Shimon Peres: Death of a Dreamer

Photo: Facebook / Shimon Peres שמעון פרס

The departure of a political long-liver, 93-year-old Shimon Peres, is in some ways the end of an era for Israel. The era of the founding fathers of the Jewish State.

A native of the Western Belarusian village of Vishnevo, the future ninth president of Israel began his journey as a “Komsomol member of Zionism” on the eve of World War II, climbing the career ladder in the only correct party of power at that time - the Workers (allegedly) Party, in the first years of the formation of the newly born State of Israel .

A young socialist functionary was driving in the car of the first head of government and listened to David Ben-Gurion share his thoughts about Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin.

It's no joke: Peres was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 - 57 years ago! Kennedy had not yet become President of the United States, Gagarin had not yet flown into space. And Peres has already entered the Israeli parliament from the post of general director of the Ministry of Defense, having managed to sell a batch of Israeli machine guns to West Germany, which caused a scandal - they say, “how is it that Jews are selling weapons to their yesterday’s killers?!”

Photo: Facebook / Shimon Peres שמעון פרס

Then there was a leapfrog of ministerial posts - from the Minister of Absorption to the Minister of Communications, overseeing the Israeli nuclear project in the second half of the 1960s. And the peak of success was 2 years as rotational prime minister in the mid-1980s, and then the post of head of the Foreign Ministry under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1992-1995.

Shimon Peres, inside his left-wing Labor Party, was known as a talented schemer. It was he who dismissed Yitzhak Rabin from the post of party leader in 1977. He first applied the patent to create a coalition in the Knesset with the involvement of the Shas ultra-religious party for good compensation.

Perez lost every parliamentary election of his life. He did not bring his party to power, he always came to this power on the wave of someone else's success. For decades he was the shadow of Yitzhak Rabin. Peres even received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Rabin (and Arafat) in 1994 for the Oslo Accords, which created the Palestinian Authority.

Rabin's assassination made Perez the Prime Minister on 8 months, until May 1996.

The only time Peres won was in the Knesset vote for a new president in 2007. The election of Shimon Peres as president was a way to urgently replace the previous president, Moshe Katsav, who was under investigation for rape. Respectable and well-known in the world, Nobel laureate Perez looked like a bastion of stability and respectability after the scandal with Katsav.

And for 7 years after that, Shimon Peres perfectly performed the functions of the president - that is, the person who does not interfere in politics, but travels around the world, representing Israel, being the formal virtual head of state.

Peres was a bad prime minister but became a great president. As prime minister, he caused fierce controversy with his dovish policy of reconciliation with the Arabs. His right-wing political rivals then accused Peres of making excessive concessions to the Palestinian Arabs and of installing the corrupt regime of Yasser Arafat. The far right directly said: “Peres, on your hands is the blood of 1500 Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists after the signing of the so-called Oslo Peace Accords.”

Kinder critics called Shimon Peres an out-of-touch dreamer. Even the title of Peres’s book, “The New Middle East,” became in the mid-1990s a symbol of such beautiful-hearted fantasy about how wonderful it would be if all the peoples and states of the region would forget their differences and begin to build a rosy and prosperous future together.

Peres believed that people and nations were driven by economics and the desire to make good money - a typical approach of European social democracy, of which Shimon Peres was a part. Hence his concept: give the Arabs the opportunity to work honestly, give them jobs, and their businessmen the option of good profits, and peace will reign between the countries.

Reality has shown that in the seething cauldron of the Middle East, the factors of religious intolerance and ideological hatred play a huge role. The Islamic world has been experiencing a process of radicalization since the late 1990s. In response to Israel’s outstretched hand of peace, there was a response from Islamic terror organizations and entire states (Iran, for example): “We don’t want jobs in your factories, we don’t want profits from business cooperation with you - we want you not to be in map."

Shimon Peres was ready to give up the Golan Heights to the bloody Assad dynasty of dictators in Syria - only in exchange for a piece of paper of a peace treaty. Fortunately, this did not happen. Otherwise, it’s scary to imagine what would happen to the north of Israel if militants from various Islamist organizations currently waging a civil war in Syria were firing rockets at the cities of Galilee from the strategically important Golan Heights.

Former Soviet dissident and current head of the Jewish Agency, Natan Sharansky, wrote today in an obituary:

“Shimon Peres always felt responsible for the entire Jewish people. Thinking about the future, he always cared not only about providing our people with a worthy place in the family of peoples of the world, but also for each part of the people - a worthy, equal place among its other components. Me and (my wife) Avital always felt that our struggle was close to him. Helping in this fight, Shimon Peres used his personal connections and influence, opening the closed doors of the powerful to Avital. When I flew to Israel after liberation, it was Prime Minister Shimon Peres who was the first Israeli to meet me at the plane.”

Shimon Peres and Natan Sharansky. Photo: Facebook/Jewish Agency for Israel (Sokhnut)

Shimon Peres, as president from 2007-2014, became an internationally respected symbol of Israel. Approaching his 90th birthday, he easily and actively contacted young people, was interested in the latest computer achievements and fresh scientific discoveries. He could easily give a 45-minute speech in the hall of the Moscow Institute of International Relations - so much so that students and professors listened to him with bated breath, which I myself witnessed while sitting in this hall.

Shimon Briman and Shimon Peres. Photo: Shimon Briman

I’ll share a small personal detail from that trip to Moscow with Peres to celebrate the 65th anniversary of the Victory on May 9-10, 2010. Already on the way back to the airport, the Russians told Peres: “You personally can drive straight up to the plane, but the members of your delegation must go through all the cordons at Domodedovo.” The President replied: “Either the entire Israeli delegation drives up to the ramp and boards the plane, or I, too, will go with my people through Domodedovo.” Peres was refused - and the president, together with us, journalists, diplomats and employees of his office, passed through the Russian “border” inside the airport. He didn't abandon his own.

Perez said that young people should break patterns, throw out the stereotypes of the past from their heads, and strive to make the world a better, more holistic and healthier place. High-tech achievements were the new faith of the last years of the life of the “grandfather of Israel.”

Shimon Peres would be interested in communicating with John Kennedy and John Lennon - this trinity can easily be imagined against the backdrop of the words of the song “Imagine all the people Living life in peace.”

The grandfather of the future president, Hirsch Meltzer, instructed his 11-year-old grandson Syoma Persky, who was leaving with his mother for the Holy Land in 1934: “Remain a Jew, remain a human being.” Shimon Peres fulfilled his grandfather's will.

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