HE'S FINISHED, IN MY JUDGMENT Rael Jean Isaac In the aftermath of the elections, there has been an understandable impulse to bind the wounds of division in Israel. This has produced the kind of fulsome praise for Israel's outgoing Prime Minister normally accorded-- on the principle de mortuis nil nisi bonum--to those who have passed out of this world altogether. Thus, Benjamin Netanyahu in his first speech following his election paid tribute to Peres's contributions to Israel for 50 years, declaring "the nation of Israel will know to thank you." And in this country, the normally sober Eric Breindel, in an editorial in the New York Post described Peres as "a towering figure in [Israel's] national life," "a visionary, an intellectual and a poet" who was "also the supreme realist." But it is vitally important that Peres's impact be honestly evaluated. And the harsh truth is that for the last three years Israel was led by a madman. True, Rabin was formally at the helm most of that time, but the policies he followed were those of Shimon Peres, the undisputed architect of Oslo. It may sound absurd to use the term "madman" in relation to Peres, for he was clearly clever, articulate, and handled the affairs of state competently. But, in fact, while their impact is always disastrous, as our own century amply attests, it is by no means unusual for countries to be led by deeply disturbed individuals. The form mental disturbance takes in world leaders is usually paranoia and grandiosity, and these tendencies are expressed in murder of those who are feared and efforts to achieve, in the extreme case, world domination and at the least, territorial expansion. Jews do things differently, and so in their case the leader's mental disturbance took the form of an extreme and absurd optimism, accompanied by dedication to contracting the state's borders. In the wake of the Cold War, Shimon Peres had an epiphany -- he saw a vision of a New Middle East. The realist who had once written, "In the absence of a secure border, the State faces extinction," now was convinced that the vision of the prophets had been fulfilled, and swords had been forever beaten into plowshares (or at the very least were just a few whacks from assuming their final peaceful shape). As for Israel's border, Peres adapted to geopolitics environmentalist E.F. Schumacher's dictum that "small is beautiful." Speaking at the University of Pennsylvania in October 1994, he said: "The more we give up land, we discover we have more Ph.D.s per kilometer -- so we are going to make a living on the Ph.D.s and not on the mileage." In speeches, interviews and books, Peres revealed a mind that had lost all moorings in reality. At the University of Pennsylvania in October 1994, he declared: "The change occurring is a total departure from whatever we have known in history. It is the end, shall I say,

of the hunting season in history, the beginning of a creating season in our lifetime." And to a conference of businessmen in Jerusalem that same year: "What wars can produce is no longer important; and what is important, wars can no longer produce. It's finished, in my judgment." Because history teaches that wars and conflicts are part of the human condition, and the history of the Arab-Israel conflict provided more than ample evidence that they were endemic to the region, Peres repudiated history. "I have become totally tired of history because I feel history is a long misunderstanding," the Wall Street Journal's reporter Amy Dockser Marcus reports him saying in September 1994. A few days before the elections, in an interview with the Israeli daily Maariv, Peres declared flatly: "There is nothing to learn from history." The astonished reporter responded: "How can you say such a thing?" And Peres returned to his theme of a total human transformation: "Human history is built on material rather than intellectual things. We are now going from the material to the intellect in the 21st century." But if history could teach nothing, for Peres it nonetheless determined everything. History had dictated there be a New Middle East. At the May 1994 signing of the Gaza-Jericho accord in Cairo, Peres proclaimed: "Ladies and gentlemen, The future is inevitable, just as peace is inevitable -- and for all of us." As Peres saw it, the wise politicians let history carry them in its deterministic wake. It is vitally important that Peres' impact be honestly evaluated. In his talk at the University of Pennsylvania mentioned earlier, Peres says: "[W]e are now flying with a new wind and we are moving with a new current, and we politicians can hardly stop it..." And, to a Jerusalem Post reporter, that same year: "I'm convinced there is a stream of history that even the public polls cannot stop. Suppose we have a majority of people saying we don't like it -- so we'll stop?" And so for Peres, there is a future -- an ineluctable future -- but no past. "Reality," said Peres, in his most recent book Battling for Peace, "for me at any rate -was not what objectively existed or happened; it was what was going to happen..." Riding the currents of history to which he is directly privy (a psychiatrist might impolitely call such a conviction delusional), Peres has been impervious to all disconfirming evidence. He either shoves it under the carpet or in the manner of some followers of millennial sects, believes all the harder when his "vision" is disproved. Normally, when two parties negotiate an agreement, each is anxious to make sure the other party lives up to its side. But Peres, fully cognizant of the PLO's violation of every one of its undertakings, sought only to bury this information. A French documentary maker actually caught on film an exchange between Peres and (Continued on p.11)

Outpost               - 10 -               June 1996