There is no place for Shimon Peres in the State of Israel

[Oh Jerusalem]

Israel's loser is still on the loose.

Peres Says Religious Parties Have no Place in the State of Israel (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=64435)
10:56 Jun 22, '04 / 3 Tammuz 5764

(IsraelNN.com) Addressing a Jewish Agency forum in Jerusalem, opposition leader MK Shimon Peres stated yesterday that there is no room in the State of Israel for religious parties.

Peres added that there is a place for religious persons in the nation’s political parties but there is no place in our system for religious parties, explaining that religion is non-compromising while the political arena demands compromise.

Peres’ remarks were met by angered responses from members of the Shas Party and the National Religious Party, both Orthodox political parties.

[KSO]

Shimon Peres Done many good things for Israel, but now he is pathetic, He should retire immideatly and take his party with him.

[NewsGuy]

As it turns out, Peres and Labor with their security blanket are now much stronger than at any time during the past few years, because of Sharon's withdrawal plan.

I read yesterday that Sharon was moving closer to the religious parties, but I think that his real preference is for a coalition with Labor.

Maybe Peres' comments were directed at this recent development.

[NewsGuy]

I find it hard to understand how a party headed by Fuad ben Eliezer, Yuli Tamir, Avrum Burg and Shimon Peres is still in a position of influence.

[NewsGuy]

test

[Oh Jerusalem]

Originally posted by KSO
Shimon Peres Done many good things for Israel, but now he is pathetic.
He's been pathetic for ages (http://www.afsi.org/SHIMON2001/shimon2001.htm).

[Oh Jerusalem]

Originally posted by NewsGuy
I find it hard to understand how a party headed by Fuad ben Eliezer, Yuli Tamir, Avrum Burg and Shimon Peres is still in a position of influence.
One down. Giid riddance!

Burg Planning to Pull Out of Politics (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=64502)
09:25 Jun 23, '04 / 4 Tammuz 5764

(IsraelNN.com) Army Radio reported this morning that Labor Party MK and former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg in the coming weeks will be resigning from the Knesset and political life to enter a lucrative business enterprise. When asked to comment on the report, Burg declined to confirm or deny the information.

Speaking to Army Radio, Labor Party leader MK Shimon Peres also declined to comment on the report.

[Oh Jerusalem]

Today's JPost has an editiorial with a frightening title but a more consoling content.

Peres forever (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1088046777862&apage=2)

Has there ever been a more enduring political phenomenon than Labor leader Shimon Peres?

Fidel Castro was just another guerrilla in the mist when Peres was director-general of the Defense Ministry, plotting Moshe Sharrett's downfall and laying the foundations of Dimona. He's been at the center of Israeli and world events ever since.

Is this a good thing?

For those who generally oppose Peres ideologically (as we do), the facile answer is no. His last great service to Israel was in the 1980s, when he tamed inflation. After that, the practical statesman gave way to the prophet. He treated the peace process as an article of faith rather than a political hypothesis susceptible to disproof. He empowered Yasser Arafat and gave him one pass after another when someone needed to yell "Stop!" He helped create the perception abroad that the arguments of the Israeli Right were not only wrong but immoral. And, it can be argued, he unwittingly persuaded the Palestinians that Israel would bargain everything away in the face of terror.

At the same time, we must ask whether all this could have been avoided had Peres simply retired from politics in 1987. Probably not. Oslo - if not in its precise form, then in its basic drift - was more than just the strange and accidental contrivance of a few self-deceived men. It was a creative, albeit profoundly flawed, response to an elemental fact; namely, that the Greater Israel project would not succeed and something had to be done about it. (The Right, for all its clear-sightedness about Arafat, was a decade late in recognizing this.) Had Peres exited the game, would it not have been left to lesser men to accomplish this?

Indeed, it was left to lesser men. Ehud Barak, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Amram Mitzna - each of these would-be kings was more incompetent, more obtuse, more churlish and more dangerous to his party and his state than his immediate predecessor. By their standards, Peres comes out looking remarkably well.

The problem is that the longer Peres perdures and dominates, the longer it will be before the Israeli Left can coalesce around a new set of plausible leaders and practicable ideals. As we have written before in this space, Israel desperately needs a Zionist Left. Instead, what we're getting is a Left ever more alienated from a country that no longer flatters its moral and cultural vanities. This is the Left of Avraham Burg, who sees fit to denounce Zionism in the pages of Le Monde. It is the Left of Beilin, who sees nothing inappropriate in conducting a private foreign policy for a country that ejected him from the Knesset. It is the Left that, as Amos Oz once noted, will accept Israel only on its own terms. It is the Left that will never govern, but will do its utmost to make it impossible to govern. It is, finally, the Left that only the Left itself can quash.

