1894 - 1965
Israel's first foreign minister and second prime minister.
Moshe Sharett was born Moshe Shertok. His family migrated from Russia to Palestine in 1906. He attended school in Herzliyya and Tel Aviv, and after graduating in 1913, he entered the University of Istanbul to study law. When World War I broke out, he was drafted into the Turkish army.
At the end of the war, Sharett attended the London School of Economics, graduating in 1924. He returned to Palestine and became a journalist; from 1929 to 1931 he was editor of Davar, a daily newspaper in Tel Aviv.
In 1931 Sharett became political secretary of the Jewish Agency Executive. In 1935 he was named director of its political department, and began laying the foundations for what was later to become Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Sharett had a long-time working partnership with David Ben-Gurion in the Jewish Agency Executive, and after 1948, in Israel's first cabinets.
In 1946 he participated unofficially in talks in London to negotiate Zionist goals. Sharett was a representative of the Jewish Agency in the 1947 negotiations with the United Nations (UN) Special Committee on Palestine. He sought UN support for the creation of an independent state for the Jews in Palestine. In December 1947 he was among Jewish leaders lobbying for American support in the UN.
In May 1948, Sharett (who had hebraized the name Shertok at the time of the creation of the state of Israel) was named foreign minister in the Jewish provisional administration. In that capacity he negotiated support for Israel's statehood with U.S. Secretary of State George Marshall.
Once the state of Israel was in existence, Sharett became its first foreign minister, a position he held until 1956. In that post he emphasized that proceeds from the sale of lands belonging to absentee Arabs would be applied to a fund to resettle the refugees elsewhere, not to repatriate them in Israel. He argued that the problems of the Palestinian refugees were just like the problems of refugees around the world. In that sense, there was no legal precedent requiring their repatriation to the lands they had occupied before the war.
In March 1949, Sharett introduced the "principle of nonidentification" to indicate that Israel would not be aligned with either the East or the West. Israel's intention was to work with all nations to develop peaceful links and support for its existence. By 1951, however, it had become clear that the Soviet Union would support the Arab bloc against Israel, and Israel's foreign policy became clearly aligned with the West.
Prime Minister Ben-Gurion resigned in December 1953, and Sharett became prime minister. In June 1955 his cabinet was overturned by the withdrawal of the General Zionist Party from the coalition. He remained as acting prime minister until the scheduled elections for the third Knesset took place. After the elections, Ben-Gurion returned to the prime ministership with a new cabinet in November 1955.
In 1956 tensions increased between Ben-Gurion and Sharett over the appropriate response to Egypt's actions in and around the Suez Canal. Sharett argued that Israel should act with great restraint, while Ben-Gurion was in favor of a more provocative strategy. When Ben-Gurion felt that the tensions were growing too great, he asked for Sharett's resignation as foreign minister in June 1956, replacing him with Golda Meir.
Bibliography
Ben-Gurion, David. Israel: A Personal History, translated by Nechemia Meyers and Uzy Nystar. New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1971.
Sachar, Howard M. A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism toOur Time, 2d edition. New York: Knopf, 1996.
Sheffer, Gabriel. Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, 1996.
— GREGORY S. MAHLER
