Oslo, the Bomb, and Other Home Remedies

By Amnon Lord

Over a political career spanning five decades, Shimon Peres has fought for the idea that inexorable human progress will solve everything, real soon.

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The Peres of the 1960s and 1970s, holding fast to the Ben-Gurionist approach of tiring out the Arabs by one means or another of creating massive Israeli power—whether with settlements, nuclear weapons or captured territory held hostage—was easily recognized as a member of the Israeli political “right” of those days—so much so, that some Labor leaders did not wince at calling Peres a “fascist.”²⁰ Later, during the negotiations with Egypt, Peres took a stance more uncompromising than that of Likud leader Menahem Begin. He considered Begin’s acknowledgement at Camp David of the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” a grave error. He did advocate territorial compromise with the Jordanians, but his anti-PLO position was similar to Begin’s; although Peres was more polite than Begin, who viewed some of the PLO’s constituent groups as “Arab Nazis,”²¹ he nevertheless agreed with Begin in seeing the PLO as the primary enemy obstructing the attainment of peace on the eastern front.²² “The Arab decision and position distanced Jordan, at least at this stage, from being able to be a negotiating partner,” lamented Peres in 1974. “They thwarted the Egyptian attempt to break away from the military path ֹ towards diplomatic negotiations.”²³ Peres considered the PLO an extremist power center in the Arab world, and saw it for many years thereafter as a primary stumbling block to an agreement. But in the distorted political lexicon taking shape in Israel at that time, the “territorial compromise” that Peres suggested, a reasonable stance for anyone who did not believe in strategic value of land, made him appear to the “left” of Begin even when his views were still exceptionally hard-line.

After Ben-Gurion was effectively eliminated from Israel’s leadership in 1967, Peres remained as a nominal centrist in a political camp that was drifting increasingly to the left. The Labor party’s vanishing “Ben-Gurionist” wing, Begin’s accession to power, and the short-lived centrist Democratic Movement for Change party all served to emphasize the shift of the Labor bloc away from the country’s natural political “center.”

But the drift to the left was not merely a political optical illusion. It was a very real phenomenon, resulting in part from the fact that Labor was increasingly coming under the influence of intellectuals such as Amos Oz, S. Yizhar, and others who—unlike the old-line Labor leadership—believed in the struggle of the Palestinian Arabs for national liberation and their right to self-determination as political ends in the themselves. Gradually, the view that a “just” solution to the Palestinian problem must be a central goal of Israeli policy gained precedence over the traditional Labor position that Israel had a right to receive a permanent peace in exchange for some or all of the territories acquired in 1967.

Peres’ view, on the other hand, remained one focused not on “justice” for the Palestinians, but rather on Israel’s long-term security. Thus it was that when he took over the leadership of the Labor party after Yitzhak Rabin resigned as prime minister in 1977, Peres found himself the de jure leader of a genuine left that was becoming increasingly extreme, even as he himself was struggling to gain legitimacy within the party despite his well-known position as a hawk. Equipped with neither the historical halo that had always been a source of power for Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir, nor the prestige of victorious generals such as Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin, Peres had to base his political strength on the consent and support of his constituency. He therefore faced the unenviable choice of either recanting his beliefs in favor of those of Oz and Yizhar, or paying for his principles with his political life.

Peres chose neither. Instead, he responded to the exigencies of the moment by effecting an ideological transformation which left him with a new outlook that was at once far more palatable to the new Labor party, while at the same time remaining entirely true to his fundamental outlook. Where the powerful, futuristic dream of melting down the Arabs’ “desire for war” by settlement or nuclear weapons had failed, a new futuristic dream began to take shape—one in which a regionalized economy, mutual dependence and “soft borders” between Israel and the Arab states would have precisely the same effect. Through a breathtaking combination of inexorable political necessity and Peres’ lifelong search for the “knockout” nostrum for Israel’s chronic vulnerability, the “new Middle East” was born.

A significant turning point in the development of Peres’ relations with the peace camp occurred in the stormy days of the Lebanon war. At the outset of the war, Peres had come out strongly in support of the actions of the government led by Begin and Ariel Sharon in Lebanon. Any criticism he voiced at the time was of a technical nature; on the substance of the issue he was still a disciple of David Ben-Gurion. Indeed, as late as July 1982, Peres wrote in support of the overall strategy of eliminating the PLO as a force in the political arena: “Our argument with the PLO is not about the past, but rather about the future. I do not foresee any substantive Israeli mandate being given to anyone in its name, to [accept the PLO’s demands of returning to] the pre-1967 borders, to divide Jerusalem and to establish a Palestinian state that will attempt now to overthrow Israel, now to take over Jordan.” Thus, the Peres of 1982 endorsed Ariel Sharon’s view that PLO forces must be swept out of Beirut, and he lauded the IDF’s successes: “The IDF accomplished its immediate mission: to release northern Israel from the threat of PLO terror.”²⁴

Yet only a few weeks later, Peres spoke at a massive Peace Now demonstration following the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians allied with Israel at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut. This scene epitomized the dynamic in Peres’ relations with the left and the creeping rapprochement which was taking place between the leader and his camp. That night, this long-time scourge of the PLO recognized that he had no choice but to stand up and speak before an unprecedented crowd of protesters, already sewn with the seeds of pro-Palestinian sentiment—or else face being swept aside. And speak he did, creating, by his very presence, the first political bridge between the radicalism of Peace Now and the Labor party. Nor could there be any mistaking what had taken place, as Ha’aretz writer Avi Valentine wrote at the time: “If for the Labor party this was a step forward, then for Peace Now it was a watershed, and those at the head of the movement emphasize this repeatedly. For the first time, the Labor party and Peace Now stood together as equals.” When asked by Valentine whether they were apprehensive about being swallowed up by the Labor party, two Peace Now leaders, Avshalom Vilen and Tsali Reshef, responded with unequivocal confidence. “Vilen: ‘The Labor bloc has a problem, not us. Labor came to a dovish demonstration. It moves within our forces.’ Reshef: ‘Labor learned this evening that there is a large constituency in the streets awaiting a dovish leadership—and this is the antithesis of the Likud…In the future Labor will have to take us into account as a political force in every move it makes.’”²⁵

And, in fact, Peres learned the same lesson that Peace Now did, and did begin taking them into account. For the first time he recognized that the foreign policy of the peace camp (“total justice” for Palestinian Arabs achieved through the establishment of a Palestinian state), even if not meritorious in and of itself, nevertheless did not really contradict his own concerns over finding a way to overcome the Arabs’ “desire for war.” A stunning example of the change in Peres’ strategy can be found in his new attachment to left-wing intellectuals, particularly Amos Oz. In the early 1960s, Oz had left the Labor party along with a number of other academic and cultural figures in the wake of a public scandal known as the Lavon Affair, which had centered on Ben-Gurion’s allegedly immoral and authoritarian policies in operating Israel’s defense establishment; Peres, then a leading figure in implementing Ben-Gurion’s defense policies, was at the very center of the campaign of vilification conducted by Oz and his group. After the Six Day War, Oz had gone on to become a leading advocate of the view that justice required that the Palestinian Arabs be granted a state alongside Israel, more or less regardless of whether such a state would constitute a permanent danger.

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