NEWS ANALYSIS : Can the Old Naysayer, Shamir, Say Yes? : Israel: Despite a record of extreme immobility, the feeling is he’ll join Mideast peace talks.

Yitzhak Shamir has made a name for himself by saying no. He opposed the 1979 Camp David treaty with Egypt and efforts in the 1980s to set up talks with Jordan. He sank his own Palestinian peace plan last year when issues of procedure called for compromise.

In his more than six years as prime minister, saying no gave him his most shining moment, when, during the Gulf War, he refrained from attacking Iraq after Baghdad’s missiles struck Israel. The world applauded Shamir for, as more than one Israeli observer put it, doing what he does best: nothing.

Now, he is being asked to endorse a historic gathering between Israel and its Arab neighbors, one with the goal of bringing peace to a land that has known mostly conflict for seven decades.

Can the leader that local pundits call Dr. No finally say yes?

Opinion in Israel has edged toward thinking that he may. “It could be that Shamir is starting to see the limits of his room for maneuver. It could be the conference is on its way,” the Hadashot newspaper commented.

Officials in the Foreign Ministry insist that the benefits for Israel are piling up too high for Shamir to ignore. “This is the moment for Shamir to take his place in history,” a senior ministry official said.

Well, maybe. Last week, a television interviewer asked Shamir how he would like to go down in history.

“I do not think about history,” Shamir answered. Vintage Dr. No.

Cocksure predictions of which way Shamir will decide seem impossibly elusive. Each day, a new hurdle arises on the road to the talks. Last week, Israel complained about reports from Syria that the Bush Administration had promised Israeli withdrawal from all land conquered in the 1967 Middle East War. New conditions on the Palestinian role arise almost every day.

Shamir brings to the process a life of suspicion in a world he found dangerous for Jews: a youth spent surrounded by anti-Semitic hostility, his family made victim of Nazi atrocities; a life in the underground battling the British in Palestine and a deadly undercover career in the Israeli secret service.

Assessments of Shamir’s current political personality give a picture of extreme immobility, which his admirers forgive as caution. All he has at heart is the safety of Israel, they say. “Security is his main concern. There is a lack of trust but not a total mistrust,” said government spokesman Yossi Olmert, cutting his opinion finely.

“(Shamir’s) motto is don’t do anything that will get you in trouble,” a colleague of the prime minister told Jerusalem Report magazine. “He doesn’t take risks that will get us involved in war, but the other side is that he doesn’t take risks for peace.”

Yet, caution appears to have won out. A newspaper columnist noted that Shamir, by holding back, had succeeded in getting better terms for Israel. “Stubbornness paid off,” Zvi Gilat wrote in Hadashot.

In the eyes of detractors, the caution is purely tactical. Shamir, they argue, is stubbornly ideological. It is not caution that hinders compromise but a deep-seated belief in the historical rightness of Israel’s claim to occupied land plus overriding confidence in the force of will.

“Shamir is a believer, not a thinker,” said Aryeh Naor, who served as Cabinet secretary under former Prime Minister Menachem Begin. “Shamir has never given the slightest hint of compromise.”

Naor suggested that the bantam-sized leader is only out to win propaganda points. “He is in it for process, not substance,” he said.

In Shamir’s latest public comments about the talks, he has hinted that he is willing to participate, arguing that nothing is at risk for Israel in any issue of substance. Giving up land in return for peace treaties is rejected outright. “I don’t believe in territorial compromise,” he told last week’s TV interviewer.

Shamir has spoken clearly about his intention to keep the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and also the Golan Heights, which Israel annexed in 1981.

Last week, he repeated a favorite line about Israel’s ties to the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan: “The territory is made up of thousands of threads that relate to our lives: to our security, our water, our economy. I believe with all my heart and soul that we are eternally bound to this homeland.”

It was a soft variation of remarks he made to a recent rally of followers in his ruling Likud Party. In it, he said that in the occupied land, “threads had been woven over the course of thousands of years with one people, the people of Israel, the Jewish people.

