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June 18th, 2013 
Peter Nolan
Mr Peres, the world’s oldest serving head of state whose 65-year political
career spans the entire history of Israel and includes three spells as prime
minister, dismisses that argument. The winds of change in the Middle East
will blow Israel towards peace, he believes, whoever is in government.
“Everybody is dealing with the policy of the government and naturally they
look at the combination of the different parties [in] the coalition,” says
Mr Peres, who spent most of his career in the Labour party and other
Left-wing groupings. That participant, he adds, is the “realities”
of shifting circumstances.
“In my experience in life, I found that more than leaders change
realities, realities affected leaders – and the realities of the present
situation in the Middle East [don’t] leave much time for any other
alternative but to conclude a peace agreement between us and the
Palestinians.”
We are talking in his wood-panelled office in the president’s official
residence in the upmarket west Jerusalem residential district of Rehavia.
The setting is functional rather than grandiose and subject to incongruous
domestic intrusions, as the drilling and hammering of workmen in a nearby
house repeatedly interrupts our conversation.
“It’s the neighbourhood,” Mr Peres, who fought in Israel’s 1948 War of
Independence, explains in humble embarrassment at his inability to stop the
racket.
The mid-sized office is modestly furnished and offers no sweeping vista of the
Holy City’s familiar landmarks. Biographies about Winston Churchill,
Margaret Thatcher and Michael Foot sit among the tightly-packed bookshelves.
Hebrew scripture written on the ceiling offers the only clue to the religious
significance of our location. “The writing is of phrases from the Bible:
‘There will be peace,’” Mr Peres explains in English, translating words that
could summarise his own guiding credo.
A portrait of Theodore Herzl adorns the wall, a replica of a painting produced
for a book the president wrote depicting a fictitious trip by modern
Zionism’s founder to Israel. It is one of the few evocations of the past in
an hour-long discourse in which the veteran statesman relentlessly expounds
his optimistic vision for the future.
The pretext is Mr Peres’ 5th annual president’s conference, a three-day
spectacular opening in Jerusalem on Tuesday June 18 and featuring an array
of high-profile speakers, including Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Mikhail
Gorbachev. This year’s guest list, which also features Barbara Streisand,
Robert De Niro and Sharon Stone, is especially august in honour of the
host’s landmark birthday (which actually falls on August 2). They are
coming, I suggest, to celebrate his long political life.
Mr Peres won’t hear of it: “No. They are coming for the conference, please,”
he says, stressing its themes of high-tech agriculture that will produce
medical benefits, and brain research. “The conference is called Tomorrow. We
don’t deal much with the past, neither with the past achievements or
failures.”
Which is exactly how Mr Peres justifies his assertion that peace is around the
corner.
“What happened is over; forget it,” he says, his heavy accent accentuating the
finality of the statement.
The same forward-looking philosophy is applied to the Israeli public and
political class whose scepticism towards the peace process he believes can
be overcome by an optimism based on plain common sense.
“There is a clear majority for a two-state solution,” he says, referring to
the vision of a Israel living peacefully alongside an independent Palestine
that has become the accepted mode of solving the century-old Jewish-Arab
conflict.
In doing so, he rejects the commonly-held belief that Israeli public opinion
has become more polarised and extreme. “[Where] you can say there is a
change maybe [is] in the amount of scepticism. There are always sceptics in
life. And you know, for people it’s hard to agree with optimists.
“To be an optimist, you have to work very hard and have a lot of patience.
It’s more natural to be sceptic, be on the safe side – something wrong will
arrive, you are not surprised. You are more surprised when something nice
arrives.
“But in my experience in life I feel that being optimistic is wiser and more
realistic than being pessimistic. My life is a sum-up of the victories of
optimism, not of pessimism.”
One such victory in Mr Peres’ eyes is the 1993 Oslo Peace Accords, agreed
while he was foreign minister and for which he shared a Nobel prize with
Yitzhak Rabin, the then Israeli prime minister who was subsequently
assassinated, and Yasser Arafat, the late Palestinian leader.
It is not a view widely shared by Israelis – or Palestinians, for that matter
– many of whom gave up the accords for dead after the early optimism
descended into violence, leading in turn to the present diplomatic
stalemate.
“How can they be dead?” retorts Mr Peres in defence of his crowning political
legacy. Oslo, he argues, was the crucial beginning that also crafted the
desired end-game – the two-state solution that has now become international
diplomacy’s Holy Grail. The stumbling block is the chasm in between. But
that can be bridged with further negotiation, he says.
“We have a Palestinian Authority. We have a Palestinian security force…
[created] with the consent of Israel,” he argues. “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas,
the Palestinian Authority president] has today a force of 30,000 persons and
in Arab terms, a security force is not less important than the political
one. And they are trying to introduce order to stop terror. They are
building their own economy. Without Oslo it would never have started.”
It is on the topic of Mr Abbas that the Israeli president veers most sharply
away from the views of Mr Netanyahu’s government. In contrast to the prime
minister, who has not met the Palestinian leader since 2010, Mr Peres holds
Mr Abbas in high esteem, having held several public and private meetings
with him over recent years.
Asked if Mr Abbas was Israel’s best-ever “partner for peace”, Mr Peres – who
has negotiated with a host of Arab leaders including Mr Arafat and King
Hussein of Jordan – has no doubts: “In many ways, yes… Nobody’s perfect, but
by and large he is a serious man, a man that wants peace, a man that negates
terror and there are some important political merits… [He] is a man in my
judgement that we can conclude peace [with].”
