Shimon Peres with his old friend Henry Kissinger. Both have been compared to Machiavelli, but this is a unfair on the Florentine, who was a true philosopher, a genuine Renaissance Man, and nothing like as Machiavellian in his dealings as these two old rogues have been.
Early this May, Christopher Hitchens sat down for an interview with Israeli President Shimon Peres. He writes about the encounter in the Slate column: President of Which Israel? I was looking forward to reading it because we know from experience that Hitch is unafraid of asking candid questions and also because Peres has a lot questionable history behind him. But alas, it was not to be. Hitch settled instead for a round of softball questions, and the column is essentially an exercises in selling Peres as a moderate and pragmatic leader than Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in case nobody had noticed that. But the lack of bark, let alone bite, in this piece is palpable, and Hitch makes an excuse of sorts, although not an apology, for his lack of aggression in the warm-up paragraph.
If we'd had time, I would have wanted to ask him about the days in 1956, of which he is now the sole living witness, when the governments of Britain, France, and Israel met secretly in a French villa to plan the invasion and occupation of Egypt. I should also have liked to ask him about his other achievement at the Israeli Defense Ministry, when Israel became the possessor of a nuclear facility at Dimona, in the Negev Desert.
I too would have liked Hitch to have asked about Peres's youthful exploits. He was born Szymon Perski in 1923 in Vishnevo (Wiszniewo), a small town in a part of Poland that is now in Belarus. The family moved to Palestine in 1934, which was fortunate for them as the bulk of the Jewish population of his hometown disappeared during the Second World War, mostly murdered by the SS.
It would have been interesting to hear about Peres talking about Mandate Palestine and the early days of the State of Israel. He was militarily active in the years leading up to the foundation of Israel, joining the Jewish paramilitary organization Haganah in 1947. Allied with the British, the Haganah had fought against the Urgun, which was violently anti-Arab and anti-British. But in 1946, while these two groups were working as allies, Urgun operatives disguised as Arabs bombed the central offices of the British Mandatory Authorities of Palestine at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people. This atrocity ended the alliance.
Peres was active in government from the early years of the State of Israel. In 1954, as Director General of the Ministry of Defense, he played a central role in the failed covert operation in Egypt that become known as the Lavon Affair, in which Israeli military intelligence planted bombs in Egyptian, American and British-owned targets in Egypt in the hope of blaming "the Muslim Brotherhood, the Communists, or other unspecified malcontents. As Wikipedia has it, "The spies acted seemingly without Prime Minister Moshe Sharett's knowledge, and Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion would later resign from his post after being unable to get the full investigation he insisted on." Peres resigned as Deputy Defense Minister in 1965 when his involvement in Lavon was revealed.
In the fifties, Peres was influential in establishing the Dimona nuclear reactor that produced the materials for Israel's still undeclared nuclear arsenal, and he was also one of the prime Israeli architects of the plan to seize the Suez Canal in 1956. But lamentably, current events took up the bulk of the interview, although the recent Gaza offensive with more than a thousand Palestinians dead and tens of thousands wounded and traumatized didn't rate a mention in Hitch's column. Instead the main issue was one that appears close to Hitch's heart: the potentially nuclear-armed theocracy in Iran and its pursuit of "hegemony" in the Middle East. Apparently, Peres would like to reach an agreement with the Palestinians on their future state, so that the Arab world will be able to make peace with Israel and unite against the Iranians.
Hitch asked very delicately about whether Peres had remarked that Iran, too, could be "wiped off the map."
With complete suavity, he assured me that this was meant only as a warning to the Iranian regime that it was not all-powerful.
This response is intriguing because Peres has publicly compared President Ahmadinejad and his call to "wipe Israel off the map" to the genocidal threats against European Jewry made by Chancellor Hitler in the years prior to the Holocaust. Thanks to Juan Cole, Hitch and the rest of us are well aware that Ahmadinejad has made no such remark about Israel, but Peres has done so about Iran. One wonders what he intends to use as an eraser.
