Security Stressed : Shamir Views Peace Process as 3rd Priority

Yitzhak Shamir, who is scheduled to take over as Israel’s prime minister this week, is an uncompromising nationalist with an almost messianic belief that “right makes might”--a twist on the aphorism--and a priority list that puts the Middle East peace process third, behind Israel’s economy and its national security.

“Peace is very important, but not more important than the security of our people,” Shamir said in an interview last week. “I’m not a follower of peace at any price.”

A man with a reputation for toughness and immovable convictions, Shamir has often expressed the view that out of such total belief in the rightness of his cause comes the strength that gives him the edge over his enemies.

Shamir, 70, an underground leader before Israel became an independent nation in 1948, is now the foreign minister and is scheduled to exchange posts Tuesday with Prime Minister Shimon Peres, his centrist rival who has led the government for the past 25 months.

As his words suggest, Shamir will bring a different emphasis and a different style to the job. The publicity-conscious Peres spent much of his term trying to overcome what he described as an international image of Israeli intransigence.

But given the constraints of the coalition agreement under which the two men are bound in a “national unity” government, any apparent policy changes are likely to be less than meets the eye.

Ehud Olmert, a member of Parliament from Shamir’s rightist Likud Bloc and a member of the transition team advising him on priorities for his 25 months at the helm, said recently: “Basically, I think the name of the game will be continuity. There is not any grand design to start an entirely new policy. Mr. Shamir will not be the leader of a Likud government. . . . He will be the leader of a national unity government which has an agreed platform.”

No Brinkmanship

Moshe Arens, a minister without portfolio and the man seen as Shamir’s closest ally in the Likud leadership, said:

“The major thing that’s going to change is the following: Mr. Peres was taking all kinds of initiatives and making all kinds of statements which, if they had met with any response from the Arab nations, would have brought this government to the brink. Mr. Shamir is not going to do that.”

Shamir has been prime minister before, but he did not have the post long enough to put his personal stamp on it. He was selected by his party to succeed his political mentor, Menachem Begin, after Begin resigned suddenly in 1983.

Shamir served for 11 months before inconclusive elections in July, 1984, set the stage for formation of the national unity coalition, with Peres having first turn at the helm.

A latecomer to politics, Shamir succeeded to the Likud party leadership, and therefore to the office of prime minister, largely because his lack of charisma made him inoffensive to all factions.

A low profile is a matter of personal as well as political preference for him. While Peres courts the media, Shamir shuns it as much as possible. He says he prefers to work out of the spotlight, a reflection, perhaps, of his years in the underground--a British high commissioner in Palestine described him as one of the “most fanatical terrorist leaders”--and as a senior operative in the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service.

Olmert says Shamir’s relative neglect of personal public relations is “maybe his greatest weakness” as a politician. Together with his unimposing appearance--he stands about 5 foot, 4 inches and has narrow shoulders, a large head, and bushy white eyebrows--his penchant for privacy has given him a reputation as a gray and uninspiring leader.

A subordinate at the Foreign Ministry called him “a mediocre guy,” slow to make decisions. But others say he is badly underrated.

Uri Avnieri, a leftist publisher and former member of Parliament, said: “Mr. Shamir is very unlike his public image in Israel and maybe in the world. He’s sometimes pictured as a kind of caricature, a small, rather ridiculous, maybe pompous kind of clown. This is how he has been represented by Israeli humorists and entertainers. Or he’s been pictured as a sinister, fanatical terrorist going around killing people. . . . Neither of these two stereotypes is the real person.”

As stiff and uncomfortable as he seems in public, Shamir can be relaxed and animated in private conversation.

“This is what really surprises people when they meet him for the first time,” Avnieri said, “because he is quite amiable, without any effort to make a good impression or to be liked by you.”

Avnieri described Shamir as a serious and tough man, “totally dedicated to what he believes in” and “absolutely, totally immovable” with regard to Israel’s continued sovereignty over the territories that it captured in the Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973--the West Bank of the Jordan River, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights.

In their highly regarded book on “Israel’s Lebanon War,” Israeli journalists Zev Schiff and Ehud Yaari describe Shamir, who was also Begin’s foreign minister, as “the most belligerent and uncompromising foreign minister in the country’s history.”

