Israel without its elder statesman

JERUSALEM >> The world awoke Wednesday to an actuality it had never known before: a modern state of Israel without Shimon Peres. But in many respects Peres’ Israel began to disappear long ago.

During more than seven decades in public service, Peres, who died at 93 two weeks after suffering a stroke, accompanied Israel through startling transformations and constantly reinvented himself.

Rolling with the punches of reality, he went from state-builder to divisive political schemer to, in the early 1990s, an architect of the Oslo peace accords that were meant to lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He never ceased to work behind the scenes for his tantalizing vision — some would say mirage — of a “New Middle East.”

Transcending internal divisions in his last official post, as Israel’s president, Peres was ultimately embraced by most of the country as its elder statesman, even as chaos engulfed much of the region and the promise of peace with the Palestinians faded into popular skepticism and fatigue.

So for many Israelis, trying to untangle and define Peres’ legacy is like peering through a historical kaleidoscope where the lines between Israel’s longtime ideological rivalries are at once sharp and distinct, then dissolve into a dazzling blur.

“We are orphaned,” Moran Daniel Rosenfeld lamented, in Hebrew, on Peres’ Facebook page Wednesday, joining thousands who posted condolences. “How sad that a natural heir to his path, his willpower, his determination and his statesmanship has not been born.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu opened a special Cabinet meeting in memoriam Wednesday with a minute of silence and the words, “This is the first day of the state of Israel without Shimon Peres.”

Netanyahu, from the right-wing Likud Party, himself only reluctantly endorsed the principle of a Palestinian state in 2009, and continued to clash privately with Peres, a former political opponent from the Labor Party, in recent years. Still, Netanyahu issued a statement praising Peres, who served two stints as prime minister, as “a man of peace,” and said at the Cabinet meeting: “I admired him; I loved him.”

Peres himself looked back with a mix of satisfaction and concern. In a 2013 interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he said that the reality of Israel was “both different and greater than the dream.” He marveled that Israel’s population had grown to 8 million people — but said he worried that they were becoming less grounded in moral values as they increasingly pursued material goals.

After years of violent shocks and political erosion on both sides, some Israeli Jews trace the collapse of Peres’ dream to the moment when a Palestinian suicide bomber ripped through a Passover Seder at the Park Hotel in the coastal city of Netanya.

It was March 22, 2002, and 250 guests had just sat down for the holiday meal. Thirty were killed. Days later, Israeli tanks invaded the Palestinian cities of the West Bank in the fiercest military operation there since Israel occupied the territory in the 1967 war.

The Oslo accords, for which Peres shared a Nobel Peace Prize, were imploding. The Palestinian Authority they had created was under siege. And it was left to Peres, then foreign minister, to explain the Israeli offensive to the world.

“They were offered a Palestinian state,” Peres told CNN at the time, referring to subsequent rounds of failed peace talks between the sides. “They were offered practically all of the land. They were offered a position in Jerusalem. Why fight? Why kill? Why incite?”

This was clear vindication if ever there was any for those on the other side of Israel’s political spectrum who had opposed the accords.

“At the time they were signed, they enjoyed the support of the majority of Israel — now, most people see them as a failure,” said Moshe Arens, a contemporary of Peres’ and former defense and foreign minister from the Likud Party, of the accords. “If they had been a success I would have had to say I was wrong.”

Speaking as Peres lay mostly unconscious in the hospital after his stroke, Arens described him as “an inveterate optimist,” while articulating the apparent policy void that he was leaving behind.

“It is very difficult for us to make projections about the future in the Middle East,” Arens said. “I say proceed slowly. Everyone wants to know what’s the end game. I don’t know what it will be.”

Haim Cohen, a longtime friend of Peres’, said on Israel Radio that recently, “Every meeting was like listening to his last will and testament.”

“One of the main messages he tried to leave for us,” Cohen said, “was his deep concern for the unity of the nation.”

Despite Peres’ own late-in-life attempts at unity among Israelis, perhaps it is only natural in a fractious country that his legacy is viewed through a prism of old divides.

Many Arabs still denounce him as a “criminal” for his early support of settlement-building, and as a warmonger because of his role in building Israel’s weapons arsenals and campaigns that led to civilian deaths.

Many Israelis and Jews from around the world remembered him in fatherly and grandfatherly terms — a veiled or not-so-veiled contrast with the current Israeli leadership.

Isaac Herzog, the current Labor leader and parliamentary opposition chief, said of Peres, “I don’t think his vision is gone,” noting that the aspiration for a two-state solution with the Palestinians has been accepted by most mainstream Israeli political figures, though its prospects have lately ebbed.

A new generation of Labor Party legislators is grasping at what is left.

“Peace has become a word that people sneer at the mention of,” said one of them, Merav Michaeli. “It is our responsibility to gain back the people’s trust.” Another, Stav Shaffir, said that Peres and his cohort “always thought way ahead” and worked in a stately fashion “to make every Israeli feel Israeli.”

“The mission of my generation is to be that leadership,” she said.

Yet Micah Goodman, an American-Israeli philosopher, said the problem of the Israeli left is not a dearth of leadership, but of ideas. The founding ideology of Israel’s Labor movement, socialism, crumbled and morphed into the pursuit of peace. The vision of a new Middle East was a “messianic” one, Goodman said in an interview, and Peres was its prophet.

As that option receded, he said, Peres increasingly turned his attention to the boundless possibilities of technology and science and the pull of a secular, humanistic type of Judaism.

A few months ago, Peres reached out to Goodman to discuss Goodman’s Hebrew best-seller, “The Secrets of the Guide for the Perplexed,” about Moses Maimonides, the medieval Jewish sage also known as Rambam.

“I find myself in his apartment in Tel Aviv,” Goodman recalled. “He is wearing his jeans. He wants to understand Maimonides.

“He told me that before he goes to sleep he thinks to himself, ‘Did I bring more good to the world today, or bad?’ He kept a balance sheet. He was like a 16-year-old idealist. At 93.”