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Summing Up: An Autobiography

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When I first picked up this book I thought that I was going to be pleasantly suprised because the author begins with a candor and an unabashed style that gives the impression that he is prepared to render his account honsetly and forthrightly without concern for politics or detractors. He goes through and discusses his ideas without regard for whether or not you agree with him or like him, so, while I very much do disagree with the author, I at least had a respect for him for being fervent in his convictions and not lowering himself to attempting to whitewash his career. Unfortunately that grudging respect gives way as the author begins to use the pages here to attack his enemies and gloss over his own failures.

One major problem is the tone the author takes throughout his discussion of his time in power. The fact is that Mr. Shamir was in prominence in Israeli politics during a time of great upheaval for the Isreali state, but to hear this author tell it one would not get that impression. His political victories at the ballots were very slim and his coalitions very weak, but yet in this book the impression is made that the author always found the entire Israeli state firmly behind him, accept for a few unpatriotic enemies that obviously had know idea what was best for the state such as Peres. Even though the state was riven with racial and political problems the author never mentions them. The same can be said for his trips abroad where he was forever being met with a world Jewish community that was one hundred percent behind him and his vision of the Israeli state. I couldn't quite make out whether this was simply him deciding not to write about the problems or if he was in denial as to whether they actually existed. He speaks as if the Israelis are a monolith barring the few unpatriotic ones who defied his vision.

What lost the most respect for me was his discussion of his governments handling of the huge financial crises that occured under his watch. The author simply dismisses this major moment in the history of Israel with but a few sentences letting the reader know that the author had no knowledge of finacial matters, and as such the blame certainly cannot rest on his shoulders but must lie eslewhere. This would be bad enough if in his last chapter "Summing Up" the author doesn't then have the gall to take credit for financial gains that were later made under his government. Incredulous doesn't seem to do this author justice.

What the book does do well though is to show the shallowness of ideologues and their thoughts. What I found most interesting is the fact that the author only gives one visceral and physical description of this area, and this is from his boyhood before he had ever stepped foot on this soil. Subsequently there seems to be no incongruity between his boyhood visions of this perfect state and the reality of the place he found. Unlike so many other immigrants to this land who found their expectations were not met by the reality of what was there, Shamir seems to have found everything just as he had imagined it.

Another problem that displays the shallowness of his thinking is when he discusses Jabotinsky and the Palestinians. He speaks of the future Israeli state as if there is no conflict between his vision and what the Palestinains would ever accept. Shamir speaks of both people living this area peacefully as millions of Jews pour into this place pushing the Arabs to the peripheries of the state and society as Israel becomes more and more Jewish and less Arab. To him there seems to be no inevitable conflict that will take place as his national aspirations for a Jewish state mean the minimization of the other people who live there as well. What comes through clearly is that there exists no empathy at all in the author as he doesn't even recognize the reality of the impossibility of what he envisions. It is as if the Palestinians are not real people, and this flows right along to the eventual "autonomy" discussions as the author amazingly writes about the enormous benifits that will befall the Arabs with his magnanimous vision of autonomous Arab enclaves as more and more Jewish settlements move to squeeze the Palestinians tighter and tighter. It is absurd and surreal.

Lastly the author completely misses the irony of his discussion of his underground days and his encomprehension of violence from Palestinains and Jewish groups opposed to the state. It would be laughable if not so absurd. Mr. Shamir justifies his violence against the British Mandate government as being legitimate because in his eyes the British authority was not the legitimate power there. He believed that a Jewish state was the only legitimate entity to rule over this area, and as such violence against the British became not only acceptable but a national duty. Then when he speaks of Jewish and Palestinian terrorists the irony is completely lost especially when he discusses the Jewish terrorists who believe the government has no legitimate right to restrain them because all of Israel should be under Jewish rule. He doesn't seem to understand his very own justification for his violence naturally flows to both Palestinians and Jewsih terrosist who do not accept the Israeli government's authority.

In the end this author went the same way as most memoirists in that prevarications and venom abound. He uses the his pen to eviscerate his enemies and expound on his glories. In the end what he succeeds in doing is displaying the intellectual shallowness of ideologues and nothing more. These books are important to read because they give you and idea of the man behind the decisions and the history which provides the reader with a better context and understanding of events, but one always needs to understand they going to be wading through a lot of the author's unreality and attempts to rewrite history.

