Shimon Peres and the Miracles of Israel and Europe

 
Shimon Peres who died yesterday was a man of singular achievements, discernment but also a certain myopia of our new age.
At the time when Robert Schuman was French Prime Minister in 1947-8, Peres spearheaded with French help Israeli defense of its new State. Later, when Schuman was still a major influence in French government, he helped build Israel’s nuclear program. In the 1950s Israel was threatened with destruction with hostile nations, led by the rabid rant of Jewish ethnocide of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser.
They were remarkable times, not only in living memory. They were miraculous times in the history of our planet.
Peres was an acute observer of current events and perspicacious of the import of those events in the broader span of history. This is what he told the European Parliament on 12 March 2013.

Israel was born from the ashes at the end of the Second World War. If someone had stood up then and said that within three years a Jewish state would be created – he would have been considered a delirious visionary.
But the dream became a reality.
And if somebody would have stood up on that very day, and said that in six short years a new united Europe would be born, with borders erased, barriers lowered, he would have been considered an author of fiction.
And another miracle occurred.
Six countries signed the Treaty of Paris and became a community of 27 nations across Europe.
Our relations here and now are a dialogue between two miracles.

A few days earlier on 7 March, Shimon Peres had visited the European institutions in Brussels.
To my knowledge on three separate occasions that day he spoke with of the two miracles of our time.
What did Peres mean by a ‘Dialogue of Miracles’?
The miracle of Israel was that for the first time in nearly two thousand years, Jews were no longer scattered and persecuted in just about every country were they settled. They were enslaved , provoked and killed for many reasons, often quite different ones in each of the countries.
Why?
For that, Peres had a quick answer. But he answered his own question. His question was “What was the greatest contribution that Jews made to the world?” His answer was “Dissatisfaction”. Jews always applied a critical attitude about how to make society better.
With the founding of the State of Israel, Jews and Hebrews applied that critical thinking to making a home and a home country. Today we know it as the “Start-up Nation”—a country with little or no natural resources that has made major achievements in science, medicine, industries and new discoveries, like no comparative area in the world.
The first miracle of the young State of Israel was the ability of those who had escaped or survived Hitler’s death camps to defend themselves against hordes of foes who wished to “drive them into the sea.” The Israeli miracle was one of defense. It was one of self-preservation by an almighty shield.
Europe’s miracle was not the same. Europeans were for two millennia a crazy quilt of armed societies. They had been at war with each other back into the dim recesses of history, before the times of the Romans. What was striking to anyone who reflects is that for the first time Europeans are at peace, children, parents, grandfathers and even great grandfathers have known peace for more than 70 years. Such a period is unprecedented.
So what of the Dialogue of Miracles? Wouldn’t such a combination be unbeatable, a society that flourishes, innovates and provides a unique example of restoration of Nature in a dry and barren land. The Desert shall bloom like a Rose. Much more. With less than 0.2 percent of the world’s population, Jews have globally gained 20 percent of Nobel Prizes. But Israel had no peace.
Is the world ready for the combination of European super-peace and Jewish super-accomplishment?
On his Brussels visit Peres was questioned about his early vision of a Community in the Near East. It would bring peace to the region like the first Community brought peace to Europe. Europe placed the materiel and instruments of war, coal and steel, under the rule of law and a High Authority of impartial, high moral character. Part of Schuman’s plans was the creation of solid guarantees for fundamental freedoms for all Europeans. How could the Near East initiate peace?
In the Near East Water is life. The idea of putting the water resources under a common authority dates back to the 1950s.
However, when he spoke to a packed audience in the Press Room of the Commission’s Berlaymont building, he had moved from Community solutions to the power of science and innovation. ‘Science is taking over the war of lands,’ he said. But he also conceded that ‘Terror has replaced armies.’ Science is neutral and can be used for good or evil. It depends on applying moral judgement.

Europe learned long ago that scientific prowess is no guarantee of peace. Rather it provides the means for mass and mutual destruction. Germany once had ‘Nazi science’ that banned Jews like Einstein. It is no sign of peace that Iran is on a headlong struggle with the civilized world to gain high-tech nuclear weapons. North Korea has impoverished its land in order to build rockets and nuclear bombs. Terror is based on ignorance and failure to answer basic questions. But it is a growing sort of globalism, as much as global companies are.

The Community was based on reinforcing Human Rights. Among the chief ones was the freedom of expression and freedom of religious belief. It is difficult for Islam to shake off 1200 years of considering Jews and Christians as infidels and second class citizens. That started in 705 and the pace of killings and expulsions from the Middle East is reaching a climax of paroxysm.
Israel has faced seven wars in its short history yet Peres seemed to neglect this Human Rights basis for peace. What caused this distortion of his vision? The reason was clear in the dogma that he reiterated like many others today. “The Two State Solution is the only solution.” For anyone who looks objectively at the record of woes and disaster in Europe, it would be more accurate to say: “The two State solution is the sure road to perpetual war.” That is the conclusion of Europe’s 2000 year history.
How did this deception arrive in Peres usually clear-thinking mind?
First there was the deception about Arafat as a partner for peace. Arafat was born in Egypt and was used by Nasser to start a war against Israel. Hafez al-Assad of Syria would have nothing to do with Yasser Arafat because Arafat’s Egyptian Arabic gave him away. Then he became the tool of the Russians in the Cold War period. The Soviets made him into a professional agent of influence.
The highest grade spy chief who defected to the West, Lt General Ion Mihai Pacepa of Romania, described the conversion from an Egyptian Marxist into a Palestinian nationalist.

