Shimon Peres is celebrating. Shimon Peres? The whole world is celebrating with him!
What has he got to celebrate?
Well, he has reached the age of 80. A respectable age. I can’t begrudge him. (After all, I myselfam now 80 years old, and I just had a celebration, too.)
When one gets to be 80 years old, it is customary to invite some friends round. So Peres invited afew pals, too. Such as Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev, Frederick de Klerk and JoschkaFischer, the presidents of Slovenia, Germany and Malta, not to mention the Ivory Coast,several billionaires, an assortment of ministers from various countries, some actors andsingers and the holocaustist Claude Lantzman. Diplomacy, entertainment and the holocaust,a tasteful mixture.
A whole luxury hotel has been booked for the 400 exalted guests, 1200 policeman will bemobilized, streets in two cities will be closed. Excellent. Something like the triumph of avictorious Roman Imperator coming home from the wars.
And that is the weird part.
What has he got to celebrate, after all?
He is the chairman of the Labor Party. The Labor Party lies in ruins. It has ceased to exist as afunctioning party. Its leaders haunt the corridors like ghosts. Its local branches are in ashambles. It has no program. It has no plan. Nobody knows what it wants. Nobody knows what itexists for. If, indeed, it does exist.
True, Peres does not bear the responsibility for this collapse alone. Its main architect wasEhud Barak, the champion of disasters, who spread the historic lie that we have no partner forpeace. With this he opened the way for Ariel Sharon’s rise to power. But Shimon Peres joinedSharon’s government, served him loyally, disseminated around the world the myth that Sharonis a man of peace, paved his way in Washington and lent a willing hand to all his atrocities – the‘targeted killings”, the wholesale demolition of homes, the enlargement of the settlementsat a frantic pace.
Now the Labor Party has reached such a miserable state that Sharon is not even interested inhaving it as a junior partner in his government. What does he need it for? He has got Tommy Lapid.There are few sights more pitiful than a worn-out whore whom nobody wants anymore.
Since Peres was appointed party chairman by default – with no other credible candidatestanding – it has the atmosphere of a graveyard. No whiff of fresh (or indeed any) air reachesit. Nothing happens. From time to time some television channel devotes a few minutes to a partycaucus, out of pity or schadenfreude .
Shimon Peres has no time to deal with the Party, because he is busy with the party. That is afull-time job with overtime.
It is also a disaster. The disappearance of the Labor Party has left a black hole in thepolitical system. No democracy can function without an efficient and combative opposition.When the government is headed by a person like Ariel Sharon, who is leading Israel towards apredictable catastrophe, the absence of an opposition is a national crime.
Peres does not think so. “What do we need an opposition for?” he demanded recently in one of hisinnumerable interviews in the media. And indeed, what for? After all, Peres does not hide hislonging for a seat in the government, any government, even (or especially) a government underAriel Sharon.
And why not? What is the great difference between Sharon and Peres, apart from Sharon’scharisma and Peres’ record of failures? Is Peres against the assassination of Palestinianleaders? No. Does he oppose the “removal” of Yasser Arafat? In one of his interviews, he spokeagainst it feebly, but he is not mobilizing his party against the approaching disaster.Demolition of homes? Uprooting of trees? A thunderous silence, at best.
In his long career, Peres has been everything. He has been an extreme hawk and a cooing dove. Heis the father of Israel’s nuclear bomb and (after intense lobbying) a Nobel Peace Prizelaureate. One of the main initiators of the 1956 war, in the company of two foul colonialistregimes (France and Britain, at the time), and a partner to the Oslo agreement. The father ofthe West Bank settlements and the creator of the Good Fence on the Lebanese border. Theadvocate of the Lebanon invasion and, just a few days later, the main speaker at the Peace Nowdemonstration against it.
He has supported everything. At one time he declared that Israel is not a Middle Eastern but a”Mediterranean” country. For years has advocated the “Jordanian Option” that ignored theexistence of the Palestinian people. Then he shook the hand of Arafat and invented the NewMiddle East. And through all these years he has never, never won an election.
What has he got to celebrate?
Shimon Peres bears a major part of the responsibility for the woeful state that Israel is nowin, for the continuation of conflict with the Palestinians, for destroying the Israeli peacecamp, for strengthening the Likud’s hold on power, for paving the way for Ariel Sharon, who isquite capable of bringing about the destruction of Israel.
Even in the declining years of the Roman empire, they did not celebrate a triumph for a defeatedand humiliated general. Only in Israel. Because, in Israel, nothing succeeds like failure.