Yet rather than living in an imaginary world in which the Arabs would give up their war against Israel’s existence or where the West could be beguiled into embracing the cause of the Jewish state, Shamir preferred to dwell in the more bleak reality in which Israel actually existed.
Though he made mistakes as all leaders do, Israel benefited from his leadership. Indeed, when you compare his missteps to the blunders some of his more popular and dynamic successors committed (the Oslo Accords and the misbegotten process that empowered Arafat, the withdrawal from Gaza and the second Lebanon war, to name just a few), Shamir seems like a genius.
Looking back on Shamir over the passage of time, his patient stewardship of Israel and his refusal to indulge in the starry-eyed rhetoric of peace or even the muscular rhetoric that the right loves to cheer, seems like the height of wisdom and statecraft.
A courageous fighter for Israel’s freedom in his youth, he lived long enough to bring forth that valor again as its prime minister. There is much Israel’s current generation of leaders as well as those who will follow can learn by the way this small, taciturn man operated.
Jonathan S. Tobin is senior online editor of Commentary magazine and chief political blogger at www.commentarymagazine.com, where this originally appeared. He can be reached via e-mail at [email protected].
