“An ambassador is an honest man sent to lie abroad for the good of his country,” said the Britishstatesman, Sir Henry Wotton, some 400 years ago.
Shimon Peres is a perfect ambassador and an honorable man (as in the speech by Marc Anthonyabout the murderers of Caesar in Shakespeare’s play: “And they are all, all honorable men.”)He lies all the time, not for the good of his country, but for the good of his government and itshead, Ariel Sharon.
Peres resembles a man playing with his dog. The master throws a stick, the dog runs to retrieveit. Sometimes the dog is so quick that it catches the stick in the air. That is Peres’ act, too: hethrows a statement, and his dog, called “Denial”, runs and retrieves it.
This happened three times last week. Peres announced that Yasser Arafat had agreed to acease-fire, and then denied it. He convinced President Mubarrak that a cease-fire was aboutto begin any minute, and then denied it. (Not before Mubarrak had already made a highlyembarrassing announcement.) He declared that Arafat is not responsible for the terror, andthen denied it (when Sharon’s people hit him over the head.)
Peres’ admirers – yes, there still are some – argue that he lies for a good cause. It’s alltactics, they say: he tells each party that the other one has agreed to his ideas.Unfortunately, the result is the very opposite: all parties become convinced that there is nochance of peace.
Truth is, Peres is himself a walking lie. When a Nobel Peace Prize laureate appears as Sharon’smessenger, he creates the illusion that Sharon really wants peace, while Sharon himself saysand does the opposite. Peres serves Sharon as a bullet-proof vest, protecting him from thebullets of criticism, while Sharon continues with his policy of assassinations(“liquidations” in the Mafia-style slang of the occupation officers), destroysneighborhoods and enlarges settlements, in the course of his war against the Palestinianpeople. In the tradition of the oldest profession, Peres offers his services for a price. Itcould be called Perestitution.
The gossips, who are called “political correspondents” in Israel, invent battles betweenSharon and Peres. The truth is different: a nearly perfect harmony prevails between the two.Peres is the ideal collaborator. It is doubtful whether Sharon could do what he does withoutPeres’ special expertise.
Let’s take, for example, the “Egyptian-Jordanian initiative”. It offers a simple deal: anend to the Palestinian uprising in return for an end to the settlement activity. Afterwardsthe political negotiations will be resumed to bring about a final settlement within a year.Reasonable? Well, yes.
Sharon, a very unsophisticated man, rejected the proposal “out of hand”. (Rejecting “out ofhand” is the hallmark of Israeli-style masculinity.) Peres convinced him to adopt a moresophisticated method: to accept the proposal and reject its contents. In other words, tocastrate it while mouthing good wishes for a happy birth.
To stop the settlement activity? Yes, of course, with pleasure, why not. The government hasalready declared in its “basic guidelines” that it will not build new settlements. But onemust provide for “natural growth”. Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Especially when it comesfrom the mouth of a Nobel-prize laureate like Peres.
Well, first, the “basic guidelines” are not worth the paper they are written on. I would not besurprised if they hang on the wall of the Prime Minister’s office lavatory. Every newgovernment, upon its creation, presents them to the Knesset when it asks for its vote ofconfidence, and from that moment on they are forgotten. They have no legal standingwhatsoever.
Second, the talk about not setting up new settlements is manifestly mendacious. On the WestBank and in the Gaza Strip dozens of new settlements have been set up in the guise of newneighborhoods of old settlements. For example: at this very moment the government isendeavoring to put up a new settlements on Tal hill, under the pretext that it is just a newneighborhood of Alfei Menashe settlement, which lies a few kilometers from there. Efratsettlement looks like a string of sausages going on for kilometers, and from time to time a newsettlement is set up on the next hill.
“Natural growth” is an especially sophisticated lie. The government does not say “naturalincrease”, which would mean houses for the children of the old settlers. “Natural growth” issomething else altogether. It has no limits. It can be stretched like chewing gum. Who willdecide what is “natural” and what is “growth”? Sharon, of course. Indeed, since the Osloagreement, in which Israel undertook not to change the reality on the ground, the number ofsettlers has nearly doubled under the guise of “natural growth”. Even if the settlers bredlike rabbits and entered the Guiness Book of Records for it, they could not achieve such a highnatural increase.
But the pinnacle of sophistication was achieved by Peres in his proposal that thePalestinians should end the “terror”, and then, several months later, negotiations wouldstart again. Meaning: the Palestinians will lay down their arms in return for nothing. ThePalestinian public will certainly reject a proposal that says that its more than 400 martyrswill have fallen in vain and the intifada will end in capitulation, in the hope that Sharon willoffer concessions after the Palestinians have been disarmed. Especially when two or threesuicide-bombers could at any time provide a pretext for stopping everything. But Peres canpretend that he made a far-reaching offer for peace.
The basis of all these lies is, of course, the use of the word “terror”, which denies the factthat this is an uprising of the whole Palestinian people, including all sectors andorganizations. The denial of this simple fact leads to the ridiculous debate in Israel aboutwhether Arafat “wants” or “can” put an end to the “violence”. The answer is: Yes and yes, ifIsrael makes an offer that the majority of the Palestinian people are ready to accept. If not,the answer is: No and no. There is no difference between Arafat and his people in this respect,and any effort to create such a difference is futile, suited more to an occupation-forcebrigade-commander than to a Nobel-prize laureate.
I believe that all this is clear to Peres. He lies brazenly to the world, the Americans,Mubarrak, the Palestinians. I don’t believe he lies to Sharon. Well, maybe a little, out ofhabit.
Somebody has said that Israel now resembles a Video cassette in rewind mode, rolling back to1948 and beyond. Peres is a part of this process. After the intermezzo of the New Middle East, heis becoming again what he was all his life: a Zionist hawk, the defense minister who put thefirst settlement (Kedumim) in the middle of the West Bank, an architect of the French-Israelicollusion against Egypt, Ben-Gurion’s messenger-boy. And at every stage – an inveterateliar.