Word: shamir
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...rivals consider Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir a wily political escape artist. By exhausting opponents with delaying tactics and evading crucial decisions, the Likud party leader has managed to stick to his hard-line ideology while feigning compromise, burying in procedural minutiae every proposal for Arab-Israeli peace that has come...
Last week the master of delay found himself cornered, however. Forced to choose between accepting U.S. Secretary of State James Baker's compromise plan for Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Cairo and risking the collapse of his national unity government, Shamir stuck to his ideology. After a dramatic showdown on the floor of the Knesset, he became the first Israeli leader ever to be evicted from office when Labor Party leader Shimon Peres pushed through a vote of no confidence by a margin...
...collapse of the national unity government was appropriately ignominious. Ever since its formation 15 months ago, the coalition of Likud and Labor has functioned as something of a joke, breeding acrimony and indecision. Its foreign policy has been contradictory. Peres proposed swapping land for peace; Shamir insisted on both peace and territory. Says Dore Gold of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies in Tel Aviv: "Imagine Richard Nixon and George McGovern in the same Cabinet trying to negotiate the Paris peace talks ((with Viet...
Ironically, Shamir's fall was prompted by his own peace initiative, which he launched last spring under heavy pressure to negotiate an end to the intifadeh. The plan called for elections among the 1.7 million Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza to choose representatives who would then negotiate a period | of limited autonomy with Israel. To get the elections off the ground, Baker proposed a formula under which Egypt, Israel and the U.S. would select Palestinian delegates for preliminary talks...
...last-ditch effort to budge Shamir, Washington embarked on a high- profile game, threatening Jerusalem with both diplomatic and financial pressure. When President Bush condemned the settling of Jews in Israeli- annexed East Jerusalem -- a long-standing if rarely stated U.S. policy -- Shamir pounced. "Voices in Washington have outraged every Jew," he said. "We have no obligation to blindly follow every move the U.S. makes." The Bush Administration resented Shamir's efforts to shift the blame for his downfall. "This business that the President is precipitating this is nonsense," said a senior official in Washington...