Dinner with Shimon Peres

He is the foreign minister, it is the early Nineties, and Shimon Peres hosts a group of writers and editors for a light dinner. I was painfully young at the time, but I still remember him maneuvering clumsily in an attempt to claim the credit for Israel’s policies, without being too obvious in taking the credit away from his boss, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Peres did not know at that time – no one knew –  that he would have to spend most of the rest of his time as a leader under Rabin’s shadow. He did not know – no one knew – that he would spend most of the rest of his time as a leader maneuvering clumsily as he was forced to deal with Rabin’s shadow.

Beginning around that time Peres became Israel’s Mr. Peace Process. And he remained Mr. Peace Process while the actual peace process gradually lost its glamour. Thus, as Israelis were praying for his health in the last thirty-six hours, many of them preferred to remember the pre-peace-process Peres and the post-peace-process Peres. The pre-peace-process man who bolstered Israel’s strength. And the post-peace-process man who, relatively late in life, became a beloved, and relatively uncontroversial, President of Israel.

He is A man of security, not peace, I once wrote. Peres wants to be seen as an intellectual, but many Israelis considered him more as a calculating politician. Peres probably wants to be remembered as the man who brought peace to Israel, but his main achievement as a peace maker, the Oslo accords, is hardly a real achievement. A more tangible, less disputed, legacy of Peres is the crucial arms deals that secured Israel the means to defend itself following its inception; the nuclear project, initiated against long odds; his part in launching the Entebbe operation.

His personal story is also the reminder we need –  I wrote after reading his biography by Michael Bar Zohar – of the significance of security in the 60 years of Israel's existence:

Here's a boy from the village of Vishneva on the border of Poland and Belarus embarking on a journey to build a new homeland for his persecuted tribe. ‘Be a Jew, forever!’ his grandfather Zvi Meltzer told the young Shimon Persky when he left home for Palestine in 1935. ‘These were the last words Shimon ever heard his grandfather say. Zvi Meltzer, and with him all the members of the Persky and Meltzer families who remained in Vishneva, were massacred by the Nazis during World War’, notes Bar-Zohar.

Then there is the story of the scheming politician becoming a likable statesman and president of Israel. Israelis’ liking of Peres grew when he lost all hope of ever again becoming Israel’s leader. I had the honor of helping to write his speech when Peres received the Medal of Freedom from President Barack Obama. Here’s one paragraph from that speech:

Liberty is also the soul of the Jewish heritage. We didn’t give up our values, even when we were facing furnaces and gas chambers. We lived as Jews. We died as Jews. And we rose again as free Jewish people. We didn’t survive merely to be a passing shadow in history, but as a new genesis, a startup nation again.

Is liberty at the soul of the Jewish heritage? I think there is little doubt of that. Did we survive to be a passing shadow in history? Shimon Peres certainly did not. That is why even those Israelis who vehemently disagreed with him grew to admire him. That is how an at-times contentious leader, a great man of many controversies, unites a people in prayer.