The passage continues: “In contrast to all his predecessors, who strove to temper the proposals forwarded by other members of the senior defense and foreign-policy establishment, Shamir always aligned himself with the most ardent of the extremists, supported every proposal for radical military moves and never brought diplomatic alternatives before the Cabinet or presented the political risks and consequences involved.”

Parliamentary Absention

Shamir abstained on the parliamentary votes that approved the Begin-negotiated Camp David agreements with Egypt and the subsequent peace treaty under which Israel returned the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

While calling further improvement in the economy his top priority, and stressing the need for increased immigration, Shamir said he also plans unspecified peace initiatives of his own after the rotation.

“It will not be useful to publicize it before we are taking some steps,” he told The Times.

However, any initiatives he may take are expected to be in the direction of greater Palestinian autonomy under Israeli sovereignty rather than any compromise on Israel’s borders.

“There are people in Jordan and Egypt who don’t like the term ‘autonomy,’ ” Shamir told an Israeli interviewer recently. “So we can call it something else. But I think that it is the way to bring about some sort of agreement that they and we can live with.”

Shamir has publicly opposed any United Nations-sponsored Middle East peace conference of the type that Peres has said he is willing to explore. But the difference in their positions appears to be mainly of emphasis. The circumstances under which Shamir has indicated he might reconsider, including Soviet diplomatic recognition of Israel and ground rules prohibiting the sponsoring powers from dictating terms, are essentially the same as those Peres has listed as conditions.

Similarly, the issue of new Jewish settlement on the West Bank may not turn into as thorny a coalition problem as some expect. Shamir is a strong proponent of widespread Jewish settlement in the occupied territories, while Peres sees added Jewish towns there as a potential roadblock to peace.

Under the national unity coalition agreement, six new settlements were to be built in the first year, but with Peres in the prime minister’s office and the government short of money, only two were added in two years. Shamir is expected to demand completion of at least the other authorized settlements, but he has emphasized that economic constraints may limit more widespread activity.

Many Israelis on the political right are viscerally anti-Arab, but Shamir seems more emotionally detached, sometimes to the point of insensitivity.

For example, the Kahan Commission, which investigated Israeli responsibility for the 1982 massacre of Palestinian refugees by Lebanese Falangist guerrillas in the Sabra and Chatilla camps south of Beirut, criticized Shamir, who was foreign minister at the time, for failing to take any action after being warned that the killing was under way.

When members of a Jewish underground group were convicted last year of a series of anti-Arab terrorist attacks, Shamir condemned what they had done but said they were more misguided than culpable. And he continues to favor an amnesty for those still in prison, including three convicted of murder.

Shamir was prime minister and directly responsible for overseeing Shin Bet, the security agency, when, in 1984, members of the agency beat to death two Palestinians captured in a bus hijacking. He has denied any wrongdoing in the affair, although the former head of Shin Bet said he had political approval in ordering the killings and then trying to cover them up. The results of a police investigation into the case are expected to be made public this month.

As one of the three leaders of the so-called Stern Gang in his underground days, Shamir was said to have ordered the killing of a British officer, a U.N. mediator, and even a fellow underground leader, all of whom were seen as threats to the goal of a Jewish state.

In his chronicle of the first Arab-Israeli War, “Genesis 1948,” author Dan Kurzman quoted Shamir as telling Stern members: “A man who goes forth to kill another whom he does not know must believe one thing only--that by his act he will change the course of history.”

Shamir conceded in the recent interview that the Stern Gang attacked Arabs. But he said it was only in retaliation for Arab attacks on Jews--”not because of their existence. Never! And if you will see one day the literature of the underground . . . it is underlined that the Arabs are not the enemies.”

He said that supporters of the Palestine Liberation Organization are losing faith in the PLO, and he contrasted the PLO with the pre-independence Jewish underground.

“They fought to destroy our country, not to create their own,” Shamir said. “Theirs was a negative purpose; ours was a positive purpose. . . . This is the great difference between our national movement and their national movement.”

It is a difference, he said, that “gave us a lot of strength. You have to be convinced that you’re right. Otherwise you cannot fight.”

Shamir, who will be 71 the day after he is scheduled to take over as prime minister, said he hopes to remain politically active even after the end of the national unity government.

An inveterate walker, whose pace is said to tax his much younger bodyguards, Shamir appears to be in exceptionally good health. He is one of the few Cabinet members who does not need reading glasses.

Shamir said in the interview that, politically, he is very young.