Isaac Shamir

Biography

Yitzhak Shamir, born Yitzhak Yezernitsky in 1915 in Ruzhany, then in the Russian Empire, joined the Revisionist youth movement Betar, studied law briefly at the University of Warsaw, and emigrated to Palestine in 1935. There he joined the Irgun, and when it split in 1940 he followed Avraham Stern into the more militant Lehi.

After Stern was killed in 1942 Shamir escaped from British detention and became one of Lehi's three leaders. He planned the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo, and in 1948 the Lehi leadership authorised the killing of the UN mediator Folke Bernadotte. Captured by the British in 1946 and exiled to Eritrea, he escaped and reached Israel after independence.

He served in the Mossad from 1955 to 1965, then joined Menachem Begin's Herut party and entered the Knesset in 1974. He was Speaker from 1977 and foreign minister from 1980, and succeeded Begin as prime minister in 1983. After the inconclusive 1984 election he shared power with Shimon Peres, returning as prime minister from 1986 to 1992.

His second term saw the first intifada, restraint under Iraqi missile fire during the Gulf War, the airlift of Ethiopian Jews and mass Soviet Jewish immigration, and the Madrid peace conference. He lost the 1992 election, gave up the Likud leadership in 1993, and died in 2012.