The Irgun:
The Acre Prison Break
(May 4, 1947)
by Prof. Yehuda Lapidot
Irgun: Table of Contents | Background & Overview | Bombing King David Hotel
Acre was conquered by the Ottomans at the beginning of the 16th century. The governor of Galilee, Ahmed al-Jazzar, developed the town, building a fortress and markets and turning it into the 'main gateway' to Eretz Israel (Palestine). Under the British Mandate, the fortress served as a jail, where underground fighters were imprisoned and where eight Irgun fighters went to the gallows. Acre prison was the most highly-guarded fortress in the country; surrounded by walls and encircled to the east and north by a deep moat; the sea to the west. It was located in the heart of an Arab town with no Jewish inhabitants.
 Acre Prison |
Amichai Paglin (Gidi), chief operations officer, toured Acre disguised as an Arab, and after thorough scrutiny of the area, concluded that a break-in was indeed possible. After discussions at headquarters, Livni received a letter stating that it was possible to breach the wall from outside, but that the success of the operation depended on the ability of the prisoners to reach the south wall on their own. To that end, explosives, detonators and a fuse were smuggled into the jail by the parents of prisoners, who were permitted to bring their sons delicacies, such as jam, oil, and fruit. The explosives were smuggled in inside a can, under a thick layer of jam. A British sergeant opened the can and examined its contents. When he poked inside, he felt hard lumps (in fact gelignite), but accepted the story that the jam had not gelled properly. The detonators and the fuse were concealed in the false bottom of a container of oil, which was also thoroughly examined. The sergeant poked in a long stick to examine the level of the oil, but since the fuse and the detonators were less than one centimeter thick, he did not notice the false bottom.
At that time, 163 Jews were being held in Acre prison (60 of them Irgun members, 22 Lehi and 5 Haganah, the remainder felons) and 400 Arabs. The Irgun General Headquarters decided that only 41 could be freed (30 Irgun members and 11Lehi members) because it was technically impossible to find hiding places for a larger number of fugitives. Eitan Livni was given the task of deciding who was to be freed and who would remain in jail (the Lehi prisoners chose their own candidates for escape).
 Irgun Fighters in British Uniform |
After the fighters had been assigned to their units, they were all given an 'English' haircut. The next day, they were taken to Shuni, a former Crusader fortress (between Binyamina and Zichron Yaakov), then serving as a settlement for the Irgun supporters. Twenty of them wore British Engineering Corps uniforms, while three were dressed as Arabs. After they had been briefed and armed, they set out in a convoy of vehicles including a 3-ton military truck, two military vans with British camouflage colors, and two civilian vans. The convoy was headed by the command jeep, and Shimshon, dressed as a be-medalled British captain, sat beside the driver.
When the convoy reached Acre, the two military vans entered the market, while the truck waited at the gate. Ladders were removed from one of the vehicles and the 'engineering unit' went into the Turkish bath-house in order to 'mend' the telephone lines. They climbed the ladders to the roof adjacent to the fortress wall, and Dov Salomon, the unit commander, helped his deputy, Yehuda Apiryon, to haul up the explosive charges and to hook them to the windows of the prison.
 Eitan Livni |  Dov Cohen (Shimshon) |  Avshalom Haviv |  Yaakov Weiss |  Meir Nakar |
An additional three-man squad, disguised as Arabs, was positioned north of Acre, and when the operation began they fired a mortar at the nearby army camp. The command jeep halted at the gas station at the entrance to the new town, laid anti-vehicle mines and set fire to the station.
 Afternoon walk of Acre prisoners |
While these units were taking up positions outside the fortress, the plan was being put into effect inside the prison. At 3 p.m., the doors of the cells were opened for afternoon exercise. Those prisoners who were not scheduled to escape went down to the courtyard to create a diversion, while the escapees remained in their cells. They were divided into three groups, each in a separate cell.
At 4:22 p.m., a loud explosion shook the entire area, as the wall of the fortress was blasted open.
The first group of escapees leap't out of their cell and ran down the corridor towards the breach in the wall. They had to push their way through a crowd of Arab prisoners who ran out of their cells in panic and blocked their path. The first escapee, Michael Ashbel, attached explosive charges to the locks barring the gate of the corridor, and lit the fuse. There was an explosion, and the gate blew open. The second gate was blown open in the same way, opening the route to freedom. At that moment, the second group went into action; they created an obstruction by igniting kerosene mixed with oil. The ensuing fire blocked the escape route, so that the guards could not reach it. The third group threw grenades at the guards on the roof, who fled. In the confusion created by the explosion, the gunfire and the fire, 41 prisoners made their way to freedom.