Then, Hitch sketched his and Peres's shared perception of an Iran that has ambitions of regional dominance and which consists of "33 million Persians along with an equal number of minorities who are poorly treated," which allows him to pose the question: "How will about 33 million Persians, then, be able to rule over perhaps 300 million Arabs in the rest of the Middle East?"
Hitch's grasp of Middle East population statistics appears to be on a par with the late Charlton Heston's knowledge of the region's geography. As of the 2006 census, Iran's population was officially 70,049,262 and it has grown since, yet Hitch opts for the doubtful figure of 66 million from the CIA, an organization he doesn't usually consider reliable. As for 300 million Arabs in the Middle East, even if for the sake of argument we include Egypt, it is hard to find two thirds of that number. Of the 340 million people living in Arab League nations, 80 million live in Egypt and a further 130 million live in other African nations. But neither mathematical nor geographical detail have have ever been among Hitch's strong points.
The idea of a potentially nuclear-armed Iran having ambitions to recreate the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius is about as bizarre as the idea of a nuclear-armed Israel wanting to revive the Kingdom of Soloman and David or of a flying carpet-equipped Al-Qaeda wanting to bringing back the Caliphate. The fertile imaginations of those who dream up such fantasies are matched only by the gullibility of those who swallow them.
I had particularly wanted Hitch, who is genuinely concerned about the risks of nuclear war, as can be seen from his frequent drawing of our attention to the possibility that Iran might be clandestinely planning to develop its own nuclear deterrent, to ask Peres about his role in Israel's nuclear weapons program and about the country's alleged stockpile of about 80 undeclared nuclear warheads and its refusal to sign the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty. No such luck there, but intriguingly Hitch describes Dimona as Peres's "other achievement at the Israeli Defense Ministry." I can't quite work out whether this kudo was written tongue in cheek.
Sadly too, Hitch didn't find the time or the courage to put in a word for Mordechai Vanunu, the whistleblower who told the world about the underground nuclear weapons center at Dimona and was then kidnapped in Italy in 1986 by Mossad on Peres's orders — "Bring the son of a bitch back here" — and has since been subject to imprisonment and subsequent persecution by the Israeli State for the past 23 years — which is even longer than the Burmese State has been persecuting Aung San Suu Kyi.
Israeli President Peres and Turkish President Edrogan had a public bust up at this year's World Economic Forum in Davos after Peres made an impassioned defence of Israel's Christmas and New Year offensive against Hamas in Gaza.
And lastly but by no means leastly, I was terribly disappointed that Hitch rolled over like an Irish Setter in giving Peres a free pass on the question of the Armenian Genocide. In what must be one of his biggest displays of Hitchpocricy ever, our boy wrote three Turkey-bashing Slate pieces in three successive weeks (April 6, 13, & 20) slamming President Obama for not pushing Turkey sufficiently on its failure to recognize the Armenian Genocide issue, then faulting him for not insulting the Turks when speaking at their parliament in Ankara, and finally declaring that "Turkey wants all the privileges of NATO and EU membership but also wishes to continue occupying Cyprus, denying Kurdish rights, and lying about the Armenian genocide." Then, just three weeks after the last of these tantrums, Hitch has the gall to cite Israel's military alliance with Turkey as a reason that "helps explain Peres' strongly held view that the sufferings of the Armenians should not be equated with the Jewish Holocaust."
Last time I looked, the US had a military alliance with Turkey too. I believe it was called NATO. Perhaps that helps explain Obama's strongly held view that there are other ways of dealing with one's allies than waving accusations of century-old genocide in their faces. If it is acceptable for the Israeli President to lie about the Armenian genocide, and OK for Hitch to deny it a capital "G", what grounds does the Great Contrarian have for lecturing the US President or the Turkish Government on how to deal with it?
“The enemies of intolerance cannot be tolerant." • "If it is an offense to justice to hold people who may have been victims of mistaken identity or of vendettas by other factions, then it is also an offense to justice to release psychopathic killers who believe that they have divine permission to throw acid in the faces of girls who want to attend school." • "Don't be such a lesbian!
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