Designer, Defender of Israel’s security dies age 93
Former Israeli president and Nobel Peace Prize winner Shimon Peres died Wednesday two weeks after suffering a major stroke. Peres held nearly every major office in the country, serving twice as prime minister and also as president, a mostly ceremonial role, from 2007 to 2014.
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In 1994 he won the Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for his role in negotiating the Oslo accords, which envisioned an independent Palestinian state. But not everybody looks back at him with fondness.
One crucial thing that marked Shimon Peres forever, and crucially influenced his thinking, was the fact that he was born in Poland, moved away before the Nazi invasion, but then learned that the part of his family that remained there was completely wiped out during the war.
It gave him the sense that Israel as a country that neededsecurity at all cost.
“Shimon Peres represented the generation of almost the founding fathers,” says professor Shmuel Shandler, of Bar Ilan University.
“He was close to Ben Gurion, he was his assistant, then he was one of the founders of the Israeli security concept, he definitely was the architect of the French-Israeli alliance in the 1950s, also the development of the nuclear research in Dimona.”
Shimon Peres was key in convincing the French government that Israel needed nuclear technology in order to defend itself against its hostile Arab neighbors.
“He left the labor party, and he came back in the 1970s, and from then on he was one of the leading figures of the Israeli security and foreign policy.
"Since 2007 he has been president of the state, was accepted as a global leader, with a global stature, a statesman, and in departure he represents the dying out of the founding part of his generation,” Shandler says.
But there’s a lot of criticism too.
“I will remember Shimon Peres for the war criminal that he is,” says Diana Buttu, a lawyer and former spokesperson for the Palestine Liberation Organization based in Ramallah.
“I think it is important to put his legacy in its proper political light. Shimon Peres will forever be known for his massacre in Lebanon, who ordered the bombing of a UN facility, killing over one hundred Lebanese; for his establishment of Israel's nuclear program, a nuclear program that has never undergone inspection and has set up that legacy of making Israel above the law.
"And also for continuing unabashedly to build and expand and support Israel's settlement activity,” says Buttu.
How will history judge him? Analysts say that due to the complex nature of the Israel-Palestine problem that still seems to be without any hope of a solution, it very much depends on whose side you are if you want to judge the players.
"Some would say he proves that Israel is a peace-seeking nation,” says Daniel Levy, president of the US-Middle East Project and himself a former peace negotiator under Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin.
“Some would say that he supports the settlements. That he is a nuclear proliferator that demonstrates just the opposite, demonstrates. Others would use Shimon Peres to contrast Israel's current leadership and its desultory lack of peacemaking aptitude to the Israel that Shimon Peres represented.”
Shimon Peres was a Jewish nationalist, an ardent Zionist who [ ... ] thought that the end of Israel’s existence and survival could justify any means
Shimon Peres dead
He says there was a chance for Peres to change the course of history. It was in 1995, after the Oslo peace accords were signed and after the murder on then Prime Minister Yitzak Rabin. Peres had become prime minister himself:
“This was a moment, Israel was in turmoil,” says Levy.
“'Oslo' was new. There was hope, and there was also terrible fear after the assassination.
“But rather than be bold and courageous and push forward with peace, Shimon Peres stepped back and gave the order to assassinate an important Hamas military leader.
“Right or wrong, that led to a wave of suicide bombings, it meant that the peace process was further upended. He gave the command to launch a major military operation in Lebanon and he called for early elections.
“And Shimon Peres lost that election and Netanyahu won that election. And I think what it says is that Shimon as leader was not the success that Shimon was as global spokesperson, global statesman, and global figure,” he says.
“For me, the most important thing to remember, and the most important aspect of this legacy is that Shimon Peres was a Jewish nationalist, an ardent zionist who was of the school of thought that the end of Israel’s existence and survival could justify any means.
"Yes, he was not a friend of Palestinian rights or Palestinian historic justice, but he was a pragmatic jewish nationalist, not a fundamentalist, not an ideological or religious zealot. And therefore he could also strive for peace, he could also be in favor of compromise, and he could be a friend for a different Palestinian future.”
The official Palestinian news agency WAFA reported that Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas had sent a condolence letter to the Peres family.
An official farewell ceremony will be held for Shimon Peres on Thursday, and he will be buried on Friday, 30 September.
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