Put the Peres Peace Illusion to Rest, Part II

I wrote Part I on Sept. 28 and gave Shimon Peres the due courtesy of respectfully honouring his memory, but in my second part I will dispense with that notion, as it's no longer necessary. And you will see why below.

A little on my background: As a child growing up with two Israeli American parents I had a bittersweet relationship with Israeli politics. In 1993 when the Oslo Accords were signed, I was in the 3rd grade, but I still remember the euphoria of those Israelis that believed that the wars with the Arabs were approaching their end. I embraced that attitude for a long-time even at a young age, notwithstanding having both divorced parents that did not believe in the peace process. It took many years, many bitter arguments (yes I was a mouthy bastard back then too) and more terror attacks than I can remember for that vision to be revealed to be a mirage. And though I've known if for years and admitted it in conversation, I will say now on the record that I was as wrong as Shimon Peres was. 

Carrying the torch and burning the fields with it

Though he was hated equally
by the Israeli right, Peres was not
as directly targeted by activists
of the right as Yitzhak Rabin, as
shown by this poster popular
at anti-Oslo rallies.

In 1995 Shimon Peres was rendered back control of the Labour Party by its leadership following the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. The country was divided. Justifiably, many supporters of the peace process felt that Rabin had been targeted by a campaign of incitement in which he was depicted maliciously as an SS officer and in other degrading ways by right-wing Israeli protesters. Leader of Opposition Benjamin Netanyahu was often seen accompanying these protesters, and was blamed by some on the left for inciting the murder.

Some of Peres' political staff advised him to immediately call snap elections in order to capitalize on the voter mood. Peres, in one of the many strategic blunders of his political career, declined and the elections occurred as regularly scheduled on May 29, 1996. Peres believed that he now had the people's mandate given his Nobel Prize and his association with Rabin. What happened instead was a wave of Hamas terror bombings, in particular in Tel Aviv-Jaffa that took their toll on public support for Peres. He also alienated the left by launching Operation Grapes of Wrath in Southern Lebanon against Hezbollah. The same operation was a public relations disaster as the IDF shelled a UN shelter for conflict refugees in a botched artillery strike. 

On the face of it, no one in the world thought that Peres could lose that election. He had endless experience including the following posts: Director General of the Defence Ministry, Defence Minister (twice), Foreign Minister (3 times), Finance Minister, Transport Minister, and Prime Minister (3 times). Netanyahu was viewed as a demagogue and a pawn of the ultra-Orthodox and extreme right. Yet they underestimated his intelligence, in particular his ability to latch onto the fears and insecurities of the Israeli voter. In one of the first modern political campaigns in Israel that utilized scientific polling, and which mobilized a dizzying grassroots support base, Netanyahu pulled even and then pulled out a victory by the narrowest of margins. It was a true changing of the guard to a new generation and Peres would never be the Labour Party's candidate in elections again, although he would lead it again from 2003-05 before being stunned in a primary election and defeated by union leader Amir Peretz.

The Elder Statesman cannot admit his faults

Foreign Minister Shimon Peres with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon
and Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in February 2005.
These three top-level figures in Israeli politics were at
the time in the midst of the debate over the Gaza Withdrawal.[ABC (Austrailia)]

In 1999 Netanyahu was defeated by his former military commander Ehud Barak of Labour. Barak had never trusted Peres, as he had been a loyalist of Rabin's faction of the party, and he appointed him to the lowly post of Minister of Regional Co-operation, where had few powers or responsibilities. In 2001 Barak was ousted in an emergency election and Ariel Sharon of the Likud was elected in his place, all of this largely due to the outbreak of the Second Intifada.. Whereas Barak had been seen as the heir to Rabin's legacy, Sharon was portrayed as the bogeyman by most of the press due to his implication in 1982 for allowing a massacre in Lebanon of Palestinian refugees by an allied militia of Lebanese Christians during that war.

Yet Peres had no problem cooperating fully with Sharon as his foreign minister. The truth that the media hero worshipers are not mentioning is that as both were members of the defence establishment and had served in governments together in the 1980s, and on top of that they were close friends. So the belief in the pro-peace community that this symbol of the peace movement would be incompatible with a hawk like Sharon was a complete bluff. Ironically, as a tandem Peres and Sharon would succeed in alienating both the left and the right of Israeli society with two major actions. In 2002 Sharon launched Operation Defensive Shield, a protracted offensive into the Palestinian cities of the West Bank that shattered the Second Intifada militarily. This operation effectively blunted a wave of Palestinian terror attacks and neutralized several organizations in the West Bank. On the far left and among Israeli Arabs, it was seen as a major offence and following Defensive Shield the PLO chief Yasser Arafat would never recover and died in 2004. For all intents and purposes the negotiated peace process was ended there.

Then beginning in 2004 Sharon began floating an idea once promoted by his electoral opponent Amram Mitzna (Labour, Peres' boss) of unilaterally withdrawing all troops and civilians from the Gaza Strip. Later termed the Hitnatkut (Disengagement, or Withdrawal), this action caused a schism within Sharon's right-wing Likud movement. As a result, a new centrist party centered around Sharon called Kadima ("Forward") split from the Likud bringing with it Sharon's loyalists against the stalwart Likud people that remained under Netanyahu. Some Labour politicians defected to Sharon's new movement, one of them being Peres. He served under Sharon's successor Ehud Olmert as Vice Prime Minister, and would then be elected to the symbolic post of State President in 2007.