Peres's recent shift leftward on economic policy, along with his ongoing conversations with Palestinian Authority officials, does not inspire confidence that he's the man to do this. The Left needs to understand that, while it was prescient about the need for separation, it was utterly wrong about the possibility of peace with this generation of Palestinian leaders. And it has to draw the appropriate conclusions, especially the need to restore the Israeli electorate's confidence in its toughness.

At some point, perhaps, the Left will get it. Meanwhile, it has Peres, who is, at once, the party's last best hope, and the principal obstacle to its own salvation.

[Oh Jerusalem]

Originally posted by Oh Jerusalem
One down. Giid riddance!

Burg Planning to Pull Out of Politics (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=64502)

It's official.

MK Burg Resigns (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=64663)
11:20 Jun 27, '04 / 8 Tammuz 5764

(IsraelNN.com) MK (Labor) Avraham Burg submitted his resignation to Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin about one hour ago. The resignation takes effect in 48 hours.

[KSO]

Originally posted by Oh Jerusalem
It's official.

MK Burg Resigns (http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=64663)
11:20 Jun 27, '04 / 8 Tammuz 5764

(IsraelNN.com) MK (Labor) Avraham Burg submitted his resignation to Knesset Speaker Ruby Rivlin about one hour ago. The resignation takes effect in 48 hours.

Oh No... not Burg! Why?!! God?! Why?! What have we done to desrve this?!
Ohh the Humanity!!

[Oh Jerusalem]

Today's JPost minces no words in reminding us of why Burg will not be missed. I was pleasantly suprised by the JPost's politically incorrect denigration of Burg. Sort of like "don't forget to close the door on your way out!"

Burg goes home (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1088305776782&p=1006953079865)

Sixteen years after he and another 17 new parliamentary faces set out to revolutionize the Labor Party's following, Avraham Burg is going home, leaving for the public plenty of generational, structural, and ideological food for thought.

On the generational level, the mind boggles at the thought that Burg's patron, Shimon Peres, has not only launched but also survived his protege's entire political career. Moreover, the carefully engineered circle of which Burg was a part – a group of eight relatively young people who included a woman (Yael Dayan), an Arab (Nawaf Masalhah), a kibbutznik (Hagai Merom), a development-town mayor (Amir Peretz), and an intellectual (Yossi Beilin) – has been all but scattered in the wind.

Clearly, the main cause of this generational failure was the demise of the Oslo vision. Its members' dedication to the diplomatic formula which for most Israelis eventually became anathema, condemned its protagonists to the political margins. Consequently, two ended up in Meretz-Yahad, another – Peretz – focused on the so-called social ticket, and one flirted with the now-deceased Center Party. Only one, Haim Ramon, eventually rejected his former colleagues' peace-in-our-time gospel, as he became a leader of the pro-separation fence school of thought.
Still, Burg's personal case is even more thought provoking, and tragic, than his colleagues'. Of the eight, there was another person (Dayan) who was born into power, and another three (Beilin, Ramon, Peretz) who ended up heading large agencies. Burg was the only one who belonged in both categories. With a 16-year hindsight, one is at a loss to detect his long-term imprint on any part of our political landscape.

As chairman of the Jewish Agency in the 1990s, Burg led a cutback plan, and as speaker of the Knesset from 1999 to 2003 he led a computerization drive. Alas, his pretensions reached far beyond such managerial goals, while his accomplishments forced the public to agree with Yitzhak Rabin, who saw him as a verbose lightweight unworthy of a cabinet post.

Just how much the public resented his claim to national leadership became apparent in 2001, when even in the aftermath of Ehud Barak's decimation at the polls, and even when faced with an electorally unattractive opponent like Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, Labor's own members rejected Burg as their choice for party leader.

Sadly, the more his political fortunes dwindled, the more Burg became bitter, entrenched, and belligerent. At first, this attitude made him join the Geneva initiative that undermined the authority of Israel's elected government, and then it made him publish abroad a scathing attack on the Zionist enterprise's current leadership, which he claimed had come to rest "on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression." At that point he lost whatever respect he might still have enjoyed within the political mainstream. Such sweeping statements would be uncalled for even in one of our brutish TV talk shows, where Burg was always welcome, but to go with this kind of rotten merchandise in print indicated a complete loss of cool, balance, and dignity.

Real leaders don't respond in such impulsive ways when things don't work their way. And Burg was no real leader, only the son of one – longtime National Religious Party head Yosef Burg – who hooked up with another mythological leader, Shimon Peres. This history allowed him to offer the unusual combination of Orthodox peace crusader. That is how he won, almost effortlessly, the opportunity to head a major organization like the Jewish Agency, only to soon make it plain he would merely use that opportunity to leap from there to yet higher office.

