Shimon Peres and the war on Palestinians
India, Aug. 24 -- Recently, I've been thinking about Shimon Peres. When I first met him in the mid-1980s, it was, I think, just after his first term as prime minister of Israel. He had moved to the foreign ministry. He served a second term as premier in the mid-1990s and then went on to become president from 2007 till 2014. He was a member of 12 cabinets, represented five political parties and served 46 unbroken years in the Knesset, in a political career spanning seven decades. Quite honestly, I know few politicians like him.
At the time I was anchoring "The World This Week", which London Weekend Television used to make for Channel 4. It was a Sunday morning show that dwelt on the key foreign affairs concerns of the time.
We flew to Tel Aviv to interview Peres. When he first walked into the room where we had set up our cameras, he was polite but perfunctory. I thought he was in a hurry to get the interview over with. I soon realised that my first impression was terribly wrong.
Peres spoke at length. He seemed to read deeper meanings into my often shallow questions and honoured them with lengthy detailed answers. He never rambled. He wasn't prolix. But he wasn't brief either. It wasn't long before I realised he was enjoying the interview. He liked being drawn out. He liked holding forth.
When the formal interview ended, we hastily packed up our equipment and I stood up to bid him farewell. "Can't you have a cup of tea with me and a chat before you go?" he asked to my surprise. "There's so much more to tell you about Israel which one can never fit into a half hour interview."
We moved to his office which was next door, and he began to talk about the Palestinian people. I'm not sure why. It was as if he had a weight on his mind that he wanted to alleviate. Forty years later, I can't accurately recall his words but I will never forget their drift or the impact that made on me and the producer and director who had accompanied me to Israel.
Peres spoke from the heart and I felt I could sense an unexpressed anxiety and concern. The need to solve the Palestinian problem lay at the core of his conversation. Unless I'm mistaken, it lasted for over half an hour. He quoted Mahatma Gandhi, who he clearly admired. I felt that gave him strength. His problem was that he knew what he wanted to do but wasn't sure how to persuade his countrymen. A dilemma Gandhi also faced.
I guess the Oslo Accords were the natural result of what he was starting to articulate that day. It is the closest that Israel has come to a solution of the Palestinian problem. But it was aborted or stillborn.
How different was that time to Benjamin Netanyahu's Israel of today? Peres wanted to solve a situation that had already lingered for four decades. In 2025, Netanyahu doesn't care about the Palestinian people. Peres had a conscience. The Palestinian people mattered to him. Netanyahu is only concerned about himself.
Decades later I met Peres a second time. I'm not sure if he was president of Israel but he was staying in a suite at the Ashok Hotel. There were others in the room. I wasn't his only guest. But he remembered our earlier conversation. "At the time I thought we could make the world we wanted," I recall him saying. "Now I'm older and wiser and accept there are some mountains you cannot move. But I'll keep trying." We were at the door and I was saying my farewells when this conversation happened. Once again, it wasn't what I expected.
Peres died in 2016 at the age of 93. Politics and other connected developments may have thwarted him but his spirit remained undiminished. If he had been prime minister today, we might have had a solution to the Palestine problem....
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