Betraying their total ignorance of the colonial mindset of the Israeli leaders in general, some Arab politicians have welcomed the victory of Shimon Peres in the recent presidential election in Israel. An invariable feature of the Israeli decision-making is that only policies that serve the expansionist and colonial interests of Zionism are adopted and implemented by their leaders whether they are described as hawkish or dovish as in the case of Peres.
The office of president in Israel is ornamental. It does not have any role in the running of the government.
A basic qualification of a successful leader in Israel, seemingly, is that the blood of hundreds of innocent Palestinians or other Arabs should be on his hands. This description would be quite fitting to leaders such as Pinhas Lavon, Menachem Begin, Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert.
Despite several attempts Shimon Peres could not become Israel’s prime minister except for once. This was because he did not meet the above specifications as this Polish immigrant lacked a military background. He contested for the post of prime minister from 1977 to 1996 but succeeded only once in 1984 — that too only for two years on a rotational basis. The second time he was promoted to the post after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995.
But this does not mean that Peres is an avowed pacifist as he has been portrayed in the media. He has been shifting between the doves and hawks in Israeli politics. His political leaning was determined by the direction of the political trends in the country.
Peres was one of the masterminds of the aggression against Egypt in 1956 and he supported the Israeli aggression against Lebanon in 1982, though shortly after that he joined the ranks of the “Peace Now” movement condemning the Israeli incursion into Lebanon. While he was a major partner in the Oslo peace agreement in 1993 and 1995, he was also the spiritual father of the settlements in the West Bank. And not to be missed is the fact that Peres subscribed to the idea of a security zone in South Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s. He was also reported to be a participant in the notorious Qana massacres.
Peres and Gen. Moshe Dayan take the credit for kicking off a nuclear race in the Middle East and placing the region in the shadow of a nuclear war. It was after Peres was named the deputy director general of the defense department in 1952 that he took steps to build a nuclear reactor in Israel. Ignoring opposition from various quarters he started designing an atomic reactor in utmost secrecy.
Despite the fact that he was instrumental in making Israel the sole nuclear power of the region with hundreds of weapons of mass destruction, Peres was defeated in several elections. The last was in 2000 when he ran for president. In that election Likud Party’s Moshe Katsov was elected. However Peres became the deputy prime minister in 2007 after his rival withdrew from the election fray. Afterward he also became the president of Israel.
Though international Zionist movement, which established a Jewish homeland in the midst of the Arabs, declares publicly that it upholds the international values of freedom and human rights, it violates every one of them when dealing with the Palestinians and Israel’s other Arab neighbors.
On the one hand, while the Zionist movement protects the Western interests in the region, it orders the political leaders in Israel to achieve the basic Zionist goals of territorial expansion to annex all the lands mentioned in their mythologies. It is because of this reason every government in Israel, Labor, Likud, or a coalition of various parties, always surrenders to the uncompromising dictates of the international Zionism. That is why it is stupid to believe that peace will return to the Middle East if Peres becomes the head of state in Israel.
