If you watched the performance of Shimon Peres being interviewed by the acerbic and incisive Tim Sebastian on the BBC last Saturday you might be forgiven for comparing Israel’s elder statesman with Nelson Mandela provided you weren’t au fait with his past that is.
The man has been at the forefront of Israeli politics for most of his life as a veritable font of peace and love. I almost expected him to break out with the Hebrew version of “Kumbaya”.
Forget the past and look to the future, he exhorted the Doha Debates’ well-behaved audience. The only obstacle to peace with the Palestinians was their current disunity, he said.
According to Peres, the majority of Israelis want peace. “We were not born to master people. We left the house of slaves not to join the house of masters,” he asserted.
Yet a 2002 Israeli poll showed 46 percent of Israeli Jews favored transferring Palestinians out of their territories, while 31 percent favored transferring Israeli Arabs out of the country. A poll published in the Israeli paper Yedi’ot Ahronot last month suggests the hawkish Benjamin Netenyahu would sweep to power if elections were to be called. This does not indicate most Israelis are hungry for peace.
My first thought on seeing Peres talking to a mainly Arab audience in Doha was one of surprise at his courage. It couldn’t have been easy for a top Israeli government minister to address such an inherently unsympathetic milieu. But as the debate progressed it became clear that Peres relied on his natural charm together with a hefty dose of mendacity not only to survive the 45-minute spotlight but to win applause at the end of the program.
As for the audience, they were almost unnaturally respectful. Those who posed questions could have just stepped out of obedience school. Few of them countered Peres’ arguments with anything solid, a few smiled as he soft-soaped away, and others quietly thanked him following his blatant distortions of the truth.
It’s true that Sebastian tackled him head on at the start of the program with strong rebuttals and occasionally interrupted with inconvenient facts during the question and answer session, but the audience was either too timid, or too polite or too lacking in knowledge to make any impact at all.
Firstly, Peres blamed the intifada for Israel’s failure to dismantle illegal Jewish colonies on the West Bank even though new settlement sprang up in the interim between the first and second intifadas at a time Israel and the Palestinians were seriously talking peace.
When presented with hard statistics indicating that Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, including 140 children, last year, compared to 17 Israeli civilians who lost their lives at the Palestinian hands, this is what Peres said.
“Let them stop firing and no child will be killed. Israel never initiated. Israel always reacted. The minute they stop there would not be a single victim.”
This is simply untrue. There have been many instances when Israeli forces were responsible for the deaths of Palestinian children during a unilateral Palestinian cease-fire. One instance happened last June when an Israeli missile ended the lives of three children. This attack and the targeting of a family of nine picnicking on a Gaza Beach prompted Hamas to break a 16-month cease-fire.
Second, Peres divided Israel’s history into two parts. The initial 30 years of Israel’s existence, he said, were years of war, bellicosity and craziness. “Israel was outgunned, outmanned and outnumbered...and we had to defend ourselves”. The last 30 years, “we went from emphasis on the military to emphasis on politics. We made four attempts to make peace; twice we succeeded and twice we failed.”
The two failures, according to Peres, were with the Lebanese and the Palestinians and the reasons he gave centered on the internal divisions of those nations. “Their division is our tragedy, not only theirs,” he said before suggesting that were the Palestinians to unite under one flag “peace will come rather promptly”.
Mr. Peres you are talking complete and utter poppycock and you know it. You said, “for years our relations were superb and then a foreign body came in”. Your country occupied Lebanon for 18 years and Hezbollah was born from that occupation as a resistance group. You may have had superb relations with certain Lebanese political figures but never with Lebanon.
As for the Palestinians uniting under one flag, until Israel and its Western allies began demonizing and isolating the democratically elected Hamas-led Palestinian National Authority, the Palestinians were united. If all that Israel required to make peace was a united Palestinian nation then why was Yasser Arafat, a strong cohesive force, treated as a pariah, virtually jailed and attacked and why was President Mahmoud Abbas ignored after Arafat’s demise?
Then someone asked Peres why Israel still occupied the Shebaa Farms and the Golan Heights. “What do you mean we occupy the Golan Heights?” he retorted. “Syria attacked us for no reason without provocation on the holiest days of our life. Syria together with Egypt made a surprise attack against Israel. We won the Golan Heights and the Sinai Peninsula...”
At this juncture somebody should have interrupted him. Where were you Tim?
Peres seems to be claiming that the Golan Heights were taken from Syria during the 1973 “Yom Kippur” War when, in fact, most of the Golan was grabbed by Israel in the 1967 “Six-Day War” when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on the Egyptian Air Force. In this case, Syria had every right to attack Israel in 1973 in an attempt to return its own territory.
I’m a great fan of Tim Sebastian and the Doha Debates but if Shimon Peres is ever invited back don’t let him use the stage as a propaganda platform. Get some experts up there with him or find an audience with a little more gumption and savvy.
