In November 1993, a group of men crossed the Allenby Bridge from Israel to Jordan in disguise. Among them, foreign minister Shimon Peres, a distinguished statesman who had already served as prime minister, and worked with practically every Israeli prime minister since the nation was born. Yet, Peres had no qualms in putting on a fake moustache and a hat, as he travelled the distance, short in length, but very long in the making on the road to peace with Jordan.
Peres and his team were bound for the Raghadan Palace in Amman, to meet in total secrecy with King Hussein and his officials to iron out the final details of a “non-aggression” pact, that would end decades of bloodshed between the two countries. According to Peres, who records the story in his memoirs, “No Room for Small Dreams”, completed just before he died last year, the fake moustache filled him with a sense of power and purpose. “I looked like an actor in a low-budget stage show,” Peres writes, “But I felt like the tip of a spear.”
Several subterfuges
The subterfuge is one of many Peres admits to in the book, including some that changed Israel’s future: from procuring ammunition from the Czechs for the original war in 1949, to buying weapons and planes from Colombia and Cuba while he stayed in the U.S., and even working with the ‘teamsters’ or labour union bosses to ferret weapons out in small parts to Israel.
Later in life, there were larger subterfuges, like building a nuclear programme with French help in the Negev desert away from all eyes, including the prying eyes of their biggest ally, the United States. When finally caught out, and confronted by U.S. President John F Kennedy, Peres’ evasive answer became Israeli policy for the future: “Israel shall not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region,” he said.
At another point in the book, the subterfuge described is of how Peres, as defence minister, built the plan for the daring Entebbe raid of 1976 to rescue hostages, without letting his Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin know until much later. As he describes it, Rabin was worried that commando action would lead to too many casualties. The IDF team that eventually carried out the raid was mostly successful, although they lost their commander Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s brother Yonatan, in the operation.
Memoirs are rarely ever ‘Mea culpas’. And like others No Room For Small Dreams is a favourable view of the author, and one that is action-packed with a life fully lived. However, the book contains little by way of remorse, self-reflection or even much mention of the plight of Palestinians in all his decades in government and power.
There are many details of Peres’ workings with Palestinian interlocutors, including Abu A ‘la or Ahmed Qurei, who became Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority, but none of the human tragedy that still afflicts Palestinians in the occupied territories, in refugee camps, and in Gaza. Instead, there are long passages on his commitment to the pursuit of peace, the need for compromise in order to achieve it, and detailed accounts of how he drove the processes with Jordan, Egypt and the Palestinian Authorities.
Peres, who spent many formative years on a socialist Kibbutz, speaks also of the hardened positions in Israel on the two-state solution, that now dominate the radical elements on both sides, neither side willing to give an inch. His disappointment in the politics of the present especially that of current Prime Minister Netanyahu is reflected by the almost negligible mention Netanyahu receives in the book, although he worked closely as prime minister with Peres as president from 2009-2014.
Hardened positions
“If you work for peace, you will have no more loyal a friend than me. If you turn your back on peace you will have no worse enemy than me,” Peres says repeatedly in the book. Peres never did see the peace he worked so hard for, and by the time he died, after a stroke in September 2016, he had seen the total collapse of the dialogue he and Rabin painstakingly put together with the new policies of the far-right.
The well of emotion in Peres’ memoirs is reserved for the pages that describe Rabin’s assassination. He describes each moment, including how they discussed the plan for a “peace rally” in Tel Aviv’s King of Israel Square in November 1995, exactly two years to the day Peres had made his mustachioed crossing on the Allenby bridge. When he saw how many people came to support his peace efforts, Peres says Rabin burst into smiles and then sang songs, something he had never been known to do before. The words that follow, of Rabin’s killing at the hands of ultra-radical Jewish assassin Yigal Amir, are clearly the most painful to write, but Peres documents each moment. While the killing of Rabin didn’t kill the peace process immediately, it was clearly the beginning of the end.
Hamas, and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad picked up where Yigal Amir left off, with a series of deadly bus bombings that finished any chance of reconciling the two sides for time to come. Today, there is no road to dialogue, no commitment to the peace process, and little acceptance of the two-state solution mapped in the Oslo accords that won Peres, Rabin and Yasser Arafat a joint Nobel peace prize. Yet as Peres records in the last words written just days before he breathed his last, that road to peace remains the only one worth travelling.
No Room for Small Dreams ; Shimon Peres, Hachette India, ₹599.
