PRESIDENT OF WHICH ISRAEL?
Christopher Hitchens
Slate Magazine
May 10, 2009 Sunday
As the old music-hall lament has it:
Don’t tell my mother I’m a horse in a pantomime Don’t tell her my
life is a sham But if you have in due course To tell her I’m half a
horse Please don’t tell her which half I am!
Last week was a more-than-usually interesting time for a sit-down
with Israeli President Shimon Peres.
Enhanced Coverage LinkingShimon Peres. -Search using: Biographies
Plus News News, Most Recent 60 Days Now almost 86, he represents
the old Labor Party tradition that stood for a secular Zionism and a
"peace through strength" compromise with the Palestinian Arabs. 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. (Some of these things are touched upon in his memoirs.)
But as usual, conversation is dominated by the here and now, and in
the here and now the right is back in Israeli politics, with Benjamin
Netanyahu forming a tenuous coalition government and selecting as his
foreign minister a man-Avigdor Lieberman-who explicitly rejects the
"land for peace" formula that led up to the Oslo Accords of 1993 and
that now constitutes the bedrock of U.S. and European diplomacy.
Lieberman and people like him say that Iran and the Palestinian issue
should be effectively decoupled, that Iran should be recognized as
the main problem, and that concessions will only encourage Hamas’
militancy and Iran’s sponsorship of same. Peres’ views, it emerges over
our conversation, are almost diametrically opposite. If an agreement
can be reached on statehood for the Palestinians, he says, then the
Arab world will be enabled to unite against what much of it already
sees as the main problem: a nuclear-armed theocracy in Tehran. Iran,
he adds, is not simply making noises about the destruction of a member
state of the United Nations. It is seeking "hegemony" in the region,
especially over neighboring Sunni Arab countries.
I asked Peres if he was quoted correctly as having told Israeli Army
Radio in 2006 that Iran should bear in mind that it, too, could be
"wiped from 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. In a few strokes, he sketched the position as he
saw it: Of the Iranian population of about 66 million, perhaps only
half is ethnically Persian. (This much I know to be true: Azeris and
Kurds and other minorities-including many Arabs in the provinces
bordering Iraq-are undercounted and often poorly treated.) How
will about 33 million Persians, then, be able to rule over perhaps
300 million Arabs in the rest of the Middle East? Peres’ response:
"Talleyrand said that you can conquer with bayonets but that you
cannot use bayonets to sit upon."
I stupidly didn’t think of saying this at the time, but this Peres
analysis reverses one of Israel’s old doctrines, which is the so-called
"doctrine of the periphery." On the edge of the Arab world (which at
its core surrounded Israel), there were Muslim countries like Iran and
Turkey and largely Christian countries like Ethiopia, which could be
used as a counterweight. Israel had very close relations with Iran when
it was under the shah, and the Israeli military alliance with Turkey
continues to hold-despite some recent spats with the Erdogan regime,
including a very public one involving Peres himself at Davos a few
months ago. (As a detail, this also helps explain Peres’ strongly
held view that the sufferings of the Armenians should not be equated
with the Jewish Holocaust.)
But now, the doctrine of the periphery is being turned inside
out-in order to appeal to Arabs against a common threat from a
messianic Shiite dictatorship armed with apocalyptic weapons. This
is a development well worth following. I can think of some Arab
diplomats who will say in confidence that they truly do dread the
Iranian challenge. But they also tend to express vast exasperation
at the glacial progress toward a Palestinian state. I asked Peres
about Lieberman’s apparent rejection of Oslo as binding on successor
Israel governments, and he replied that the new government had not
yet had enough time to evolve a united policy. So I pressed him by
asking if he thought a Palestinian state was nearer or further away
than at Oslo, and he smiled and said that his unofficial view was
that it was "inevitable." There were no alternatives, or rather,
the alternatives were unthinkable. At this stage I decided to drop
my frivolous final question, which was to have been: Is it true that
Lauren Bacall is his cousin? I know that they were both originally
named Pirsky … (Wikipedia says they are.)
In the corridors outside Peres’ hotel suite I learned that Israeli
historian Michael Oren was soon to be announced as Israel’s next
ambassador to Washington. His book, Power, Faith, and Fantasy, is a
fascinating account of American engagement with the region since 1776,
and in Georgetown in March he made quite a strong speech in favor
of evacuating the West Bank. To be inside the foreign ministry horse
that contains both Lieberman and Oren could be quite vertiginous. To
be observing the rearings and canterings of the horse that contains
Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Peres is to be compelled to
ask which half is which.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
