Israel Matzav

Arens: Shamir warned Bush he was going to attack Iraq

Former Prime Minister Itzhak Shamir passed away during the course of the Sabbath. He was 96-years old. Shamir will be buried in the part of Mt. Herzl that is reserved for the country's leadership in a state funeral on Monday. I don't think Shamir would be pleased with much of what is said about him here.

Shamir was the state’s seventh prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and again from 1986 to 1992, the longest-serving premier after David Ben-Gurion. He was known for resisting international pressure to make concessions, yet initiated a peace process in Madrid that led to many diplomatic overtures by his successors.

“The truth is that, in the final analysis, the search for peace has always been a matter of who would tire of the struggle first, and blink,” he wrote in his autobiography.

Shamir also served as foreign minister, Knesset speaker and opposition head, and was an agent in the Mossad. He was among the leaders of the Stern Group (Lehi) in the Jewish underground in Mandatory Palestine.

President Shimon Peres, who fought bitterly with Shamir in the 1980s, issued a statement in which he described Shamir as a courageous fighter both before and after the establishment of the state. Peres said Shamir had left a lasting legacy of bravery.

“He remained true to his beliefs, was a great patriot of his people and a great lover of Israel who served the nation loyally and with great dedication for many years,” Peres said.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants that established the State of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people in its land.”

He said Shamir, whose family died in the Holocaust, fought in the Stern Group and as prime minister to build up the security of the state and ensure its future out of concern for its citizens.

“We lost a great man who was a great leader, who was fundamentally a man of the people,” Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin said.

“To really understand him and his refusal to be enticed by diplomatic overtures that would have weakened Israel, you had to have heard him speak on Holocaust Remembrance Day,” he continued.

“Shamir was a symbol of Israel’s rising from the ashes of the Holocaust to strength and staying power. Out of this developed his personality as an enlightened realist and a stiff ideologue who withstood internal and external pressure and fought to prevent a situation in which the people of Israel will not have their own land and state.”

By contrast, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, who served as a minister in Shamir’s cabinet, praised Shamir for negotiating with the Palestinians, initiating peace talks in Madrid and resisting pressure to attack Iraq after Saddam Hussein fired Scud missiles at Israel during the First Gulf War.

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Although known as a hardliner, Shamir nonetheless showed teeth-gritting restraint during the 1991 Gulf War. At the urging of the United States, he held Israel’s fire in the face of Scud missile salvoes by dictator Saddam Hussein rather than retaliate and endanger the US alliance with Arab powers battling to expel Iraq from Kuwait.

His forbearance on that occasion drove home Israel’s consideration for Washington’s Middle East interests.

“I can think of nothing that went more against my grain as a Jew and a Zionist, nothing more opposed to the ideology on which my life has been based, than the decision I took... to ask the people of Israel to accept the burden of restraint,” Shamir said later.

After the war, US president George H.W. Bush called on Israel to accept multi-party peace talks with the Arabs. His administration drove home the demand by postponing $10 billion in US loan guarantees that the Shamir government needed to absorb new immigrants.

Shamir hinted darkly that Bush, the leader of the country’s most important ally, was an anti-Semite but relented on attending the Madrid peace conference, where he became the first Israeli leader to sit opposite Palestinian, Syrian, Jordanian and Lebanese delegates.

One has to wonder whether deep down Shamir understood that Madrid was a mistake. The 'Palestinian' delegates were supposed to be a part of the Jordanian delegation, which became a joke when it was discovered that they were reporting to Arafat.

We no longer have to wonder whether Shamir regarded the restraint during the Gulf War as a mistake. Moshe Arens, who was Israel's ambassador to Washington at the time, told Israel Radio on Sunday morning that Shamir sent him to warn George H.W. Bush, who was President at the time, that Israel had it with restraint and was going to attack Iraq. Before Israel could attack, a cease fire was declared. Bush repaid Shamir by withholding loan guaranties, as noted above, and by working for his defeat in 1992 elections. I doubt that restraint during Gulf War I is something Shamir would want as his legacy.

Labels: First Gulf War, George H. W. Bush, Moshe Arens, Yitzchak Shamir

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:48 AM