The Israeli politician Shimon Peres has died at the age of 93. His demise has brought with it an avalanche of sentimental, mendacious, mostly revolting coverage in the liberal press, including not one but two gushing, dishonest, ignorant and self-serving obituaries in the Irish Times - one from Reuters, and one presumably from an IT staffer (or maybe taken from The Guardian or the New York Times).
Shimon Peres was a relic, and his death induces elite opinion in the West to mourn the loss of a relic in which it invested a huge volume of Panglossian, narcissistic, and destructive sentiment. Peres was the leader of Israel that Western liberals liked or wanted. They liked or wanted him because he gave a certain gloss to the gross realities of Zionism, its murderous aggression, its crimes against Palestinians and against humanity. Western liberals liked Peres because, unlike more rebarbative Revisionist figures such as Begin or Shamir, or even Netanyahu today, he made them feel good about protecting, respecting, trading with, doing diplomatic business with the major rogue state in the world.
But Peres was no 'symbol of peace', as the Irish Times called him. He presided over the Zionist project in its heyday of Western approval, when Israel could do no wrong. Yet, it was doing great wrong: attacking Egypt in 1956, conquering the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, transplanting colonial settlers to those territories from the 1970s onwards.
Specifically, Peres helped organise the 'Samson option', the Israeli nuclear programme and weapons-building project, which has never been officially acknowledged. Israel has never signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike its local rival, Iran.
Peres helped to negotiate the Oslo accords, which inaugurated the disastrous 1990s 'peace process'. It was Peres's presence and authority which allowed elite politicians and opinion-makers - like the ostriches of the Irish Times - to keep the sheen of peacemaking on a process which allowed one side to go on making war. For making war is what we must recognise Israeli settlement construction and expansion (entirely unaffected by the Oslo agreements) to be, and it was tensions around settlements (not the Palestinian suicide attacks which the Reuters obit drones on about repeatedly) which undermined whatever potential for peace there was.
Peres was Prime Minister when Israel launched 'Operation Grapes of Wrath', a devastating bombardment of south Lebanon in 1996. Notoriously, the IDF lobbed 155mm shells into a UN base at Qana, butchering 100 Lebanese civilians who had taken shelter there. Robert Fisk later uncovered video imagery of an IDF targeting drone in the air over Qana, which removed the slightest possibility that the massacre was a simple gunner's mistake.
Shimon Peres shot and cried, to use the brutal but truthful Israeli formulation - he did or presided over terrible things, and then managed to present to the world a putatively agonised and tragic conscience. It's a disgusting emotional and political strategy. Thank God he's gone. Here are two powerful exposés of Peres, by Marc Ellis and Ilan Pappé.
First, Ellis, from the fine American Mondoweiss site:
Shimon Peres, Israel's greatest ambassador, will be remembered for ...
And here is Pappé, writing on the Electronic Intifada site:
Shimon Peres was a relic, and his death induces elite opinion in the West to mourn the loss of a relic in which it invested a huge volume of Panglossian, narcissistic, and destructive sentiment. Peres was the leader of Israel that Western liberals liked or wanted. They liked or wanted him because he gave a certain gloss to the gross realities of Zionism, its murderous aggression, its crimes against Palestinians and against humanity. Western liberals liked Peres because, unlike more rebarbative Revisionist figures such as Begin or Shamir, or even Netanyahu today, he made them feel good about protecting, respecting, trading with, doing diplomatic business with the major rogue state in the world.
But Peres was no 'symbol of peace', as the Irish Times called him. He presided over the Zionist project in its heyday of Western approval, when Israel could do no wrong. Yet, it was doing great wrong: attacking Egypt in 1956, conquering the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, transplanting colonial settlers to those territories from the 1970s onwards.
Specifically, Peres helped organise the 'Samson option', the Israeli nuclear programme and weapons-building project, which has never been officially acknowledged. Israel has never signed up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, unlike its local rival, Iran.
Peres helped to negotiate the Oslo accords, which inaugurated the disastrous 1990s 'peace process'. It was Peres's presence and authority which allowed elite politicians and opinion-makers - like the ostriches of the Irish Times - to keep the sheen of peacemaking on a process which allowed one side to go on making war. For making war is what we must recognise Israeli settlement construction and expansion (entirely unaffected by the Oslo agreements) to be, and it was tensions around settlements (not the Palestinian suicide attacks which the Reuters obit drones on about repeatedly) which undermined whatever potential for peace there was.
Peres was Prime Minister when Israel launched 'Operation Grapes of Wrath', a devastating bombardment of south Lebanon in 1996. Notoriously, the IDF lobbed 155mm shells into a UN base at Qana, butchering 100 Lebanese civilians who had taken shelter there. Robert Fisk later uncovered video imagery of an IDF targeting drone in the air over Qana, which removed the slightest possibility that the massacre was a simple gunner's mistake.
Shimon Peres shot and cried, to use the brutal but truthful Israeli formulation - he did or presided over terrible things, and then managed to present to the world a putatively agonised and tragic conscience. It's a disgusting emotional and political strategy. Thank God he's gone. Here are two powerful exposés of Peres, by Marc Ellis and Ilan Pappé.
First, Ellis, from the fine American Mondoweiss site:
Shimon Peres, Israel's greatest ambassador, will be remembered for ...
And here is Pappé, writing on the Electronic Intifada site:
SHIMON PERES FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HIS VICTIMS
Conor
