http://sarahhonig.com/2012/07/20/another-tack-the-same-sea/
Another Tack: The same sea
One of US President Barack Obama’s few admitted regrets is his inability to conjure up an instant resolution to our vexing dispute. This seems a tad odd considering that during her recent whirlwind visit to our troublesome midst, his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had waxed ecstatic about this being a time of “great change and transformation in the region.”
If things are so upbeat, why are they so intractable?
Both Obama and Clinton would be a lot less frustrated and much wiser had they turned to the late Yitzhak Shamir for clues.
He was endlessly mocked by members of our chattering classes when he stated outright that “the sea is the same sea and the Arabs are the same Arabs.” He plainly harbored no illusions in a wishy-washy world of wishful-thinking, where reality often becomes a most unwelcome intruder.
Political vogue decrees that disagreeable facts shouldn’t inconsiderately interfere with uplifting fantasy, but Shamir didn’t mind being denigrated as insular, intransigent and above all terminally uncool.
With both his feet solidly on the ground, he had no patience for pipe-dreams about a phenomenal sea change in the Arab mind-set. Continuity appeared more plausible, especially given the depth and duration of virulent Arab enmity toward the Jewish state. Hardhearted hate is unlikely to wondrously dissipate overnight.
Shamir sounded this observation on more than one occasion and in a variety of contexts, most notably on the eve of the 1991 Madrid Conference to which he went unwillingly and in which he had no trace of trust.
Yet his reluctant participation in what he termed as the Madrid charade suffices for many today to misrepresent him as the trailblazer to what eventually culminated in the Oslo folly.
When Shamir took over from Menachem Begin as Israel’s seventh prime minister in 1983, our ever-presumptuous trendsetters and omniscient opinion-molders disdained him and scorned what they determined were his unimaginative orientations and do-nothing proclivities. They couldn’t stand him. He was anathema to them no matter how much they now, after his death, expediently reinvent him, much as they have been dishonestly skewing Begin’s legacy for decades.
But the truth is that Shamir was never cool and never aspired to be popular. He aspired to do the right thing, a fact which in and of itself made him different, an odd bird in a setting obsessed with the façade but leery of the substance. And if the right thing meant keeping mum, Shamir didn’t answer his voluble detractors and didn’t get dragged into verbal bouts.
In an interview years ago, I asked him whether he didn’t think he was thereby losing the battle for public opinion by default. He insisted that “most of the time the least said is best.” It was his “responsibility not to babble needlessly,” even if that cost him support.