighter who would one day become Israel’s seventh prime minister.

Shamir, who died yesterday at the age of 96 after a long struggle with Alzheimer’s disease, left the prime minister’s office 20 years ago. In the time that has passed since then, Israel has changed greatly as its economy expanded and transformed a once poor country into an economic dynamo. It has also endured a failed peace process, fought wars and dealt with terrorist offensives as a subsequent generation of political leaders took up the mantle of power and sometimes succumbed to illusions about the country’s neighbors that never afflicted Shamir. His time in power as well as the period of the great struggles in his life seem like a very long time ago, and it is more than possible most Israelis, let alone foreign friends of the Jewish state, have largely forgotten him or regard him as merely a figure who connects the periods when it was governed by the more famous Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Rabin. But he is no mere footnote to history. The lessons of Shamir’s life and his tenure in power (he served longer as Israel’s prime minister than anyone other than David Ben-Gurion) could serve the country well today and in the future.

A Personal Memory: Former Israel Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir Dies at 96

Barry Rubin..
Rubin Reports..
01 July '12..

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir has just died at the age of 96. Rather than discuss his broader career, I’d like to tell you about my most memorable meeting with him.

It was January 13, 1991. Everyone in the world knew that in 48 hours, a U.S.-led coalition was scheduled to attack Iraq in order to force Saddam Hussein’s withdrawal from Kuwait. Saddam had announced that if the coalition attacked he would strike at Israel with long-range missiles, possibly with biological or chemical warheads.

I was asked by a visiting American delegation to accompany it to a meeting with the prime minister. We arrived at the prime minister’s office and went to his quite modest meeting room. Along with Shamir was Elyakim Rubinstein, then the cabinet secretary but today a Supreme Court justice. I won’t tell you who the Americans were but I’d love to do so and perhaps will some day but the group’s leader, let’s call him Mr. Bird, later held high diplomatic positions in the U.S. government.

Shamir sought to break the ice with a friendly question. “So,” he said to the delegation’s leader, “how long are you planning to be here? A week?”

I don’t know if he was joking about the impending deadline but a look of pure fear and panic leaped onto Mr. Bird’s face. “Are you kidding!” His voice shook with dismay. “We’re getting out of here tomorrow!” (Those were his precise words.)

Almost immediately, however, he realized that he was making himself look like a fool. He tried to calm down and recover. So he added, albeit with equal ham-handedness, “But I guess you have to stay here.” (Honest, that’s what he said.)

Rubinstein answered with a big smile on his face: “Oh, no. We don’t have to stay here. We just happen to like it here.” I will never forget the even bigger smile on Shamir’s face. Mr. Bird and all the little birds who fancied themselves great statesmen and Middle East experts had no idea what had just happened.

(+Video) Yitzhak Shamir, loyal to his land and his people

LOTL
29 June '12..





Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir died on Shabbat in Tel Aviv at the age of 96. He was Israel's seventh prime minister and served two terms in office, 1983–1984 and 1986–1992.

While many have commented on his passing, the following struck me in particular as a truly accurate description of the man and what was most important to him.

“Yitzhak Shamir was rock solid in his convictions, loyal to his land and his people, also in the face of tremedous outside pressures that lay on him. These were values that guided him all these years and projected on his leadership.” Vice Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon

The following was an interview by Leon Charney of former Prime Minister of Israel Yitzhak Shamir originally broadcast October 22, 1995. An interesting interview covering many topics and personalities of the time.




Updates throughout the day at http://calevbenyefuneh.blogspot.com. If you enjoy "Love of the Land", please be a subscriber. Just put your email address in the "Subscribe" box on the upper right-hand corner of the page.Twitter updates at LoveoftheLand as well as our Love of the Land page at Facebook.
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Feiglin - Learning the Lessons of Shamir's Mistakes

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
9 Cheshvan, 5772
(Nov. 6, '11)

http://www.jewishisrael.org/eng_contents/articles/72/article7208.html

Translated from the NRG website.

