Shimon Peres: The Man Who Dreamed Too Much

Reflecting on the long and often controversial career of Shimon Peres, who died Tuesday night at the age of ninety-three, Amnon Lord tries to make sense of the man he deems a worthy successor to his mentor David Ben-Gurion:

Before and after everything, Peres loved his country. Even though it usually seemed as if the state of Israel was too small for him, he seemed pinned to this rock, this mountain, this valley, whose rounded shoulders were padded by a fur of thorns with the color of a lion’s mane. That’s how the land of Israel appeared to him from Kibbutz Alumot [which he helped found at age fifteen]. Somehow—no one understands how—Peres managed to maintain the romantic optimism of his love for the land. . . .

Shimon Peres was perhaps the first politician, aside from Ben-Gurion, who truly understood what sovereignty is, and the significance of the transformation that took place in 1948, when Israel achieved statehood. Peres, apparently under Ben-Gurion’s influence, developed the concept of “our own orientation” in the 1950s. That is, a strategy of not relying on superpowers and alliances. . . .

Before 1977, Peres was the biggest sponsor of Gush Emunim’s settlement project in Judea and Samaria. He is the man who formulated the most convincing arguments against a Palestinian state and the PLO. Such a state, he said, would undermine both Jordan and Israel.

Then, after the upheaval [of Labor’s first loss in the 1977 elections], the best and brightest figures in the party started to gather around Peres: Yossi Beilin, Gideon Levy, Yisrael Peleg, Yossi Sarid, and others, [who went on to be the hard left’s leading opinion makers]. . . . Later he was crowned by the European socialists who at the time reigned supreme: Bruno Kreisky, Willy Brandt, Pierre Mendès France, and finally François Mitterrand.

The result was a slow move left in the direction of the PLO. It was a long period which began in 1977 and reached its peak with the Oslo Accords of 1993. How tragic and how significant is the fact that Peres had a stroke on September 13, the anniversary of the signing of those accords? . . .

[T]today, as we say goodbye to Shimon, we will only say this: there were times when we lost you, [but now] it’s time for you to rest, you subversive and incorrigible Don Quixote.

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Shimon Peres: The Man Who Dreamed Too Much

This piece was first published on the Hebrew-language website Mida on September 28, 2016, rendered into English by Avi Woolf, and republished here with permission.

 

From solidifying Israeli sovereignty and the nuclear project to the Oslo Accords and the post-national trend: Shimon Peres always knew how to sense the next big thing and reinvent himself. 

 

Before and after everything, Peres loved his country. Even though it usually seemed as if the state of Israel was too small for him, he seemed pinned to this rock, this mountain, this valley, whose rounded shoulders were padded by a fur of thorns with the color of a lion’s mane. That’s how the land of Israel appeared to him from Kibbutz Alumot [which he helped found at age fifteen]. Somehow—no one understands how—Peres managed to maintain the romantic optimism of his love for the land. That’s how it looked from Kibbutz Kalya, a place he wrote a romantic poem about.

He was the father of the schemers and manipulators, who somehow—no one knows how—managed to maintain the romantic optimism in his love of the land. He made innumerable mistakes, the last of which was in the run-up to the 2013 elections when he toyed with the idea of running for prime minister egged on by Tzipi Livni, who came armed with flattering polls. Shimon Peres forgot his own advice, or perhaps remembered it only at the last moment: polls are like perfume—they are for smelling, not for using or taking seriously.

Peres was prime minister for only two years [in the 1980s], plus half a year after Yitzḥak Rabin’s murder. But we will remember him as the greatest statesman in the country’s history, after the country’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, whom Peres so admired. There are those who say that over the last generation he was constantly rewriting history to embellish his own doings, while diminishing the stature of the Old Man. “The nuclear plant in Dimona is me. The Negev is me. The aerospace industry is me. The raid on Entebbe is me.”

However, in the case of Entebbe, it’s very hard to imagine this amazing operation having occurred without Peres’s lead, and his prodding as the hawkish defense minister in Rabin’s government. It was Peres’s fate that when he published his diary from the days preceding the operation, no one bought it.

Anyone who really looks into his political personality will understand just how unique he was in the 1950s. Shimon Peres was perhaps the first politician, aside from Ben-Gurion, who truly understood what sovereignty is, and the significance of the transformation that took place in 1948, when Israel achieved statehood. Peres, apparently under Ben-Gurion’s influence, developed the concept of “our own orientation” in the 1950s. That is, a strategy of not relying on superpowers and alliances.

