- published: 11 Apr 2010
- views: 11420
Yitzhak Shamir (help·info) (Hebrew: יצחק שמיר, born Icchak Jeziernicky; October 15, 1915) is a former Israeli politician, the seventh Prime Minister of Israel, in 1983–84 and 1986–92.
Icchak Jeziernicky (later Yitzhak Shamir) was born in Ruzhany (Yiddish: Rozhinoy, Polish: Różana), Russian Empire (now Belarus). He studied at a Hebrew High School in Białystok, Poland. As a youth he joined Betar, the Revisionist Zionist youth movement. He studied at the law faculty of Warsaw University, but cut his studies short to immigrate to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine. In 1935, after settling in Palestine, he Hebraized his surname to Shamir. In 1944 he married Shulamit Shamir (1923 – July 29, 2011), whom he met in a detention camp. Shulamit immigrated to Mandate Palestine from Bulgaria on a rickety boat in 1941 and was sent to prison because she entered the country illegally. They had two children, Yair and Gilada. Shulamit died on July 29, 2011.
Shamir joined the Irgun Zvai Leumi, a Zionist militant group that opposed British control of Palestine. When Irgun split in 1940, Shamir joined the more militant faction, National Military Organization in Israel, also known as the Stern Gang, headed by Avraham Stern.
Ariel Sharon (Hebrew: אריאל שרון, also known by his diminutive Arik, אַריק, born Ariel Scheinermann, אריאל שיינרמן on 26 February 1928) is an Israeli statesman and retired general, who served as Israel’s 11th Prime Minister. He has been in a permanent vegetative state since suffering a stroke on 4 January 2006.
Sharon was a commander in the Israeli Army since its inception in 1948. As a paratrooper and then officer he participated prominently in the 1948 War of Independence, becoming platoon commander of the Alexandroni Brigade and taking part in many battles, including Operation Ben Nun Alef. He was an instrumental figure in the creation of Unit 101, the Retribution operations, the 1956 Suez War, the Six-Day War of 1967, the War of Attrition and the Yom-Kippur War of 1973. As Minister of Defense, he directed the 1982 Lebanon War. During his military career, he was considered the greatest Field Commander in Israel's history, and one of the country's greatest ever military strategists. After his assault of the Sinai in the Six-Day War and his encirclement of the Egyptian Third Army in the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli public nicknamed him "The King of Israel" and "The Lion of God".