Summing Up: An Autobiography (review)

198 SHOFAR Fall 1996 Vol. 15, No. 1 Summing Up: An Autobiography, by Yitzhak Shamir. NewYork: little, Brown and Company, 1994. 276 pp. $24.95. One of the key arguments being used by the "revisionists" in the field of Israeli studies today has to do with perspective. "Why should we assume," these scholars ask, "that everything written by Ben Gurion, Eshkol, Meir, and others of the founding generation of Israeli political leaders was objective, or for that matter even true?" The fact is, Ben Gurion had his own perspective of the world in which he operated, and this perspective inevitably colored his perceptions as described in the several tomes he authored. The same can be said for Eshkol, Meir, Eban, Dayan, Weizmann, Begin, and the many Israeli political leaders who have written autobiographical works describing their particular "takes" on how and why Israeli politics has evolved as it has. This being said, it must be noted at the outset of this review that this is an autobiography. One cannot criticize Yitzhak Shamir for having a particular perspective of the world, or for putting that perspective down on paper. This autobiography tells us a great deal about Shamir's background and thus contributes to the collective knowledge available to students of Israeli politics and Israeli history who are interested in knowing about the environments within which Israel's political leaders were reared. If scholarship on political socialization has any validity, then Shamir was affected to a greater or lesser extent by the times in which he was growing up, the places in which he was growing up, and the experiences in which he participated as he was growing up. Shamir tells us this in his writing. Even individuals not particularly interested in Yitzhak Shamir the man will be interested to read about his early days, his experiences in early Palestine, and his going underground to participate with other freedom fighters. Shamir's description of the evolution of his political style, and the level of his political participation, will be of great interest to those who were his followers; the material will also be of interest to students who are interested in how Israeli political leaders have become Israeli political leaders over the years. Probably of greater interest to students of contemporary politics will be the chapters that focus on Shamir's period in the foreign ministry and his term as Prime Minister. What is especially interesting to this reader is not Shamir's particular perspective of developing world events, because those perspectives have been matters of public record for several years now, but rather Shamir's "inside" perspective of the meetings that took place, actors' behavior at meetings, and the interactions between and among individuals who participated at these meetings. This is material that Book Reviews 199 can only be recounted by someone who was a participant-or at least an observer-at the meetings, and cannot be inferred by students of foreign or domestic policy. To this reader the real value of Shamir's book is that it contributes one more window on the day-to-day operation of Israeli politics, and gives us the opportunity to "be there," to sit in on the meetings between and among Israeli politicians and generals, and between and among Israeli leaders and foreign leaders, which in many of the cases described in this volume was not possible in the past. What are the strengths and weaknesses of this volume? In many respects weaknesses are directly related to strengths, and they involve perspective. The strengths of the volume lie in its ability to open doors that have been closed, to let us "sit in" on meetings from which we have been excluded, and to give us an "inside" perspective on events we have witnessed from the outside. The weaknesses ofthe volume are the flip side of the same coin. To the extent that we can "sit it" on meetings, we look over Shamir's shoulder, hear his perspective of the conversation, and see his view of what happened. Is this the way the meetings really were? We can't know. All we can do is read Mr. Shamir's version of the meeting and...