US President Barack Obama’s eulogy of Shimon Peres at Mount Herzl last Friday was a thinly disguised assault on Israel. And he barely bothered to hide it.
Throughout his remarks, Obama wielded Peres’s record like a baseball bat. He used it to club the Israeli public and its elected leaders over and over again.
Peres, Obama intimated, was a prophet. But the suspicious, tribal people of Israel were too stiff necked to follow him.
In what was perhaps the low point of a low performance, Obama used Peres’s words to slander his domestic critics as racist oppressors.
“Shimon,” he began harmlessly enough, “believed that Israel’s exceptionalism was rooted not only in fidelity to the Jewish people, but to the moral and ethical vision, the precepts of his Jewish faith.”
You could say that about every Israeli leader since the dawn of modern Zionism.
But then Obama went for the jugular.
In a startling non sequitur he continued, “‘The Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people,’ he [Peres] would say. ‘From the very first day we were against slaves and masters.’” We don’t know the context in which Peres made that statement. But what is clear enough is that Obama used his words to accuse the majority of Israelis who do not share Peres’s vision for peace – including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu who was sitting in the front row listening to him – of supporting slavery.
