Word: shamir
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Yitzhak Shamir personifies intransigence. Wherever he goes, even if it is just to his office in Jerusalem, he is attended by low expectations for Arab- Israeli diplomacy. Still, his visit to Washington next week could advance the cause of peace if his encounters with the American President, Congress and the Jewish community reinforce the message he has been getting back home: something has to give on the occupied territories...
...Shamir believes that Israel has a historic birthright to the lands it seized from Jordan in the 1967 War. After 21 years of Israeli rule and settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian Arabs still outnumber Jews there 16 to 1. For demographic reasons alone, it is hard to see how "Greater" Israel can remain a Jewish state and still be a true democracy. Nor is an Israel whose soldiers are ordered to break teenagers' bones the "light unto the nations" that its Zionist founders wanted...
...incidentally, those founders -- David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann -- detested the Stern Gang that was implicated in terrorist bombings and assassinations. Shamir was one of its most notorious members. If Israel refuses to budge on the West Bank, it could, over time, become just another Levantine war zone pretending to be a country, in which latter-day equivalents of the Stern Gang battle with the most extremist of the Palestinians...
...forcing the issue now will do no good and could do harm by giving Shamir an excuse to dig in his heels. Likud has consolidated its strength in recent local elections, so it would be folly to peg American diplomacy to the more pliable policies of the weakened Labor Party...
Neither side is ecstatic about Baker's gradualist approach, and the hard- line Likud government of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir does not want to concede anything of substance. But Baker's hint in testimony to Congress last week that the U.S. may urge Jerusalem to deal directly with the P.L.O. rather than with "moderate" West Bank Palestinians (who can never be found) may eventually force Shamir out of his bunker. Baker "was rather astute," concedes an Israeli diplomat. "The fact that Baker is clearly not eager to play a central role in our crisis may actually cause Shamir...