Requiem for a charlatan

Peres in his new role as Israel's celebrity greeter with Madonna
and husband Guy Ritchie [Ynet News].

Until his passing this week at age 93, Peres was treated by the international community as Israel's Nelson Mandela, when in reality he may be their Jimmy Carter or Neville Chamberlain. With the passage of 23 years, even dedicated opponents of the Oslo Accords have accepted his role as the top international representative of his country on the international stage.  

They shouldn't have. Peres' main flaw throughout his career was the lack of remorse for the consequences of the policies he enacted. It started in the 1970s when he displayed literally no understanding of the lives of oriental Jewish immigrants. A memorable quote from those days was of Peres supporter and comedian Dudu Topaz who was thankful that none of these Chakhchakhs (A slur basically equivalent to the n-word referring to oriental Jews) was at the rally he was speaking at. This comment was forever associated rightly or wrongly with the Peres crowd, and he never lived it down, because from then on it was evident that he had no emotional rapport with that community.

Yet the fact that he was disconnected from the average citizen did not deter Peres, because he was the consummate politician. In every role he had Peres seemed intent on furthering his own prestige, NOT with ensuring the safety, welfare, and prosperity of his constituents. If he did then. . .

• . . . why is it that even as a member of coalition governments or as state president for years afterward he assailed Israeli leaders for their lack of commitment to the "peace process", a process that he knew very well had been a failure.
• . . . why did he force the Israeli people to enter into a treaty with a murderous terror organization led by a notoriously brutal leader (Yasser Arafat) and then a Holocaust denier (Mahmoud Abbas).
• . .. why was he consistently for two decades undermining the leadership of his true archenemy, the other Israeli peace "visionary" Yitzhak Rabin.
• Peres drew the Israeli public into the peace process on the understanding that it would end all of the Arab-Israeli Wars, yet since then there have been wars in 1996 (Operation Grapes of Wrath), 2000-06 (Second Intifada), 2006 (Second Lebanon War), 2009 (Operation Cast Lead), 2012 (Operation Pillar of Fire), and 2014 (Operation Protective Edge). The last four happened after Israel's unilateral retreat from Southern Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. Although Peres was not the prime minister for either of those actions he was actually the "vice prime minister" during the Gaza Withdrawal, meaning that a position was actually created in order to justify his participation in this process.
• Between 900 and 1,050 Israelis, between 650 and 750 of them civilians, were killed during the Second Intifada, while on the other side as many as 3,300 Palestinians were killed. Despite that the governments of both Israel and the PA never offically abandoned the Oslo Accords, partially due to the pressure of people like Shimon Peres that REFUSED to admit that despite the Israelis having offered almost all of the Palestinian land demands Arafat had already planned to launch the Intifada.This is a clear example of a man who saw his own personal legacy as being more important than the safety of his fellow citizens.

Yossi Beilin, a Peres loyalist who has served as Israel's Justice
Minister, made the overtures to the PLO that would result
in the Oslo Accords. Unlike Peres, none of the other
people that were integral to that process have
had any electoral success [Jerusalem Post].

Many of the other people that Peres left in his wake have had the closure to forgive him. This is inexplicable in many ways. I'm talking about the people on the left of Israeli society that has been decimated by allowing people like Peres to be their royal leader:

• During Peres' longest term of leadership in the Labour Party (1977-92), on of its economic components, the various kibbutz movements, underwent an economic meltdown.
• Younger Labour Party leaders like Ehud Barak, Amir Peretz, and others were consistently forced to contend with Peres' subversive and overbearing behaviour, until finally he ditched the party in 2005 after Peretz upset him in a leadership election. That defeat seemed to be official confirmation that the Oriental Jews had rejected Peres for once and for all, because Peretz is Moroccan. 
• Besides Peres the other Oslo leaders had almost no public to support them, and this was revealed through the consistently poor electoral performance of them. The main architect of the Oslo Accords, Yossi Beilin, was trounced by Barak in the 1996 leadership election. Beilin then went on to lead the further left Meretz Party which itself failed to make any gains in Knesset elections. This means that effectively Peres and his party were forcing Israeli governments to support a peace process that had lost public backing as early as 2001.

Burying this chapter

Telegraph.co.uk.

We should never forget the image at the left of the funeral of Shimon Peres, but not for the reasons the subject would want. Peres, an arrogant politician willing to sacrifice the lives of his citizens for political gain, was the forerunner of Barack Obama, a person of very similar behaviour patterns. Neither ever accepted their own responsibility for their failures. In Obama's case it was the Republicans in Congress and the racist American people; for Peres it was the fact that he was the leader, but somehow the voters were too dumb to recognize their roles versus his own. This whole week of political hero worship is not worthy of a functioning democracy, but yet it is very likely that even though the Peres legacy will never receive its proper renunciation, his main "project" the Oslo Accords will no longer reap its share of victims.