Mr Netanyahu’s coalition, formed in March, contains ministers – mainly from
the prime minister’s Likud party and the pro-settler Jewish Home – who view
the Palestinian leader with undisguised contempt.
Yet even the government’s more moderate elements are unimpressed with Mr
Abbas. Yair Lapid, the charismatic finance minister who leads the broadly
pro-peace Yesh Atid party, recently fiercely criticised him as a “founding
father of the concept of Palestinian victimhood”.
And Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator and the cabinet’s leading dove,
told journalists that the Palestinian leader’s credentials were flawed,
citing his lack of control of the Gaza Strip and failure to hold elections
since 2006. Mr Netanyahu himself has criticised Mr Abbas for refusing to
negotiate without preconditions and for seeking reconciliation with Hamas,
the Islamist group which runs Gaza and refuses to recognise Israel.
The sincerity of the prime minister’s own commitment to a two-state solution –
first declared in a speech at Tel Aviv’s Bar Ilan university in 2009 – has
come under scrutiny as his government continues to expand Jewish settlements
in the occupied West Bank and east Jerusalem. Last week, Danny Danon, the
deputy defence minister and a member of Mr Netanyahu’s Likud party,
suggested to The Times of Israel that the prime minister might only be
supporting peace talks because he knew there was little chance of agreement.
Mr Peres, however, says Mr Netanyahu has come to share – albeit slowly – his
view of the need for a Palestinian state, even at the painful price of
dumping his former ideological baggage.
“He’s said so, yes. For him it was an ideological departure. He wasn’t born
with the two-state solution – as a party, I mean. The fact that he has
agreed to it… is a change in the traditional ideology of the Likud Party.
There are realities in life. You can’t escape them. The fact that you have
an ideology doesn’t mean you don’t follow the reality.”
It is a more upbeat assessment than that given in a previous interview with
the New York Times magazine, when Mr Peres chided the prime minister for
failing to provide leadership to an Israeli population yearning for peace
but cynical about its prospects.
Mr Peres had already started his political career when Mr Netanyahu, 63, was
born.
With that gulf in experience, was the president able to exert a restraining
influence on the younger man’s more radical instincts? “I wouldn’t take such
a pretentious position,” he says, perhaps restrained by political
considerations as much as modesty. “We talk, we discuss, I think he listens
to me. That’s all I can say.”
But Mr Netanyahu’s relations with Barack Obama, for long chilly bordering on
hostile, have improved since the US president’s visit to Israel last March –
another positive harbinger, according to Mr Peres, who previously warned
that Israel risked losing American support through its hawkish policies.
“I don’t know what is in the depth of the heart of anybody. But today the
United States and Israel can function together in the aim, I believe, of
achieving peace, and that’s the most important feature of that
relation[ship].”
It is easy to forget, amidst all this talk of peace, that the younger Peres
was a renowned hawk who supported the earlier settlers’ movement and was
given responsibility by Israel’s founding prime minister, David Ben Gurion
(“my mentor”) for acquiring the country’s widely reputed but officially
unacknowledged nuclear arsenal.
Peres the elder statesman makes one of his few ventures into his distinguished
past to set out the time-honoured Israeli policy of “strategic ambiguity” –
which means neither confirming nor denying that it possesses nuclear
weapons. “I think the first statement about the policy was when President
Kennedy asked me in 1961 if Israel is going to build a nuclear bomb,” he
recalls. “I told him, ‘Mr President, Israel will never be the first to
introduce nuclear bombs in the Middle East and I don’t think this is our
intention. But if there is a legend that creates this sort of deterrent, why
not?’”
The hawkish Mr Peres flickers briefly when discussing Iran, whose nuclear
programme Israel views as an existential threat. He is polite but sharp when
told that Jack Straw, the former Foreign Secretary, had written in the Daily
Telegraph this year that an Iranian nuclear bomb would not be worth going to
war over: “I know Jack Straw. He is a fine gentleman. I wish he would be the
foreign minister of Iran, then I would really feel very well.”
Iran is seeking to become the hegemon of the Middle East, trying to build a
bomb and, he says – getting animated for the only time in the interview –
threatening to do away with Israel.
“Iran is a menace to the world. Why should Iran menace, tell me? What for?
They are the centre of terror, they send arms, they hang people, they kill
people, they provoke terror {so}… with all due respect, and I have respect
for Straw, it’s not enough.”
Affecting bewilderment, he adds: “You know what, I even don’t understand what
the hell they want.”
Nevertheless, Israel has no intention of unilaterally attacking Iranian
nuclear facilities, he suggests, but backs the Obama administration’s “good
policy” of intensified sanctions, twinned with diplomacy.
Yet Iran is the sole shadow on the bright Peres horizon. The Middle East three
decades from now will be a region marked not by war and conflict but by the
scientific and technological development promoted by his conference – with
Israel at peace and accepted by its neighbours.
Forget the Arab Spring. In the winter of his life, the world’s oldest
president foresees a spring of wider dimensions. “There is a world spring
and whether you are an Arab or a Jew or whatever you are, you cannot attend
the world spring with wintery dress. You have to dress accordingly and
[that] means you have to give supremacy to science, to globality [sic], to
human rights.”
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