Human Wrongs Watch
By Uri Avnery*, TRANSCEND – Two former Prime Ministers of Israel are in the news these days. They represent two of the many faces of Israel. They also raise a universal question: which is preferable – an honest fanatic or a corrupt pragmatist?

**Yitzhak Shamir’s coffin lying in state in the Knesset, July 2, 2012. Photo: יעקב | Wikimedia Commons
Yitzhak Shamir died two weeks ago and was buried in the cemetery of the “Great of the Nation” in Jerusalem. He was 97 years old and had been vegetating for years in a state of dementia. Most Israelis did not know that he was still alive.
When I described him on TV as “the most successful terrorist of the 20th century”, the interviewer raised his eyebrows. But it was an accurate description.
Shamir was not a great thinker. In his teens he joined the right-wing Zionist youth organization of Vladimir Jabotinsky in Poland, and since then he did not change his world-view one iota. In this respect he was absolutely immovable. He wanted a Jewish state in all of the historical country. Period. No nonsense about Arabs and such.