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Columbia Encyclopedia: Sharett, Moshe
('shə shərĕt') , 1894–1965, Israeli statesman, b. Russia, originally named Shertok. In 1906 he emigrated to Palestine where he was active in the labor movement. In 1933 he became head of the political department of the Jewish Agency for Palestine. Sharett was David Ben-Gurion's closest associate in the struggle for an independent Jewish state. In 1948 he was appointed foreign minister of Israel and from 1953 to 1955 served as prime minister. He resigned from the government in 1956. Sharet sought to strengthen Israel's position by statesmanship rather than confrontation, emphasizing “caution” rather than “courage.” His replacement as premier by Ben-Gurion in 1955 and retirement in 1956 reflected the movement in Israel toward confrontation that resulted in the 1956 Arab-Israeli War.

Bibliography

See biography by M. Z. Rosensaft (1966).

 
 

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

 
Wikipedia: Moshe Sharett
Moshe Sharett
משה שרת
Moshe Sharett

In office
7 December 1953 – 2 November 1955
Preceded by David Ben-Gurion
Succeeded by David Ben-Gurion

Born October 15 1894(1894--)
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 (1954-1955), serving for a little under two years between David Ben-Gurion's two terms.

Born in Kherson, Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire, Moshe Sharett emigrated to Palestine in 1908. 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.

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.

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.

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.
  • Gabriel Sheffer: Moshe Sharett: Biography of a Political Moderate. (New York: Clarendon Press of Oxford University Press, 1996), ISBN 0-19-827994-9.

References

  1. ^ MOSHE SHARETT Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs

External links


Preceded by
David Ben-Gurion
Prime Minister of Israel
1954–1955
Succeeded by
David Ben-Gurion
Preceded by
David Ben-Gurion
Leader of Mapai
1954–1955
Succeeded by
David Ben-Gurion
Preceded by
none
Foreign Minister of Israel
1948–1956
Succeeded by
Golda Meir


COA_of_Israel.svg
Ben-GurionSharettBen-GurionEshkolAllon (Acting) • Meir RabinPeres (Acting) • Begin ShamirPeres ShamirRabinPeresNetanyahu BarakSharonOlmert


Persondata
NAME Sharett, Moshe
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Shertok, Moshe
SHORT DESCRIPTION second Prime Minister of Israel
DATE OF BIRTH October 15, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Kherson, Ukraine
DATE OF DEATH July 7, 1965
PLACE OF DEATH Israel

 
 

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Copyrights:

Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Mideast & N. Africa Encyclopedia. Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Moshe Sharett" Read more

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