Nadene Goldfoot
One of Israel's Prime Ministers was Yitzhak Shamir, bornin 1915, 2 years younger than my mother. He was born in Poland and in 1935, a year after I was born, he immigrated to Palestine when he joined the Irgun Tzvai Leumi or Etzel (National Military Organization) in 1937 leaving it in in 1940 for the Lohamei Herut Israel of which he became one of the 3 heads.
That was a group that my 3rd cousin, Stanley Goldfoot, had become the Chief of Intelligence. Stanley was born in 1914 in South Africa. His father, Simon Goldfoot b: 1874 and my grandfather and his cousin, Nathan Goldfoot, were born in Telsiai, Lithuania. Simon made his way to South Africa and Nathan to Oregon, USA. As soon as Stanley graduated high school, he made his way to Israel. This is what Zionistic young men did when they made Aliyah to Palestine. They helped to create the land of their history into land they could maintain and live in and get away from all the anti-Semitism of Europe with its pogroms and hatred for Jews. At the end of WWI, the land was no longer under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The Allies were deciding how to divvy up Palestine and the rest of the Ottoman's Middle East land. It was open for speculation.
These men were fighting the British who held the 30 year mandate over Palestine. They were occupying Palestine and were supposed to help the Jews create a Jewish Homeland. They had other ideas that boiled down to helping Arabs enter the land while they kept Jews out. They did this while they were fighting the Germans in WWI. The mandate started in 1917 at the end of the 1st war and went on till Israel's birth, May 14, 1948, when the British left Palestine, so the fighting continued on throughout WWII.
Then their land became Israel once more, like it had been under King Saul, David and Solomon, about 1030 BCE to 70 CE when the Romans burned down Jerusalem and the Temple, 1100 years as Israel. The USA will not match that span of time until the year 2876. - 676 more years to go. Do you think Americans will be greatly attached to the USA by then? Many Jews are still attached to Israel though we have been separated from it for almost 2,000 years till May 14, 1948.
Shamir escaped from the British twice who wanted to arrest him. Once it was after deportation in Eritrea. From 1955 to 1965, he worked for the Mossad which is the Israeli secret service.
From 1972 he sat in the Knesset as a Herut member, serving as speaker. From 1977 to 1980 he was the foreign minister and on. That's when my husband and I made Aliyah to Israel and lived there for over 5 years.
In 1983, he succeeded Menahem Begin as Prime Minister.
The 1984 elections led to a stalemate and an agreement was reached between Shamir's LIKKUD party (which is also Netanyahu's Party) and Shimon Peres' LABOR party for a government of National Unity, which a rotation agreement between the 2 men, like the government is doing today.
Shamir then served as foreign minister. In 1984 to 1986, he resumed the premiership. After the 1988 elections he continued to head a national Unity Government and after the Labor Party left the government in 1990, he led a right wing-religious coalition, which entered the peace talks with the Arabs. At the same time, conditions were such that they felt they must continue insisting on the expansion of Jewish settlement in the Administered Territories. The fact is, the promised Jewish Homeland had been whittled down immediately with Prince Abdullah getting 77% of the Jewish Promised Land that had been Israel in ancient days, also.
Then the 23% did not last. Jews were left with about 10% after Judea and Samaria (the original Israel) now called the West Bank and Gaza were taken from them. Israel's population has now grown from the 600,000 in 1948 to over 6 million now, and people are almost ALL living in apartments. It's getting populated like Japan. It's a place of refuge for Jews that have had it with anti-Semitic life. The Arabs have a life-style of having 4 wives and no birth control. Jews have one wife-at least at a time like the USA.
Did anyone consider what the Arabs were going to do in this process? Yes, Emir Feisal was their spokesman at the conferences. He was happy about the Jews' plans of creating their homeland and had hoped that the Palestinian Arabs would learn from them. He became the king of Iraq and the king of Syria. Palestinians were basically nomadic people, and those who did own land had sold it to the incoming Jews who paid the outlandishly high prices. They were mostly Arabs from Syria. There was never a country of Palestine, only a Jewish land renamed by the Romans as Palestine which came under the Ottoman Empire in the last 400 years-and that meant held by the Turks of Turkey, not Arabs. The only thing they had in common was that they were both Muslims.
Shamir had to make a speech. He said, " i could recite a litany of facts which demonstrate the extent to which Syria merits the dubious honor of being one of the most oppressive, tyrannical regimes in the world." He went on explaining that Syria was a terrorist state. The previous evening, Moualem had shown Farouk al-Shar'aa a 1948 newspaper clipping-that he got from a man from the Lebanon delegation, with a photograph of 33 year old Yitzhak Shamir with the word, WANTED, written across it in bold letters. Shar'aa tore up his prepared speech, went to the podium with the photograph. He asked the audience why this picture was distributed? It was about the assassination of Count Bernadotte, the UN mediator in Palestine in 1948, and then he claimed that Shamir was the one who did the assassination. He told the people that Shamir kills peace mediators."
Well, he was a little confused. Shamir had belonged to the Stern Group. It was my cousin, Stanley, who was also thought to have done the planning of this, but that was not the case. Others had taken it out of his hands. It actually was Yehoshua Zettler who was to exercise overall command of the the operation and the 2 key men were to be his new deputy, Joshua Cohen, and his intelligence officer, Stanley Goldfoot. He was also a journalist. This was a Stern operation, though, and what Shamir's part was happened to be in discussion , the same with all of the members.
Zettler was born on July 15, 1917 in Kfar Saba, a Sabra (native born) a Jewish settlement in what became the British Mandate of Palestine following World War I, and later part of Israel. The community — including Zettler's home — was largely destroyed in Arab riots in 1921, and the house was reconstructed after his family and other residents returned. He attended the Geula school in Tel Aviv. Zettler was an Israeli who served as the Jerusalem commander of the Jewish paramilitary group Lehi, often called the Stern Gang. Stanley told me not to refer to it as a "gang." I was able to meet him in Jerusalem at the King David Hotel for our 1st meeting, then at his home at other times. Tall and slender, he maintained his figure even in old age, like his cousin Ian Goldfoot, that my brother and I also met in the States. Stanley is remembered for his essay, LETTER TO THE WORLD.
Remember the movie, Exodus with Paul Neuman? "Exodus is a 1960 American epic historical drama film on the founding of the State of Israel. It was made by Alpha and Carlyle Productions and distributed by United Artists. Produced and directed by Otto Preminger, the film was based on the 1958 novel Exodus by Leon Uris. It gives you a taste of what Jews went through in getting their state established. While Preminger's film softened the anti-British and anti-Arab sentiment of the novel, the film remains contentious for its depiction of the Arab–Israeli conflict". I wonder what people would think of it today?
Resource:
Genesis 1948 by Dan Kurzman
Israel and the Arabs-an eyewitness account of war and peace in the
Middle East, by Ahron Bregman and Jihan El-tahri
The New Standard Jewish Encyclopedia
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