The first group of escapees boarded a van and drove off, but the driver mistakenly drove towards Haifa, instead of Mount Napoleon. On the shore, a group of British soldiers who had been bathing in the sea opened fire on them. The driver tried to turn back, but hit the wall of the cemetery and the van overturned. The escapees ran towards a gas station, the soldiers pursuing them. Dov Cohen fired his Bren at them, but was mowed down by a volley of 17 bullets. Zalman Lifshitz, at his side, was also killed. When the firing stopped, five of the first group of 13 escapees were dead, six injured and only two were unscathed. The survivors were returned to jail.
 Acre prison's wall after the explosion |
The remaining escapees and members of the strike force in the truck and the second van escaped safely. They reached Kibbutz Dalia, abandoned their vehicles, and made their way on foot to Binyamina. There they were given refuge in the Nahlat Jabotinsky quarter and the following morning were dispersed throughout the country to pre-designated hiding places.
Haim Appelbaum of Lehi, wounded during the retreat, succeeded in boarding the last van, but died soon after. His body was left in the vehicle, and members of Kibbutz Dalia conveyed it to the burial society in Haifa the following day.
To conclude, 27 inmates succeeded in escaping (20 from the Irgun and seven fromLehi). Nine fighters were killed in clashes with the British army; six escapees and three members of the Fighting Force. Eight escapees, some of them injured, were caught and returned to jail. Also arrested were five of the attackers who did not make it back to base. The Arab prisoners took advantage of the commotion, and 182 of them escaped as well.
Despite the heavy toll in human lives, the action was described by foreign journalists as "the greatest jail break in history." The London Ha'aretz correspondent wrote on May 5:
The New York Herald Tribune wrote that the underground had carried out "an ambitious mission, their most challenging so far, in perfect fashion."
In the House of Commons, Oliver Stanley asked what action His Majesty's Government was planning to take "in light of the events at Acre prison which had reduced British prestige to a nadir."
Shortly after the Acre jail break, Andrei Gromyko, USSR representative to the UN, caused a sensation when he informed the stunned delegates that his country took a favorable view of the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine.
Three weeks after the jail break, the five Irgun fighters who had been captured after the operation were put on trial. Three of the defendants - Avshalom Haviv, Yaakov Weiss and Meir Nakar - were carrying weapons when they were caught close to the jail wall. They challenged the authority of the court and, after making political statements, were all sentenced to death.
The other two, Michaeli and Ostrowicz, were captured, unarmed, at some distance from the jail. Since there was a chance of saving them from the death penalty, the Irgun General Headquarters decided to conduct a proper defense procedure. The counsel for the defense succeeded in producing documents proving that the two were minors, and the court sentenced them to life imprisonment.
Sources: Israeli Government National Photo Collection
1. Menachem Begin, The Revolt, (NY: Nash Publishing, 1977), p. 224.
2. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out Of Zion, (NY: St. Martin's Press), p. 172.
3. Anne Sinai and I. Robert Sinai, Israel and the Arabs: Prelude to the Jewish State, (NY: Facts on File, 1972), p. 83.
4. Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., "International Terrorism: Challenge And Response," Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, July 25, 1979, (Jerusalem: The Jonathan Institute, 1980), p. 45.
1. Menachem Begin, The Revolt, (NY: Nash Publishing, 1977), p. 224.
2. J. Bowyer Bell, Terror Out Of Zion, (NY: St. Martin's Press), p. 172.
3. Anne Sinai and I. Robert Sinai, Israel and the Arabs: Prelude to the Jewish State, (NY: Facts on File, 1972), p. 83.
4. Benjamin Netanyahu, ed., "International Terrorism: Challenge And Response," Proceedings of the Jerusalem Conference on International Terrorism, July 25, 1979, (Jerusalem: The Jonathan Institute, 1980), p. 45.
1947: Three Jewish terrorists and two British hostages
1 comment July 29th, 2011
On this date in 1947, three members of an Irgun commando team who had engineered a massive prison break of Zionist terrorists were hanged for the affair.
The Acre Prison Break was a meticulously coordinated operation by the Zionist underground in British Mandate Palestine that, a Conservative MP later charged, “reduced British prestige to a nadir.”
