POSTSCRIPT: SHIMON PERES, 1923-2016 by Bernard Avishai ,( Republished with permission of the Author and The New Yorker in which the article first appeared)
Despite serving in almost every important government post, including Prime Minister, Shimon Peres remained something of an outsider in Israeli politics.
Shimon Peres, the former Israeli President, died at ninety-three, a revered elder statesman, but his glory days were as part of a suspect young guard. In the early fifties, he was part of a cadre of defense officials whom David Ben-Gurion promoted in order to wrest control of the economy from veteran leaders of the Zionist Labor Federation and hand it to the fledgling state. Peres was at first hawkish, in favor of nuclear deterrence against Arab invasion and retaliation against Palestinian border attacks. He ended his career as a symbol of the peace process, after secretly initiating and championing the 1993 Oslo Accords, for which he and his co-signers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat, won the Nobel Peace Prize. “If I’ve changed my policies, it’s because the situation has changed. I was a hawk, but when we could make peace I was a dove,” he told David Remnick, in 2002.
For his seventy years of public life, Peres was famous as a man who tempered his views to accommodate shifts in political power. He held almost every important government post—Prime Minister, Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, President—and served people he both idolized and reviled. After the Oslo negotiations stalled, and during the darkest days of the Second Intifada, Peres assumed his last significant position, as Ariel Sharon’s Foreign Minister, and stayed even after Sharon put Arafat under siege. Yossi Beilin, an Oslo negotiator and a protégé of Peres, was not impressed: of Sharon, he said, in 2002, “To do what he is doing now, he needs a rabbi to make it all kosher.” Beilin added, “In Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon got the most kosher rabbi in the world.”
Yet it would be wrong to suppose that Peres lacked governing principles. What set him apart, and prepared him for a short but pivotal premiership from 1984 to 1986, was political-economic prescience. Early on, he was a builder of Israel’s military power, becoming an expert on increasingly sophisticated arms. He grew fascinated by advanced technologies and, more important, the kind of society that advances them. In many ways, Israel’s entrepreneurial burst in the nineties was facilitated by Peres’s economic reforms of the eighties. It is no diminution of his achievement to say that he was Israel’s first technocrat. “The Arabs have the numerical superiority; we have technological superiority,” he told a cluster of reporters in 1974, while he was the Minister of Communications. “Technology will always defeat numbers.”
Szymon Perski, who emigrated with his family to Israel from Poland, in 1934, at age eleven, was viewed, in the parochial pioneering society he joined, as both a potential recruit and something of an intruder. The view stuck, and he seemed to embrace it, making himself conspicuously useful to his elders in the socialist élite, but also nudging them toward vaguely bourgeois values. Peres spent his adolescence on a kibbutz and at the Ben Shemen youth village. He wrote lyric Hebrew poetry. The writer Yael Dayan, the daughter of the military leader and government minister Moshe Dayan, told me recently that Peres was “insecure as a young man, cultivated relations with writers, and probably hoped to become one.”
His first distinction came in 1944, when, as a youth leader, he rushed from student group to scouting group, trying to keep the labor movement’s youth wing loyal to David Ben-Gurion’s governing social-democratic party, while much of the kibbutz movement, drawn to Soviet Marxism, parted ways with it. “Shyness and nerve are two sides of the same coin,” Peres later told his biographer, Matti Golan. Peres and Moshe Dayan were chosen as youth delegates to the 1946 Zionist Congress, in Basel, as plans for the partition of Palestine took shape. The following year, Peres joined the Haganah, the Labor Zionist self-defense force. Ben-Gurion personally made him responsible for organizing manpower, and for clandestine missions to buy weapons. These tasks kept Peres off the battlefields of the War of Independence, which earned him, unfairly, a lesser moral prestige than celebrated war heroes like Dayan, Rabin, and Sharon, who became his rivals for leadership positions in the seventies.
In 1953, Ben-Gurion, who was serving as the Defense Minister as well as Prime Minister, appointed Peres his Director-General of Defense. Peres was barely thirty. Ben-Gurion extolled him and Dayan, the Chief of Staff, as examples ofmamlachtiyut, or “statism”: the drive to absorb the flood of immigrants into nationalist, not proletarian, institutions. Ben-Gurion, exhausted, exited the government that year, but when he returned, two years later, Peres was his right hand, plotting Israeli participation in what would become the Suez Crisis, in 1956, and acting as the liaison to the French government. The connections would prove essential to setting up Israel’s nuclear program and acquiring the advanced jets that were critical to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, in 1967. But they also reinforced Peres’s enchantment with scientific management. Peres, who was elected to the Knesset in 1959 and became Deputy Defense Minister, grew impatient with traditional Labor Zionist condescension regarding market competition. He had seen what companies like Dassault, the French aircraft manufacturer, could do. That same year, Bedek, a company that Peres had helped found and the forerunner to Israel Aerospace Industries, produced its first plane.
Beginning in 1955, Peres and Dayan were embroiled in what came to be known as the Lavon Affair, the fallout from a botched operation to discredit Egypt’s new President, Gamal Abdul Nasser. The controversy finally led, in 1963, to Ben-Gurion’s resignation. In 1965, Peres persuaded Ben-Gurion and Dayan to lead a new leftist, secular-nationalist party, Rafi, which would, in Peres’s words, bring together “famous and influential names from the worlds of art, literature, commerce, and science.” The Party went on to join a national-unity government just before the 1967 war, and a united Labor Alignment during the euphoria after it. But its challenge to the labor aristocracy continued to define Peres’s position. In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, in 1973, Prime Minister Golda Meir and Dayan, the Defense Minister since 1967, were forced to resign; the clique that had inherited the Labor Alignment, run by the Finance Minister, Pinchas Sapir, anointed Rabin as Meir’s successor. Peres, though still marked as having been part of the Rafi insurrection, unexpectedly announced his candidacy. He presented himself as the hard-liner, supporting the National Religious Party’s defense of the settlement project. Peres won forty per cent of the delegates’ votes, conceded, and was named Defense Minister. Rabin would later brand Peres an “indefatigable schemer.” When, in 1976, Rabin planned to remove by force a Jewish outpost in the hills of Samaria, in the northern West Bank, Peres intervened to let it stay.
