Lesson to learn

I am deeply saddened by the death of Shimon Peres, who devoted his life to the State of Israel.

Israelis have lost a great leader. They have been left with the memory of a legend and with a remarkable contribution to the country. DAUD ABDULKADIR HUSSEIN

Mogadishu, Somalia

Admirers of veteran Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, especially leftists, are trying to present him as an infallible god.

His filling of so many high offices in Israel’s public life may be interpreted as a genuine love and devotion to his country, but also as unbridled power-lust. It has largely been forgotten that his great patron, prime minister David Ben-Gurion, prophesied that Peres would one day lead the country into disaster.

Peres’s blind fanaticism in seeking peace with the Arab and Muslim world was largely responsible for the 1993 Oslo Accords, which, under the prime ministership of Yitzhak Rabin, almost plunged Israel into civil war – something prevented only by Rabin’s assassination.

Israelis are all too apt to whitewash their heroes. ROY RUNDS

Tel Aviv

In your September 29 editorial “Peres’s legacy,” you quote from a July op-ed that Shimon Peres wrote for The Jerusalem Post in which he stated: “The past is frozen. It therefore has no creative power .... ”

Although I honor Peres’s memory for his many contributions on behalf of the State of Israel, I beg to differ with his conclusion that the past has no creative power. It is precisely the Jewish nation’s past that has given it its creative power. The Almighty delivered the Jewish people from Egypt, gave us the Torah and the Land of Israel. His creative power has sustained us – and continues to sustain us to this day. ANN ROSMAN

Jerusalem

Shimon Peres was the best of Israel. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu exhibits Israel’s worst.

Removing the long-overdue Israeli occupation of Palestine and allowing the Palestinians to have their own country at this historical moment would be a magnificent way to honor Peres’s legacy of peace and justice.

JOE SCHWARZ Penticton, British Columbia

Apparently, the fashion embraced by journalists who insert their opinions into what they write has taken over at The Jerusalem Post.

Note the screaming frontpage headline “Netanyahu seeks support in UN from US presidential candidates” (September 26). Is this the most newsworthy aspect of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s meetings with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton? I imagine that even the dullest Post reader would assume that Netanyahu is always looking for support for Israel, so excuse me for supposing that the news is that the candidates wanted to be seen meeting with him.

But the best bit of self-serving journalism is the part about him “apparently having learned a lesson from 2012, when he was widely perceived and criticized for favoring Republican Mitt Romney over the incumbent President Barack Obama.”

Despite Netanyahu’s care not to involve himself in that campaign, journalists with an ax to grind endlessly repeated the widespread perception – their own – and then, as night follows day, went on to widely criticize it. Most people might assume that Netanyahu favored Romney, but that shouldn’t have given journalists license to report and criticize non-existent involvement.

It’s journalists who should have “learned a lesson,” but they don’t see the problem. NAOMI SANDLER

Jerusalem