A team of guerrillas attacked the prison from the outside, coordinating with imprisoned Irgun and Stern Gang operatives who had explosives smuggled into their cells to help detonate their way through the walls. Hundreds of prisoners — most of them Arabs availing the opportunity — escaped.
According to the London Times (May 6, 1947), 16 escaping prisoners were slain in the affray, with eight British guards and police wounded.
More crucially for our purposes, five of the guerrillas who assailed the prison were captured. Three — Haviv Avshalom, Yaakov Weiss, and Meir Nakar — were taken armed, and sentenced to death by the British.
To browse the contemporaneous western press coverage is to visit a Holy Land very familiar to the present-day reader, filled with “terrorists” and “extremists” and “fanatics” and “murderers” abetted by “those who incite them from a safe distance and supply the funds and the weapons which they put to such deadly use.”* Except that this discourse was directed at Jews, not Arabs.
One good way to earn such an imprecation would be to kidnap two British soldiers and hold them hostage against the execution of the sentence. That’s exactly what the Irgun did.
The British searched for their men, but disdained to stoop the majesty of the law at the pleasure of some seditious blackmailer. So, early this morning at that same Acre Prison they had lately helped to liberate, Avshalom, Weiss, and Nakar went to the gallows.
Left to right: Avshalom, Weiss, and Nakar.
Palestine awaited with anxiety the expected discovery of two kidnaped British sergeants whom the Irgunists have vowed to kill in retaliation. The Mosaic law of vengeance applies and any show of clemency would be regarded by the extremists as evidence of cowardly submission.
The Irgun had already applied that Mosaic law of vengeance.
On the evening of that same July 29, it hanged its two hostages, intelligence corps sergeants Clifford Martin and Marvin Paice. The bodies were moved and strung up in a Eucalyptus grove near Netanya, to be discovered the next day, booby-trapped with a land mine. A scornful note announced their condemnation for “criminal anti-Hebrew activities.”
The bodies of Sgts. Clifford Martin and Marvin Paice, as discovered on July 31, 1947, hanging from Eucalyptus trees.
Moderate, mainline Zionists were horrified.
Of all the crimes that took place till this day on this land, this is the most grievous and disgusting one and will stain the purity of our peoples struggle for freedom. May this act of hanging remain as a sign of Cain on the doers of this disgraceful deed! The heavens and the earth are my witnesses that most of our population took desperate measures to free the hostages and prevent this shame.-Netanya Mayor Oved Ben Ami
Said disgraceful deed-doers were far from apologetic.
And you could say they had a point, since although the threat did not prevent the death sentences at hand from being carried into execution, its example proved to be a lively deterrent: Avshalom, Weiss, and Nakar were the last Zionists executed by the British. Then-Irgun leader, and later Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin made no bones about the trade.
The Brits were a little less sanguine about “the sergeants affair”.
A Times editorial for Friday, Aug. 1 fulminated against “the violent deeds of the Palestine terrorists [that] will not readily be effaced,” comparing them to “the bestialities practiced by the Nazis themselves.”**
Over the ensuing long weekend’s summer bank holiday, racist riots against Jews shook Britain. Jewish businesses, cemeteries, and synagogues were smashed up and vandalized all over the island, to the horror this time of milquetoast liberals like the Manchester Guardian, with again-familiar lines like: “to answer terrorism in Palestine with terrorism in England is sheer Hitlerism. We must be desperately careful to see that we do not let ourselves be infected with the poison of the disease we had thought to eradicate.”
Fine points for debate in Britain, which within months was bugging out of the Levant as open war engulfed Palestine — the violent birth pangs of modern Israel and its embrace of its own subject populace with its own frustrated national ambitions pursued by its own violent extremists.
* London Times editorial, May 21, 1947.
** Irgun propaganda’s riposte: “We recognize no one-sided laws of war. If the British are determined that their way out of the country should be lined by an avenue of gallows and of weeping fathers, mothers, wives, and sweethearts, we shall see to it that in this there is no racial discrimination.”
On this day..
- 1629: Louis Bertran, martyr in Japan - 2015
- 1938: Janis Berzins, Soviet military intelligence chief - 2014
- 1879: Kate Webster, of the Barnes Mystery - 2013
- 1969: Joseph Blösche, Der SS-Mann - 2012
- 1936: Aboune Petros, Ethiopian bishop - 2010
- 1600: The Pappenheimer Family - 2009
- 1747: Alexander Blackwell, who left them smiling - 2008
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Capital Punishment,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,England,Execution,Hanged,History,Israel,Jews,Martyrs,Milestones,Murder,Occupation and Colonialism,Revolutionaries,Separatists,Terrorists
Tags: 1940s, 1947, acre prison, acre prison break, clifford martin, haviv avshalom, irgun, july 29, marvin paice, meir nakar, menachem begin, nationalism, nationalists, netanya, olei hagardom, oved ben ami, religion, sergeants affair, terrorism, yaakov weiss, zionism
1942: Avraham Stern, a strange bedfellow
February 12th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1942, Zionist freedom-fighter — or was he a terrorist? — Avraham Stern was captured by British colonial authorities and summarily executed.
