By David K. Shipler
Shimon
Peres has been lionized since his death this week, but the praise has obscured
at least two of his grave errors, which damaged Israel’s options for peace with
the Palestinians. One was his early support for Jewish settlements in
territories captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war. The other was his
unwillingness to call snap elections after the assassination of Prime Minister
Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. These two miscalculations, which went unreported in The New York Times obituary, have had
lasting effect, and not to the good.
Peres, the last of Israel’s
founding fathers, had a long list of accomplishments to his name. He was
instrumental in obtaining weapons for Israel before the United States became
its chief benefactor, and in getting the materials necessary for the country to
develop nuclear weapons. He served in multiple posts, including defense
minister, foreign minister, prime minister, and finally president. He
philosophized eloquently.
Most important, his aides secretly
negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization a loose agreement known
as the Oslo accords, which led to the PLO’s and Israel’s mutual recognition and
opened a way to peaceful coexistence. Peres, Rabin, and PLO chairman Yasser
Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded too hastily as it turned out. Ultimately,
the Oslo process was violently derailed by extremists on both sides. Ironically,
Peres’s mistakes were partly responsible.
Decades before, by facilitating
Jewish settlement in occupied lands, he had inadvertently helped give a
foothold to a movement that became a zealous force of religio-nationalism, one
that today brooks no compromise with the Palestinians. The movement, whose
adherents now occupy cabinet positions in the government, reveres the ancient
biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria—known to the rest of the world as the West
Bank of the Jordan River—captured from Jordan in 1967 and the logical place for
a Palestinian state, were it ever to be created. Jews have a historical right
to be there, the religio-nationalists argue. And they are there, with some
among them committing daily vandalism and vigilantism against Palestinians.
