Moshe Shamir was a founder of the Land of Israel Movement, which brought together prominent figures from all parts of the political spectrum to assert Israel’s right to all the territory taken in the Six Day War. A distinguished novelist and essayist, who wrote dozens of books and plays (he was awarded the Israel Prize for literature in 1988) Shamir came from the far left. As a young man he belonged to the Hashomer Hatzair movement, fought in the Palmach, joined the Mishmark Haemek kibbutz and became a member of Mapam.

While Shamir was widely seen as making a sharp break with his past beliefs in 1967, he himself did not agree. Shamir said that over many decades he had become aware of problems in the way Hashomer Hazair defined the situation. Hashomer Hatzair called for class war, but the problem facing the Jews was the hostility of the British and Arabs. Shamir says he found it possible to live within the Movement until the Soviet Union, which Hashomer Hatzair considered its moral lodestar, took an anti-Israel stance. For Shamir, it became impossible to combine Marxist dogma with survival of the Jewish people.

What Shamir all along saw as the positive element in the ideology of the Hashomer Hatzair – its consciousness of the Land of Israel as “one, whole, natural fatherland” destined in its entirely for the redemption of the Jewish people – was what later drew him to the Land of Israel Movement, which had become the proponent of that perspective, now long rejected by the Israeli left.

Shamir was a member of the Knesset for the Likud Party when it staged its surprise victory over Labor in 1977, but left when Begin surrendered the Sinai in the Camp David accords. With Geula Cohen and physicist Yuval Ne’eman, he helped establish, and became a Knesset member for the Techiya Party.

Within Israel Shamir’s most famous novel was the 1948 He Walked in the Fields which was credited with shaping the image of the sabra, rough on the outside, sensitive within. Outside Israel his best known novel was The King of Flesh and Blood, about Judean king Alexander Yanai. His My Life with Ishmael was an intellectual autobiography. His Red Thread, was a devastating evaluation of the impact of socialism on Zionism. His last book was Yair, a historical novel about the leader of the Stern Gang.