Stern, as pictured on a 1978 Israeli stamp.
Born in 1907 in a part of eastern Poland then in Russian hands,Stern immigrated to British Palestine in 1925 and became an adherent of Revisionist Zionism— a maximalist strain of the fermenting Jewish homeland movement.
Various threads and factions within the Zionist movement pursued different territorial and political goals with different strategies; Stern was among the most militant foes of anything with the whiff of collaboration with the British. When the armed underground movement Irgunopted in 1940 to suspend attacks against British targets during World War II, Stern created a splinter organization with aprogramme of continuing anti-British violence.
The “Stern gang,” as imperial authorities knew it, had its reasons — controversial enough that some more moderate Jewish elements were happy to help the British hunt it, but reasons with their own logic, premised on the notion that London was the fundamental enemy of Jewish national interests while Berlin, for all its anti-Semitism, was not.
Between those two lay the room for wartime collaboration with Hitler against Britain with the object of establishing a Jewish state in the Levant open to unlimited immigration from a Reich eager to be rid of its Jews. In one fell swoop, it would solve Germany’s “Jewish question,”* realize Zionist state-building aspirations, and disrupt the Nazis’ wartime enemy. Stern, who had cultivated an affinity for fascism while studying in Italy and pitched a similar bargain to Mussolini, offered a pact with the devil: “the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”
Berlin never took up the offer. Stern himself would have only a year to live, and his tiny splinter group didn’t get very far off the ground during it, carrying out a few murders and trying to raise money through crime. A high-profile bank robbery in January of 1942 that left several Brits and Jews dead brought down an intense manhunt that caught up with Stern on this day. He was handcuffed and shot on the spot.
His organization would come into its own after his death under leadership that included future Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, carrying out a campaign of assassinations in the mid-40’s as Palestine slid towards the civil war that would give birth to Israel. In that incarnation, it valorized its creator:
He was a lion, and the cravings of the foxes were foreign to him. He was an eagle who did not know how to fly low … He was not of those who live and die, like all human beings. He was a Prometheus, one who appears but once over many generations. (Source)
That valorization has been contested but nonetheless lasting. The Knesset, just days ago as of this writing, voted laurels for Stern’s hundredth birthday. There’s almost no apolitical way to write his story, and given Israel’s persistence as a flashpoint — and its own ironic inheritance of a rebellious subject population reminiscent of pre-1948 Palestinian Jews — the radicalism of his words, deeds and persona invite debate.
February 12th, 2008 Headsman
On this date in 1942, Zionist freedom-fighter — or was he a terrorist? — Avraham Stern was captured by British colonial authorities and summarily executed.
Stern, as pictured on a 1978 Israeli stamp.
Born in 1907 in a part of eastern Poland then in Russian hands,Stern immigrated to British Palestine in 1925 and became an adherent of Revisionist Zionism— a maximalist strain of the fermenting Jewish homeland movement.
Various threads and factions within the Zionist movement pursued different territorial and political goals with different strategies; Stern was among the most militant foes of anything with the whiff of collaboration with the British. When the armed underground movement Irgunopted in 1940 to suspend attacks against British targets during World War II, Stern created a splinter organization with aprogramme of continuing anti-British violence.
The “Stern gang,” as imperial authorities knew it, had its reasons — controversial enough that some more moderate Jewish elements were happy to help the British hunt it, but reasons with their own logic, premised on the notion that London was the fundamental enemy of Jewish national interests while Berlin, for all its anti-Semitism, was not.
Between those two lay the room for wartime collaboration with Hitler against Britain with the object of establishing a Jewish state in the Levant open to unlimited immigration from a Reich eager to be rid of its Jews. In one fell swoop, it would solve Germany’s “Jewish question,”* realize Zionist state-building aspirations, and disrupt the Nazis’ wartime enemy. Stern, who had cultivated an affinity for fascism while studying in Italy and pitched a similar bargain to Mussolini, offered a pact with the devil: “the establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich.”