His approach was the opposite of what the public has come to know of him in the last generation. “Heavy Jewish settlement in these two regions [the Negev and the Galilee] will constitute a serious balance in a time of danger, and not because war, if it comes, will be concentrated on the border settlements—if we’re attacked, we will do everything possible to move the battlefield onto the enemy’s territory—but because Jewish settlement lessens the Arabs’ desire for war,” Peres wrote in September 1955. As far as diplomacy and peace-seeking are concerned, he wrote that “any declaration on our part that we want peace is not seen by [the Arabs] as a serious statement of policy but as an expression of weakness.” Thus, he concluded, the question of borders needs to be detached from the diplomatic realm; it’s not up for negotiation.

Peres always knew how to sense the next big thing. In the 1950s, inspired by Ben-Gurion, he saw technology and science as being of the utmost importance; in recent years, he spoke more and more of multinational corporations. I remember meeting him while he was still in the presidential before Passover in 2013, and he was suddenly speaking of these much-despised corporations with great affection. He envisioned all sorts of economic roles for them, not to mention contributions to development and education.

The state had gone down a peg in his estimation. He went on at length about the inability of “the state” to solve economic problems. He spoke of a chronic economic crisis no one knows how to exit. He spoke of security and terror problems that the state doesn’t know how to solve. He meant the state as such, not necessarily Israel. The number-one statist in Israeli history had lost faith in the state as a state! He believed multinational corporations will replace traditional concepts of sovereignty—the very thing he understood so well at the outset. Indeed, even at age ninety, he didn’t lose his ability to infuriate and annoy—the cowherd from kibbutz Alumot who discovered the wonders of grand strategy.

If he was partner to any original outlook that he successfully promoted himself, it was the Ben-Gurionist approach of neutrality in the cold war—not faux-neutrality dependent on the Moscow, but true independence. There were very few examples of states that adhered to such an approach: France, Sweden, Israel.

His was not the neutrality of the Non-Aligned Movement—Egypt, India, Yugoslavia, and all the rest—which were in practice pro-Soviet. This was neutrality that put its faith in Western democracy, including a gradual embrace of the free market, but without dependence on the United States. It is not for nothing that these three countries developed all developed a nuclear strategy. One, Sweden, had already come close to nuclear capability in the late 1950s. Only out of fear of the Soviet Union did Stockholm stop the project, just when it was on the verge of completion. France and Israel became partners in the nuclear project, and according to foreign publications reached certain capabilities in this field.

The goal was always to achieve deterrence vis-à-vis the Arabs. Peres thought at first that the settlements would do that; others thought of a preventative war decided on the enemy’s territory would do the trick. Eventually Ben-Gurion came to the conclusion that the old strategy of preventative war should be abandoned in favor of the ultimate deterrence: the atomic bomb.

Peres shared Ben-Gurion’s opinion. He was the executor. In fact, Israel’s greatest gain from the 1956 Suez campaign was the French “royal gift,” part of the secret deal to bring down Nasser after he nationalized the Suez Canal. Peres has been the bête noire of the Israeli left ever since then. [The Israeli peace activist and journalist] Uri Avnery, who is around Peres’s age, described him as joining the most reactionary forces in the world.

There are various theories on what led to the conflict between Peres and Rabin, which dominated Labor’s internal politics for decades. The background was the dispute regarding defensive posture; Rabin didn’t believe in the nuclear option, preferring instead to invest in an armored force capable of deciding wars. Meanwhile, Peres wrote in an article in Haaretz in 1966 that the best preventative war is the one which is prevented. Afterwards, the scenario that Ben-Gurion and Peres feared most came to pass. The Six-Day War, followed by the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, demonstrated the failure of Ben-Gurion’s approach to some extent, since Israel’s nuclear program didn’t prevent them.

From here on out, the conflict intensified between Peres and Rabin, with the latter being accused of bringing about the crisis of May 1967 and then collapsing and being unable to deal with it. The irony is that Peres’s greatest contribution to the state came when he served in more junior positions as director-general of the Defense Ministry (1953-1959) and then as deputy defense minister (1959-1965).

