On September 21, 2003, corresponding to Elul 24, Shimon Peres celebrated his 80th birthday, following several days of taxpayer-supported events, capped by a gala held at the Mann Auditorium in Tel Aviv attended by numerous Israeli and foreign luminaries. The "expected guest list" included Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, former Austrian Chancellor Franz Vranitzky, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, present and former European governmental leaders, as well as actress Kathleen Turner and prominent American Jews such as Ronald Lauder, Malcolm Hoenlein, and Abe Foxman. What could bring such a disparate group together to honor the leader of a minority political party of a small nation, who failed to win five prime ministerial elections and in 2000 was rejected for the presidency by the members of the parliament in which he has served for the past 44 years?

The apotheosis of Peres reflects his elevation to "nearly a mythological figure...an icon" in the words of Akiva Eldar, a political columnist for Ha'aretz, the newspaper favored by the elite of Israel's left. European leaders, who normally do not extol Israeli leaders, make an exception of him. Peres himself asserts that French President Mitterand, referring to Peres's role in Oslo, said to him, "What intellectual depth! What political courage!" Foreign Jews treat Peres with the reverence reserved for a prophet.

Of course, there is a steadily growing number of those with a very different assessment of Shimon Peres. Norman Podhoretz compared Peres -- unfavorably -- to Neville Chamberlain (Commentary, October 2001). In a poll of Israeli Jews and Arabs published in Ma'ariv on September 12, 2003, 54% of those polled said it was wrong for Israel to have entered into Peres's proudest achievement, the Oslo Agreements; only 31% believed it was right. Prof. Efraim Karsh recently described the Oslo accords as "the worst blunder in Israel's political history" and views the current war as its "direct and inevitable result." Nevertheless, Peres, writing in Ma'ariv on September 14, 2003, in an article entitled "We Did Not Err," stated that "There was no smarter step than the Oslo Agreement..."

Asked in 2001 by Bret Stephens, then an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe, whether Oslo was "a success," Peres replied that Oslo was "a must" and added that perhaps "it's not so successful to be moral." His interview with Peres led Stephens, now editor of the Jerusalem Post, to conclude that "Peres's commitment to Oslo has transmogrified into something else: a statement of virtue, an affirmation of Israel not so much as a political and geographic entity but as an ethical ideal, the purity of which must not be stained by the mortal concerns of the ordinary world, including the deaths of hundreds of his fellow Israelis."

Israel could scarcely have a more damaging spokesman. After the terror attack on America that destroyed the World Trade Center, with the nation still in a state of shock, Shimon Peres, then Israel's Foreign Minister, in an interview with Paula Zahn on CNN confirmed the Arab canard that the attack was linked to the Palestinian-Israel conflict. Despite bin Laden's own declarations that his principal grievances related to the "infidel" presence in Arabia, "the holiest of [Islamic] territories" and to the sanctions on Iraq, Peres chose to undermine the Jewish community's vigorous refutation of the specious Arab propaganda against Israel. Specifically, Peres was asked to comment on the allegation of linkage that had been made by Jordan's King Abdullah. After showing a video clip of the King's assertion, Zahn asked Peres, "What do you think of the linkage the King is making to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?" Peres responded, "I think it's one hundred percent right." Despite his subsequent remarks that the Palestinian rejection of Barak's "very generous proposal" was incomprehensible, the damage to Israel had already occurred, and a precious opportunity to rebut the notion of linkage was recklessly squandered.

The apotheosis of Peres reflects his elevation to "nearly a mythological figure...an icon."

On September 10, 2003, the day following the horrendous murderous bombing attacks at the Tzrifin bus stop and at Cafe Hillel in Jerusalem, Peres appeared, with former ambassador to Israel Dennis Ross and Raghida Dergham, senior diplomatic correspondent of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Hayat, on PBS. The program was moderated by Fareed Zakaria, editor of Newsweek. At one point Zakaria turned to Ms. Dergham, who was in the New York studio with Zakaria, and asked why Arafat did not fight the terrorists. Before Ms. Dergham could reply, Peres, in the Washington studio, interrupted forcefully to announce that Arafat had in fact fought Hamas, had arrested "thousands of their leaders" and killed at least "20 of their killers." When Zakaria asked Peres why Arafat stopped fighting the terrorists, he implied that the fault was Israel's: the 1996 election in Israel brought to power a government that ceased implementing the "peace" process. In other words, the former Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Israel, on nationwide United States television, interposed himself between the interviewer and a Palestinian journalist who had been asked a challenging question in order to blame Israel for Arafat's failure to dismantle the terrorist infrastructure.

October 2003               - 3 -               Outpost