Rabin resigned over a minor financial infraction just before the election of May, 1977. Peres, his replacement, debated Menachem Begin, of the Likud Party, on television, insisting that it was the labor pioneers who knew how to settle the land. Begin won, concluded the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1979, and increased the number of settlers to about ten thousand by 1981. Begin won reëlection that year, by increasing subsidies for staples and slashing tariffs on imported consumer products, setting off a spending spree among his poorer and less educated base. By 1984, government deficits, worsened by the Lebanon War, had pushed inflation to more than four hundred per cent.
The election that year produced a tie for Peres, and he assumed the Prime Minister’s job for two years, in a rotation agreement with Yitzhak Shamir. This proved to be Peres’s finest hour, as he worked tirelessly with respected economists to prevent economic collapse and to enable future growth, privatizing or closing failing public companies and encouraging private investment. He introduced a new shekel, pegging it to the dollar, while imposing austerity and wage and price controls. He confidently oriented the economy toward technology exports, focussed on the defense technologies he had nurtured, reinvested in the universities, and advocated for tax holidays to encourage investment by foreign technology corporations such as Intel, Motorola, and I.B.M. By 1991, the chairman of Intel-Israel, Dov Frohman, told me that the country was primed to become a home to technology startups: “four for every direct foreign investor.”
In the fall of 1993, I met with Peres, who was the Foreign Minister in the new Rabin government at the time, in New York. I was working for a consulting firm founded by, among others, the Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter. When I entered the room, Peres had Porter’s “Competitive Advantage” in his hands. He started off subdued, businesslike, but his face brightened when I asked how the state might facilitate an export-driven economy. He told me what many would later come to believe, that the competitive advantage Israel’s military gave it was not in its technology but in the “human capital” that the Army experience created: the teamwork, the comfort with advanced machinery. He spoke of Israel as a hub of a “new Middle East,” the name of a book he published that same year, which argued that economic integration, based on scientific exchange, had made war obsolete.
At the same time, political vanity caused Peres to miss opportunities to build that new Middle East. In 1987, shortly before the first intifada roiled the Palestinian territories, Peres, who was serving as Foreign Minister under Shamir, secretly negotiated a deal with King Hussein’s representatives in London, which would have brought Jordan into the peace process and halted settlement building. Peres promised Hussein that, if Shamir rejected the deal, he would resign and mount an electoral campaign on the issue. Shamir did reject it, Peres did not resign, and Hussein renounced all interest in representing Palestinian claims.
Peres was the indispensable proponent of the Oslo Accords with the Palestine Liberation Organization. But Oslo never produced a final-status agreement, and Rabin and Peres were put on the defensive by terror attacks and settler violence. After Rabin’s assassination, in 1995, Peres became Prime Minister, and the polls showed that he would have won an overwhelming victory over Benjamin Netanyahu had he called an immediate election. But Peres seemed determined first to prove that he could be charged with the nation’s security. He put the election off until the spring, and secretly authorized a series of retaliatory operations against Hamas terrorists, which led to retaliatory bus bombings. During the early spring, he authorized an action against Hezbollah in the north, Operation Grapes of Wrath, which included an errant strike against a Lebanese town in which more than a hundred civilians were killed. When an election was held in May, he lost to Netanyahu by less than a per cent. By the time Ehud Barak regained power for Oslo’s advocates, in 1999, the climate had been soured by settlement growth and terror, and in 2000 a new intifada broke out.
Thereafter, Peres was something of a shadow figure in Israeli politics, taking back interim leadership of Labor in 2004, and eventually joining with Sharon and Ehud Olmert in forming yet a new party, Kadima, in 2005. After Sharon’s death, Olmert formed a government and organized a Knesset vote to elect Peres to the Presidency, a largely honorific role, but one the outsider seemed to thrive in, inviting “famous and influential names,” as he had once put it, to his official residence, encouraging ethnic integration, and promoting large entrepreneurial projects: the electric car, a canal joining the Mediterranean to the Dead Sea. He seemed to revel in the idea that he’d never again face an election.
One is hard-pressed to know what was happening in the shadows, or to assess what political courage he had left. The late Ron Pundak, former head of the Peres Center and one of Oslo’s negotiators, told me just before his death, in 2014, that Peres had him deposed for his anti-government peace activities after 2009, “convinced that Netanyahu was serious about making progress toward a two-state solution.” Later in 2014, as his term as President was ending, Peres told Channel Two that he had met with the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Jordan three years before, and that the two had worked out a comprehensive peace deal, including recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu, Peres claimed, had “stopped it.”
Why did Peres not resign and expose the matter? Why, too, did he draw close to powerful mentors, adapt to new parties, take only the most calculated risks, and shift with the winds of war and peace? “Shimon never seemed far from the center of things, but felt himself the outsider,” Yael Dayan told me. “Shimon was the immigrant who knew the language well, who thought himself a man of letters. But he spoke with an accent; he had a certain paranoia.” The outsider’s restlessness seemed critical here. “Shimon was endlessly curious about the sciences, taught himself what he didn’t know: in chemistry, hydrology, nanotechnology, economics,” Dayan added. “He saw the Israel he wanted: advanced, democratic, multicultural, at peace. He did what he could to set the stage for it.”
No comments:
Post a Comment