Goodbye to ‘grand old man’ of Israeli politics
Robin Shulman
Shimon Peres, an Israeli statesman who helped build his country into a nucleararmed regional military power, shared a Nobel Peace Prize for laying out a short-lived framework for peace with the Palestinians and more recently defended Israel's controversial military actions in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon, has died at a hospital in Tel Aviv. He was 93.
The cause was complications from a massive stroke earlier in the month, Israeli media reported.
Peres, who held nearly every high office in his country and whose influence spanned 10 US presidencies, was the last of a generation of politicians who came of age as Israel did and helped guide it through regional conflicts and economic restructuring.
In addition to having been the President and serving as Prime Minister three times — once briefly in an acting capacity — he had been Foreign Minister, Information Minister, Finance Minister and Defence Minister. It was during his time as Defence Minister that Israel pulled off the exquisitely orchestrated 1976 rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe International Airport in Uganda.
After more than a half-century of involvement in the most important events of Israel's history, Peres had become “the grand old man of Israeli politics,” said Chuck Freilich, a senior fellow at Harvard's international security programme and a former deputy national security adviser of Israel. “You could feel his influence everywhere.”
Yet Peres left a complex legacy. At every stage in his political career, the European-born Peres had to fight the sense that he was insincere, consummately political and opportunistic. He never passed for an Israeli-born sabra and always seemed to be slightly removed from the country he led.
His Hebrew was tinged with a Polish accent, and his florid rhetorical style was at odds with Israeli directness. He was never a combat soldier or an officer in the Israeli Army.
As Foreign Minister, Peres shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with the late Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organisation leader Yasser Arafat after helping to create a programme for negotiating with the Palestinians that later stalled and sputtered out.
The man best known internationally for promoting peace started his public career procuring weapons at a young age. While still in his 20s, as director general of the Defence Ministry in the 1950s, Peres embarked on a sweeping programme to make Israel a major military force. He negotiated with Germany for arms, cultivated a secret alliance with France, fathered Israel's aircraft industry and made his country a nuclear power by building a 24,000-kilowatt reactor in the Negev Desert.
In the 1970s, Peres encouraged Jewish settlers to claim land in the occupied West Bank, Gaza Strip and Golan Heights. Yet, by the 1980s, he said peace with the Arabs could not be achieved through military means. As Prime Minister from 1984 to 1986, he pulled Israeli troops out of most of Lebanon, fostering a sense that war could end. On the premise that a sound economy could promote peace, Peres devised a plan to lower inflation from more than 400 per cent annually to less than 20 per cent. He made overtures to Jordan and to the Palestinians, and he moved to thaw the cold peace with Egypt, which in 1979 had signed a peace treaty with Israel but remained aloof.
In the 1990s Peres, then Foreign Minister, authorised his deputies to pursue secret contacts with Palestinian leaders, including a track in Oslo. In 1993, in a sudden and astonishing breakthrough, Peres and Rabin sealed the peace accords with Arafat, their mortal enemy, on the White House lawn under the gaze of President Bill Clinton. “We live in an ancient land, and as our land is small, so must our reconciliation be great,” Peres said at the ceremony. “As our wars have been long, so must our healing be swift.” — US President Barack Obama
Little went as planned. In 1995, Rabin was killed by a right-wing Israeli extremist. Peres succeeded Rabin as Prime Minister, took on his mantle of peace, and seemed poised to win the election. But Israelis, angered by Palestinian suicide bombings, voted for Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu, who opposed the Oslo peace process. Peres's hopes for a “New Middle East,” an economically integrated place without borders, like the European economic bloc, began to seem anachronistic before they were realised.