This selfish and abusive attitude toward public office has become common here in recent years, across the political spectrum. That is how Roni Milo regarded his mayoralty of Tel Aviv, how Ehud Olmert viewed his years as Jerusalem's mayor, and how Haim Ramon treated his leadership of the Histadrut. Like them, Burg lacked the patience to build himself slowly, and accomplish something impressive on a lower level before he could be seriously considered for office on a higher level.

That is how, even as he leaves the public scene as a 49-year-old political has-been, we have no reason to predict that Avraham Burg will be missed.

[Oh Jerusalem]

This is rich - a delightful comedy - or is it maybe a tragedy? It reveals everything about Peres, now and then. There is nothing new under the sun.

The year is 1977. The slithering snake gets his head crushed. Not the first time. Not the last.

Begin has the last word (http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1088391895173&p=1006953079865)
By YEHUDA AVNER

'Begin's speaking!" cried the press secretary, poking his head through the door of the Knesset restaurant.

Like hounds to a horn, the parliamentary correspondents jumped up as a pack and piled out of the eatery, up the stairway and into the press gallery, where they peered down on the wily old Knesset fox standing at the podium, whetting his appetite to lure Shimon Peres into his lair.

It was September 2, 1977, and a day-long foreign affairs debate was drawing to a close. Opening it, prime minister Menachem Begin had revealed that he was working on the draft of a prototype peace treaty in readiness for a possible Geneva peace parley, at the initiative of the American president.

Shimon Peres, the leader of the opposition, roundly ridiculed the notion, calling it "pie in the sky." Israel would never have peace with its neighbors, he contended, so long as the government was unwilling to make painful and far-reaching territorial concessions on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, not to speak of the Sinai and the Golan Heights.

"So stop lulling the nation into pipe dreams," he mocked. "Knesset Member Shimon Peres," said Begin artlessly, "I should like to read you some quotations."
He held up a sheet of paper, brandishing it for the whole House to see. "I'm quite sure they will sound familiar to you, Mr. Peres."

The prime minister looked immensely pleased with himself, relishing the lethal parliamentary moment he was about to trigger. He placed the page close to his nose, adjusted his spectacles and, cocking one eye toward the press gallery to make sure the pack was there, declaimed in a faint theatrical mimic:

"'It is a fallacy to believe that the solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict depends on our willingness to grant territorial concessions.'"

"Well?" snickered Begin in Peres's direction, flourishing the page. "Who do you think wrote that?"

Letting the question hang, he scanned the chamber from end to end, jaw jutting, expression derisive, his gaze finally settling on the object of his scorn, who sat bristling in the number one seat of the opposition front bench looking daggers back at him.

"Knesset Member Shimon Peres, you wrote that, did you not? And who wrote: 'I know that no territorial concession proposed by us will meet with a positive Arab response. To think otherwise is futile.' Who wrote that?"

A buzz began to drone around the packed Knesset chamber. Members sat grinning, grimacing or glowering, each according to his politics.

"I ask again, who wrote that?" goaded Begin.

The buzz in the chamber rose. "Quiet!" bellowed the chairman. "Order!" "I'll tell you who wrote that," snarled Begin. "Knesset Member Shimon Peres wrote that! And who wrote: 'How can anybody believe that if we settled east Samaria the Arabs would be more amenable to peace than if we were to settle west Samaria?' Who wrote that?"

THE GLOWERERS and gloaters now began to heckle one another. Not a one heeded the frantic gavelling of the chairman."

"Knesset Member Shimon Peres wrote that," teased Begin above the tumult, "And who said, 'Everybody agrees we must hold on to the Golan Heights because they are strategic high ground. But there is also strategic high ground in Judea and Samaria, at the foot of which lie Israel's most densely populated centers, the coastal plain.' Who said that?"

The gavel of the chairman, a small man with a small voice, rose and fell as if it was a noiseless thing. Slowly, he got to his feet, immobilized, his face distorted with frustration.

In vast contrast, the prime minister seemed amused. He leaned nonchalantly against the podium, fingers steepled, a smug sneer hovering over his lips. And once the uproar began to subside, he rearranged his sardonic look into a frown, straightened himself up, and pointed a grim finger at the leader of the opposition.

"Now listen well to what I'm about to add, Mr. Peres. It is important the nation hear the facts. It is important they know what kind of a leader advocates one policy one day and another the next."

Begin was nettling the man like a faultfinding referee to an outmatched contestant.

[Oh Jerusalem]

(continued)

Caustic with contempt, Peres shot back: "I always listen well to your Knesset routines, Mr. Prime Minister. But don't think you can mislead the nation today. Everybody here knows those statements you attribute to me were made at a different time."

Upon extracting this admission of authorship, the prime minister stroked his chin with great satisfaction.

