The Last Link
Shimon Peres was the last Israeli secular politician who could relate to Torah Jews with respect born of knowledge and not just as a horse trader. He never managed to lose his Polish accent in any language, and similarly, the great-great grandson of Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin, never shed his ties to the Polish milieu of his youth. He always spoke warmly of his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Zev Meltzer, who was burned to death in the shul together with his kehillah by the Nazis, ym"sh.
Peres attributed his success and long-life to a blessing received from the Chofetz Chaim as a young boy. Dr. David Luchins, a long-time foreign policy advisor to the late Senator Daniel Moynihan, recounts a meeting that Moynihan and he had with Peres just after the signing of the Oslo Accords. Moynihan sought clarifications about the agreements from Peres.
In the course of the meeting, Peres related why he was such a strong supporter of the Aish HaTorah Jerusalem Fellowships, of which Moynihan was the honorary chairman. A religious relative took eight-year-old Shimon to Radin to visit the Chofetz Chaim, in the hope that meeting the venerable sage would have a salutary effect on his religious practice.
At the end of their meeting, in Peres's account 65 years later, "[the Chofetz Chaim] began to cry and put his hands on my head and blessed me, 'TheAibeshter gave me a long life. He should give you the same. You should go to Eretz Yisrael as you wish and become a great leader of the Jewish people. But remember meiner kind you can't have a Jewish state without the Aibesther and the Aibesther's Torah." (The stroke that felled Peres took place on the Chofetz Chaim's 83rd yahrtzeit, at the same age as the Chofetz Chaim at his petirah.)
The Chofetz Chaim's message was not forgotten. Over decades, Peres earned the gratitude of the chareidi leadership for protecting the status of the yeshivos and lomdei Torah. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef was reported to have said at the time of the 2000 presidential election, "{Moshe] Katsav is mitzvah-observant; Peres will protect the mitzvah-observant."
Peres's physiognomy further linked him to his eastern European origins. His was the classic face of the European Jewish intellectual. The full lips, prominent nose, high forehead, and deep-set eyes under thick eyebrows and permanently furrowed brow conveyed intelligence, nobility, sensitivity, and a certain sadness, as if he had witnessed too much of the life of Jews living among eastern European peasants.
SHIMON PERES is today best-known for his crucial role in the 1993 Oslo Accords, which rescued Yasir Arafat from oblivion in Tunisia, but have done little to bring peace between Palestinians and Israelis. The world leaders who flew to Israel for his funeral, including U.S. President Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton, came to pay their respects to Shimon the peacemaker. The homage given to Peres in recent decades has always been a means for foreign leaders to polish their pro-Israel bona fides while implicitly contrasting him to his allegedly bellicose successor Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, a man said to lack Peres's grand vision.
The initial negotiations leading to Oslo were conducted by Peres as foreign minister, without the full knowledge of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin. In 1987, he did the same thing as foreign minister under Prime Minister Yitzchak Shamir by negotiating a framework agreement for a Jordanian-West Bank confederation with Jordan's King Hussein, without telling Shamir. The difference was that Rabin went along Peres's schemes; Shamir did not. Things might have worked out better if the opposite had been the case.
History will not judge Peres's Oslo involvement favorably. The original effort can be defended as a necessary attempt to put Palestinian intentions to a clear test. Absent such a test, Israeli society might have torn itself apart over issues of war and peace. The failure of Oslo, and the Palestinians' evident lack of interest in long-term peace has brought about a far greater degree of consensus on those issues.
But if the initial attempt can be justified, the refusal to recognize that Arafat was still bent on the destruction of Israel in stages cannot. Peres was chief among those who made a fetish of the "peace process" rather than peace itself. He placed more emphasis on the wording of agreements than the words of Palestinian leaders when they spoke to their own people. That pretty much puts things backwards. Intentions are far more important that the terms of agreement. No one would invest with someone convicted of fraud five times, no matter how secure the investment appeared to be.
Peres never fully acknowledged that he had been duped by Arafat into believing that the Palestinians had made a strategic decision for peace. As foreign minister, he fought to suppress evidence of the Palestinians' violations of Oslo and of Arafat's appropriating billions of dollars of foreign aid to his own bank accounts. And he ignored for too long the continual incitement against Jews in the official Palestinian media and educational system. When Arafat declared a "jihad for Jerusalem" in a speech in Arabic to a Muslim audience in South Africa, shortly after the signing of Oslo, Peres spun his words as referring to a "jihad for peace."
Martin Peretz wrote early in the Oslo process that the process was driven too much by the Zionists' desire for "recognition of their legitimacy. . . . This is perhaps a weakness of the Jews worrying too much about whether others acknowledge their peoplehood." Certainly, Peres's vanity made him susceptible to caring too much about the good opinion, even adulation, of the world.
In addition, he had a full measure of the liberal's naïve belief in material inducements to transform ancient hatreds. In The New Middle East he wrote that hotels would soon be more important than territory or battlefield deployments. Charles Krauthammer rightly summed up that vision: "A lovely dream. And quite mad."
He assumed that the promise of a brighter economic future and scientific progress fueled by Israel would dampen Arab hatred of Israel. It did not. Only a more feared enemy – Iran – has succeeded to some extent in doing that in recent years.
STILL IT WOULD BE HUGELY UNFAIR to judge Shimon Peres solely by Oslo. Few, if any, contributed more to the creation and subsequent defense of Israel. In 1946, David Ben-Gurion charged him and Moshe Dayan with the arms procurement for the Haganah.
As Deputy Defense Minister and then Director-General of the Defense Ministry, he was the key figure in gaining crucial French assistance in the building of a nuclear reactor. (He convinced the French prime minister, who had lacked the authority to sign the relevant undertakings due to a parliamentary defeat, to backdate the crucial documents.) And he was a key figure in forging the British-French-Israeli alliance in the wake of Nasser's nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. Though the Suez Campaign proved a disaster for Israel's French and British allies, it provided Israel with crucial breathing room on its southern border.
As Defense Minister in 1976, he was the principal backer for the Entebbe raid. And as Prime Minister in the mid-'80s, he tamed the hyper-inflation that threatened to turn Israel into another Weimar Republic.
In his later years, he used the international respect in which he was held to defend Israel more effectively than anyone else could have done. His impassioned response to Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan's accusations of Israeli war crimes at the 2009 Davos Conference still retains the power to thrill and fully captures Peres's love and pride in the country he did so much to build. (An enraged Erdogan stormed off the stage.)
ADAM GARFINKLE has acutely remarked on the optimism that characterized Israel's founding generation, of which Shimon Peres was the last. They experienced personally the hardships Jews endured in Europe, and most of them lost many family members in the Holocaust. After coming to Palestine, they experienced new threats in the form of the 1936-39 Arab Uprising.
They knew how precarious Israel's survival was in 1948, and again in 1967, when Nasser boasted that the Arab armies would throw the Jews into the sea. Their connection to the Jewish past and more recent Israeli history gave them the power to face each new threat with the confidence that we will prevail this time as well.
That optimism, remarks Garfinkle, "enables patience and rewards the stoicism without which reasonable normal life in Israel could not long endure." And it continues today. On a graph of the OECD countries – using birthrates as the vertical axis and suicide rates as the horizontal axis – Israel exists a nation alone in the upper left quadrant facing the future with hope and confidence.
In that optimism, there can be found a trace faith in Hashem's protective power – or so, at least, it strikes me. No one embodied that optimism better than Shimon Peres.
Perhaps the Chofetz Chaim's bracha had something to do with that as well.
