JERUSALEM — Israel’s Shimon Peres was widely admired around the world as a peacemaker and visionary, but the view in the Arab world was more complex: Memories linger of another Peres, who built up Israel’s military might, waged war in Lebanon and promoted policies seen as harmful to the Palestinians.
In a reflection of this sentiment, Peres’ death on Wednesday was greeted with silence across the Arab world — in sharp contrast to the emotional tributes that poured in from the West.
While a long list of Western dignitaries prepared to descend upon Jerusalem for Peres’ funeral on Friday, no Arab leaders are yet scheduled to come. Even Egypt and Jordan, the two countries that have peace accords with Israel, had no official reaction Wednesday.
Arad Nir, the foreign affairs commentator for Channel 2 TV, said it would be “very sad” if the people who Peres negotiated with did not attend the funeral. “It puts a question mark on Shimon Peres’ vision, his life’s mission: Peace,” he said.
The silence reflects the animosity toward Israel in the Arab world, particularly at a time when the peace process Peres helped launch has collapsed and Arab anger is high at the hard-line policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The Israeli-Palestinian issue is not high on the region’s agenda these days, amid other wars and crises, noted Michael W. Hanna, a Middle East expert at the New York-based Century Foundation.
“Besides, Peres left behind a complicated legacy,” he said.
Peres gained worldwide fame — and a Nobel Peace Prize — as the architect of the historic Oslo interim peace accords with the Palestinians in the mid-1990s. Late in life, he established a “peace center” in Tel Aviv that promoted coexistence between Israelis and Palestinians, and as the nation’s president he used the global stage to call for peace.
But in the Arab world, especially among Palestinians, many saw Peres’ vision of peace as all talk. “He often presented himself as a man of peace, but no one in the Arab world really believed him,” said Abdullah El-Sennawy, a prominent Egyptian columnist. “Whenever there was war, he was there.”
As one of Israel’s founding fathers, Peres was associated with the “naqba,” or catastrophe, that befell the Palestinians in the war surrounding Israel’s creation, when hundreds of thousands fled or were forced from their homes.
“Peres was a significant contributor to the historic injustice that occurred to the Palestinian people,” Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian government spokesman in the West Bank, wrote on his Facebook page. —AP