Yitzchak Shamir was arguably the most determined and stubborn of Israeli premiers since Ben Gurion. In the winter of 1991, during the first Gulf War, Shamir was faced with an existential dilemma that is very reminiscent of the quandary that we are facing now. True, Saddam did not have nuclear weapons because Begin bombed his reactor despite Peres' objections. But the Scud missiles that Saddam fired at greater Tel Aviv could certainly have carried a chemical payload that would have caused mass casualties.

Today, Ahmadinijad threatens Israel and simultaneously awakens the ire of the Western nations, just as Saddam did 20 years ago. When Saddam captured Kuwait, George Bush put together an international coalition and attacked him.

What was the consideration that motivated the "intransigent" Shamir to stay out of the fighting? We can safely assume that Israel preferred to let others do its "dirty work". If the entire world was fighting Iraq for its own reasons, what reason could there have been to give Saddam the "proof" that this was a Zionist war, allowing him to destabilize the already shaky coalition?

For his part, Saddam made no attempt to fight back. All that interested him was to present himself as a warrior against Israel; he focused his resources on firing Scud missiles at Tel Aviv. For the first time since the War of Independence, Israel's civilian population found itself under direct attack. Israel's citizens became addicted to their sealed rooms, plastic sheets covering their windows, gas masks and the voice of the IDF spokesman and his "secret weapon" for trauma…a glass of water.

Bullying the neighborhood bully

Soccer Dad
19 March '10

Well, the chances are against it and the odds are slim That he'll live by the rules that the world makes for him, 'Cause there's a noose at his neck and a gun at his back And a license to kill him is given out to every maniac. He's the neighborhood bully.
Neighborhood Bully - Bob Dylan

Scott Wilson writing on the web for the Washington Post posits that Israeli leaders are not likely to win diplomatic battles with the United States.

Next, think back to 1992. Picking a fight with the Bush administration cost Shamir his job. Who succeeded him as prime minister?
Rabin, who immediately pledged to cease construction of what he called "political" settlements in the territories. Perhaps he, too, remembered 1975.

Of course one could also point to Ehud Barak who did all he could to cooperate with the Americans to the point of making an unprecedented offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in 2000. Arafat rejected the offer and, two months later, launched a war against Israel. None of President Clinton's goodwill towards Barak helped him as months later he went down to the worst electoral defeat in Israel's history.

The two previous paragraphs, though, give a hint to Wilson's premises and the limitations of his analysis.

(Read full post)
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Peres’s extracurricular clinchers

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
12 March '10

So who says you can’t accurately predict the future? admittedly, clairvoyance isn’t realistic in all circumstances, but in some instances not to sense what’s about to occur is to willfully avoid reality. In given situations what threatens to unfold is obvious.

So it was when Shimon Peres campaigned for the presidency in 2007.

I wrote then: “How Peres would exploit presidential office, given his past predilections, boggles the mind. A Peres presidency would be invitation to intrigue. It’s safe to assume he wouldn’t make do with a figurehead role, but would hyperactively preside over a parallel government and spawn an unimaginable surfeit of inventive visions, plans and proposals. Their common denominator would be the increasing Palestinization of this land and dangerous compromising of what Golda Meir called ‘the Jewish national interest.’”

There was plenty over the past few years to vindicate this forecast, but the most recent reports of Peres’s extracurricular activities are the clincher.

GET A load of the following samples from Haaretz (which fully approves of the president’s hijinks).

“Talks have recently been under way to arrange a summit meeting in Rome this April between President Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. The talks have reportedly been carried out without the involvement or even the knowledge of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whom Abbas has persistently refused to meet.”

Sounds familiar? Deja vu? The same old MO?

There’s more:

“The person behind the summit drive is Uri Savir, president of the Peres Center for Peace, who was one of the architects of the Oslo Accords and served as director-general of the Foreign Ministry when Peres was foreign minister.”

And more:

(Read full article)
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