Uri Avnery
June 22, 2013
(A shorter version of this article was published in Haaretz on June 19, the day
after the official birthday.)
When the Gods Laugh
IF THE life of Shimon Peres was a play, it would be difficult to classify. A
tragedy? A comedy? A tragicomedy?
For sixty years it looked as if he was under a curse of the Gods, much like the
curse of Sisyphus, who was condemned to roll an immense boulder up a hill, and
every time he approached his goal the rock would roll down again to the bottom.
Disclosure: our lives have run somehow on parallel lines. He is one month older
than I. We both came to
We met for the first time 60 years ago, when we were 30 years old. He was the
Director General of
He was David Ben-Gurion’s main assistant, I was Ben-Gurion’s main enemy (so
defined by his security chief.) From there our paths crossed many times, but we
did not become bosom friends.
ALREADY IN his early childhood in Poland, Peres (still Persky) complained that
his mates in (Jewish) school beat him up for no reason. His younger brother had
to defend him.
When he came to
He had to make a much more momentous choice in the 1948 war, a war all of us
considered a life-and-death struggle. It was the decisive event in the life of
our generation. Almost all the young people hastened to join the fighting units.
Not Peres. Ben-Gurion sent him abroad to buy arms – a very important task, but
one that could have been carried out by an older person. Peres was considered a
shirker at the supreme test and was never forgiven by the 1948ers. Their
contempt plagued him for decades.
At the early age of 30 Ben-Gurion appointed him director of the Defense Ministry
– a huge advancement, which assured him a rapid rise to the top. And indeed, he
played a major role in pushing Ben-Gurion into the 1956
The French were struggling with the Algerian war for independence and believed
that their real enemy was the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser. They got
In my opinion, the war was a political disaster for
Throughout this period, Peres was the ultimate hawk, and a central member of a
group which my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, branded as “Ben-Gurion’s youth gang” – a
group we suspected of plotting to assume power by undemocratic means. But before
this could happen, Ben-Gurion was kicked out by the old party veterans, and
Peres had no choice but to join him in political exile. They formed a new party,
Rafi, Peres worked like mad, but in the end they garnered only 10 Knesset seats.
Peres and the boulder were back at the bottom.
Redemption came with the Six-day War. On its eve, Rafi was invited to join a
National Unity government. But the big prize was snatched by Moshe Dayan, who
became Minister of Defense and a world idol. Peres remained in the shadows.
The next opportunity arose after the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Golda Meir and Dayan
were pushed out by an incensed public. Peres was the obvious candidate for Prime
Minister. But lo and behold, at the last minute Yitzhak Rabin appeared from
nowhere and snatched the crown. Peres was left with the Defense Ministry.
The next three years were a continuous story of subversion, with Peres trying by
all available means to undermine Rabin. As a part of this effort, he allowed
right-wing extremists to establish the first settlement in the heart of the
Rabin coined a phrase that stuck to him: “Tireless Backstabber”.
This chapter ended with the “dollar account”. Upon leaving his former job as
ambassador in
It was never proved that Peres had a hand in the disclosure, though many
suspected it.
AT LONG last, the way was clear. Peres assumed the leadership of the party and
ran for elections. The Labor Party was bound to win, as it always had before.
But the Gods only laughed. After 44 years of continuous Labor Party dominance,
in the Yishuv and the state, Peres managed to achieve the unthinkable: he lost.
Menachem Begin made peace with Egypt, with Moshe Dayan, Peres’ competitor, at
his side. Soon afterwards, Begin invaded
In the election before that, Peres had a shattering experience. In the evening,
after the ballots were closed, Peres was crowned on camera as the next Prime
Minister. On the following morning,
The elections after that ended in a draw. For the first time Peres became Prime
Minister, but only under a rotation agreement. When Shamir assumed power, Peres
tried to unseat him in a dubious political plot. It failed. Rabin, caustic as
ever, called it “the Dirty Exercise”.
Peres’ unpopularity reached new depths. At election rallies, people cursed him
and threw tomatoes. When, at a party event, he posed the rhetorical question:
“Am I a loser?” the audience shouted in unison: “Yes!”
To change his luck, he underwent a cosmetic operation to alter his hangdog look.
But his lack of grace could not be remedied by a surgeon. Neither could his
oratorical skills – this man, who has delivered many tens of thousands of
speeches, has never expressed a truly original idea. His speeches consist
entirely of political platitudes, helped along by a deep voice, the dream of
every politician.
(This, by the way, disproves to me his pretense of having read thousands of
books. You cannot really read so many books without a trace of it showing up in
your writing and speeches. One of his assistants once confided to me that he
prepared resumes of fashionable books for him, to save him the trouble of
actually reading before quoting them.)
IN THE meantime, Peres the hawk turned into Peres the peacenik. He had a part to
play in achieving the
After
The assassination of Rabin was a turning point for Peres. He had been standing
near Rabin when the “peace song” was sung. He came down the stairs, when Yigal
Amir was waiting below, the loaded pistol in his hand. The murderer let Peres
pass and waited for Rabin – another crowning insult.
But, at long last, Peres had achieved his goal. He was Prime Minister. The
obvious thing to do was to call immediate elections, posing as the heir of the
martyred leader. He would have won by a landslide. But Peres wanted to be
elected on his own merit. He postponed the elections.
The results were disastrous. Peres gave the order to assassinate Yahya Ayyash,
the “engineer” who had prepared the Hamas bombs. In retaliation, the entire
country blew up in a tsunami of suicide bombings. Then Peres invaded
Later, when the feared Ariel
IN ALL his long political life, Peres never won an election. So he decided to
give up party politics and run for president. His victory was assured, certainly
against a nondescript Likud functionary like Moshe Katzav. The outcome was again
a crowning insult: little Katzav won against the great Peres. (Causing some
people to say: “If an election cannot be lost, Peres will lose it anyway!”)
But this time the Gods seem to have decided that enough was enough. Katzav was
accused of raping his secretaries, the way was clear for Peres. He was elected.
Since then he has been celebrating. The remorseful Gods shower him with favors.
The public, which detested him for decades, enveloped him with their love.
International celebrities anointed him as one of the world’s great.
He could not get enough of it. Hungry for love all his life, he swallowed
flattery like a barrel without a bottom. He talked endlessly about “Peace” and
the “New
The culmination came this Tuesday. Sitting alongside Netanyahu, Peres celebrated
his 90th birthday (two months before the real date), surrounded by a
plethora of national and international celebrities, basking in their glamor like
a teenager. It cost a lot – Bill Clinton alone got half a million dollars for
attending.
After all the cruelties they had inflicted on him all his life, the Gods laughed
benignly.