Mon Mar 25, 2024
March 25, 2024

Shimon Peres, the man of the “peace of the graveyard”

The statements of global leaders about the death of Israeli ex-PM Shimon Peres last September 27th, at the age of 93, reveal the colonial peace they defend for Palestine. Peres was not a “man of peace”: he used that rhetoric in service of the Zionist project – in which he played a decisive role. A project of removal of the native Palestinian population for the construction of Israel as a Jewish state.

By Soraya Misleh.

 

Born in Poland in 1923 and emigrated to Palestine in 1930, he was part of the so-called “Labour Zionists” – which were no different from the “revisionists” in their actions and purposes, but tried to be different from the latests through a clear affirmation of their colonial intentions. A school which Peres helped to create and to which he was loyal throughout his life.

He was a disciple of the founder of Israel, David Ben-Gurion. He called himself a “Ben-gurionist”. Together with his leader, Peres was one of the architects of the ethnic cleansing which culminated in the Nakba (the Palestinian catastrophe) a little more than 68 years ago; and he was part of the most important paramilitary militia, the Haganah, responsible for innumerable atrocities in the Palestinian hamlets. He claimed these forces demonstrated the “purity of weapons”.

And even at the end of his life, in a statement from 2013, he raised the old and now discredited myth of the “unpopulated land for a landless people” – that is, the idea that the Palestinians were not a people. A logical dehumanization for someone who has an extensive resumé of participating in massacres.

In this list we have to count the massacre in Qana, Lebanon, in 1996, which resulted in the murder of 154 people – with the recurrent and false argument of the “defense of Israel”, frequently used in pre-electoral times like it was the case back then.

A defendant of the policy of Israeli settlements from its beginning, and of the murderous siege of Gaza, it was during his government that the genocidal offensives to the narrow strip of 2008-2009 and 2012 took place – and during the last one, in 2014, he left the Presidency, not before authorizing it [the continuation of the attacks]. His history also includes the construction of the Israeli nuclear program, the order for kidnapping the chemist Mordechai Vanunu after his denounciation of this program to the world, and the collaboration with the apartheid in South Africa (he even offered nuclear assistance to this regime in 1975).

In these almost seven decades, he was Prime Minister of Israel twice, and President from 2007 to 2014; he was part of 12 cabinets and Minister of Defense, Foreign Affairs and Finances. One of his greatest deeds was being laureated with the Nobel Prize of Peace in 1994, along with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, for their central role in the consolidation of the ill-fated Oslo Accords of September 1993 – a second Nakba for Palestinians, as history showed.

The reality of Oslo – “the Treaty of Versailles of the Palestinian cause”, as said by the Palestinian intellectual Edward Said – shows the kind of peace Peres defended and wanted. A pacification with total economic dependence of the Palestinian National Authority (PNA), consequent security cooperation with the State of Israel, and normalization of relations amidst the apartheid and occupation of Palestinian lands. Against this “peace” stands the Palestinian resitance. To Peres it is left the graveyard of History for murderers and colonists.

**

Sources:

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/israel-elder-statesman-shimon-peres-dead-93-160128070510467.html

https://noticias.terra.com.br/mundo/oriente-medio/dirigentes-mundiais-comparecerao-ao-funeral-de-shimon-peres-em-jerusalem,a71b928b122e920d297eddf285bad9f6ow84x2ci.html

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20160928-shimon-peres-israeli-war-criminal-whose-victims-the-west-ignored/

**

Translation: Gabriel Tolstoy.

 

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