What Would Yitzhak Shamir Do?

The Media Line asked Yair Shamir, son of Israel’s late former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, what his father would have made of Israel’s current situation

Former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir was born in Eastern Europe in 1915 and died in Israel in 2012.

A longtime leader of Israel’s right-wing Likud party, he was the country’s prime minister from 1983 to 1984, and then again from 1986 to 1992. Before that, Shamir was the country’s foreign minister and parliamentary speaker. Earlier, he was a senior officer in Israel’s foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad.

During Israel’s pre-state era, Shamir was one of the leaders of Lehi, a right-wing Zionist militia that attacked British mandatory authorities. Also known as the Stern Gang after its founder, Avraham Stern, Lehi was known for several high-profile killings of senior political figures, including Lord Moyne, the British minister for Middle East affairs, in 1944, and UN representative Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948.

Following that killing, Israel’s provisional government declared Lehi a terrorist organization and imprisoned 200 of its members, only to pardon them shortly thereafter.

The Media Line sat down this week with Yair Shamir, Yitzhak Shamir’s son, to ask what his father would have made of Israel’s current situation.

Yair Shamir, born in 1945, is a former politician who was a member of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, for the right-wing Yisrael Beitenu party from 2013 to 2015, holding the post of agriculture minister. A former colonel in Israel’s air force, he was once chairman of Israel Aircraft Industries and is now a businessman.

Shamir told The Media Line that his father had always feared that Israel would do more damage to itself from within than its enemies could do from without. Unity was “the number one priority” for his father, Shamir said.

Shamir said his father would have been deeply concerned by Israel’s current political crisis, which has pitted Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s coalition, which includes far-right and conservative religious parties, against the center and center-left.

Netanyahu’s coalition is seeking to restructure relations between the Knesset and the Supreme Court, a move opponents say amounts to a de facto coup. The dispute has roiled the country since January, propelling hundreds of thousands of angry demonstrators into the street.

That was the best government ever

Shamir said that in the 1990s his father, a leading figure in Israel’s political right, established a national unity government with Shimon Peres, the center-left’s luminary.

“That was the best government ever,” he said. The two leaders from opposing sides of the political spectrum did not try to think alike. Instead, Shamir said, they concentrated on the issues they could agree upon.

He said it is an undeniable fact that Jewish Israelis hail from “different countries, cultures, and backgrounds,” with different levels and types of education.

Still, he said, they generally have three things in common.

We are all Jews. … Most of the people are Zionists. … [Jerusalem] represents the aspiration of the Jewish people to be free.

First, he said, “We are all Jews,” meaning that certain basic traditions and beliefs are common to all Jewish Israelis. Second, “most of the people are Zionists,” meaning that most Jewish Israelis believe in the importance of a Jewish state. And third, the idea of “Jerusalem” has been “in the heads of the Jewish people for generations.” Jerusalem “represents the aspiration of the Jewish people to be free,” Shamir said, as exemplified by saying every Passover, “Next year in Jerusalem.”

Shamir said that if Israel loses its ability to agree on those three core issues, “the nation will be in trouble … [and today] this is what you see.”

In March, following demonstrations, Netanyahu paused his reform plans and said his coalition would negotiate with the political opposition, with the help of President Isaac Herzog, whose role in the country is largely ceremonial.

“It was the right thing to do as it calmed the waters and gained time,” Shamir said. However, a real solution still needs to be hammered out in the Knesset.

Despite his concerns, Shamir said the current crisis may have a silver lining.

“It puts new energy into conversations we need to have,” he said. “A constitution, yes, or no? Human rights, and where is the limit between Judaism and the state?”

Today’s large public protests could help Israel move the constitution debate forward, Shamir said. Israel currently has a series of Basic Laws, but no constitution. As a result, politicians routinely clash over Jewish and secular aspects of life, and the balance between the two has never been settled.

These issues matter not only for the Jews who make up over 73% of Israel’s population, but also for the non-Jews who comprise the remainder of the population. Muslims are the largest religious minority in Israel, making up 18% of the population.

Shamir said that when Israel was established in 1948, an agreement was established to maintain the “status quo” between religious and secular Jews, including in policies on the Jewish Sabbath and the level of religious observance in the military. Accepting that status quo required all sides to make sacrifices, a principle understood by everyone then.

Today, however, that understanding seems to have broken down.

Shamir did not think his father would have allowed the country to reach such a highly polarized state. Prime Minister Shamir would never have initiated the kind of legal reforms pushed by Netanyahu’s government “without understanding, negotiating, and going forward together” with the opposition, his son said. And had Shamir seen that it was not the right time to move ahead, he would never have said, “I am the ruler now, and I will dictate.”

That kind of thinking was “not Yitzhak Shamir,” his son said.

