A man of some consequence
James Buchan
SUMMING UP: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY by Yitzhak Shamir Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 19.99, pp. 288 he man who calls himself Shamir I met only once, in Germany of all places, in the early 1980s. He had come to Bonn to inter- fere in the Bundestag election of 1983, and it stunned me that a man so coarse and brutal could be Foreign Minister of a democracy — especially one as lively as the Israeli.
Over the past ten years I have thought about this man and come upon an explana- tion, which arises deep in the nature of the state of Israel and the agonies that attend- ed its birth. Because the great virtues of the Jews of Europe could not save them from catastrophe, their qualities — of pride, intelligence, industry, moderation and loyalty — became suspect and the Israelis sought their reverse in the hideous Caliban that is Shamir and his violence, stupidity, paranoia and self-pity.
I should state here that Shamir murdered my wife's grandfather; or rather, to be precise, delegated the murder to two young men and sent them to their deaths as well. Against the larger injury of Shamir's life, to his country, its neighbours, the Jews of the world and humanity in general, my little vendetta will appear sufficiently banal. I mention it merely in passing.
Minds of murderers, says Rilke, are easy to fathom; and one has plumbed the Shallows of Shamir's after just a couple pages of this book. He swings like a town- hall jack between two emotions: hatred and sentimentality. He hates Arabs, democracy, George Bush and this country, though the British treated him always with justice and fairness, even when he was having our citi- zens killed. Whatever destroyed him as a moral human being also destroyed any authentic emotion but hatred, and he is sentimental about Israel, his family, the Holocaust, assassination, bank robbery, religion, the IDF, the Lehi (sometimes known as the Stern Gang) and, in one of his more gruelling passages, the Mossad. He devotes many pages of incoherent bafflement to an attempt to understand Begin's withdrawal from public life after the invasion of Lebanon in 1982, but of course he cannot understand because Begin, amid all his faults and virtues, did know that there was a such a thing as a consequence to his actions, whereas this simple impulse is beyond Shamir. Shamir, for example, when informed by telephone that Palestinians were being massacred in Sabra and Chatila camps that September failed to pass the message on to Begin because he simply could not see what the fuss was about (and still doesn't); or that it might injure the country he pretends to love (though love, of course, is also quite beyond him. ) Yet through the fog of distortion, igno- rance and rant that is these memoirs, I sensed a flickering not so much of remorse but of fear; as if Yitzhak Yezernitzky, now in his 80th year, were aware that he might have a difficult interview ahead of him — at which guns and letter-bombs and whin- ing will avail him not at all. For example, it has long been known in Israel that Shamir ordered the murder of his friend in the Lehi, Eliahu Giladi, and many Israelis believe he did it with his own hand. Shamir avoids the question, hiding behind a coward's passive, 'the decision was made — and carried out', but goes to great lengths to besmirch Giladi and stress his own terrible anguish. He later named his daughter Gilada, an action so repulsive that though I live by the English language I can find no word to describe it. He also would have us believe that he had nothing to do with the murder in 1948 of Count Bernadotte, the UN envoy who during the war had saved many Jews from the Nazis; but since Bernadotte was murdered by the Lehi, and Shamir was one of its three-man command council, I can't imagine anybody believing this. In the account here of the murder of Lord Moyne, the British Minister Resident in the Middle East, in Cairo in 1944, Shamir has used the intervening half- century to try and dredge up something bad about his victim, without success. The account here doesn't square with Shamir's speech to the conference of the 'Fighters for the Freedom of Israel' in March, 1949 (published by Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan, 1985, p. 97), where the murder is presented simply as an 'anti-imperialist operation'. As for Lord Moyne's alleged response to an alleged offer of Eichmann's, I should remind readers that it was the Lehi, not the British, that sought an alliance with the Third Reich. Indeed this was the Lehi's very raison d'être, while the British fought the Nazis to defeat and saved the remnant of European Jewry. Of Shamir's role in contacts with the Nazis, which took place in late 1941 when Jews were being butchered behind the advancing German armies in the East, I defer to Professor Margalit of Hebrew University in the New York Review of Books of 14 May, 1992:
Even if Shamir had not previously known about the dealings with the Nazis . . . he obviously knew about them from that day on. He also knew that [Abraham] Stern was determined to renew his connections with the Nazis.
And where did it get Shamir? From atop his mountain of corpses, what does he see? Israel does not occupy that land of Gene- sis, `from the river of Egypt unto the great river, the Euphrates' (Gen 15:18). It is a small state which, for all the talents of its population, survives on foreign subventions and is handing over small parcels of Genesis to Palestinian administration. As for Jerusalem, the Undivided Capital of Israel of these pages, the last time I visited the Old City against the pressing entreaties of Israeli friends I saw not a single person of recognisably Jewish origin, though many Palestinian Arabs and a few moth-eaten priests.
It was Saddam Hussein's great service to humanity in 1990 that he exploded two putrid myths: that all Arabs were brothers and that Israel was indispensable to United States interests in the Middle East. With these illusions shattered on both sides, peace at last became a possibility. It is an irony of history, or the workings of a benign Providence, that Shamir — who is still gloating in this book that the British sergeant who arrested him in 1946 was killed — was forced as Prime Minister in 1991 to sit and fume and rage while his country was attacked.
In the months that followed, Shamir was effortlessly outmanoeuvred by Secretary Baker and led by the ear into peace negoti- ations which finally issued in the agree- ments signed on the White House lawn last September. It is wholly typical of the man that he devotes his final chapter to a rant against these agreements, which he did so much to bring about. So, in his own terms, his life has been wasted; and this is what one would expect of a man who laid waste other lives.
These memoirs are a disgrace to their publishers, who compound the offence by printing a number of photographs of Shamir's choosing. Most of these show him with heads of state and government, not all of them obviously counting spoons/vital organs; though the Pope, the most intelli- gent of these people, appears to be intense- ly at prayer. The last photograph shows Shamir with his little grand-daughter on his knee. I close my eyes, and try to recompose this photograph into an English family in, say, 1960, but I can't: not just because of the event in Cairo of 9 November, 1944, but because of the picture's impenetrable laminations of Kitsch. I guess that Hannah Arendt was right, though she was speaking of Eichmann, that there is a category of evil on the earth that is also banal.
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