Guardian obit on Yitzhak Shamir reduces sum of former PM’s moral life to Palestinian litmus test

Since June 1967 Israel has relinquished the overwhelming majority of land captured during the defensive Six Day War, including the Sinai and Gaza.  In fact, as early as June 19, 1967 (8 days after the war) the Israeli government agreed in principle to giving up the Sinai and the Golan Heights (to Egypt and Syria respectively) in exchange for peace, with separate negotiations to be conducted regarding the future of Gaza and the West Bank.

Indeed, Palestinian identity was almost exclusively a product of the Six Day War.

But, while Israelis indeed never saw their post-Six Day War boundaries as permanent, neither, until relatively recently, was the idea of a Palestinian state a serious consideration, especially before 1988 when the PLO had not even begun to mouth vacuous platitudes about “peace and recognition. Even in 1996 – the height of Oslo and the year Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was assassinated – a majority of Israelis still opposed the establishment of an independent Palestinian state.

So when Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir agreed to participate in the Madrid Conference in 1991, the conference’s goals of Palestinian autonomy and self-rule were consistent with the expectations of the time.

Though Ehud Barak’s peace offer to the Palestinians in 2000 (which Yasser Arafat turned down) included the creation of an independent, and territorially contiguous Palestinian state, in 2001 Ariel Sharon was the first Prime Minister to officially proclaim that a Palestinian state was the goal of his administration. The governments headed by Ehud Olmert and Binyamin Netanyahu repeated the same objectives.

So, as Sharon was the first PM to officially proclaim support for the creation of a Palestinian state in 2001 (and Barak’s de facto recognition occurred in 2000), how are we to understand the strap line and opening sentence of the Guardian’s report by Cass Jones, June 30th 2012, on the death of former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir?

How can Shamir, who last served as Prime Minister in 1992 – 8 to 9 years before the idea of a Palestinian state was a serious consideration within the Israeli political milieu – be defined by his “reputation” as an uncompromising opponent of Palestinian statehood?

Shamir lived 96 years.

Members of his immediate family were murdered during the Holocaust.

Yet his long and complex life is callously, though quite characteristically, reduced by Jones to his performance within perennial litmus test which continues to frame the good Jew – bad Jew moral framework of the Guardian left.

Of course, the fact that – 64 years after its birth – even the most “moderate” Palestinian leaders refuse to recognize Israel as the Jewish state (and often reject Israel’s “right” to exist entirely) would never be the narrative focus of a future Guardian obituary for Saeb Erekat or Mahmoud Abbas.   

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