Peres’ political persona
“I stand here before you, as the President of the State of Israel, the home of the Jewish people.”
THIS is how Shimon Peres began his speech in Hebrew to the German Bundestag on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, January 27, 2010. This simple declarative sentence made Jewish history.
We live in an age marked by the loss of historical memory. One result is that the word “historic” has lost virtually all meaning. Television newsreaders tell their viewers who can’t remember last night’s news — let alone last week’s — of “historic” and “unprecedented” happenings that will be forgotten by the next bulletin.
But Shimon Peres knows about history, because he’s lived it, and made it. Again. While it wasn’t the first time an Israeli president had addressed the German parliament, it was the first time on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
But beyond the symbolism of the place and time — not far from the Wannsee Villa where the “Final Solution” was planned in 1942, and 65 years after the liberation of the Nazi death camps in 1945 — it was what Peres said and how he said it that made the speech historic.
Although readers can see and hear the speech on YouTube as delivered in Hebrew, I first came across it in the translated English text, which I found intensely moving and powerful from the first sentence.
For those who can follow Hebrew, it is even more engaging in its cadences and allusions to the Hebrew canon, ancient and modern. Although nearly 4000-words long, it’s a compelling piece of elevated rhetoric which, for this reader, is sustained to the very end.
The Israeli President began his remarks by reciting Kaddish “in memory of, and in honour of, the six-million Jews who turned to ashes”. And he ended by reciting the Hatikvah.
Throughout the speech he interwove the Jewish national tragedy of the Shoah with his hauntingly personal recollections of his childhood in Vishniev, Poland, praying with his grandfather Rabbi Zvi Meltzer “wrapped … in the folds of his tallit” during Kol Nidrei on Yom Kippur. When the Nazis came, Rabbi Meltzer perished with his community in Vishniev’s torched synagogue.
But even more than speaking to Germany and the world about the Holocaust, the speech was about Israel and the Jewish people today and their aspirations for¬† the future. It recognised a different Germany and different German leaders. And there, in the Bundestag, he told Chancellor Angela Merkel that Israel would not forget her pledge to the US Congress that “an attack on Israel will equate with an attack on Germany”.
For long-time Israel-politics watchers, the speech was also further evidence of the fundamental change in political persona that Peres has undergone as president, and the resultant change in the way many Israelis now perceive him. Quite something for an 86-year-old national leader.
Today, Peres may not be as “powerful” as he was at age 29, when he took charge of Israel’s Defence Ministry in the 1950s, forged the vital defence supply links with France, established Israel’s electronic and aviation industries, created its nuclear program, and planned the 1956 war in Sinai. Or when he was elected to the Knesset, and over the next 48 years filled almost every ministerial portfolio, including two terms as prime minister.
But in many ways he’s become more “influential”. Not only internationally, where he was always more highly regarded than at home, but within Israel. He has become something more than an “elder statesman”; he’s won the respect and affection of a wide cross-section of Israelis who had never warmed to him as a politician and, despite his repeated attempts, never directly elected him as prime minister.
Of course, there are some Israelis, and some Diaspora Jews, who will never forgive Peres. They blame him for driving the failed Oslo Peace plans and so leading Israel down a blind and dangerous alley. And then there are some, myself included, who welcomed Oslo at the time, but could never quite buy the Peres vision of the Middle East.
In that vision, Israel was a combination of Silicon Valley and Hong Kong/Singapore, the hub of an economically flourishing Middle East where science, innovation and business would trump politics, culture, religion, nationalism, and yes, history itself.
It was a vision splendid, but always divorced from reality. Yet President Peres, now a very different Israeli leader, was never more real and never more idealistic than when he spoke in the Bundestag on behalf of his people and of history.
Sam Lipski is the chief executive of The Pratt Foundation and a former editor-in-chief of The AJN.