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After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz, 10 October 2024

... Civil War ended in 1990. It wasn’t an unusual trajectory in the region. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, former leaders of the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the ...

The Finchley Factor

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Thatcher in Israel, 13 September 2018

Margaret Thatcher and the Middle East 
by Azriel Bermant.
Cambridge, 274 pp., £22.99, September 2017, 978 1 316 60630 8
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... from the intelligence services that Moyne’s killing had been organised by the Lehi leader, Yitzhak Yezernitsky. While underground he adopted the codename ‘Michael’ in homage to Michael Collins (despite some myth-making, almost no self-styled anti-colonial movement took Irish republicanism as a model, with the exception of Revisionist Zionism), and ...

The Two-State Solution: An Autopsy

Henry Siegman: An Autopsy, 24 May 2018

... statehood, whereas when my country elects former terrorists as prime ministers (Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir) it proves we are the greatest democracy in the Middle East. When my terrorists are killed or imprisoned, a grateful people take care of their families. When my neighbours do the same, it proves they reward terrorism, and must be denied ...

Peace for Galilee

David Twersky, 21 April 1983

The Longest War 
by Jacobo Timerman.
Chatto, 160 pp., £7.95, December 1982, 0 7011 3910 2
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... who went to the Communications Minister Mordechai Zippori. Zippori phoned the Foreign Minister, Yitzhak Shamir. What Zippori said to Shamir is a question of some interest, as the two Ministers rendered very different accounts of the talk in their respective testimonies to the Kahan Commission – which believed ...

On Trying to Be Portugal

Geoffrey Wheatcroft: Zionist Terrorism, 6 August 2009

‘A Senseless, Squalid War’: Voices from Palestine 1945-48 
by Norman Rose.
Bodley Head, 278 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 224 07938 9
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Major Farran’s Hat: Murder, Scandal and Britain’s War against Jewish Terrorism 1945-48 
by David Cesarani.
Heinemann, 290 pp., £20, March 2009, 978 0 434 01844 4
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... movements did not claim Irish inspiration. As it happens, there is one interesting exception. When Yitzhak Shamir was an underground leader of the Stern gang he took the nom de guerre Michael in homage to Michael Collins, and the Irgun’s campaign of 1946-48 was consciously inspired by the IRA’s activities in 1919-21. There are other telling ...

Pissing on Pedestrians

Owen Bennett-Jones: A Great Unravelling, 1 April 2021

Fall: The Mystery of Robert Maxwell 
by John Preston.
Viking, 322 pp., £18.99, February, 978 0 241 38867 9
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... relationship with Jeffrey Epstein? ‘He has done more for Israel than can be said here today,’ Yitzhak Shamir said at his funeral. Was that a reference to his helping Jews escape the communist bloc or to the help he gave Israel over the kidnapping of the nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu? Or something else? And finally there was the conundrum of ...

After Nasrallah

Adam Shatz: Israel’s Forever War, 24 October 2024

... Civil War ended in 1990. It wasn’t an unusual trajectory in the region. Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, former leaders of the Likud, Netanyahu’s party, both started out as ‘terrorists’. Begin was behind the 1946 bombing of the King David Hotel, which killed nearly a hundred civilians; Shamir planned the ...

The sea is the same sea

Adam Shatz: Bibi goes to Washington, 30 August 2018

Bibi: The Turbulent Life and Times of Benjamin Netanyahu 
by Anshel Pfeffer.
Hurst, 423 pp., £20, May 2018, 978 1 84904 988 7
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... as defence minister, after Sharon was forced to step down over the Sabra and Shatila massacre. But Yitzhak Shamir, the new prime minister, saw Netanyahu as ‘shallow, vain, self-destructive and prone to pressure’. As he put it, ‘the sea is the same sea and Netanyahu is the same Netanyahu.’ The ‘princes’ of Likud may have had little time for ...

