Shamir championed Israeli settlements as prime minister

Published 5:00 am Sunday, July 1, 2012

Yitzhak Shamir, who emerged from the militant wing of Israel’s prestate militia and served as 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. He was 96.

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, a survivor of a family wiped out in the Holocaust, 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, 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 Palestine he was a terrorist, an assassin. He appeared in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi. But Shamir said he considered those “the best years of my life.”

In a statement Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: “Yitzhak 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, Yitzhak Shamir took action to fortify Israel’s security and ensure its future.”

Begin appointed Shamir as foreign minister in 1980. When Begin suddenly retired in 1983, Shamir became a compromise candidate for prime minister, alternating in the post with Shimon Peres for one four-year term, and then won his own term in 1988. He entered the political opposition when Yitzhak Rabin was elected prime minister in 1992. Shamir retired from politics a few years later, at 81.

As prime minister he actively promoted continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel conquered in 1967. While he was in office the Jewish population in the occupied territories increased by nearly 30 percent. He also encouraged the immigration of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, a move that changed the country’s demographic character.

But one of the most notable events during his time in office was the Palestinian uprising against Israeli control that began in December 1987 — the so-called intifada. He and his defense minister, Rabin, deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories with the goal of quashing the rebellion by force. 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 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; the death toll rose from dozens to hundreds. Israel’s isolation increased, until finally the rebellion was overshadowed in 1991 by the war in the Persian Gulf.

During that war, at the request of the U.S., 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 U.S. to help with the settlement of new Israeli citizens from the Soviet Union.