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October 2016

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Peres’ funeral, Abbas’ hypocrisy : Ruthie Blum

By on October 1st, 2016

On Thursday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas requested and was granted permission from the Israeli government to travel to Jerusalem to attend the funeral of elder statesman Shimon Peres, who died on Wednesday at the age of 93.

This gesture on Abbas’ part should make perfect sense to all who knew and loved Peres, much of whose illustrious history was spent singing literal and figurative songs of peace. Indeed, the former president, prime minister and defense minister of the Jewish state, who was honored the world over for his self-proclaimed “dreams” of a new Middle East, has spent decades sympathizing with what he considered to be the plight of the Palestinian people, ostensibly longing for independent statehood.

Peres also shared a Nobel Peace Prize with the late Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin and PLO chief Yasser Arafat for the signing of the Oslo Accords. Though these agreements were revealed to be an unmitigated disaster for Israel — leading to heightened waves of Palestinian terrorism — Peres never faltered. If anything, his fantasies of friendly economic and cultural ties between Israel and the Palestinian Authority grew with each passing suicide bombing perpetrated against innocent Jews.

Abbas has always known this about Peres, despite his own and other Palestinian officials’ public pronouncements over the years that the long-time Labor party leader was, like all Jews, a liar and a war criminal.

Abbas is also keenly aware that leaders from countries around the world have begun landing in Israel to pay their last respects to the Israel’s most famous peace-monger. And he doesn’t want to be left out, particularly since he has been trying to persuade all of them, individually and collectively, that all he wants is a state he can call his own. Of course, he always fails to acknowledge that he already possesses sovereignty over most of the West Bank, while Hamas rules supreme in Gaza, and that Israel is not to blame for the ills suffered by his people.

Nor has he budged one iota from his assertion that no Jew would be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. And why should he? After all, when Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused him recently of promoting ethnic cleansing, many of the dignitaries who are arriving en masse to say goodbye to Peres responded very harshly. Not to Abbas, mind you, but to Netanyahu.

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Shimon Peres, 1923-1016 Essay: With Peres’ death, two very different men died. BY: David Isaac

By on October 1st, 2016

With the passing of Shimon Peres at the age of 93, two very different men died. The first was young, pragmatic and tough-minded, skilled in negotiation and focused on building Israel’s military strength. The second was older, a dreamer, resolutely focused on a vision of peace that proved stubbornly impervious to reality.

The first Peres was tapped by Ben-Gurion to head Israel’s navy at the tender age of 24, and then became director general of the defense ministry at 29. He helped establish Israel’s arms industry and led the negotiations with France that made it Israel’s chief weapons supplier. He was deeply involved in the planning, with England and France, of the 1956 Sinai campaign and is credited with the construction of Israel’s nuclear deterrent at Dimona.

This Peres reacted to events like a security hawk. When in 1976 then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin wavered between sending a rescue mission to Entebbe or giving in to terrorist demands, it was Peres, as defense minister, who pushed hard for the risky and unprecedented rescue effort. And it was Peres, within a divided government, who supported the settlement movement in Judea and Samaria.

But around 25 years ago, Peres was reborn. In 1993, as foreign minister he became the architect of the Oslo Accords. Until then, it had been illegal for an Israeli to speak to PLO representatives. In the blink of an eye, Yasser Arafat went from terror chieftain to world statesman. The new policy led to a Nobel Peace Prize for both Arafat and Peres, along with Prime Minister Rabin, whom Peres carried along with his vision. This is the Peres who promoted the idea of a New Middle East, in which cooperation would replace conflict.

The new Peres would become the most un-Jewish of Israel’s prime ministers. This is not in the sense of religious observance: Peres may have been less alienated from tradition than some of Israel’s other secular leaders. It is in the sense of departing from fundamental Jewish historical values and insights. One of the most central of these is the importance of remembrance. Zakhor—remember, according to former Columbia Professor of Jewish History Yosef Haim Yerushalmi, is invoked 169 times in the Bible. Indeed, Yerushalmi wrote a book entitled Zakhor in which he notes that only in Israel “is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.” Yet Peres repeatedly insisted that he had no interest in the past. Noting the contrast between Yerushalmi’s emphasis on memory in Judaism and Peres’s cavalier dismissal of history, the pro-Israel group Americans for a Safe Israel compiled a pamphlet of statements from Peres on subjects like history, Zionism, and Judaism over nearly a decade following the Oslo Accords. Below is a sampling:

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