Shimon Peres, the last of the founding fathers of the Jewish State of Israel, died last week, aged 93. He was buried on Friday, September 30, with scores of world leaders in attendance. The departed statesman was one of the most notable leaders of his country. He held all the important positions in Israeli history and served as President until 2014.
He had earlier served as prime minister of Israel on three occasions, and thrice as foreign minister. He had also occupied the offices of defence minister, transport minister and information minister. He was always in the centre of the affairs of his country and he creditably discharged the obligations of his various offices.
The world is bound to mourn Peres because, compared with his contemporaries in the Israeli Right and the Arab Left, he was an apostle of peace. In addition to negotiating and initiating various peace moves in the Middle East, he was fundamentally committed to the two-state solution – the existence, side by side, of a Jewish and a Palestinian state. When he was delivering his inaugural speech as president in 2007, he did not shy away from telling his compatriots that Israel had to “get rid of the (occupied) territories.” As late as November last year with his health failing, he insisted that Israel faced “eternal war” if there was no Palestinian State.”
He had asked Palestinians and Arab nations to join in “a great journey toward a world built on logic and intellect, not on land.” His peace efforts yielded him recognition from various organisations and nations of the world. In 1994, he won the Nobel Peace Prize, an honour he shared with the Chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, Mr. Yasser Arafat. That year, he initiated and concluded a peace treaty between Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan. In 2012, US President Barack Obama honoured him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Two years later, he won the Congressional gold medal.
He was a man who believed in negotiations. He told the famous British TV interviewer, Robert Frost, that “unlike holiness, politics is built on compromise.” He was ever willing to put himself on the other side of an argument which explains his successes as a peacemaker and which sometimes alienated him from his more uncompromising compatriots.
He began his career as a backroom operator for the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben-Gurion, who tasked him with the delicate and difficult assignment of acquiring armaments for the state of Israel, at a time it was illegal to sell arms to Israel. His success was borne out by the successes of Israeli forces in the 1948 war with the Arab States. Indeed, by 1953 at the age of 29, he was in charge of the entire defence ministry of Israel. He was, indeed, the father of the Israeli nuclear programme having initiated and lobbied the French Government in 1957 for a nuclear reactor. His skill and talents were demonstrated by the extremely discreet manner the nuclear programme was executed, especially in the testing of the weapons without attracting too much international uproar.
He was also capable of playing hardball. In 1989, he ordered the Israeli Mossad agents to abduct the nuclear whistleblower, Mordecai Vanunu, from British soil. He strongly believed in the two-state solution, and was the first Israeli premier to address the parliament of an Arab or Muslim state when he had the privilege to speak to the National Assembly of Turkey in 2007. He had a vision of a greater Middle East and he advocated a “valley of peace”, an initiative for which he enlisted the support of Turkey and Japan for the economic revival of the Palestinian territories with joint industrial projects in the West Bank. Last year, he blamed Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, for paying lip-service to the need for Israel to live in peace with its neighbours.
The hope now is that with his death, the Labour Party and other moderate parties might force Netanyahu to resume the peace efforts without which the resumption of armed hostilities between Arabs and Israelis is only a matter of time.