The Last Revisionist Zionist
Article Summary and Author Biography
In Yitzhak Shamir's new autobiography, the last surviving founding father of the Israeli right watches uncomprehendingly as history leaves him behind.
Meron Benvenisti was Director of the West Bank Database Project and a Deputy Mayor of Jerusalem. His latest book, Intimate Enemies, will be published in the fall by the University of California Press.
"Ecclesiastes, of course, was right: indeed, nothing is new under the sun," writes Yitzhak Shamir in his autobiography. This seems a surprising statement from a man who has seen and molded dizzying changes in an amazingly active life. Inspired by the visions of Theodor Herzl, the father of modern Jewish nationalism, Shamir came to British -- controlled Palestine in 1935 as a young Polish immigrant named Yitzhak Yezernitzky and joined the militant Jewish underground. The name Shamir came from a forged identification certificate he carried. Shamir became the commander of the underground militia known as the Stern Gang, or Lehi. After Israel's establishment in 1948, he spent 17 secretive years working as a Mossad agent. He then began a rapid political climb in the rightist Likud party: first a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), then its speaker, then foreign minister, and then in 1983 prime minister. Despite this remarkable career, Shamir considers his career as a Lehi fighter 50 years ago "the best part of my life." Shamir's formative experiences etched such lasting impressions on him that whatever occurred thereafter has seemed only a slight variation on the same theme. This is not an unusual phenomenon among people who, in their youth, participated in dramatic events and therefore consider later life a dull anticlimax. For a person who eventually assumed awesome responsibilities for an entire nation, however, such a nostalgic, petrified worldview is crippling and dangerous...
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