Obama, Bill Clinton will attend Peres funeral
Obama, Bill Clinton lead U.S. delegation heading to Israel.
World leaders make plans to converge on Israel to pay tribute to the country’s elder statesman, who died Wednesday at 93.
World leaders made plans to converge on Israel to pay tribute to Shimon Peres, the Nobel Prize-winning former prime minister who died on Wednesday, focusing renewed attention on his quest for peace in a fractured land that fell well short of his dreams.
Presidents, prime ministers and a prince accepted invitations to the funeral on Friday for Peres, who transformed himself from a polarizing figure to perhaps Israel’s most renowned elder statesman.
Peres, 93, who slipped away just over two weeks after a stroke, emerged as a symbol of what might have been, after the peace accords he helped broker in the 1990s failed to bring lasting change.
The U.S. delegation will include President Barack Obama, former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry, the Israeli Foreign Ministry said.
The ministry mistakenly reported that Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee for president and a former secretary of state, would attend. With just weeks until the election, however, Clinton’s campaign said she would not make the trip.
Obama, who has been at odds with the current Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, over the logjammed peace process, made clear that he saw the moment as an opportunity to prod Israel to fulfill Peres’ legacy.
“I can think of no greater tribute to his life than to renew our commitment to the peace that we know is possible,” Obama said in a statement.
Some Israeli analysts said they expect Obama to use the occasion to make a new pitch for a peace settlement that would grant statehood to the Palestinians, but that they doubt Peres’ death will change the dynamic.
“Just by appearing here, he’ll probably want to make a speech that will mention the two-state solution,” said Zalman Shoval, a two-time Israeli ambassador to the United States and a member of Netanyahu’s Likud party. “On whom will this have an impact is another question. On the Israeli public? I don’t think so. On the Palestinians? They have their own problems.”
Peres’ body was to lie in state today at the Knesset, the Israeli parliament. The funeral is to be held at Mount Herzl, the national cemetery.
Israeli government ministers stood for a moment of silence at a special Cabinet meeting Wednesday. A portrait of Peres, with a black band across one corner, was in the background.
Netanyahu, who unseated Peres as prime minister in 1996, opened the meeting with the words, “This is the first day of the state of Israel without Shimon Peres.”
He added: “I admired him. I loved him.”
But Peres was seen as a more complicated figure among Palestinians, who remembered his role in advancing settlements in the West Bank and ordering a brief but intense military campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon in 1996 that led to civilian deaths.
Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, which controls the West Bank, sent a letter of condolence to the Peres family, saying Peres had been a “brave” partner in peace and had invested intensively in trying to realize the promise of the Oslo Accords of 1993 until his final moments.
But leaders of Hamas, the more militant Palestinian group that controls Gaza and is considered a terrorist organization by Israel, the United States and other nations, alternately celebrated Peres’ death or complained that it allowed him to escape justice.
“He is a criminal who committed massacres against the Palestinian people and justified wars in Gaza,” said Hazem Qasem, a spokesman for Hamas. “He is one of the founding leaders of the Israeli occupation that caused the displacement of millions of Palestinians.”
While Peres was a divisive figure for much of his long career, he came to enjoy support and admiration across the Israeli political spectrum by his final years.
Netanyahu visited Peres in the hospital during the last two weeks, as did opposition leader Isaac Herzog. Bill Clinton called the hospital for updates. Pope Francis prayed for his recovery.
Obama, who awarded Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012, called the former prime minister’s family after his death to convey his sympathies.
In an unusually long and personal statement, Obama described their first meeting, while he was a U.S. senator, and recalled their conversations in detail.
“Shimon was the essence of Israel itself,” he said.
“A light has gone out, but the hope he gave us will burn forever,” he added. “Shimon Peres was a soldier for Israel, for the Jewish people, for justice, for peace and for the belief that we can be true to our best selves — to the very end of our time on earth and in the legacy that we leave to others.”
Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who has worked for years on Middle East peace issues, described Peres as “someone I loved deeply” and as a mentor. “His intellect, his way with words that was eloquent beyond description, his command of the world and how it was changing were extraordinary,” he said.
In Germany, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier recalled that Peres became in 1986 the first Israeli prime minister to visit Berlin, then divided, and that he had described the Israeli-German partnership in evocative and emotional terms in a speech to the German Parliament in 2010.
Germany, Steinmeier added, “mourns a courageous and wise voice, who was a constant motivation” to do more.
Peres was surrounded by his children when he died.
“My father used to say, and I quote, ‘You are only as great as the cause you serve,’” Chemi Peres, his son, told reporters afterward. “He had no interest other than serving the people of Israel in whom he had great faith and whom he loved dearly until his final breath.”
‘He had no interest other than serving the people of Israel in whom he had great faith and whom he loved dearly until his final breath.’ Chemi Peres Son for former Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres