RUTHFULLY YOURS

Remembering Shmuel

By David IsaacRuth King, who runs the excellent Web site ‘Ruthfully Yours’ and was a close friend of Shmuel, once expressed astonishment when she learned that he read Ha’aretz, an Israeli newspaper whose editorial content is somewhere to the left of The New York Times.

“His response was that he skipped the political articles but that the paper often had interesting columns on unsung Jewish heroes and the role they played in the history of Israel and the defense of Jews,” she wrote.

This was consistent with Shmuel’s belief that it was essential to remember those who fought to make the Zionist idea a reality in order that their memory should inspire future generations. So it’s fitting, as he would have turned 96 this past Thursday, to take this opportunity to remember him.

Those who knew Shmuel invariably describe him as warm and generous. He was a wonderful storyteller with a terrific sense of humor and a great gift for friendship. He was, of course, highly intelligent and gifted. He was also possessed of a natural modesty. This writer, visiting Shmuel at his Tel Aviv apartment 20 years ago, remembers Shmuel telling him that his manner reminded Shmuel of his own, which would often lead him to be underestimated, at least until he got into a debate.

Of Shmuel’s modesty, William Van Cleave, Professor Emeritus at the Department of Defense & Strategic Studies at Missouri State University, and a man with whom Shmuel once shared the pleasure of being fired upon, provides perhaps the best example, “In all of the many photos in the two volume Lone Wolf, Shmuel included only one of himself, and that with his back to the camera.”

Yisrael Medad, who compiled a collection of Shmuel’s writings in the book Battletruth, wrote, “[H]e was kind, gentle and considerate and, as he sometimes admitted to me, all he wanted to be was a Yiddishe mensch, a good Jewish person.”

Shmuel was not a politician, but thought of himself as “an information man”. He served in the First Knesset only at the insistence of Menachem Begin, saying he hated every minute of it and got out as soon as he could. In 1977, when Begin finally broke through Labor’s hegemony and became prime minister, Katz briefly reentered public life as Begin’s personal representative to the United States. It took less than two weeks for Katz to undo the lie Israel’s Laborites had disseminated for decades that Begin was a thug and a terrorist.

Shmuel will be most remembered for his wonderful books. As Outpost editor Rael Jean Isaac wrote, “Shmuel wrote by far the best book on the Irgun, Days of Fire, as gripping a read today as when it was written over forty years ago. In Battleground Shmuel provided the definitive work on Jewish rights in the context of the Arab-Israel conflict. There remains today no better single source to counter the lies of Arab propaganda. Then there are the collected essays in The Hollow Peace and Battletruth and the major biographies, of Jabotinsky and the Aaronsohns.”

It was the remarkable Zionist leader Vladimir Jabotinsky who inspired Shmuel to devote his life to the Zionist enterprise. As he wrote in Days of Fire:

I’d been captivated by Jabotinsky on his first visit to South Africa in 1930, when I was a 15-year-old student at university. I was invited to hear him lecture at a private gathering of the Betar Youth Organization. Jabotinsky, one of the great orators of the age, was capable of holding vast audiences spellbound for hours. I was enthralled by the irrefutable logic of his words, and the restraint with which he conveyed their searing content.Without hesitation I became a dedicated soldier in the cause which Jabotinsky espoused, speaking, writing, organizing, at first in the Betar Youth Organization, later in the Zionist-Revisionist party. My studies were neglected and my university career came to an ignominious end.

In the late 1930s, Jabotinsky expressed his own admiration for Shmuel’s talents in a letter: “I have been reading your reports and articles and must very earnestly congratulate you on the perfect clarity, the forcible simplicity, the sachlichkeit [matter of fact, to the point] with which you present the most complicated situations. I think you are much more than a journalist; but you also are a born journalist and a very good one.”

Katz inspired the creation of Americans for A Safe Israel, an American counterpart to the Land of Israel movement. Herbert Zweibon, AFSI’s chairman, writes, “For me, meeting Shmuel Katz was a life transforming experience. I had been active in my synagogue, a buyer of Israel Bonds, typical of the vast majority of Jews who supported Israel and were comfortable in their confidence that Israel’s government knew and did what was best for the country’s future.

“Katz made me recognize that this was not the case, that the (then) Labor government was profoundly wrong in looking upon the territories Israel had taken in the Six Day War as bargaining chips for ‘peace’ and that United States policy, wedded to the same false idea, had to be challenged.”

Zweibon often says that he has been caught by “Katz’s curse” – his way of describing how Shmuel could draw people into his political orbit and transform them into Zionists dedicated to the cause.

He now jokes this writer has been similarly condemned.

Shmuel was unfailingly optimistic despite the fact that he understood the implications of one disastrous policy after another on which the Israeli government embarked. His friends would be surprised, sometimes even frustrated, by this unshakeable optimism. It was only at the end, according to Yisrael Medad, that his optimism began to waver, something Medad believes contributed to his physical decline.

Shmuel is very much the unsung hero. But his impact continues, to which this blog is testimony.