It is very likely that among Israelis and among those committed to peace efforts in the Middle East there is truly a single name for the last 50 years. It was that of Shimon Peres (1923-2016), twice prime minister and, at the end of his career, president of Israel (2007-2014).
Peres is the subject of a great documentary of just over two hours (“Nunca de Sonhar”) that Netflix produced in 2018 under the direction of Richard Trank and which premiered last July on the Brazilian streaming service.
Let’s say, to summarize, that it is relatively easy to do politics with great ethics in countries or periods of great calm. Shimon Peres, however, went down in history for his integrity, despite three wars (1948, 1967 and 1973) in which he had directly or indirectly participated.
And he was also one of those awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, for having negotiated the Oslo Accords – which, through no fault of his own, ended up aborted without resulting in conciliation between Israelis and Palestinians.
He was born in Weszniew, a small town in Poland that today belongs to the territory of Belarus and whose synagogue was burned down by the Nazis with all the Jews inside. Szimon Perski, his name at the time, had already emigrated in 1932 with his parents to Palestine, then a British protectorate.
(Fun fact that the documentary doesn’t quite address: Shimon Peres isn’t the first cousin of American actress Lauren Bacall; their families both come from the same region and have the same Jewish surname, which could just be a coincidence.)
But back to Israel. The young immigrant, who was active in a youth association linked to the Labor Party, caught the attention of David Ben Gurion, patriarch of Israeli independence and its first prime minister. The amazing thing is that at the age of 26, Peres was appointed deputy minister of the Navy and in charge of smuggling weapons, to break the embargo that the British and French imposed on Israel.
Years later, he was also the creator of the Israeli nuclear program, which gave rise to the atomic bomb, a topic that is still secret in the country. To do so, he was helped by France, in the 1950s, which tried to contain the Algerian independence movement, fueled by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, a declared enemy of Israel.
Note that foreign policy is often a rule of three, in which, in this case, the French were unaware of the Israeli plan to produce the bomb.
The rise of Peres in the power structure is also due to the Suez crisis (1956). Nasser nationalizes the canal, Israel confronts it militarily – with France and the United Kingdom in the rear, the war lasts only 100 hours and ends with the Egyptian defeat.
The personal moment of highest tension experienced by Peres was in 1976, when Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Air France Airbus and took it to the Entebbe airport in Uganda. Just over 100 Israeli or Jewish passengers remained kidnapped. He was then Minister of Foreign Affairs and gave the green light for a military command to land in the African country and free the hostages. A single Israeli, Lieutenant Colonel Yonatan Netanyahu, whose brother would become prime minister years later, died in the rescue.
Shimon Peres’ other great enemy was inflation, which he faced and conquered in 1984, at the cost of a fabulous budget cut. The annual rate dropped from 500% to 17%, which gave the then prime minister incredible popularity. He was pressured to dissolve the Knesset, a unicameral parliament, and call for elections that he would quietly win. But he preferred to abide by a prior agreement and handed over the head of government to Labor Yitzhak Rabin.
Peres was married to Sonya, who bore him three children, and lived with him in a relatively modest apartment in Tel Aviv. In the documentary, one of her granddaughters testifies in which she insists on her grandfather’s taste for a good negotiation.
In fact, the politician reinforced his reputation as a supporter of dialogue throughout his long career. Whether with a compatriot, with the Palestinian Yasser Arafat or with King Hussein of Jordan, he was a refined interlocutor. He never defended the forceful solutions he came to use and defined himself as a dreamer. “My greatest talent was dreaming. I don’t regret any of my dreams. I only regret not having dreamed more.”
His latest and most intense dream lies in creating a foundation to produce Israel’s latest specialty, high technology. But with one detail. All the projects that the foundation funds have the equal participation of Jewish Israelis and Palestinians. Perhaps this is an alternative path to peace?
