Yitzhak Shamir (, ; born Yitzhak Yezernitsky; October 22, 1915 – June 30, 2012) was an Israeli politician and the seventh prime minister of Israel, serving two terms (1983–1984, 1986–1992). Before the establishment of the State of Israel, Shamir was a leader of the Zionist militant group Lehi. After the establishment of the Israeli state he served in the Mossad between 1955 and 1965 and as a Knesset member. He served as the sixth speaker of the Knesset, and as foreign affairs minister. Shamir was the country's third-longest-serving prime minister, after Benjamin Netanyahu and David Ben-Gurion.
Early and personal life
Yitzhak Yezernitsky (later Yitzhak Shamir) was born in the predominantly Jewish village of Ruzhany, Bialystok-Grodno District of Ober Ost, shortly thereafter incorporated into the Kingdom of Poland (now in Belarus), as the son of Perla and Shlomo, owner of a leather factory. Shamir later moved to Białystok and studied at a Hebrew high school network. As a youth, he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He studied law at the University of Warsaw, but cut his studies short in order to emigrate to what was then Mandatory Palestine.
His parents and two sisters were murdered in the Holocaust. Shamir claimed his father was killed just outside his birthplace in Ruzhany by villagers who had been his childhood friends after he had escaped from a German train transporting Jews to the death camps, though this was never confirmed. His mother and a sister were murdered in the concentration camps, and another sister was shot dead. Shamir once told Ehud Olmert that when his father, living under Nazi occupation, had been informed that the extermination of the Jews was imminent, his father had replied that "I have a son in the Land of Israel, and he will exact my revenge on them". According to an obituary, he had dreamed of living in the Land of Israel since he was a boy, and felt immediately at home when he moved there. In 1935, Shamir immigrated to Palestine, where he worked in an accountant's office. He later adopted as his surname the name he used on a forged underground identity card, Shamir. He told his wife this was because Shamir means a thorn that stabs and a rock that can cut steel. In 1944 he married Shulamit, whom he met in a detention camp where she was incarcerated after the ship on which she sailed to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria in 1941 was declared illegal. They had two children, Yair and Gilada. Shulamit died on July 29, 2011.
Zionist militancy
Shamir joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist paramilitary group that opposed British control of Palestine. When the Irgun split in 1940, Shamir joined the more militant faction Lehi, also known as the Stern Gang, headed by Avraham Stern. He was imprisoned by British authorities in 1941. A few months after Stern was killed by the British in 1942, Shamir and Eliyahu Giladi hid under a stack of mattresses in a warehouse of the detention camp at Mazra'a, and at night escaped through the barbed wire fences of the camp. Shamir became the leader of the Stern Gang, and, together with Giladi, Anshell Shpillman and Yehoshua Cohen, reorganized the movement into cells and trained its members. In his memoirs, Shamir admitted in 1994 what had long been suspected: that the killing of Giladi in 1943 was ordered by Shamir himself, allegedly due to Giladi advocating the assassination of David Ben-Gurion, and arguing for other violence deemed too extremist by fellow Stern members.
In 1943, he became one of the three leaders of the group, serving with Nathan Yellin-Mor and Israel Eldad. Shamir sought to emulate the anti-British struggle of the Irish Republicans and took the nickname "Michael" after Irish Republican leader Michael Collins. Shamir plotted the 1944 assassination of Lord Moyne, British Minister for Middle East Affairs, and personally selected Eliyahu Hakim and Eliyahu Bet-Zuri to carry it out. Moyne had been targeted due to his perceived role as an architect of British restrictions on Jewish immigration to Palestine, and in particular, the Patria disaster, which was blamed on him.