http://www.washington-report.org/backissues/1291/9112041.htm
Why Did Syria Call Israel's Prime Minister a "Terrorist"?
By Richard H. Curtiss
December/January 1991/92, Page 41
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
On the fifth day of the Middle
East peace conference in Madrid,
Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk
Charaa produced an old British
"wanted" photo of a young Jewish
terrorist. He was responding to
charges by Israeli Prime Minister
Yitzhak Shamir that Syria
supports "terrorism. " The Syrian
reaction was understandable, but
a tactical blunder.
Until that moment, an
international noose had been
tightening around Israel's
intransigent prime minister.
George Bush's threat to link
future aid to Israel to the peace
process looked easier and easier
to accomplish.
Then, with the Syrian's words,
the US media focus changed, and
two Washington Post reporters
were able to write,
straight-faced, that ''the week's
most dramatic demonstration was
the Syrian display of
aggressiveness toward Israel."
Syrians live in a vanished
mid-century world where the Cold
War set the tone of international
politics. US and Western European
public opinion was meaningless,
because Syria's support came from
the USSR. Syrians seem unable to
realize now, in the absence of
Soviet support, that their best
defense is to see that America's
Cold War client loses its support
as well.
Probably fewer than 50 of 535
members of the US Congress truly
support Likudist Israel. The rest
would follow a firm presidential
lead in cutting unconditional aid
to Israel. But these politicians
would prefer to ride on a tide of
changing American public opinion.
This is what most of the
Palestinians at Madrid
understood. The Syrians, alone,
didn't know how to support that
change.
The Palestinians explained over
and over their utterly reasonable
requests. They returned smiles,
shook Israeli hands when they
were extended, and went right on
talking. They won a major public
opinion victory.
The Syrians, with an equally
comprehensible case to present,
tucked their hands behind them,
and returned scowl for scowl with
the grim but glib Israelis. A
Syrian spokesman even declined to
acknowledge questions from
Israeli journalists.
In the words of Washington Post
columnist Jim Hoagland, " Here
was the Arab that Shamir's Likud
party has come to know, hate and
rely on. " Referring to Syria's
delegates, Israeli Ambassadorto
the US Zalman Shoval joked on
television, "I want to deny the
rumor that we paid them to help
our information effort."
Madrid was not a disaster for the
Syrians, who have everything to
gain from negotiations. But it
immensely complicated Secretary
of State James Baker's strategy
of focusing the media spotlight
on Israeli intransigence. The
media, instead, focused on the
scowling Syrian, and stubbornly
ignored the Palestine police
mugshot he was holding.
It was a photo of an undersized
gunman still known by his Polish
name, Yitzhak Yizernitzky. He was
one of the Jewish extremists who,
between 1937 and 1939, killed
more than 300 Arab civilians by
machine-gunning passing buses and
bombing open air restaurants and
marketplaces. On one July day in
1938, they rolled an oil drum
laden with explosives downhill
into a bus stop in Haifa, killing
35 men, women and children and
leaving others maimed and
bleeding.
When World War II began, one
group of these terrorists, called
Irgun Zvai Leumi and headed by
future Israeli Prime Minister
Menachem Begin, declared a
cease-fire with the British. The
other group, Lehi, the Hebrew
acronym for "Fighters for the
Freedom of Israel " tried to ally
itself first with fascist Italy,
then with Nazi Germany and
finally with Stalinist Russia.
Lehi became known as the ''Stern
Gang" after its founder, Avraham
Stern, who eventually was killed
by the British, while his
followers killed some 300 British
policemen and soldiers.
Leadership passed to a
triumvirate consisting of
Yizernitzky, Israel Sheib and
Nathan Friedman-Yellin. They
ordered the 1944 assassination of
Lord Moyne, the British governor
general of Cairo.
Yizernitzky was captured and
interned by the British in
Eritrea. With other prisoners he
dug his way out of the prison
camp, however, and smuggled
himself back to Palestine early
in 1948. He also adopted a Hebrew
name, Yitzhak Shamir.
In April 1948, Lehi and Irgun
gunmen massacred the men, women,
and children of the Palestinian
village of Deir Yassin, which had
been neutral in the fighting
between Arabs and Jews that broke
out after the 1947 partition
resolution. The massacre took
place a month before the British
withdrew, the state of Israel was
proclaimed and Arab military
units from Jordan, Iraq and Egypt
entered Palestine. The terror
inspired by the massacre explains
the ease with which Israel's army
cleared Palestinian villages of
their occupants in the months of
fighting that followed.
Assassinating a Peace Mediator
Shamir and the other two Lehi
leaders set out in July 1948 to
assassinate the UN peace
mediator, Count Folke Bernadotte.
They feared he would negotiate a
cease-fire that would force
Israeli forces to withdraw from
West Jerusalem, which they had
seized in defiance of the UN
partition plan. The plan
envisioned a Jewish and an Arab
Palestinian state, with Jerusalem
separate from both and under
international supervision.
Lehi gunmen in Israeli uniforms
intercepted Bernadotte's
motorcade and pumped six bullets
into Bernadotte, and 17 into a
French colonel sitting beside
him, killing both. Some Lehi
members were arrested by Israeli
police, but all were released by
the time the fighting ended a few
months later.
Between 1955 and 1965 Shamir
served as chief of Mossad
(Israel's CIA) operations in
Paris. Colleagues link him to
letter bombs mailed to German and
other European scientists engaged
in Egypt's rocket development
program, and to their families.
In Paris Shamir also worked
closely with his Soviet spymaster
opposite numbers, a relationship
that continued right up to the
1991 breakup of the Soviet Union.
After a brief attempt at
business, Shamir entered politics
in 1973, serving as a Member of
the Knesset for Begin's Herut
party. He first became Israel's
prime minister in 1983, and again
in 1986.
Today, when reporters ask Shamir
about Bernadotte, Lord Moyne, or
those hundreds of innocent
civilians, he may answer, in
English, "It is difficult for a
person who is unaware of the
circumstances of that time to
understand things properly."
Perhaps the phrase also explains
why Syria saved Israel from total
defeat in the media battle of
Madrid. It is difficult for those
''unaware of the circumstances"
of their time "to understand
things properly."
Richard H. Curtiss is the
executive editor of the
Washington Report on Middle East
Affairs.
(c) Copyright 1995-1999, American
Educational Trust. All Rights
Reserved.
