Monthly Archives: July 2012

Israel‘s giants keep falling. With the death of Yitzhak Shamir, at age 96, in the nursing home where he was treated for Alzheimer’s Disease, the scale of the public lives that long drove Israel’s politics becomes, at least for the time it takes to read an obituary, alive again in an imagination not much fired any more by the biographies of public servants. But Shamir’s was an epic story and it is impossible to trim his life to a sentence, leaving out the prison breaks, assassinations and Holocaust. He went from robbing banks to support a terrorist organization committed to establishing a Jewish state, to serving longer as its prime … Continue reading →