Shimon Peres of Israel Dies at 93

[Valin]

NY Times:

MARILYN BERGER

SEPT. 27, 2016

 

Shimon Peres, one of the last surviving pillars of Israel’s founding generation, who did more than anyone to build up his country’s formidable military might, then worked as hard to establish a lasting peace with Israel’s Arab neighbors, died on Wednesday in a Tel Aviv area hospital. He was 93.

 

His death was announced by his son Nehemya Peres, who is known as Chemi, and his personal physician and son-in-law Dr. Rafi Walden, outside the Sheba Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized for the last two weeks.

 

Mr. Peres died just over two weeks after suffering a stroke. Doctors kept him largely unconscious and on a breathing tube since then in hopes that it would give his brain a chance to heal. But he deteriorated as the nation he once led watched his last battle play out publicly and leaders from around the world sent wishes for his recovery.

 

As prime minister (twice); as minister of defense, foreign affairs, finance and transportation; and, until 2014, as president, Mr. Peres never left the public stage during Israel’s seven decades.

 

He led the creation of Israel’s defense industry, negotiated key arms deals with France and Germany and was the prime mover behind the development of Israel’s nuclear weapons. But he was consistent in his search for an accommodation with the Arab world, a search that in recent years left him orphaned as Israeli society lost interest, especially after the upheavals of the 2011 Arab Spring led to tumult on its borders.

 

(Snip)

[Valin]

New York Times writes in its obituary below about the causes of the second Intifada is incorrect. As I have pointed out before, the Palestinian Authority Communications minister and other Palestinian leaders have long confirmed that the intifada was carefully planned by Yasser Arafat and not caused by Ariel Sharon.)

 

Tom Gross

[Valin]

Shimon Peres
Editorial of The New York Sun
September 28, 2016

The death of Israel’s former president, Shimon Peres, is a sad occasion, even for those who stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from him politically. The respect and affection he enjoyed owed not only to the length of his service in the Zionist struggle and the range of important positions he held but to the combination of dignity, integrity, and humor with which he conducted himself.

It would be vainglorious to suggest that we knew him well. The first of the several times we met him was in the late 1980s, when he was serving as the finance minister. He received us in the Labor Party’s offices at Tel Aviv. He inquired whether we were related to the American Zionist Louis Lipsky (alas, no). What about the French financial schemer Claude Lipsky, he inquired. (alas, no, either).

At the time, Peres was in an awkward spot, being a Laborite sharing rotations as prime minister with, in Yitzhak Shamir, one of Israel’s most right-wing politicians. Israel had already begun to liberalize its economy. Peres told us he had his own strategy for dealing with this, for him, unaccustomed ideological trend. “We’re going to make money like capitalists,” he said, “and spend it like socialists.”

Though in the 1970s he was a fierce backer of extending Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, Peres won his Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Oslo Accord, a test of the intentions of the PLO that found it wanting. He was more invested in the peace process than any other Israeli leader, though when he was briefly prime minister in the mid-1990s, he launched such a fierce attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon that the Forward newspaper called it the “war process.”

 

(Snip)

 

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