The Last Revisionist Zionist

"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.

As prime minister, Shamir vehemently rejected any proposal to convene a superpower -- sponsored international peace conference with the Arabs. " `Peace' secured in this way, under duress," he writes, "would only bring greater demands in its wake until everything the Arabs wanted would, at last, be theirs, even Jerusalem." His rejectionism strained relations with the United States and brought down the government of national unity that he had formed with the opposition Labor Party. Shamir candidly admits that "somewhere in the back of my mind there still echoed the fiasco of 1939," when the British brought Jewish and Arab leaders to a roundtable conference in London as a final attempt to seek a peaceful solution to the conflict in Palestine. Shamir's militant opposition to attempts to avert a direct clash between the defenseless Jewish minority and the Arab world just before the Second World War seem relevant to him 50 years later, when a powerful Israel forced the Arab states begrudgingly to come to terms with its existence. But Shamir's perceptions of the Arabs have not changed, so there is no reason for him to change his mind.

It is a pity that, even as he sums up his life, Shamir remains totally mobilized. His personal account reads just like his beloved underground's old pamphlets -- a perpetual struggle between the sons of light and the sons of darkness. Shamir does not allow himself to open up and share with his readers the emotional intensity, the personal passions, or the intellectual and literary wealth of the fascinating political culture -- the Revisionist Zionist movement -- of which he is the last remaining founding father.

SHAMIR TACTICS

Israeli political history is in large measure the conflict between Revisionist Zionism and Labor Zionism writ large: the more pragmatic Labor Zionists, with their devotion to socialism and compromise, formed the -- state majority and, through the Labor Party, held power until 1977; the Revisionists, who insist on Jewish sovereignty in the entire biblical land of Israel, formed the PRE -- state underground and later the Likud Party. "As for myself," writes Shamir, "nothing I have learned since I was a young man in Poland has altered, or in any way lessened or diluted, my belief in the logic, the justice and, yes, the grandeur of the objectives, as Jabotinsky articulated them, of Zionist activism." Shamir still retains this emotional allegiance to Vladimir Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the charismatic founder and leader of Revisionist Zionism.

Like his fellow believers, Shamir was attracted to Jabotinsky's sweeping vision: his magnetic oratory, ideology of integral nationalism and monism, distaste for socialism, obsession with ceremony, and particularly his cult of power. Much has been written on the political and cultural environment in post -- World War I Europe that nurtured such ideas and on the tragic paradox of Jabotinsky, the Jewish liberal who was influenced by those cultural trends. Shamir's attachment is merely emotional, for he and most of his Jewish colleagues in Palestine exposed Jabotinsky's inherent contradiction: he wanted to achieve a Jewish state in the whole land of Israel (including Transjordan) by a show of strength and military power -- while under the patronage of Great Britain. The British, who ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate after World War I, would assume moral responsibility for the Jewish "orphans," Jabotinsky believed, or at least treat Jewish settlers returning to their biblical homeland as well as it treated white settlers in Kenya, Ceylon, or Singapore.