Herbert Zweibon

Shmuel Katz, who celebrates his 90th birthday in December, was the inspiration for the establishment of Americans for a Safe Israel thirty-three years ago.

Underground leader, member of the first Knesset, publisher, historian, biographer, essayist, Shmuel Katz is above all the most trenchant political thinker modern Israel has produced. His career has also been marked by a selfless political integrity. Indifferent to person advantage, Katz has sought only the good of Israel and the Jewish people.

In 1936, at the age of 22, Katz came to Palestine from South Africa, and retains to this day the accent of his native land. A disciple (as he would remain throughout his life) of Zionist leader Ze'ev Jabotinsky, at his request Katz went to London in 1940 to start and edit a Zionist weekly. After the war he returned to Palestine where he rejoined the underground Irgun Zvai Leumi, becoming a member of its high command under Menachem Begin. With Israel's independence, Katz became a Knesset member for Begin's Herut Party, but left after a single term, unhappy with Begin's failure, as he saw it, to reach out beyond his narrow constituency. Katz abandoned party politics to run a publishing house for many years.

In 1977 when Begin finally upset the Labor Party's long monopoly on power, Katz returned briefly to public life, initially as Begin's personal representative to the United States. When Begin disavowed his commitment to put Katz in charge of Israeli information abroad (Katz had seized on the opportunity to transform Israel's miserable efforts in this area) and threw aside his ideological principles to achieve a paper peace with Anwar Sadat, Katz resigned. To the astonishment of Begin, who tried to buy him off with an offer he was convinced could not be refused -- the high prestige post of UN ambassador -- Katz refused.

Katz is best known as a writer and almost all his books are landmarks in their own way. Days of Fire remains the best book about the Irgun. Battleground is the best single history of the Arab-Israel conflict over Palestine. Less well known but equally trenchant, The Hollow Peace is a devastating account of how Begin, beginning with his unaccountable decision to install Labor leader Moshe Dayan (whose failures in 1973 had discredited him with the Israeli public) as his Foreign Minister, squandered the opportunity to implement Jabotinsky's vision. Lone Wolf is the definitive biography of Jabotinsky.

But above all Shmuel Katz is a prophet in his own time. When Katz was only 22, Jabotinsky said of his articles: "I 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." To this day, Katz in his essays has continued to lay out, with that same perfect clarity, the situation confronting Israel, the consequences of the actions her leaders take, and the alternative path that should be taken. Katz saw the opportunities her victory in the Six Day War opened for Israel. He became a leader of the Land of Israel Movement which recognized that Israel could be a geopolitical factor in the region, with the historic heartland of Judea and Samaria restored to the Jewish people, strategic depth and oil from the Sinai, the high ground on the Golan Heights a deterrent to Syria.

Like prophets generally, Katz has been ignored, sidelined, heard by many, hearkened to by few. History will pay tribute to his prescience. We, his disciples in Americans for a Safe Israel, are proud to pay tribute to him now.