Berlin never took up the offer. Stern himself would have only a year to live, and his tiny splinter group didn’t get very far off the ground during it, carrying out a few murders and trying to raise money through crime. A high-profile bank robbery in January of 1942 that left several Brits and Jews dead brought down an intense manhunt that caught up with Stern on this day. He was handcuffed and shot on the spot.
His organization would come into its own after his death under leadership that included future Likud Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, carrying out a campaign of assassinations in the mid-40’s as Palestine slid towards the civil war that would give birth to Israel. In that incarnation, it valorized its creator:
He was a lion, and the cravings of the foxes were foreign to him. He was an eagle who did not know how to fly low … He was not of those who live and die, like all human beings. He was a Prometheus, one who appears but once over many generations. (Source)
That valorization has been contested but nonetheless lasting. The Knesset, just days ago as of this writing, voted laurels for Stern’s hundredth birthday. There’s almost no apolitical way to write his story, and given Israel’s persistence as a flashpoint — and its own ironic inheritance of a rebellious subject population reminiscent of pre-1948 Palestinian Jews — the radicalism of his words, deeds and persona invite debate.
Books about the Stern gang in the founding of Israel
There’s a fascinating first-person apologia from a former member of the Stern gang here.
Stern also dabbled as a poet, and wrote this anthem to the struggle with his wife:
Part of the Themed Set: Unruly Britannia.
* Germany itself was tarrying with “faraway Jewish homeland” plans at this time, specifically considering relocating European Jewry to Madagascar. The Final Solution would be implemented later, once these proved unavailing. Stern, for his part, also expected the Axis to win the war.
There’s a fascinating first-person apologia from a former member of the Stern gang here.
Stern also dabbled as a poet, and wrote this anthem to the struggle with his wife:
Part of the Themed Set: Unruly Britannia.
* Germany itself was tarrying with “faraway Jewish homeland” plans at this time, specifically considering relocating European Jewry to Madagascar. The Final Solution would be implemented later, once these proved unavailing. Stern, for his part, also expected the Axis to win the war.
On this day..
- 1661: Maeyken de Smet, Olsene witch - 2016
- 1858: Henry Fife and Charlotte Jones, exonerating Monroe Stewart - 2015
- 1943: France Bloch-Serazin, bombmaker - 2014
- 2012: Three drone strike spies in Yemen - 2013
- 1937: Tom Steinbock and Juan Mirbol in Sartre's The Wall - 2012
- 2004: Former vice-governor Wang Huaizhong - 2011
- 1554: Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days' Queen - 2010
- 2003: Richard Edwin Fox, bogus job interviewer - 2009
- 1661: Maeyken de Smet, Olsene witch - 2016
- 1858: Henry Fife and Charlotte Jones, exonerating Monroe Stewart - 2015
- 1943: France Bloch-Serazin, bombmaker - 2014
- 2012: Three drone strike spies in Yemen - 2013
- 1937: Tom Steinbock and Juan Mirbol in Sartre's The Wall - 2012
- 2004: Former vice-governor Wang Huaizhong - 2011
- 1554: Lady Jane Grey, the Nine Days' Queen - 2010
- 2003: Richard Edwin Fox, bogus job interviewer - 2009
Possibly Related Executions:
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Artists,Assassins,Borderline "Executions",Capital Punishment,Crime,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,England,Execution,Famous,History,Infamous,Israel,Jews,Martyrs,Murder,No Formal Charge,Notably Survived By,Occupation and Colonialism,Popular Culture,Power,Revolutionaries,Shot,Summary Executions,Treason,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1942, avraham stern, fascism, february 12, nationalism, stern gang, world war ii, yitzhak shamir, zionism
Entry Filed under: 20th Century,Activists,Artists,Assassins,Borderline "Executions",Capital Punishment,Crime,Cycle of Violence,Death Penalty,Disfavored Minorities,England,Execution,Famous,History,Infamous,Israel,Jews,Martyrs,Murder,No Formal Charge,Notably Survived By,Occupation and Colonialism,Popular Culture,Power,Revolutionaries,Shot,Summary Executions,Treason,Wartime Executions
Tags: 1940s, 1942, avraham stern, fascism, february 12, nationalism, stern gang, world war ii, yitzhak shamir, zionism
4 thoughts on “1942: Avraham Stern, a strange bedfellow”
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Morton denied shooting Stern in cold blood (at one stage he claimed he thought Stern was going to blow himself up. How that was possible when he was in handcuffs is anyone’s guess) However a British cop present at the scene disputed this and fingered Morton as a cold blooded killer.
