Home > War in the Persian Gulf > Yitzhak Shamir Biography

Born 1915

Ruzinoy, Poland

Prime Minister of Israel during the 1991 Persian Gulf War

"The populace will come to understand ... that everything the PLO stands for will produce only disasters."

Yitzhak Shamir quoted in the New York Times.

As the prime minister of Israel during the Persian Gulf War, Yitzhak Shamir faced a difficult decision about whether or not to enter the war. Shortly after the fighting started, Iraq began firing Scud missiles at Israeli cities. Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein (see entry) apparently wanted to draw Israel into the war in hopes of breaking up the U.S.-led coalition. Hussein believed that the Arab members of the coalition would leave it, and perhaps even switch sides and support Iraq, rather than fight alongside Israel, their longtime enemy. But Shamir responded to U.S. pressure and followed a policy of restraint in the face of...