The Mask Slips on Israel’s Left

Dishonoring the dead:

Haaretz editor Uri Tuval.

P. David Hornik
Frontpagemag.com
19 April '10

“I don’t want to live in the country of Captain Eliraz Peretz or his mother. My consolations to the family…a family of Jihadist Fascists, and don’t dare let anyone say he was killed for my sake.”

The above quote is from Uri Tuval, editor of the magazine section of Israel’s left-wing daily Haaretz. He said it in a Facebook chat with other left-wing journalists, and even some members of his milieu were said to be dismayed at his words. This mini-scandal comes at a time when Haaretz is under attack for its central role in the much larger scandal of the Anat Kam espionage affair.

Eliraz Peretz was a 32-year-old Israeli soldier who was killed last month in a gunfight with terrorists in Gaza. His older brother Uriel died in combat in Lebanon in 1998. Miriam Peretz, the mother, was interviewed on Israeli TV after Eliraz’s death (it being customary in Israel to interview close relatives after the loss of soldiers). The Peretz family are observant Jews; Eliraz lived in the West Bank settlement of Eli.

To his credit, Tuval wrote a gracious apology to the Peretz family. He noted that he too is a soldier and that his father was killed in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. He said he had “stated my personal opinion on the reality we face in a provocative manner, on a forum that I viewed as private,” and that “We seem to disagree over the best way in which to build our national home.”

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‘G-d, I have paid my share’

This Remembrance Day, on her yearly visit to Mt. Herzl Military Cemetery, Miriam Peretz will have to choose which of her fallen sons to mourn first.


Tovah Lazaroff
JPost
16 April '10

As if she could lock out death, Miriam Peretz shut the door in the faces of the military officers who came to notify her that her son, Eliraz, 32, had been killed in Gaza. “I knew they were going to tell me he was gone,” she said, as she sat in the living room of her Givat Ze’ev home two weeks later and described for The Jerusalem Post the events of that painful Friday on March 26.

She’d reacted differently when her oldest son, Uriel, was killed in Lebanon, 12 years earlier, on his 22nd birthday, she said. On that late November night, she ran outside, wailing and shouting Uriel’s name loudly enough to wake the slumbering street.

This time she tried to hide from the news, as if by doing so she could keep Eliraz alive. “I didn’t want them to say anything. I just wanted a few more minutes with Eliraz. I felt he was still alive, and once they notified me of his demise that would be it. Those words would stop his life. “I didn’t want them to come into the house. I locked the doors and the windows and closed the shutters,” says Miriam.

Then she went over to the photograph of her late husband, Eliezer, hit her fist against the wall next to it, and shouted at him. “What have you done to Eliraz?”
As she speaks, she bangs her hand on the chair, so that it resounds with every word, like a beating drum. “You were supposed to fight for him there, while I protected him here,” she yelled at her husband.

“I was angry at Eliezer. Why didn’t you protect him? Why did you want him so badly?” she says, through tears.

As she stood there, someone opened the door for the officers. When she saw them, she ordered them not to speak.

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