Yitzhak Shamir was born as Icchak Jaziernicki in Ruzinov, Poland, in 1915.
He moved to Palestine in 1935 and joined Begin’s terrorist organisation Irgun Tzvai Leumi. Shamir then became one of the leaders of the murderous Stern gang.
They committed acts of terrorism and assassination against the British, whom they regarded as illegal occupiers, and were also violently anti-Arab.
Documents found after the Second World War showed that in January and again in December of 1941, the group sent representatives to meet with Nazi officials to establish a military alliance against the British. The Nazis weren’t interested.
In 1946, Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians.
They committed the infamous Deir Yassin massacre, in wich at least 107 Palestinian Arabs, including women and children, were murdered.
The Stern Gang assassinated Swedish U.N. mediator Count Folke Bernadotte in 1948. Sweden demanded a renewed apology in 1988, Israel refused.
They mined two trains. The first such attack hit the military coaches of a passenger train north of Rehovot, killing 28 British soldiers and wounding 35. Another attack killed 40 people and injured 60. Although there were soldiers on board, all of the casualties were civilians.
The Stern gang hanged British Sergeants Martin and Paice in a eucalyptus grove in Netanya. The bodies were booby-trapped with an explosive mine which exploded as Martin’s body was being cut down.
Shamir was in the Mossad for ten years and became Prime Minister of Israel in 1983.
In 1986, the Kahan Commission reported that Shamir “erred in not taking any measures” to help prevent the massacres at Sabra and Shatila in wich an estimated 3.500 Palestinian men, women and children were executed.
That same year he declared that the Palestinian city of Hebron was a “liberated” Jewish city that “will never be given back.”
After Operation Solomon in 1991, Shamir decided to leave 3,000 Falash Mura converts behind in Addis Ababa, just because they were black.
He died in 2012, aged 96.