Commentary Magazine..
17 February '15..
After a career that stretches back to Israel’s birth, 91-year-old Shimon Peres is a revered national institution. His multifaceted work in helping to build the state and especially its defense establishment demands respect and admiration. So, too, does a record of public service that saw him serve in virtually every key position of responsibility in the Israeli government. Thus, when Peres speaks, he deserves a hearing. But as much as he should be considered the last of the country’s living founding fathers, his past performance as a prophet is as bad as his resume is impressive. Thus, when Peres tells us today that European Jews shouldn’t panic, that Middle East peace will happen in his lifetime, and that, far from worrying about Iran, we should think the Islamist regime’s days are numbered, these predictions should be dismissed as not only wrong, but dangerously wrong. The problem with Peres is not just that his optimism is foolish, it’s that all too many people in the corridors of power in Washington and Western Europe think he knows what he’s talking about.
Peres served as the headliner at a Times of Israel event held Sunday night in New York and if his hosts were hoping that he would say something faintly newsworthy, the former Israeli president didn’t disappoint. He opposed Prime Minister Netanyahu’s calls for aliyah from Europe as being “political,” claiming that in doing so he was making Israel “a land of fear” rather than one of “hope.” Not satisfied with that astounding claim, he went on to claim that peace would soon break out in the Middle East, said he “trusted” President Obama to deal with the Iranian nuclear threat, opposed any “unilateral” acts against Tehran by the U.S. or Israel, and predicted that the Islamist regime in Iran would fall: “In 10-15 years, Iran will be out of water and thus out of ayatollahs, in my judgment.”
To which friends of Israel as well as supporters of the West can only say “amen,” even as they shake their heads in disbelief at the absurdity of much of what Peres said.
We might dismiss this as just a little more of the same optimism Peres has been selling for the last 25 years. Such statements are very popular, especially with American Jews who dislike being confronted with the intractability of the Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the awful scenarios that the Iranian nuclear program forces us to contemplate and he has done a brisk business peddling these notions among credible Western audiences for a long time.
But as ridiculous as Peres’s pie in the sky sermons may be, they are neither harmless nor without cost to Israel.
It should not be forgotten that this is the same man who not only promoted the Oslo Accords but also predicted in their aftermath that if everyone just tried hard enough, a “New Middle East” would soon arise that would allow Israel and its neighbors to become a new Western Europe. To those who asked him at the time why he was ignoring the reality of Palestinian rejectionism, support for terror, and the rise of fundamentalist Islam, he insouciantly replied that they were akin to those who “looked at the back of an airline ticket” and saw the disclaimers about crashes and other catastrophic outcomes. We should, he said, just trust the pilot and set back and enjoy the ride to peace. As the history of the following two decades proved, Peres wasn’t just wrong, he was willfully blind.
The cost of his mistaken policies wasn’t just paid in terms of the casualties that Israel suffered from the Palestinian terror offensives that Oslo enabled. It was also in a mindset in both Jerusalem and Washington that saw holding the Palestinians accountable for their incitement to violence and violations of the Accords as unhelpful to peace. Thus, when the inevitable explosions happened, both Israel and the United States were unprepared for what would follow and, to some extent, unwilling to face the reality that Peres had urged us to treat as details that would soon disappear.
The point here isn’t to point out his mistakes or to wonder at how his reputation as a wise man survived the implementation of some of the least-wise policies any sovereign state has ever devised and lived to tell the tale about. It’s that as long as Peres’s impressive Nobel Prize reputation survives intact, people listen to him and take his predictions and counsel seriously.
The mere fact that Peres is deprecating the obvious necessity to safeguard European Jewry in an era of rising anti-Semitism when their safety cannot be ensured by their governments is something that will be used to undermine the Zionist cause that he once served so well. His dismissal of the Iranian threat will be ammunition that the Obama administration will use to answer the cogent arguments against those sounding the alarm against its push for détente with a terror-supporting, genocide-threatening tyranny. As for peace with the Palestinians, surely even Peres should know better than to make such inane prognostications after Yasir Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas have turned down Israeli peace offers. But his sound bite will be resurrected not only to revive negotiations but also to buttress the efforts of those who will pressure Israel into dangerous concessions.
Shimon Peres’s lifetime of service to Israel may balance out the disastrous nature of some of the policies he advocated in the historian’s ledger. Prophets may never be honored in their own time, but unfortunately false prophets often are. So long as Peres is treated as an authority by the media and Western governments, his urging of more such fiascos on his successors is not only deplorable, it is downright dangerous.
Link: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2015/02/17/more-bad-advice-from-a-false-prophet-shimon-peres-middle-east-peace-process/
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