Mr. Shamir, former member of the Stern Gang should be lionized as one of the great leaders of the Israeli right. Yet he has been forgotten. He has been relegated to the trash bin so that leaders like Mr. Netanyahoo and Mr. Begin can have the limelight(should I include Sharon). This is his story, told in his words. Few books on Israel detail the reign of Shamir and even fewer seem to judge him in a fair light. A founder of the Israeli republic, he should not be forgotten. This book talks about his ideas and his many struggles. But alas, the book also has weakness in that it does not describe all th events that took place under his premiership. He descibes more the scandals then the positions he stood for. Mostly this is due to the fact that this book was written soon after his retirement and he felt the reader would be familiar with his struggles, but 20 years later we are not familiar.

Yitzhak Shamir was , in my judgment, one of the finest of Israel's Prime Ministers. He was tough, and strong. Reality helped make him that way. He was an underground leader in the struggle to oust the British and end the Mandate. He was then a Mossad operative . Called to politics he worked his way up and became a two- term Prime Minister of Israel.
No doubt one of the formative incidents of his life was the murder of his parents in the Shoah.
Shamir was a pragmatic leader for whom Security was the first consideration. He did not trust and believe in Arab good intention. And he was dedicated to attaining and preserving all the land of Israel for the Jewish people. Towards the end of his term under American pressure he went to the Madrid conference, a conference which was a predecessor of the misfortunate Oslo

Yitzhak Shamir was possibly the last really strong Prime Minister of Israel,so far. His life was dedicated to love of the Land and People of Israel.

He writes of his childhood in the small Polish town of Rujenoy,where Zionism was a part of his upbringing and his raison d' etre since he was young. In 1929 ,fired up by Arab pogroms against Jews in 'Palestine', he joined the Betar Zionist Youth Movement,aged fourteen.
Inspired by Zionist leaders such as Vladimir Jabotinsky,of whom he writes with great admiration, he was also influenced in his spirit of resistance against British control over 'Palestine' and nation-building by Irish leader,Michael Collins.Shamir immigrated to the Land of Israel,then under British control, in 1935, where he has lived ever since.

He joined the Zionist liberation movement ,the Irgun Zvai Leumi and later the Fighters for the Freedom of Israel,becoming one of it's leaders. Shamir remembers the anti-Jewish pogroms by the Arabs of 1936-1939, euphimistically dubbed by the British as 'the Palestine disturbances'. Although these riots failed to frighten off the Jews, they did frighten the British who did their best to appease the Arabs by consistently reducing the number of Jews allowed to enter the 'Land of Israel'.
This became a great source of conflict between the Jews and 'Palestine's' British colonial masters.He discusses the motives for Arab terror , which have not changed in eight decades. The motive was always to prevent Jewish immigration to and settlement in the Land of Israel, and when the British were in charge of 'Palestine',the motive of Arab terror had nothing to do with the Arabs wanting to rule Israel instead of the British -as the Jews did. "The bloodshed was always directed against the Jews, and had no motive except destruction. In 1936,when the the Arabs turned on the British, it was only in relation to the Jews,to Jewish immigration,to doing away with the Jews.It was not to drive the British out of Palestine. Nor,when the British did leave and the State of Israel was created did Palestinian Arabs attempt to assume, or make use of,those areas of the country that were not part of the Jewish State-such as Judea, Samaria and the Gaza Strip-all inhabited exclusively by Arabs.Arab energy and money were invested instead in endless and fruitless bids to make life here unbearable for us."
This has not changed in eight decades. The Palestinian Arabs have no interest in developing their own societies,even in areas under their control, only the destruction of Israel and the mass murder and expulsion of her Jews.
The Palestinian Arab offensive is not an anti-colonial one, as leftwing propagandists have brainwashed so many to believe,but rather an anti-Jewish one.

Shamir writes of his participation in the underground struggle against the British,of his exile in Eritrea,of the War of Independence and the real facts behind the so-called massacre of Deir Yassin,his years in the Mossad,and his election to the Knesset in 1973, as a member of Menachem Begin's nationalist Herut Party.

He was a kingpin in the election of the Likud Party to office in Israel in 1977,and was Speaker of the Israeli Knesset from 1977 to 1980,that year being apointed Foreign Minister. Shamir reflects on the cold hostility of American President Jimmy Carter to Israel, and Shamir also evaluates various other international role players of the time.
Shamir reflects on the Sinai talks,and his opposition to the expulsion of Jewish communities from Yamit. As Arab rage is appeased with Jewish land , Shamir has correctly pointed out, Arab terror increases, with the support of world opinion,and Israel's future becomes more endangered.
Six weeks after the evacuation of Yamit, the 1982 Lebanon War broke out,as Israel was forced to respond to increased attacks by the PLO on northern Israel from Lebanon.