Afterwards, in the post-Ben-Gurion era, Peres started feeling out a new path. Even though he became defense minister in the first Rabin government, just after the Yom Kippur War, he didn’t really make an invaluable contribution. This is the period during which Rabin called him an “incorrigible subversive.” He sought to succeed Rabin as prime minister, and for a moment it seemed like he might pull it off when the journalist Dan Margalit published his scoop on the Rabin family’s dollar account in the United States [something which was illegal at the time]. Rabin resigned on the eve of the 1977 elections, but Peres, [who took his place as leader of the Labor party], lost to Menachem Begin, thus beginning a new chapter in his political biography.

Then, after the upheaval [caused by Labor’s first-ever electoral loss], with the party building on Yarkon Street desolate, the best and brightest figures in the party started to gather around Peres: Yossi Beilin, Gideon Levy, Yisrael Peleg, Yossi Sarid, and others, [who went on to be the hard left’s leading opinion makers]. This period also saw the growth of the friendship between Peres and the author Amos Oz. Later he was crowned by the European socialists who at the time reigned supreme: Bruno Kreisky, Willy Brandt, Pierre Mendès France, and finally François Mitterrand.

The result was a slow move left in the direction of the PLO. It was a long period which began in 1977 and reached its peak with the Oslo Accords of 1993. How tragic and how significant is the fact that Peres had a stroke on September 13, the anniversary of the signing of those accords? Before 1977, Peres was the biggest sponsor of Gush Emunim’s settlement project in Judea and Samaria. He is the man who formulated the most convincing arguments against a Palestinian state and the PLO. Such a state, he said, would undermine both Jordan and Israel.

Peres led Labor in a number of elections which were the most dramatic in Israeli history. The first was in 1977. In 1981, he led Labor in the most tense, contentious election Israel ever held. That’s when the television personality Dudu Topaz made his infamous gaffe at a pre-election campaign rally in Tel Aviv, in front of over one-hundred-thousand people, about the Tchaḥtchaḥim [a derogatory term for Middle Eastern Jews] populating Likud election districts. “They are the clerks and we are the elite soldiers and pilots,” he said. Peres lost by a single Knesset seat. [In an Israeli Dewey-defeats-Truman movement], his victory was celebrated at the Dan Hotel for a few hours, but then the performance by [the popular Israeli folk-singer] Arik Lavie was cut short when the news anchor, Haim Yavin, let the nation know that Ariel Sharon would probably be the “minister of war” in the second Begin government.

In 1984, despite the disappointing results of the election, Peres led Labor to a hairsbreadth election victory against the Likud party, then led by Yitzḥak Shamir. The stalemate between the two parties forced the establishment of a national-unity government, and Peres rose to prominence again. Along with Rabin, he partially withdrew the IDF from Lebanon, the quagmire that had entangled Israel and polarized the political system, and along with Finance Minister Yitzḥak Moda’i he implemented the economic-stabilization plan which stopped the runaway inflation that, under Begin and Shamir, had reached Weimar-level proportions. Add the bank crash of 1983 to this mix and you have an economic-security tailspin. After those years of Begin and Shamir, Shimon Peres’s leadership was seen as a breath of fresh air, of sanity and the ability to handle major problems.

In 1988, he hit another “almost” [when Labor narrowly lost to Likud, forcing another unity government]. In 1996 there was the epic battle at the end of which Benjamin Netanyahu defeated Peres—after Oslo, after the horrific bus bombings, after the Rabin assassination, and after Israel’s sixteen-day campaign in Lebanon to bring an end to Hizballah’s bombardment of Galilean villages. After it all, Peres yelled at the audience at Beit Berl, [a kibbutz and college that served historically as one of Labor’s centers]: “Loser? I’m a loser?!”

Many will also remember how he politicized the institution of the presidency. He once again pondered returning to try to depose Netanyahu, using his new status as a consensus figure as a springboard. And he once again undermined Prime Minister Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak by joining up with President Obama and the group of Israeli “former senior security officials” who were defending the Iran deal. But today, as we say goodbye to Shimon, we will only say this: “No, you’re not a loser.” There were times when we lost you. But now it’s time for you to rest, you subversive and incorrigible Don Quixote.

Read more at Mida

More about: David Ben-Gurion, Israel & Zionism, Israeli history, Israeli politics, Shimon Peres

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society