Moshe Sharett

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Moshe Sharett משה שרת
2nd Prime Minister of Israel
In office 7 December 1953 – 2 November 1955
Preceded by	David Ben-Gurion
Succeeded by	David Ben-Gurion
Born	October 15, 1894(1894-10-15) Kherson, Ukraine
Died	July 7, 1965 (aged 70) Israel
Political party	Mapai

Moshe Sharett (Hebrew: משה שרת‎, born Moshe Shertok (Hebrew: משה שרתוק) on 15 October 1894, died 7 July 1965) was the second Prime Minister of Israel (1953-1955), serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms.

[edit] Early life

Born in Kherson, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Moshe Sharett emigrated to Palestine in 1910. His family was one of the founders of Tel Aviv.^[1] He was a member of the first graduating class of the Herzliya Hebrew High School. He also studied in Ottoman Istanbul and attended the London School of Economics. During World War I Sharett served in the Ottoman army as a junior officer.

Sharett's sister Rivka, Dov Hoz's wife, died in a car crash in December of 1940 while driving to an Aviron board meeting. Also killed were Sharett's other sister, Tzvia Sharett, Rivka's daughter Tirza Hoz, and Hoz's business partner, Yitzhak Ben-Yaakov.

[edit] Public career

Fluent in Arabic, he was employed as an official within the nascent Histadrut labor union. From 1933 to 1948, he guided negotiations between the Zionist movement and the British Mandate of Palestine, which led to the creation of the State of Israel.

Due to this experience, Moshe Sharett became the first Foreign Minister of Israel. His pivotal achievement was the 1949 Armistice Agreements, which ended official hostilities between Israel and the Arab states during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War.

Sharett became Prime Minister following David Ben-Gurion's retirement in January 1954. Considered to be a moderate, he advocated diplomacy with neighboring states, but was unable to implement his policies due to lack of support from hardliners in his government who continued to consult Ben-Gurion, now retired to Kibbutz Sde Boker, bypassing Sharett's authority. In February 1955 Ben-Gurion returned to serve as Minister of Defence under Sharett, replacing Pinhas Lavon who had resigned following a failed Israeli covert operation in Egypt known as the Lavon Affair. Ben-Gurion soon regained a prominent position in Mapai party, displacing Sharett as Prime Minister in November 1955.

Moshe Sharett served as Foreign Minister (1956), and then became Chairman of the Jewish Agency from 1961 until his death. He also continued to serve, until his death, as a member of the Knesset.

[edit] Legacy

In his book "Perfidy", Ben Hecht claimed that Sharett purposely prevented Joel Brand, a member of the Jewish Agency's rescue commission, from saving an immediate 1,000,000 Hungarian Jews from certain annihilation. Hecht's claims, however, are disputed. Hecht himself was a supporter of the Irgun and of the Israeli Revisionists, and a vocal opponent of Weitzmann, Sharett and Ben-Gurion, and had therefore some political motivation in publishing these claims. The accuracy of the claims is a matter of continued debate.

Since 1987, Sharett has appeared on the 20 NIS bills. The bill first featured Sharett, with the names of his books in small print, and with a small image of him presenting the Israeli flag to the United Nations in 1949. On the back of the bill, there was an image of the Herzliya Hebrew High School, from which he graduated. In 1998 the bill went through a graphic revision, the list of Sharett's books on the front side was replaced by part of Sharet's 1949 speech in the UN. The back side now features an image of Jewish Brigade volunteers, part of a speech by Sharett on the radio after visiting the Brigade in Italy, and the list of his books in small print.

[edit] Bibliography

• Livia Rokach: Israel's Sacred Terrorism: A Study Based on Moshe Sharett's Personal Diary and Other Documents (Belmont, Massachusetts: Association of Arab American University Graduates, 1980; Third Edition 1986), ISBN 0-937694-70-3. See External Links, below.
• Gabriel Sheffer: Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate. (New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1996), ISBN 0-19-827994-9.

[edit] References

1. ^ MOSHE SHARETT Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

[edit] External links

• Moshe Sharett Jewish Virtual Library
• Moshe Sharett Jewish Agency for Israel
• Livia Rokach: A study based on Moshe Sharett's diary, Foreword by Noam Chomsky, 1980.

v • d • e Prime Ministers of Israel David Ben-Gurion (1948-53) · Moshe Sharett (1953-55) · David Ben-Gurion (1955-63) · Levi Eshkol (1963-69) · Yigal Allon (acting - 1969) · Golda Meir (1969-74) · Yitzhak Rabin (1974-77) · Shimon Peres (acting - 1977) · Menachem Begin (1977-83) · Yitzhak Shamir (1983-84) · Shimon Peres (1984-86) · Yitzhak Shamir (1986-92) · Yitzhak Rabin (1992-95) · Shimon Peres (1995-96) · Benjamin Netanyahu (1996-99) · Ehud Barak (1999-2001) · Ariel Sharon (2001-2006) · Ehud Olmert (2006-date)