Never forget -- Shimon Peres and the legacy of the Oslo Accords
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------ Related: Shimon Peres on Obama, Iran and the Path to Peace [...] Referring to the continuing tension between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, Peres said: “I cannot tell you what Bibi’s considerations are on the subject of Iran. I am not his spokesman and also not [Defense Minister Ehud] Barak’s. That’s not my job. I am not looking for confrontations with them. I do think that I can explain the American pattern. America knows how to throw a punch when it has to, in order to keep the world balanced. But the punches follow a set procedure. They don’t begin by shooting. They try all the other means first — economic sanctions, political pressure, negotiations, everything possible.
“But in the end,” he added, “if none of this works, then President Obama will use military power against Iran. I am sure of it.”
I was surprised by Peres’s stridency. He had long been perceived as a moderating force on Netanyahu, a mediator between the prime minister and the international community that was losing patience with him. A month earlier, Obama awarded Peres the Presidential Medal of Freedom — America’s highest civilian honor. But the ceremony served only to deepen the rift between Peres and Netanyahu, and three weeks later, as reports became more frequent that Netanyahu was planning to send bombers to Iran, Peres took advantage of his 89th-birthday celebrations to speak out publicly against an attack. The prime minister’s office responded with ferocity, proclaiming, “Peres has forgotten what the president’s job is,” and recalling that in 1981, Peres opposed Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s decision to bomb Iraq’s nuclear reactor, an act that many Israelis consider a great achievement.
There are those who see Peres’s confrontation with Netanyahu as one of the principal reasons that an attack on Iran has not yet materialized. “I will not attribute any such thing to myself,” Peres told me. “Let others say it. I expressed my opinion, and that was my duty. How influential was it? ‘Let another man praise thee, and not thine own mouth,’ ” he said, quoting the Book of Proverbs.
Peres’s clash with Netanyahu over Iran is only one of many disagreements between the two men. On the one hand, Netanyahu is a conservative prime minister who relies on a hard-line, hawkish coalition and who is likely to win next week’s Israeli elections by a landslide. On the other, Peres is Israel’s elder statesman, who, very late in his life, has attained a degree of popularity that eluded him throughout his earlier career. In a survey conducted by the Israel Democracy Institute, 84 percent of Jewish respondents said Peres was trustworthy, while 62 percent thought Netanyahu was.
It is a pleasure to spend time with this man, whom David Ben-Gurion took under his wing and who became a top official of the Israeli defense establishment at age 24. Peres is a man of the world, full of insights and curiosity that have not worn down over the years. Though he is about to enter his 90s, he recalls in vivid detail his encounters with central figures in the post-World War II era: a Soviet joke competition started by President Ronald Reagan, marathon drinking sessions with the German defense minister Franz Josef Strauss and what he learned from the founder of modern Singapore, Lee Kuan Yew. But it is Ben-Gurion, and the many years he spent in his proximity, that Peres returns to time and again.
Although he says, “I take no interest in history, it bores me,” he devotes much effort to clarifying how significant his own imprint on modern history has been. This may be in part because, despite his enormous contribution to the power of the Israel Defense Forces, Peres never served in the military. Moreover, he was not a native-born Israeli “Sabra,” having immigrated to Palestine with his family at age 11.
Peres always believed that the Israelis needed to be a proactive partner in the peace process. As he put it in 2013: “We can and should bring an end to the conflict – and we have to be the initiators. Playing hard-to-get may be a romantic proposition, but it’s not a good political plan.”
[...]
Dashed hopes
So why did Oslo fail? As ever, it depends which voices on which side you listen to.
Many Israelis blame Palestinian violence for wrecking the peace process. After the Camp David Accords collapsed in July 2000, the Second Intifada broke out and ran until 2005. The militant Islamist group Hamas won legislative elections in 2006, further deepening a rift among Palestinians and making the Palestinian Authority more irrelevant than ever.
In contrast, many Palestinians claim that it was the Israelis who have reneged on their side of the deal. Highly contentious is the issue of Israeli settlements in the occupied territories: in 1993, there were 115,700 Israeli settlers living there, whereas today there are more than 350,000 in the West Bank and another 300,000 living within East Jerusalem’s pre-1967 borders. No settlement freezes have taken place, and this constant encroachment has made the two-state solution more difficult.
A 2013 poll examining the effects of Oslo on public opinion 20 years later found both sides have been dissatisfied. Palestinians maintained that the Israelis were the big winners, with 49% claiming that the accords damaged their interests. On the Israeli side, 68% of Israelis felt that the main beneficiaries were the Palestinians, and 64% felt that they themselves had been harmed by the accords.
And yet a 2015 poll revealed that while 90% of Palestinians don’t think Israel has abided by the Oslo Agreement, 68% still want to support the agreement. So for all that the Oslo framework is resented criticised, any new peace process for peace in the region will almost certainly have to stick to it in some form.
Although the two sides are far apart, Peres died an optimist, still hopeful that the day would come when the Israeli Defence Forces’s soldiers would serve purely for peace. As he famously put it: “Impossibility is only a product of our prejudice .. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Peres-I-do-not-regret-the-Oslo-Accords-309850 .”
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