For many Arabs, Peres was no man of peace
Israeli-Palestinian conflict colours reaction following death of polarizing figure
“I will always be grateful that I was able to call Shimon my friend. A light has gone out, but the hope he gave us will burn forever.” BARACK OBAMA U.S. PRESIDENT
“He is a giant of our history. And why? Because he attached his name to the beautiful goal of peace and he did it with a love for his country, Israel, that should be an inspiration for all of us.” STÉPHANE DION FOREIGN AFFAIRS MINISTER
“When he talked, everyone listened. And later, long after he’d left the room, you remembered what he said. It crept into your soul and stayed with you. Shimon Peres was truly a force of nature. Every nation has a soul – someone who embodies the spirit of a people. And for so many years, Shimon Peres was the soul of Israel.” JOE BIDEN U.S. VICE-PRESIDENT
“Shimon Peres was a political giant, a statesman who will rank as one of the foremost of this era or any era, and someone I loved deeply.” TONY BLAIR FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
“As one man, he carried a whole nation on the wings of imagination, on the wings of vision. And we loved him. We loved him dearly.” REUVEN RIVLIN ISRAELI PRESIDENT
“One of the founding fathers of Israel and a believer in peace has left us. Today we mourn the loss of a great man.” DAVID CAMERON FORMER BRITISH PRIME MINISTER
“His name will be forever engraved in the story of the rebirth of the Jewish people as one of our great leaders, as one of the founding fathers of the state of Israel.” BENJAMIN NETANYAHU ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER
“The Middle East has lost a fervent advocate for peace and reconciliation and for a future where all the children of Abraham build a better tomorrow together.” BILL CLINTON FORMER U.S. PRESIDENT
“Even in the most difficult hours, he remained an optimist about the prospects for reconciliation and peace. May his spirit of determination guide us as we work to ensure peace, security and dignity for Israelis, Palestinians and all the peoples of the region.” BAN KI-MOON UN SECRETARY GENERAL
CAIRO— While Western leaders mourned the death of Israeli statesman and Nobel laureate Shimon Peres, many in the Arab world reacted with scorn, viewing him as a key architect of destructive Israeli policies toward Palestinians.
In Saudi Arabia’s Sabq newspaper, the headline of his obituary read, “President of Israeli Colonialism Peres Dies.”
On the Qatar-based Al Jazeera network’s Arabic-language website, Peres was described as: “The butcher of Qana who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace” — a reference to the Israeli bombardment that killed scores of civilians in the village of Qana during the 1996 war in Lebanon. Peres was prime minister at the time. The starkly different reactions to Peres’s death underscored the deep divides over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the plight of the Palestinian people, as well as the wide gulf in perceptions between the West and Arab countries.
Even as U.S. President Obama and other leaders paid tribute to his legacy as a peacemaker, obituaries across the Middle East on Wednesday described Peres as playing a central role in Israeli assaults against Palestinians.
“To the West, Shimon Peres is the ‘Nobel laureate’ and the ‘tireless dove’ who has been widely respected for his ‘achievements’ regarding the peace in the Middle East,” said an obituary on the website of Al-Manar, the television station of Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite Islamist militant group and political party. “However, behind this image Peres, who died on Wednesday, represents the real face of the bloody and colonial policies adopted by the Zionist regime.”
The vitriol also appeared louder and more widespread than after the 1996 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat following the Oslo peace accord in 1994. Statesmen from nine Muslim countries, including Egypt, Jordan, Turkey and Qatar, attended Rabin’s funeral, which was widely seen as a tribute to his efforts to build peace in the region.
Dignitaries included Egypt’s thenpresident, Hosni Mubarak, and Jordan’s King Hussein. Both nations had signed peace accords with Israel.
Peres was a more polarizing figure in the Arab world than Rabin. In 2009, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now the country’s president, famously stormed out of a World Economic Forum debate after verbally clashing with Peres, then the Israeli president, over Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip. Critics have long condemned Peres for his advocacy of a blockade of Gaza.
Now, tensions between Israelis and Palestinians are deepening again, fuelled by a spate of deadly stabbings by Palestinians over the past year against a backdrop of growing frustration over peace talks that have all but faded. Still, Palestinians had mixed reactions to Peres’ death.
In a tweet in Arabic, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas described his passing as “a heavy loss for all humanity and for peace in the region.”
Some in the Arab world dismissed Abbas’s condolences on social media. Referring to Abbas’s comments, Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, an adviser to Abu Dhabi’s royal court, tweeted: “Might be a loss to you, but not a loss to humanity, peace, and surely not a loss to the Palestinian People. He was a Zionist and a criminal.”