HANAN ASHRAWI : Shimon Peres: The Peacemaker Who Wasn’t
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Now that the funeral of Shimon Peres,
the former Israeli president and prime minister, is over and the
effusive praise of world leaders has subsided, it’s time for a critical
look at his legacy. While many remember him as a courageous and tireless
advocate for peace, Palestinians recall a different man — one who was very good at talking peace but not so good at walking the walk.
Much
of Mr. Peres’s reputation is based on his role in the Oslo Accords. In
the early 1990s, he was involved in back-channel discussions that led to
the historic signing of Oslo I, also known as the Declaration of Principles, by Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization
amid much fanfare on the White House lawn. In 1994, along with Yitzhak
Rabin and Yasir Arafat, he was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize for his
efforts.
It
was during this period that I first met Mr. Peres, after I helped to
initiate contact between Israel and the P.L.O., along with the Israeli
academics Ron Pundak and Yair Hirschfeld. As foreign minister in Mr.
Rabin’s government, Mr. Peres followed up on these secret meetings,
leading to Israel’s agreeing — for the first time — to negotiate with
the P.L.O.
Back
then, Palestinians were optimistic about a future free of Israel’s
dominance. We hoped that Mr. Peres and other Israeli leaders would
follow up their statements in support of peace with determined action to
reach a just and lasting agreement to end the conflict. As it turned
out, there was little correlation between their lofty rhetoric and their
actual policies.
The
promise of the Oslo peace process was never fulfilled, in large part
because of the failures of Mr. Peres and the “peace camp” in Israel, but
also thanks to the flaws in the Declaration of Principles itself.
Because the declaration enabled Israel to act with impunity over
destructive unilateral measures like settlement expansion— given the
lack of will on the part of the United States to hold Israel to account —
it was inevitable that a culture of hate and racism against the
Palestinians would ensue.
During
the negotiations of the accord, discussion of core issues — such as
borders and settlements, the fate of Palestinian refugees and the status
of Jerusalem — was postponed in favor of a gradual approach without any
guarantees, arbitration process or accountability, giving Israel a free
hand to prejudge the outcome. Oslo developed into a process for the
sake of a process, rather than a means to end the conflict.
Mr.
Peres once told me that engaging in peace talks is like being an
airplane pilot. The pilot’s mother wants him to fly low and slow, but
that’s a recipe for disaster. In order to make peace, you need to fly
high and fast, otherwise you will crash and fail. Unfortunately, Mr.
Peres did not take his own advice.
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Crucially,
Israel persisted in building settlements on occupied land that was
supposed to be part of a Palestinian state, and even expanded the
program. Under Mr. Peres’s tenure as foreign minister, defense minister
and prime minister during the early days of the Oslo process in the
1990s, Israel continued to create facts on the ground that undermined
the creation of a viable and contiguous Palestinian state alongside
Israel, which Palestinians believed was the aim of the peace process.
In
the case of Jerusalem, in 1993 Mr. Peres promised me and the
Palestinian politician Faisal Husseini that Israel would respect the
integrity of Palestinian institutions in occupied East Jerusalem and
allow them to remain open. He went so far as to send a letter to Norway’s foreign minister, Johan Holst, with his assurances. Yet when Israel shut down
the P.L.O.’s Jerusalem headquarters, the Orient House, and other major
Palestinian institutions in 2001, Mr. Peres, who was once again foreign
minister, this time under the hard-liner Ariel Sharon, did nothing.
As
the world turned its attention to other conflicts, thinking the Oslo
process would lead to peace, Palestinians saw Israel’s occupation become
more entrenched, rather than being dismantled. In addition to
accelerating settlement growth, under Mr. Peres’s direction, Israel
imposed new restrictions on Palestinians and their freedom of movement.
After seven years of negotiations, during which the situation of
Palestinians deteriorated steadily, growing disillusionment and despair
that Israel was using the peace process as cover to steal more
Palestinian land led to the outbreak of the second intifada.
While
Palestinians certainly made mistakes, Israel, as the stronger and
occupying power, held most of the cards during the Oslo process. This
imbalance was worsened by the American mediators, who frequently acted
more like “Israel’s lawyer,” as one of them later wrote, than fair and neutral referees.
Finally,
the Oslo process failed because Mr. Peres and other Israeli leaders
never fully accepted the concept of a truly independent state alongside
Israel. Rather than a dismantling of the occupation and an evolution of
Palestinian independence as initially envisioned, successive Israeli
governments ended up undermining Palestinian statehood and reinventing
the occupation as an unaccountable system of control and expansion.
If
Mr. Peres had acted swiftly and decisively in pursuit of peace upon
assuming power after the 1995 assassination of Mr. Rabin by an Israeli
extremist opposed to Israel’s withdrawal from the occupied territories,
Oslo might have been salvaged. Instead, he attempted to compete with the
right-wing Likud Party on its terms. This culminated in the Qana
massacre, when Lebanese civilians sheltering in a United Nations
compound were shelled by Israeli artillery, during the bloody attack on
Lebanon that he ordered shortly before the 1996 election. As a result,
many in Israel who genuinely supported peace lost faith in Mr. Peres,
including Palestinian citizens of Israel, and he lost the election.
Of
course, Palestinians’ faith in Mr. Peres had been tested before. Not
forgotten by Palestinians and others in the region is the role that he
played arming the Israeli forces that expelled some 750,000 Palestinians
during the establishment of Israel in 1948; the regional nuclear arms
race he incited by initiating Israel’s secret atomic weapons program in
the 1950s and ’60s; his responsibility for establishing
some of the first Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian land in
the ’70s; his public discourse as a minister in Likud-led coalitions,
justifying Israeli violations of Palestinian rights and extremist
ideology; and his final role in Israeli politics as president, serving
as a fig leaf for the radically pro-settler government of Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu.
Indeed,
it was Mr. Netanyahu’s rise to prime minister in 1996 that torpedoed
any lingering hopes for peace. A few years later, he would be caught on
video boasting to a group of settlers that he had “de facto put an end to the Oslo Accords.”
After
the collapse of the Oslo process and the ensuing violence, the dual
myths of the “generous offer” made to Mr. Arafat at Camp David and the
claim that there was no Palestinian partner for peace took hold in
Israel. This narrative helped fuel a rising tide of right-wing extremism
that continues to this day. Mr. Peres himself helped to perpetuate
these myths as foreign minister under Mr. Sharon, doing tremendous
damage to subsequent efforts to restart negotiations.
Over
the past decade, the Labor Party that Mr. Peres once led has become all
but irrelevant as a diluted version of the Likud. At the same time, Mr.
Netanyahu’s hard-line, rejectionist Likud and even more extreme parties
have come to dominate Israeli politics, generating a toxic mix of
racism, religious messianism and hyper-nationalism.
It’s
true that compared with Mr. Netanyahu and other contemporary Israeli
politicians, Mr. Peres was a dove, but that’s saying very little. In
order to truly measure the man, he must be judged on his actions, not
his words and reputation — nor, indeed, in comparison to the dangerous
right-wing fanatics who now make up Israel’s government.
Regardless
of the flaws in the process, the pursuit of peace remains a noble
endeavor. But Mr. Peres’s failure to translate lofty ideals into action
continues to haunt that elusive quest in Palestine and Israel.
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian
lawmaker and a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s
executive committee, was the spokesperson for the Palestinian delegation
to the 1991 Madrid peace conference.
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A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 3, 2016, on page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: The peacemaker who wasn’t.
The true legacy of Shimon Peres is as the dove who gave cover to Israel’s hawks.
nytimes.com/2016/10/03/opi…|Di Hanan Ashrawi
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