Shamir and the Far Right

Under his successor, Yitzhak Shamir, the former head of operations of Lehi, Israel took forward the legacy of Menahem Begin. Shamir's public image was characterised as a safe pair of hands, emerging from Begin's giant shadow. In the 1984 election he was depicted as tough and silent:

Israel's friends respect him, Israel's enemies fear him … his pleasant smile hides an iron will. Pressures won't bend him. He has a heart to feel with, a mind to judge with and a hand to act with.

Shamir himself commented that he had been chosen ‘not to succeed [Begin] but to follow him’. Yet the colourless Shamir had none of the charisma, political sensitivity or sense of drama which his predecessor had evoked. He exhibited a profound disdain for the intelligentsia and was reticent about initiating any move towards peace. He had abstained in the vote in support of the Camp David Accord. Indeed, he said that he would have resisted pressure during the Camp David negotiations for a much longer period than Menahem Begin. He clearly believed that Begin had compromised in agreeing to evacuate Sinai. There was no sense of innovation in his political approach and he preferred to stonewall.

Even though Shamir was seemingly even more dogmatic than Begin and impervious to the allure of compromise, a plethora of Far Right parties emerged as an ideological response to the Camp David Accord. The combined number of seats for Labour and Likud decreased in elections in the 1980s – ninety-five (1981), eighty-five (1984), seventy-nine (1988) and seventy-six (1992).

The Far Right Tehiyah believed that Begin's proposal for individual autonomy would result in Palestinian sovereignty and not Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. It also wanted a revision of the peace treaty with Egypt and a halt called to the proposed dismantling of the settlement of Yamit in Sinai. The NRP demanded legislation preventing the evacuation of settlements on the West Bank and on the Golan Heights.