Tough, Agile Shamir Set for Another Term

After Yitzhak Shamir and the rival Labor Party closed the deal last week to form a coalition that would make him prime minister for four more years, a member of a rightist party that had been promised a place in the new government and is now left out called him to complain.

“What will I do with the promise you made? Put it in a museum?” Tehiya Party leader Yuval Neeman asked, according to published reports.

The bushy-browed prime minister replied, in so many words, “You can put it where you want.”

Vintage Shamir

It was vintage Shamir: tough, speaking to the point and damning the consequences.

Once considered a transitional player on Israel’s political stage, Shamir is poised to begin a term of office that, at its scheduled end, will have given him a seven-year hold on the premiership. Already, he has completed nearly three years as prime minister since he took over from Menachem Begin in 1983. Only David Ben-Gurion, founding father of the Israeli state, was in power longer; Begin, Shamir’s mentor, held office for six years.

For a former underground leader, secret agent and politician who is unanimously considered colorless and unimaginative, the achievement strikes not only a few as impressive.

“He’s got my vote for politician of the year,” said Harry Wall, a representative of the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith.

Narrow Plurality

In November, the 5-foot, 4-inch prime minister led his party to a narrow plurality win in parliamentary elections. During six weeks of political give and take thereafter, he deftly maneuvered the left-center Laborites into a junior coalition partnership with his rightist Likud--all the while keeping rivals within his party at bay and leaving farther-right competitors out in the cold.

But whether the agility that Shamir showed in gaining and keeping power can be transferred to resolving critical problems facing Israel is another matter, observers say.

They point out that Shamir, 73, has opposed almost every major foreign policy move of Israel’s in the last decade, including the 1978 Camp David peace accords with Egypt, the withdrawal of Israeli troops from Lebanon and outgoing Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’ effort to open peace talks with Jordan’s King Hussein.

He also ignored reports of the Lebanese massacre of Palestinians at the Sabra and Chatilla refugee camps outside Beirut in 1983, for which he was sharply criticized by an Israeli investigatory commission.

“Good leaders are those who can see things before they happen,” said Yaron Ezrahi, a political theorist at Hebrew University. “Shamir doesn’t even see them after they happen.”

In defense, Shamir’s close aide, Avi Pazner, responded: “He looks at problems in a calm manner. He is cautious.”

Since the Reagan Administration broke a 13-year ban on talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization two weeks ago, Shamir has displayed his characteristic preference for the status quo. He called the move a mistake and, with his usual bluntness, suggested that the United States had merely fallen under the spell of a “crazy” fashion of supporting the PLO.

In some ways, it is Shamir’s unadorned, straightforward view of things that appeals to many Israelis. Unlike his longtime rival Peres, who is often chastised as untrustworthy, Shamir is viewed as solid, if somewhat stolid.

He is married and has a grown son and daughter.

A lawyer by training, Shamir was born Yitzhak Yzernitsky in Czarist Poland in 1915. Nazis killed much of his family during World War II. After immigrating to what was then Palestine in 1935, he took the Hebrew name Shamir, which means thorn.

During Israel’s battle against British rule in Palestine, Shamir belonged to the militant Irgun branch of Jewish fighters and was jailed twice. Once he was imprisoned in Ethiopia, from which he escaped and returned to the Middle East by hiding in the hull of a ship.

Member of ‘Stern Gang’

During Israel’s war of independence he was a leader of Lehi, the Freedom Fighters for Israel, commonly known as the “Stern Gang.” The group’s characteristic mode of action was assassination; two former members of the group recently took responsibility for the 1948 murder of Count Folke Bernadotte, a Swedish mediator for the United Nations.

Both the Stern Gang and Irgun were implicated in the 1948 massacre of 250 men, women and children at the village of Deir Yassin, near Jerusalem. At the time of Israel’s independence, Ben-Gurion called Shamir and his group “mad dogs.”

In the 1950s Shamir joined the Mossad, Israel’s secret service, where he served until 1965. Afterward, he spent a few years in business before joining Begin’s Herut faction of the Likud Bloc in 1970. Under Begin’s tutelage, he became Speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s Parliament, in 1977 and foreign minister three years later.

Succeeded Begin

Shamir rose to prime minister when Begin resigned in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. After the stormy Begin years, Shamir’s patient, even plodding, style was considered reassuring. But he was widely considered a caretaker premier, destined to last only until his party was thrown from power or someone within Likud superseded him at the first opportunity.

The opportunity has not arrived, however. In the 1984 elections, Likud ran dead even with Labor, and the two parties joined forces in a national unity government.

Peres and Shamir had rotated for two-year stints in the premiership, but their alliance was uneasy. Shamir considered Peres’ persistent talk of negotiation and withdrawal from the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip as harmful to Israeli authority there. Last spring, Shamir sank Peres’ effort to begin international peace talks over the fate of the territories.

Since then, with characteristic steadfastness, Shamir has loudly opposed any withdrawal from the occupied lands and insisted that the way to put down the Arab uprising in the territories was through might.

‘Peace of Power’

“First, we will put down the uprising to protect our own security and then negotiate,” he promised during the election campaign. “The result will be peace--not peace that we bought, but a peace of power.”

While saying that he wants to grant autonomy to Palestinians living in the territories, Shamir publicly pushes for more Israeli settlements that eat up the land and enrage the Arabs.

“Settlements? Of course there will be settlements,” he said during the election campaign. “I see no reason why the new government, when it is formed, will not make new settlements possible.”

In the coalition agreement signed with Labor, Shamir compromised on an agreement to build eight settlements during the coming year. It was a comedown from far-right demands for 40 to be constructed in four years--and it reflected Shamir’s awareness that the government has neither the money nor the people to populate such an ambitious scheme.

Hunkers Down

Nonetheless, Shamir often responds to turmoil by hunkering down.

In 1986, when asked by reporters to comment on a budding security scandal, Shamir replied: “Those who need to know, know. Those who don’t know, don’t need to know.” He once described Jewish terrorists convicted two years ago for killing and maiming West Bank Arabs as “excellent boys gone wrong.”

And he is doggedly devoted to the idea that, by right, Israel’s territory ought to extend from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.

Unlike many Israelis who believe in the same expansion of Israeli territory, Shamir does not rely on biblical guidelines to tell him where Israel’s proper bounds would be.

Once, when asked why Israel should fill this territory, he responded simply, “Because.”