Shimon Peres has died, a man of peace and of war
He was 93 years of age. In his youth he was a "hawk". He was responsible for the supplies of arms to Israel from the USSR, France, the United States. He was the first proponent of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories. Twice prime minister, president for seven years. With Rabin and Arafat, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. He has participated as a "dove" at the meeting of prayer for peace in the Vatican in 2014. Gideon Levy: Peres was a man of "almost".
Tel Aviv (AsiaNews) - Shimon Peres, twice prime minister and once president of Israel, died last night at 3am (local time) at the age of 93. His death was announced by his son Chemi who described him a "one of the founding fathers of the State of Israel", who "worked tirelessly" for it.
Peres had been hospitalized two weeks ago for a brain hemorrhage and remained in a coma until yesterday when his condition worsened.
Peres is considered by many a man of peace in the world, but also a man of war. An Arab-Israeli MP, Basel Ghattas, of the United Arab List, posted on his Facebook profile that Peres "is covered in Palestinian blood", "from head to toe”. Ghattas continued that he managed "to masquerade as a dove of peace to the point of obtaining the Nobel Prize." In fact, he "is directly responsible for crimes and war crimes against us", "one of the most ancient pillars, most critical, cruel, extremist of the Zionist colonialist project".
In 1934 he arrived in Israel (then Palestine under British Mandate) and lived in a kibbutz in Galilee where he also shaped his political consciousness in the socialism of the new settlers.
With the proclamation of the State of Israel in 1948 and the outbreak of war with the Arab countries, he was put in charge of the Haganah underground army. In this period Shimon Peres (he took this Hebrew name, leaving his original surname, Persky) cooperated with the founding fathers Ben Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin, being responsible for the procurement of weapons for the Israeli army, Tsahal. He negotiated contracts for the sale of weapons by the USSR, then France, then the United States. Thanks to the help of France the Israeli military nuclear program was born and the Dimona nuclear plant built, whose existence was never publicly admitted by Israel.
In the early 1970s Peres was considered a "hawk". He supported the operation in Entebbe (Uganda) for the release of Israeli hostages in the hands of Palestinian airplane hijackers; approved plans for Goush Emunim, which launched the first colonization of the Palestinian territories.
Despite a series of electoral defeats (in Israel he was known as the “eternal loser"), he managed to twice be elected prime minister (1984-86; 1995-96), and over 50 years in public life, has held roles in charge of defense, foreign affairs and finance.
The brightest moment of his career was when he and Rabin, launched the dialogue with the Palestinians until the Oslo Accords (1993), which provided for the progressive autonomy for Palestinians until the proclamation of a State.
Thanks to this commitment, in 1994 along with Yasser Arafat and Rabin, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
But in 1995 Rabin was killed by a fundamentalist Jew, while Israeli society began to slide toward more aggressive positions and further away from the Labour Party.
Amid these ups and downs Peres changed parties, to form an alliance with Ariel Sharon (leaders of the Lebanon invasion in 1982), approving the withdrawal from Gaza and achieving election to the presidency in 2007. At 84 years of age he was a respected figure, a " dove ", with pragmatic aspects, however unable to stop the drift of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians.
He left the presidency in 2014 and the same year attended the ceremony of peace in the Vatican, with Pope Francis, Mahmoud Abbas, the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.
Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, described him as a man of the "almost": almost a "dove", but unable to go against the warring majority; "Almost" a national hero; "Almost" a memorable statesman.
And this, while dialogue and peace with the Palestinians, which he supported until his dying breath, remain a distant dream.
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28/09/2016 19:03