The KGB, when I was still connected with it, went to great lengths to transform an Egyptian-born Marxist, Mohammed Yasser Abdel Rahman Abdel Raouf Arafat al-Quwa al-Husseini, nom de guerre Abu Ammar, into a Palestinian-born Yasser Arafat. It took the KGB — and {the Romanian} DIE – many years to endow Arafat with a credible Palestinian birth certificate and other identity documents, to build him a new past, and to train him at the KGB Balashikha special-operations training school east of Moscow. But as {KGB Chief} Andropov said, it was worth every minute. In 1994, the KGB-born-and-trained Arafat was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Yet in 2012 alone there was a recorded 13,494 incidents of terrorism against the Israelis, committed by Arafat’s PLO. More than six hundred civilians lost their lives. Six months later, the number of Israeli civilians killed by Arafat’s “martyrs” passed seven hundred. (Disinformation, page 289)

It is an extraordinary success of the Soviet disinformation services that even the term “Palestinian”which at the time of the British Mandate meant exclusively ‘Jewish’ came to mean Arab who claimed a fictitious “Palestinian” nationality. There was never any Arab state called Palestine. There is no Palestinian Arab history. The Arabs at the time of Israel’s independence called themselves southern Syrians. The Jerusalem Post was called the Palestine Post. What would today’s deceived 'intelligentsia’ say if it was still the Palestine Post? As I have shown earlier, the family of the Israeli war hero Moshe Dayan were called ‘Palestinian’ in the British Passport they held.

Arafat was the third head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization founded in 1964. The first was Ahmad Shuqeiri, a Lebanese-born politician of mixed Egyptian, Hijazi and Turkish origin who served as a representative with the Arab League. His policy was a call to arms to drive Israelis, then in a thin coastal strip, into the sea. The so-called ‘West Bank’ was called Judea, Samaria originally by the UN. It was then under illegal Jordanian occupation. The second chairman, from December 1967 to February 1969, was Yahaya Hammuda, a left-wing member of the executive from Lifta, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, the site of the biblical town of Nephtoah on the border between the Israelite tribal territories of Judah and Benjamin. Arafat became the leader of the PLO after his April 1968 meeting with Nasser. Their policy agreement was to feign moderation by saying the PLO was not aiming at the expulsion of Jews but only eliminating the State of Israel. They would build a multi-denominational democratic entity with Muslims and Jews side by side. Nasser underpinned this with funds and propaganda efforts.
Unfortunately even with the democracy of the Jewish State and scores of European States before their eyes, ‘Palestinian’ Arabs have failed to show they have yet understood democracy even for themselves. The Palestinian National Council’s Covenant rather gave the game away by re-affirming its determination for all to ‘carry on the armed struggle’ for ‘liberation ‘. They showed their meaning by war on civilians in a series of plane hijacks, not only of Israeli planes but European ones.
Was Peres seduced by this counterfeit plan? How did Peres turn from a Community vision of peace to one of the mantra of a Two State Dissolution of Israel?
The answer can be found in an ancient British saying. Three things well understood will bring Peace: the {calming} tendencies of Nature, the claims of Justice, and the Voice of Truth.
Clearly the PLO plan had little to commend it on the grounds of truth. As for Justice, the implicit political goal to eradicate the Jews showed it was consistent only with a Medina stratagem of dhimmitude and taqiya, institutional deception and lying.
Was Peres using a clever strategy to encourage the hostile forces of the PLO to wear themselves out by the inevitable soporific forces of Nature? Was he an arch-plotter who, according to some Arabs, created a scheme for Israelis to make more settlements in the ‘West Bank’ so they could eliminate the PLO?
Can we know?
It would seem that he had cooled to the European miracle as a Near East peace solution – to judge from his remarks in Brussels. Human Rights are a fundamental first step for a Community, where violations are subject to a Court of Law. Despite the glittering three Nobel Prizes for the “Oslo Solution” the PLO has not stopped glorifying its “martyrs” who massacre the innocent in restaurants and on buses. It has not conceded that Jews would be an active part of a so-called Palestinian State but rather desires a Judenrein area. The PLO seems less concerned about Human Rights and more indignant about building minor extensions to houses and additional accommodation.
Brussels too seems to confirm this prognostication. Bludgeoned by OPEC’s energy control of its economy, there seems no place more skeptical about its own miracle of peace than the elitist inheritors of Schuman’s work of peace. There are few more enthusiastic about driving Israel into the ‘Two State Solution’ cul-de-sac of the war path of Europe’s past.
A good memorial to Shimon Peres would be to reflect seriously about the Cause of Peace, human ‘genius’ and the real Master of History.