Along the Divide

Nathan Thrall: Israel’s Allies, 5 November 2015

Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies 
by Yossi Alpher.
Rowman and Littlefield, 196 pp., £23.95, January 2015, 978 1 4422 3101 6
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... peace with Israel, but was denounced by the Israeli government as something close to the opposite. Yitzhak Shamir, then foreign minister, called it ‘a renewed declaration of war on Israel’: the plan’s proposal for a Palestinian state, the foreign ministry’s official announcement concluded, ‘constitutes a danger to Israel’s existence’. During ...

Beyond Borders

Adam Shatz: Adolfo Kaminsky’s Forgeries, 16 February 2023

... forged documents for the Haganah and its rivals in the Stern Gang, a terrorist militia led by Yitzhak Shamir, whose members included one of Kaminsky’s Resistance comrades, Ernest Appenzeller. In 1947, Kaminsky photographed Appenzeller and another Stern Gang member, Avner Grouchof, standing near a bus headed for the Gare de Lyon, next to posters for ...

Protocols of Machismo

Corey Robin: In the Name of National Security, 19 May 2005

Arguing about War 
by Michael Walzer.
Yale, 208 pp., £16.99, July 2004, 0 300 10365 4
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Chain of Command 
by Seymour Hersh.
Penguin, 394 pp., £17.99, September 2004, 0 7139 9845 8
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Torture: A Collection 
edited by Sanford Levinson.
Oxford, 319 pp., £18.50, November 2004, 0 19 517289 2
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... anomie, meaninglessness – war is modernity’s great answer to itself. ‘War is inescapable,’ Yitzhak Shamir declared, not because it ensures security but because ‘without this, the life of the individual has no purpose.’ Though this sensibility seeps across the political spectrum, it is essentially an ideal of the Counter-Enlightenment, which ...

Overtaken by Events

Avi Shlaim, 30 November 1995

Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land 
by Meron Benvenisti.
California, 260 pp., £20, September 1995, 0 520 08567 1
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... Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated earlier this month by a right-wing extremist claiming to act in the name of God, inflicted more punishment and pain on the Palestinians than any other Israeli leader. As Chief of Staff in 1967, he presided over Israel’s spectacular military victory and the capture of the West Bank ...

The Habit of War

Jeremy Harding: Eritrea, 20 July 2006

I Didn’t Do It for You: How the World Used and Abused a Small African Nation 
by Michela Wrong.
Harper Perennial, 432 pp., £8.99, January 2005, 0 00 715095 4
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Unfinished Business: Ethiopia and Eritrea at War 
edited by Dominique Jacquin-Berdal and Martin Plaut.
Red Sea, 320 pp., $29.95, April 2005, 1 56902 217 8
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Battling Terrorism in the Horn of Africa 
edited by Robert Rotberg.
Brookings, 210 pp., £11.99, December 2005, 0 8157 7571 7
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... to find the man who served as deputy police commissioner in Asmara at the time: he recalls fishing Yitzhak Shamir ‘from the tank of a water container in which he had been hiding, hoping to pass through police checkpoints unnoticed’. For Wrong, the absence of British-Eritrean mixed-race offspring confirms the ‘pinched, parsimonious quality’ of ...

The Shoah after Gaza

Pankaj Mishra, 21 March 2024

... ruling pro-Palestinian Congress party, uncompromising Zionists such as Begin, Ariel Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir seemed to have won the race to muscular nationhood. (The envy is now out of the closet: Hindu trolls constitute Benjamin Netanyahu’s largest fan club in the world.) I remember I had a picture on my wall of Moshe Dayan, the IDF chief of staff ...

Short Cuts

Yonatan Mendel: Uri Avnery, 13 September 2018

... of He Walked through the Fields, a classic novel in Zionist thought, written in 1947 by Moshe Shamir and later a play and a movie, is an Uri: a kibbutznik who serves in the Palmach and falls in love with an emigrant from Poland after the Holocaust. Earlier, in 1927, Rachel Bluwstein Sela, a Zionist pioneer who emigrated from Russia to Palestine during the ...

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