“They speak today of a connection of foreigners, of terrorists, of the Palestine Liberation Organization and others to the Land of Israel. These are brutal, savage invaders. The Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel and only to the people of Israel.”

These hardly appear to be the words of someone on the verge of compromise--at a moment when some form of flexibility is needed to get talks under way.

The Bush Administration is trying to get him to accept arrangements that would paper over disputes about who will make up the Palestinian delegation to the talks.

Shamir is holding out for veto rights over the list of Palestinian negotiators. He wants neither Palestinians from Jerusalem nor from the PLO to take part. He takes the position that Jerusalem, including the Arab neighborhoods annexed in 1967, is not a subject for talks. Contact with the PLO has long been considered taboo, both because of the group’s history of terror tactics and its demand for an independent state.

Other procedural obstacles remain. No agreement is yet worked out on a role for the United Nations, which Israel opposes. A dispute over reconvening the opening session, which includes the United States and Soviet Union, is still unresolved. Shamir wants the opening session to be purely ceremonial and disappear in favor of one-on-one talks with the Arabs.

The attention to such detail highlights a common perception of Shamir as someone who views the world largely with mistrust. He was born in Ruzinoi, Poland, and educated at a Hebrew high school. Deep anti-Semitism fills his memories, not only in his native land, but in all of Europe.

“In the years before World War II, all of Europe was pro-Nazi,” he once said in an unusually frank 1989 interview with the Jerusalem Post.

“I remember it personally. I remember how as a student I walked in Warsaw and I could actually feel it coming. Here it comes, it is overcoming us. . . . I remember the Polish students looking for Jewish prey.”

Members of his family were cut down by German Nazis, and his father by Poles. During Holocaust remembrance day two years ago, Shamir recounted the circumstances of his father’s death at the hands not of strangers, but people he knew all his life. “While seeking shelter among friends in the village where he grew up, they, friends from childhood, killed him,” Shamir recalled.

Shamir had left Poland for British-ruled Palestine in 1935 and joined up with the Irgun, an underground group that included terror in its arsenal of tactics. Shamir was a gunman and joined with the extremist Lehi, known in the West as the Stern Gang, when it broke with the Irgun in 1940.

In 1942, Lehi’s leader, Avraham Stern, was shot dead by British police, and Shamir became one of the group’s top three leaders. As a member of the triumvirate, Shamir approved the assassination in Cairo of Lord Moyne, the British representative, and of Count Folke Bernadotte, a United Nations mediator who had called for the partition of Palestine. He also ordered the execution of a renegade companion, Eliahu Giladi, according to published histories.

After Israel’s independence, Shamir tried his hand at business, but in 1955 joined the Mossad, Israel’s version of the CIA.

Little is known of his activities during the next decade. In “Secret Wars,” a new history of Israel’s intelligence agencies, authors Benny Morris and Ian Black write that Shamir “ran some ad hoc operations, usually involving assassinations” of suspected enemies of Israel.

After retiring from the Mossad, and another short business career, Shamir joined the party of Menachem Begin. He won election to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 1973, and became Speaker when Begin’s Likud bloc of rightist parties won the 1977 elections. In the Knesset, he abstained from voting on the Camp David peace accords with Egypt, although he let it be known that he opposed Israel’s retreat from the Sinai.

Still, he drew close to Begin, was named foreign minister and, when Begin resigned in 1983 in the furor over the Lebanon war, Shamir took over.

Almost everyone considered him a caretaker who would quickly make way for someone with ideas and color. Predictions of Shamir’s exit proved premature.

By the end of the year, Shamir will have surpassed Begin as Israel’s second-longest-serving prime minister.

Shamir’s caution and attention to detail have led to a painstaking round of nitty negotiations through the United States--which indirectly, despite Shamir’s tough words, is in touch with the PLO.

But time has never been a factor for Shamir. A self-description he once gave reporters seems still to fit. “I am not,” he told them, “the hurrying kind.”