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Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1947: Three Jewish terrorists and two British hostages
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http://www.kptm.com/Global/story.asp?S=7846800&nav=menu606_24_9_1
Barely even relevant, but interesting to see where Nebraska has landed on the subject.
- Morton denied shooting Stern in cold blood (at one stage he claimed he thought Stern was going to blow himself up. How that was possible when he was in handcuffs is anyone’s guess) However a British cop present at the scene disputed this and fingered Morton as a cold blooded killer.
- Pingback: ExecutedToday.com » 1947: Three Jewish terrorists and two British hostages
- http://www.kptm.com/Global/story.asp?S=7846800&nav=menu606_24_9_1Barely even relevant, but interesting to see where Nebraska has landed on the subject.
Acre Prison break...
Item # 579923
MAY 5, 1947
THE TIMES-PICAYUNE, New Orleans, Louisiana, May 5, 1947
* Acre Prison break
* Irgun - Zionist paramilitary
* British Mandate of Palestine
This 32 page newspaper has a three column headline on the front page: "Underground Blasts Ancient Prison, Frees 251 Jews, Arabs" with subhead: "Hole Blown in Wall; 15 Persons Killed" which tells of the famous Acre Prison break by the Irgun in Palestine.
Other news of the day including various advertising. Light browning along central fold, minor spine wear, but otherwise in good condition.
wikipeida notes: On Sunday, May 4, 1947, at 14:00 a military engineering unit of the Irgun, under the command of Dov Salomon and Yehuda Apiryon, made its way to the nearby Turkish bath, disguised as telephone technicians and carrying ladders, TNT, ropes and other necessary incursion equipment. Meanwhile, other Irgun strike and escape teams spread around the prison, disguised as British military convoys.
The excursion occurred at 16:22 with a massive explosion that shook the prison. One of the prisoners, Michael Eshbal, blew up the grille at the corridor, while another group of prisoners delayed the British jailors with hand grenades and burning barricades.
34 Jewish guerilla fighters attacked the prison. In the course of the retreat, Dov Cohen and two other fighters from the attacking force were killed. Another five fighters from the attacking force were captured by the British, along with eight escapees. 28 Lehi and Irgun prisoners escaped, as did 182 Arab prisoners.
Category: The 20th Century
Yitzhak Shamir, Former Israeli Prime Minister, Dies at 96
Yitzhak Shamir, who emerged from the militant wing of a Jewish militia and served as Israel’s prime minister longer than anyone but David Ben-Gurion, promoting a muscular Zionism and expansive settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, died Saturday at a nursing home in Tel Aviv. He was 96.
Mr. Shamir had Alzheimer’s disease for at least the last six years, an associate said. His death was announced by the prime minister’s office.
A native of Poland whose family was wiped out in the Holocaust, Mr. Shamir was part of a group of right-wing Israeli politicians led by Menachem Begin who rose to power in the 1970s as the more left-wing Labor Party declined, viewed as corrupt and disdainful of the public.
Stubborn and laconic, Mr. Shamir was by his own assessment a most unlikely political leader whose very personality seemed the perfect representation of his government’s policy of patient, determined, unyielding opposition to territorial concessions.
Many of his friends and colleagues ascribed his character to his years in the underground in the 1940s, when he sent Jewish fighters out to kill British officers whom he saw as occupiers. He was a wanted man then; to the British rulers of the Palestine mandate he was a terrorist, an assassin. He appeared in public only at night, disguised as a Hasidic rabbi. But Mr. Shamir said he considered those “the best years of my life.”
His wife, Shulamit, once said that in the underground she and her husband had learned not to talk about their work for fear of being overheard. It was a habit he apparently never lost.
Mr. Shamir was not blessed with a sharp wit, a soothing public manner or an engaging oratorical style. Most often he answered questions with a shrug and an air of weary wisdom, as if to say: “This is so clear. Why do you even ask?”
In 1988, at a meeting of the political party Herut, he sat slumped on a sofa, gazing at the floor as party stalwarts heaped praises on him. Shortly thereafter, he said: “I like all those people, they’re nice people. But this is not my style, not my language. This kind of meeting is the modern picture, but I don’t belong to it.”
Rather than bend to them, Mr. Shamir often simply outlasted his political opponents, who were usually much more willing to say what was on their minds, and sometimes to get in trouble for it. To Mr. Shamir, victory came not from compromise, but from strength, patience and cunning.