Yair Shamir also discussed his father’s foreign policy ideas and his likely views on the external issues facing Israel.

On Peace With Egypt

For the 1978 peace treaty between Israel and Egypt, Israel agreed to return the Sinai Peninsula, which it had won from Egypt in the 1967 Six-Day War. In return, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat promised to grant Israel lasting peace.

At the time, Yitzhak Shamir was a Likud party Knesset member and not yet leader, and he famously abstained from voting.

“He wanted the agreement with Egypt, no question,” Yair Shamir said. His father “didn’t see the Sinai Peninsula as part of the Land of Israel” and making peace with Egypt was “a must” as it was “the strongest Muslim country in the area and a leader in the Muslim and Arabic world.”

However, Yitzhak Shamir wanted to pressure then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin to address issues important to him. In particular, he wanted to retain the city of Yamit and nearby Jewish settlements in northern Sinai, which he described as “unbelievable” enclaves of “green and water in the desert.” He therefore opposed those parts of the treaty obliging Israel to destroy its Sinai settlements.

Yair Shamir said his father hoped that Begin would somehow find a way to keep the settlements intact, perhaps by resettling them with Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. He said the settlements were fruitful and economically viable, supplying “tomatoes and cucumbers to the entire country.”

Today that part of the Sinai is little more than empty desert, while the Gaza Strip is “stuck with no solution.”

From Oslo to the Abraham Accords

Israel signed treaties with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1993 and 1995 and with Jordan in 1994, and then, in 2020, it signed the Abraham Accords to normalize relations with the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain. Some have criticized the Abraham Accords as a cynical deal in which the UAE and Bahrain give Israel diplomatic cover while Israel sells the oil-rich Gulf states weapons.

Yair Shamir believes his father would have deeply appreciated the Abraham Accords. He followed the ideology of the right-wing Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky, who, Yair Shamir says, recognized that the land of Israel included, and was surrounded by, non-Jews, most of whom were Arabs, and that “we have to find a way to live with them together.” From that point of view, any agreement with an Arab state should “be blessed.”

Yair Shamir said the Abraham Accords say “loud and clear, that they [the UAE and Bahrain] accept Israel as part of the Middle East. They accept, whether they say it or not, that this land is ours. And there is room for a Jewish state and we can find the solution how to live together.”

Yair Shamir’s Path

Yair Shamir has thrived in different fields, from the military to the private sector to politics.

“I’ve done what I should have done. When my time came to go to the army, I volunteered to be a pilot. I willingly served 25 years in the Israeli Air Force,” he said. That included serving in the wars of 1967, 1973, and 1982.

“All of them were very tough, but I did what I was supposed to do for my country,” he said.

After a quarter of a century in the air force, Shamir said he “decided to jump, to build an economy that could be secure.”

Shamir has had a prolific career in the private sector, particularly in high-tech. He served in a variety of leadership roles, including as the general manager and corporate vice president of Scitex, CEO of Elite Food Industries, president and CEO of VCON Telecommunications, and chairman of Catalyst, a venture capital fund. Shamir also served as chair of Shamir Optical Industry Ltd. and has been on the boards of several high-tech firms, such as Mercury Orckit, Mirabilis, and Comfy. His tenure as chairman of Israel Aerospace Industries saw the company’s significant recovery.

“I realized that few people understood that if you want to secure the future of Israel, you have to secure its capability to grow economically,” he said.

Given the country’s poor natural resources, the only way to do so was to make the most of its human resources.

“Today the locomotive of the [Israeli] economy is high-tech,” he said.

If my father had been in the dilemma that we have [now with Iran], not just today, but 10 or 15 years ago, that dilemma would not exist today

The Iranian Challenge

Shamir also discussed how his father would have likely approached the Iranian challenge.

Yitzhak Shamir supported Prime Minister Begin’s decision to destroy the Osirak nuclear reactor in Iraq in 1981.

Yair Shamir said that most senior Israeli defense officials opposed the plan.

“Begin and my father forced the government to decide to destroy [the reactor] by a majority of one. … Many people said and believed that their decision was based on the fact that they were beaten by the Holocaust and that they looked at nuclear power as another potential Holocaust,” Shamir said.

He said that if his father were prime minister today, he would already have destroyed Iran’s nuclear reactor, and he would have done so even if the United States was opposed to the idea.

“If my father had been in the dilemma that we have [now with Iran], not just today, but 10 or 15 years ago, that dilemma would not exist today,” he said.

Shamir said everything his father ever did was for the well-being of Israel, never for his own ego.

He quoted a sentence his father once wrote, which was later engraved on his tombstone: “As for myself, I hope I will be remembered as a man who loved his people and his land and stood guard over them all his life and in every way he could.”