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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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... 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 ...”

“... torn and nobody looks at the paper.’ And yet, with the possible exception of two novels by Moshe Shamir, no work of literature has done as much as Yizhar’s Days of Ziklag (1958) to mythologise the ’48 generation as the young heroes who delivered a state to the Jewish people. The carefully researched novel is set during a ferocious see-saw battle that ...”

“... leaders to disengage from the Gaza Strip and consider other territorial compromises, but not even Yitzhak Rabin was willing to offer the Palestinians a viable state. Ehud Barak’s purportedly generous offer at Camp David would have given them only a disarmed set of Bantustans under de facto Israeli control. The tragic history of the Jewish people does not ...”

“... fight and fight, and if blood has to be shed ...Stern, and his distinctly less aesthetic deputy Yitzhak Shamir, went on to offer military and political collaboration to Hitler in the battle to expel the British and to make a manly, even skull-breaking nation out of the Jews. And Berlin, normally so eager to please, was later to refuse to shake Menachem ...”