RUTHFULLY YOURS

There is so much parlous news in the world : Israel is threatened by genocide and Jihad and unrelenting enemies and the Jewish people, even those of us who dwell in the most benign democracies, now confront mounting anti-Semitism and libel and slander in the media and the academies.

We have survived and the words of King David have been and remain an inspiration.

Psalm 91- 5 and 6

5 Thou shalt not be afraid for the terror by night; nor for the arrow that flieth by day;
6 Nor for the pestilence that walketh in darkness; nor for the destruction that wasteth at noonday.

Amen!

Shana Tova and sincere wishes for a Happy New Year…and as we always abbreviated in the Bronx “A happy and a healthy!!!” rsk

Shimon Peres was laid to rest on Friday in Jerusalem. In a long career dating to the 1950s, he served as Israel’s prime minister, defense minister, foreign minister, finance minister, and president, among other posts.

Peres, who died on Wednesday at 93, was born in Wiszniew, Poland in 1923, and in 1934 immigrated with his family to join the pre-state Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine.

Peres’s funeral was attended by dignitaries from all over the world, including President Barack Obama, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Britain’s Prince Charles, French president Francois Hollande, and many others. President Obama ordered U.S. flags to be flown at half-mast on Thursday.

The only other foreign leaders given that honor in the U.S. have been Nelson Mandela, Pope John Paul II, King Hussein of Jordan, Yitzhak Rabin, and Anwar Sadat.

Peres was a major Israeli figure with key achievements to his name. But in world leaders’ eulogies for Peres, those achievements went unmentioned.

For example, his achievements included:

— In the 1950s, forging a crucial arms deal with France, and persuading France to help Israel establish its alleged nuclear-weapons facility in the Negev desert.

— Helping to found Israel’s military industries.

— As defense minister in 1976, pushing for the Israeli commando raid in Entebbe, Uganda that freed scores of hostages after an airline hijacking.

But words like “weapons,” “military,” or “security” were entirely absent from the eulogies.

In their stead, we heard words like “peace,” “dream,” and “imagine.”

For example, here’s UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon:

Even in the most difficult hours, Mr. Peres remained an optimist about the prospects for reconciliation and peace.

Bill Clinton alluded to a John Lennon song:

Shimon could imagine all the people living in the world in peace. In his honor I ask that we remember his luminous smile and imagine.

Hillary Clinton:

When [Peres] spoke, it could be like listening to a psalm, and I loved sitting and listening to him, whether it was about Israel, the nation he loved and did so much to defend, or about peace or just about life itself.

President Obama:

Shimon never saw his dream of peace fulfilled. The region is going through a chaotic time. Threats are ever-present. And yet he did not stop dreaming and working.

Peres’s status as the dreamer and man of peace, of course, developed later in his career, in connection with his role in what was called the “Oslo process” between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization.

President Obama pressed for a Mideast peace plan today in his address at the Jerusalem funeral of former Israeli President Shimon Peres, saying that because of his “understanding of Israel’s meaning, he believed that the Zionist idea would be best protected when Palestinians, too, had a state of their own.”

The White House guidance for Obama’s visit listed the president’s stops in “Tel Aviv, Israel,” but did not say “Israel” after “Jerusalem.”

Wearing a black yarmulke, Obama joined Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former President Clinton at the Mount Herzl cemetery.

“For a younger generation, Shimon was probably remembered more for a peace process that never reached its endpoint. They would listen to critics on the left who might argue that Shimon did not fully acknowledge the failings of his nation, or perhaps more numerous critics on the right who argued that he refused to see the true wickedness of the world, and called him naive,” Obama said.

“…He understood, in this war-torn region, where too often Arab youth are taught to hate Israel from an early age — he understood just how hard peace would be. I’m sure he was alternatively angry and bemused to hear the same critics, who called him hopelessly naive, depend on the defense architecture that he himself had helped to build,” he added.

Obama stressed that “out of the hardships of the diaspora, he found room in his heart for others who suffered.”

“He came to hate prejudice with the passion of one who knows how it feels to be its target. Even in the face of terrorist attacks, even after repeated disappointments at the negotiation table, he insisted that as human beings, Palestinians must be seen as equal in dignity to Jews, and must therefore be equal in self-determination,” the president continued.

“…Of course, we gather here in the knowledge that Shimon never saw his dream of peace fulfilled. The region is going through a chaotic time. Threats are ever present. And yet, he did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working… because our founders planted not just flags in the eternal soil, but also planted the seeds of democracy, we have the ability to always pursue a better world. We have the capacity to do what is right.”

I would add that Shimon Peres played a significant role in persuading a reluctant Rabin to launch the incredible rescue at Entebbe…..rsk

By concentrating on his role in the Oslo debacle, it is easy to forget the fact that for most of his career, Shimon Peres was a great man. While he was hardly a founding father of the country, as the media are proclaiming in mindless unison, being too young in 1948, Peres played a critical role in Israeli arms procurement, in the creation of the Dimona reactor, in relations with France, even in erection of early settlements in the West Bank. He was Ben Gurion’s sidekick in the rightish breakaway Rafi Party, which split from MAPAI.

Because it lasted so long, the majority of his career days were as a skilled diplomat and leader of the Labor Right, and as Ben Gurion’s Robin. Had he retired 25 years ago, that would have been his legacy.
But he did not. He spent his last 25 years committing Oslo, endangering the very existence of Israel with his delusions. Hectoring the country that if there was no peace it was because Israelis did not want it enough, insisting to the end that almost all Israelis support the “Two-State Solution,” whereas in reality almost none do. Proclaiming that Palestinians seek peace, whereas they seek genocidal jihad.

The obscene reaction to his death among Arabs serves better than anything else to prove how deluded he was.

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.