“If he wants something, it may take a long time, but he’ll never let go,” Avi Pazner, his media adviser, once remarked.
In a statement on Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that Mr. Shamir “belonged to the generation of giants who founded the State of Israel and fought for the freedom of the Jewish people.”
“As prime minister,” he added, “Yitzhak Shamir took action to fortify Israel’s security and ensure its future.”
Prime Minister Begin appointed Mr. Shamir as foreign minister in 1980. When Mr. Begin suddenly retired in 1983, Mr. Shamir became a compromise candidate to replace him, alternating in the post with Shimon Peres for one four-year term. Mr. Shamir won his own term in 1988. He entered the political opposition when Yitzhak Rabin of the Labor Party was elected prime minister in 1992. Mr. Shamir retired from politics a few years later, at 81.
A Hard-Line Approach
As prime minister, Mr. Shamir promoted continued Jewish settlement in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, which Israel conquered in 1967; the Jewish population in the occupied territories increased by nearly 30 percent while he was in office. He also encouraged the immigration of tens of thousands of Soviet Jews to Israel, an influx that changed the country’s demographic character.
One of the most notable events during his tenure was the Palestinian uprising against Israeli control that began in December 1987, the so-called intifada. He and his defense minister, Mr. Rabin, deployed thousands of Israeli troops throughout the occupied territories to quash the rebellion. They failed; the years of violence and death on both sides brought criticism and condemnation from around the world.
The fighting also deepened divisions between Israel’s two political camps: leftists who believed in making concessions to bring peace, and members of the right who believed, as Mr. Shamir once put it, that “Israel’s days without Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria and the Gaza Strip are gone and will not return.”
The intifada dragged on year after year as the death toll climbed from dozens to hundreds. Israel’s isolation increased, until finally the rebellion was overshadowed in 1991 by the first Persian Gulf war.
During that war, at the request of the United States, Prime Minister Shamir held Israel back from attacking Iraq, even as Iraqi Scud missiles fell on Tel Aviv. For that he won new favor in Washington and promises of financial aid from the United States to help with the settlement of new Israeli citizens from the Soviet Union.
Then in the fall of 1991, under pressure from the first President George Bush and Secretary of State James A. Baker III, Mr. Shamir agreed to represent Israel at the Middle East peace conference in Madrid, Israel’s first summit meeting with the Arab states. There, he was as unyielding as ever, denouncing Syria at one point as having “the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world.”
Yitzhak Shamir was born on Oct. 22, 1915, in a Polish town under Russian control to Shlomo and Perla Penina Yezernitzky. He immigrated to the Palestine mandate when he was 20 and selected Shamir as his Hebrew surname. The word means thorn or sharp point.
Members of his family who remained in Poland died in the Holocaust; his father was killed by Poles whom the family had regarded as friends. Memories of the Holocaust colored his opinions for the rest of his life.
In the British-ruled Palestine mandate, Mr. Shamir first worked as a bookkeeper and a construction worker. But after Arabs attacked Jewish settlers and the British in 1936, he joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, the underground Jewish defense league. In 1940, the Irgun’s most militant members formed the Lehi, or Stern Gang, named for its first leader, Abraham Stern.
After the British police killed Mr. Stern in 1942, Mr. Shamir became one of the group’s top commanders. Under his leadership it began a campaign of what it called personal terror, assassinating top British military and government officers, often gunning them down in the street.
To the Jewish public, and even to the other Jewish underground groups, Mr. Shamir’s gang was “lacking even a spark of humanity and Jewish conscience,” Israel Rokach, the mayor of Tel Aviv, said in 1944 after Stern Gang gunmen shot three British police officers on the streets of his city.
Years later, however, Mr. Shamir contended that it had been more humane to assassinate specific military or political figures than to attack military installations and possibly kill innocent people, as the other underground groups did. Besides, he once said, “a man who goes forth to take the life of another whom he does not know must believe only one thing: that by his act he will change the course of history.”
Several histories of the period have asserted that he masterminded a failed attempt to kill the British high commissioner, Sir Harold MacMichael, and the killing in Cairo of Britain’s minister of state for the Middle East, Lord Moyne. When Mr. Shamir was asked about these episodes in later years, his denials held a certain evasive tone.