The reader can always feel Shamir's pain at the death and suffering caused to the Israeli people by Arab terror, mentioning attacks on schools and homes, the ambushing of buses,the murder and maiming of adults and children alike that has continued over the decades.

After Begins shock resignation in 1983 ,Shamir was thrust into the role of Prime Minister,as the situation for Israel and her people became more beleagured with the 'First Intifada' and the resulting worldwide hysterical prejudice against Israel followed by the shelling of Israeli population centers by Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Gulf War,cheered on by Palestinian Arabs,from the rooftops. Praiseworthy was his firm stand against talking to the murderous PLO,and his conviction of the indivisibility of the Land of Israel.
At the Madrid talks,Shamir proclaimed that the Jews were the only people who have lived in the Land of Israel,without interruption,for nearly 4000 years,the only people for whom Jerusalem has been a capital,the only people whose sacred places have only been in the Land of Israel..."For millenia our prayers ,literature and folklore have expressed powerful longings to return to our land.Only Eretz Yisrael,the Land of Israel is our true homeland.Any other country,no matter how hospitable, is still a diaspora,a temporary station on our way home".

At Madrid Shamir reflected on how the nature of the conflict between Israel and the Arabs is not territorial,but has raged long before Israel captured Judea,Samaria,Gaza and Golan in a defensive war. He reminded the world how Israel is a nation of 5 million , controlling only 28 000 kilometres, whereas the Arabs,numbering 170 million posses a land mass of 14 million square kilometres.
The issue is not territory but Israel's existance. Any Jew who strays into an Arab village risks losing his life,while hundreds of thousands of Arabs walk freely in every town and village in Israel.
He concludes the book by describing his defeat at the polls by Yitzhak Rabin and the Labour Party in 1992,and the Oslo process the following year in which Israel's government foolishly ressucitated the PLO,and mass murderer Yasser Arafat, allowing them to re-establish their terrorist networks in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, from where they was to continue their terror war against the Israeli people.Shamir predicted in these pages that the process would imperil Israel's existance and cost thousands of lives. His warnings against the dangers of this appeasement have turned out to be right,as the Palestinian leadership still sees territorial concession as just another step leading to the destruction of Israel and the genocide of her Jews.

This is the fascinating story of a person who did something truly atypical, going from the life of an outsider who led a violent gang to a life of genuine public service.

Shamir tells of his childhood in Poland and his education in Hebrew there. He then tells of his political hero, Vladimir Jabotinsky, who advocated free enterprise, possessed a "deeply rooted liberalism" and strongly objected to "acts of an extra-legal nature." While Jabotinsky in fact approved of "illegal" immigration into what is now Israel, that was only if all other channels were closed. And Jabotinsky was equally opposed to "evacuating" Arabs and to creating a binational state with them.

By 1935, the 20-year old Shamir was already in the Levant. Why? Because Josef Goebbels had planned a visit to Warsaw. That was the last straw for Shamir. On hearing the news of this, he left Poland at once.

As Shamir explains, the 1939 White Paper that basically shut down Jewish immigration to the Levant earned the British his "profound hostility." While he explains that he has never hated people, he then realized that the Jews of the area had to be rid of the British, and that an alliance with the British would not work. Shamir then joined the Stern Gang. In perhaps the best line in the book, Shamir says that he has always believed that "war is a conflict between the forces of evil." You read this and you wait for the second half of the sentence...maybe he'll say that it is between the forces of evil and those of good, or something. But there is no second half to the sentence.

The author then tells of the war against the British, "a war fought not for territory or glory but for immigration certificates for Jews."

The book then explains how Shamir went from being a leader of an outlawed group to a responsible citizen. The biggest step came in 1955, when he joined the Mossad. This gave him a chance to use the leadership skills he had developed in the Stern Gang to work for a responsible government. After that, he slowly managed to get into normal politics.

Shamir makes a few points that are worth remembering. First, the dismantling of Yamit was a very bad precedent, not just for Jews or Israel, but in general. Second, the American media generally show unfairness towards Israel. Third, the nature of the dispute with the Arabs is not territorial: Israel's 28,000 square kilometers not being excessive compared with the 14,000,000 square kilometers belonging to the Arabs, whose population is not even 50 times that of the Jews, let alone 500 times.

The author explains his opposition to the disastrous Oslo agreement. And he concludes that he can only hope that the people of Israel, whose judgment and endurance he trusts, "will look for, and find, alternative paths - even if they are rockier and steeper - to lead them to a viable peace that has not been bought with their security, their land, or their rights."

I agree with these sentiments, and I recommend this book.