"Really!" he said in feigned surprise. "I've heard you speak many a time and, always, you stated your conviction that it was fallacious to think that territorial compromise would bring peace. Those quotations I just cited expressed your earnest and honest political beliefs – until now.

"So, what suddenly made you change your mind, Mr. Peres? What happened between those statements I quoted just now and your dovish views of today? Tell us, Mr. Peres."

You could sense by the sudden razor bite in Begin's voice that he was ready for the kill. But Peres forestalled him: "Conditions change, positions change, only fools don't change," he retorted. "Only fools cling to fantasies and to obsolete dreams."

The way he said it, his every word calibrated, his every syllable scalpel-sharp, his every gradation savage, showed Peres had steeled himself for this duel. His devotees rallied around him in a vigorous outburst of approval, while he leaned back in his seat with the confident languor of a foilsman who had just parried a tricky swordplay.

Begin responded with a cheeky little grin. "Only fools, you say? Was it not Winston Churchill who said that the greatest lesson in life is to know that even fools are sometimes right? Well, Knesset Member Shimon Peres, tonight I'm right!"

The government benches heaved with laughter. Begin, feeling the scrap going his way, plunged in: "I shall now tell the House exactly what turned you from a hawk into a dove, what brought about your change of mind.

"You decided you wanted to seize the leadership of your party from Yitzhak Rabin, to position yourself to become prime minister one day. But to remove Rabin you first had to win the support of your party's left-wingers. And the only way you could do that was to trade in your ideological colors, to reinvent yourself from being a hawk to being a dove.

"And that's exactly what you did. Is that not right, Knesset Member Peres?"

Peres was on his feet, shaking his head violently, chopping the air with balled fists, shooting looks at his opponent that could freeze water. His usually rumbling, melancholy voice was strident with wrath as he howled that never in his life had he "sacrificed principle for expediency," or "sold his soul for a mess of political pottage." He had always been "a pragmatist and a realist, yet guided by moral imperatives."

Israel was engaged in "a struggle for its very existence" and had to constantly "be alive to new circumstances." He, therefore, refused "to remain a prisoner of outmoded doctrines." Indeed, his "sheer integrity compelled him to reappraise and reassess the situation."

Never once had he mislead the people, as the prime minister was doing now. "Never did I ever promise the nation," he raged, "that I would bring them instant and total peace wrapped up in a peace treaty without concessions. That is not a policy, it is an irresponsible flight of the imagination!"

This hit home. Begin blanched. Motionless, arms folded, lips pressed, his face granite, like his eyes, he said quietly, stubbornly, grimly: "Never did I make such a promise in my life. You have plucked this spurious charge out of thin air. It is a fiction! I challenge you to prove it otherwise."
But his opponent was not cowed. Knowing how his words had the power to wound, he hurled more: "Repeatedly, you insinuate that we stand at the threshold of peace as defined in a peace treaty. You said as much today."

Anger hung in the air between them like an invisible knife, their eyes locked in open warfare.

"Knesset Member Shimon Peres," seethed Begin, "I have just quoted to this house words you spoke and wrote yourself. I quoted them word for word. Now I challenge you to bring to this podium quotes from me, in my own words, asserting that we stand at the threshold of peace.

"I have never said it. The people of this house know that. They are well informed. You can't pull the wool over their eyes."

"Indeed you can't," countered Peres. "Which is why most people here see right through your whimsical flights of fancy. You're so enamored with your own words that you think they can move mountains. Well, they can't.

"You think a good speech is all it takes to get things done. Well, it isn't. You think you can run a government by oratory. Well, you can't. You think that just because you've prepared a draft of a peace treaty, it's as good as done. Well, it isn't."

Begin made a tent of strong, hairy fingers and responded in a tone that evoked high purpose and responsibility.

"Let me assure you and the whole House," he said solemnly, "I have no illusions about the obstacles awaiting us at a Geneva peace conference, were it ever to take place." [It did not]. "Indeed, if anything, it is your party, Mr. Peres, the Labor Party, that has been deceiving our nation for years, telling us tales about territorial compromises in exchange for peace.

"For years you have been proposing enormous concessions to our Arab neighbors, and their answer has always been the same: 'Totally unacceptable!'"

He stopped for a moment to rise to his full height, and with an expression conveying a mingling of tease and taunt, said, "So at least have the grace to be a good loser, Mr. Peres. You lost the elections, remember. Take it like a man. Stop sulking. Criticize us, if you will, in any way you want. This is a free, democratic parliament.

"But why with such excessive rancor? Why the uncontrolled fury? Why the baseless allegations? What's gotten into you, Mr. Peres? Get a grip on yourself."

And with that he stepped down from the podium into the well of the chamber, his mouth curved into the impish smile of one satisfied that he has had the last word.


The writer, a veteran diplomat, was an adviser to four prime ministers, including Menachem Begin. (avner28@netvision.net.il)