It was during his time in the underground that Mr. Shamir met Shulamit Levy, who was his courier and confidante, he wrote in his autobiography, “Summing Up.” The couple married in 1944, meeting at a location in Jerusalem and gathering people off the street as witnesses, said their daughter, Gilada Diamant. After a hasty ceremony in deep cover, each departed immediately for a separate city.
In addition to his daughter, Mr. Shamir is survived by a son, Yair, five grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren. His wife died last year.
For a brief period after World War II, the three major Jewish underground groups cooperated — until the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on July 22, 1946. Scores of people were killed, and Mr. Shamir was among those arrested and exiled to an internment camp in Eritrea. But he escaped a few months later and took refuge in France. He arrived in the newly independent Israel in May 1948.
Entry Into Politics
Mr. Shamir was a pariah of sorts to the new Labor government of Israel, which regarded him as a terrorist. Rebuffed in his efforts to work in the government, he drifted from one small job to another until 1955, when he finally found a government agency that appreciated his past: the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service. He served in several posts, including that of top agent in France, but returned to Israel and spent several years in business.
He joined Mr. Begin’s Herut Party in 1970 and was elected to Parliament in December 1973. When the Likud, or unity, bloc, which absorbed Herut, won power in 1977, Mr. Shamir was elected speaker. And when President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt visited Jerusalem in November 1977, Mr. Shamir and Israel’s president, Ephraim Katzir, escorted him to the speaker’s rostrum for his speech. But the next year, when the Parliament voted on the Camp David accords, which set out the terms for peace with Egypt, Mr. Shamir abstained.
In 1979, when Moshe Dayan resigned as foreign minister, Mr. Begin proposed appointing Mr. Shamir to replace him. Yechiel Kadishai, chief of the prime minister’s office under Mr. Begin, recalled that Mr. Shamir was chosen because the prime minister did not want or need a powerful figure high in his cabinet.
“Begin had already established himself,” Mr. Kadishai said. “But by 1980, he wanted no competitors for power and selected Shamir because he was not so known in political circles.”
The liberal members of Mr. Begin’s coalition objected, so Mr. Begin named himself foreign minister until 1980, when Mr. Shamir finally took the post. The Labor Party saw his appointment as an mistake, since it considered him an extremist.
Mr. Shamir’s political opponents said that his laconic nature played into his handling of the massacres at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in West Beirut in September 1982, during Israel’s war in Lebanon.
On the evening of Sept. 16, Phalangists — Lebanese Christian militiamen — entered the camps and began killing hundreds of Palestinian men, women and children while the Israeli Army, largely unaware of the killings, stood guard at the gates.
The next morning in Tel Aviv, Ze’ev Schiff, a prominent Israeli journalist, received a call from a military official who told him about the slaughter. He rushed to the office of his friend Mordechai Zipori, the minister of communications, and told him what he had heard. Mr. Zipori then called the foreign minister, Mr. Shamir.
Mr. Shamir was scheduled to meet with military and intelligence officials shortly, so with some urgency Mr. Zipori told him to ask about the report he had received that the Phalangists “are carrying out a slaughter.”
Mr. Zipori remembered that Mr. Shamir promised to look into the report. But according to the official findings of an Israeli governmentcommission of inquiry, Mr. Shamir merely asked Foreign Ministry officers to see “whether any new reports had arrived from Beirut.” When the meeting ended, Mr. Shamir “left for his home and took no additional action,” the report said.
Years later, Mr. Shamir said: “You know, in those times of the Lebanese war, every day something happened. And from the first glance of it, it seemed like just another detail of what was going on every day. But after 24 hours, it became clear it was not a normal event.”
Mr. Shamir was certainly not the only Israeli official who failed to act, but the commission found it “difficult to find a justification” for his decision not to make “any attempt to check whether there was anything in what he heard.”
When Mr. Begin retired in 1983, Mr. Shamir was designated his successor largely because of his position in the Foreign Ministry.
Even many in his own party thought Mr. Shamir would lose the election. And even after he took office, many saw this low-key, colorless man as a caretaker. In some ways he was. Asked once what he intended to do in his second full term in office, he said he had no plans except to “keep things as they are.”
“With our long, bitter experience,” he added, “we have to think twice before we do something.”
The Israeli foreign minister, Yitzhak Shamir, talking with reporters in Washington in 1983 after a meeting with President Reagan at the White House. Mr. Shamir, who emerged from the militant wing of a Jewish militia and served as Israel’s prime minister longer than anyone but David Ben-Gurion, promoting a muscular Zionism and expansive settlement in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, died Saturday.
Credit: Ed Reinke/Associated Press
