Letter From Jerusalem:
The Dreamer
newyorker.com
"In a time of violence, no one is speaking the language of Shimon Peres.
BY DAVID REMNICK
Issue of 2002-01-07
Posted 2001-01-07
Mahmoud al-Zahar is a surgeon in Gaza City. Born in Gaza and trained in Egypt, he specializes in diseases
of the thyroid. Several mornings a week, he lectures at the local university. On the wall around his house,
there is no announcement of his medical or academic credentials but, rather, a graffito in red spray paint
that hints broadly at another of his vocations: "There is a great difference between the one who writes
history with a pen and the one who acts it out in blood." Everywhere in the Gaza Strip—in Gaza City, in
the Jabaliya refugee camp, in Khan Younis; everywhere but in the anomalous and fortified Jewish
settlements—the walls speak the same language: defiant slogans of uprising against Israel; pictures of
exploding buses and the young "martyrs" who did the job. Dr. al-Zahar speaks that language. He is one of
the leaders of and spokesmen for the Islamic Resistance Movement, which is better known as Hamas.
Gaza is by far the poorest and most desperate of the Palestinian territories. The rutted streets are filled
with sewage and garbage. Very few men have jobs, and the children are left to invent games out of life's
scraps. I saw a group of boys in sandals or bare feet scurrying around the streets collecting spent
machine-gun cartridges; there was no shortage of them. Compared to Gaza, the West Bank city of
Ramallah is suburban Connecticut. Hamas, like despair itself, is a growth industry in Gaza.
A friend and I buzzed at the doctor's gate. An adolescent boy wearing a dusty sweater greeted us sternly
and led us inside to a darkening living room. It was late afternoon.
"Come in, please, sit down," the doctor said. "Sit down here."
Al-Zahar is fifty-seven, with a delicate, bearded jawline and thinning hair cut close to his skull. He wore a
long light-brown robe and curled himself into an armchair. Earlier in the day, I'd dropped by the apartment
of another Hamas leader, Abdel Aziz Rantisi, where there were guards with Kalashnikovs on one floor and,
in the living room above, a few family members watching intifada highlights on al-Manar, the official
television station of the Hezbollah in Lebanon. Here there was only the unguarded Dr. al-Zahar. And he
was nothing if not curious about his guests.
" 'David'?" he said at one point. "That's a Jewish name, isn't it?"
Al-Zahar lives across a narrow dirt road from a mosque and not far from his superior in Hamas, a
wheelchair-bound cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin. Ever since the Sheikh founded Hamas, during the
first intifada uprising in Gaza, fourteen years ago, the group has steadily gained popularity. Much of this
has to do with an ever-increasing fury at the Israeli occupation, but it has also become an article of faith
among Palestinians that the Palestinian Authority, under Yasir Arafat, has siphoned off many millions of
dollars in foreign aid. Although Arafat remains the symbol of Palestinian resistance, the P.A. as a whole is
seen as aloof, compromising, and corrupt, and so Hamas, which calls for an Islamic Palestine, portrays
itself as devout, absolutist, pure. That morning, there had been funerals in Gaza for six Palestinians, most
of them young Hamas sympathizers, who had been shot by Arafat's police. Under pressure from the
United States and the Israeli government, which had declared him "no longer relevant," Arafat was trying
to crack down on Hamas, although Hamas, and its willingness to carry out "martyr operations," has often
proved useful to him.
Al-Zahar seemed pleased by Arafat's predicament. He was wanted by Arafat's police, but he refused to
surrender himself and seemed confident that if they came after him hundreds, if not thousands, of his
supporters would defend him. "I am not afraid," he said. Soon our conversation came around to the
disintegration of Israeli-Palestinian relations since 1993, when the two sides signed the Oslo accords,
which called for mutual recognition and augured a Palestinian state comprising Gaza, the West Bank, and
perhaps some portion of Jerusalem as its capital. The doctor smiled indulgently.
"Look," he said. "We will be happy to take any square metre of land from the Israelis—the West Bank,
Gaza—that they are prepared to give us, but that doesn't mean we'll renounce our rights to all of
Palestine."
Then what are your real goals? I asked him.
"What is the final goal of Islamic peoples everywhere?" he said. "It is to establish an Islamic state in
Palestine, in Egypt, in Lebanon, in Saudi Arabia—everywhere under a single caliphate. There is no role for
a Jewish state in this. I would ask you: What role is there for a Jewish state in the United States? In
California? Well, in Los Angeles you may have one. In Brooklyn, yes." A knowing laugh. "But what
happens in your country if they are asked to establish a Jewish state?" He made the point plainer still: "We
will not tolerate a non-Islamic state on Islamic lands. We cannot allow that. Anwar Sadat was assassinated
because he refused to implement Islamic law—Sharia—as Egypt's constitution."
At the same time, the doctor wished to reassure his guests. "We are not enemies of the West," he said. "It
would be a historic crime for America or the West to consider Islam the enemy. Islam is not looking for a
new enemy. Islam is working for the spread of virtue, whether by David or Muhammad. We are calling
for the purification of the world." "Purification" was a word he used often. There would be no Israel,
al-Zahar insisted, but Jews needn't worry: "It is well known that the only system in the world with no
discrimination is Islam."
The young boy brought around a tray loaded with small cups of steaming sweet coffee. We drank in
silence and then the conversation turned to the blowing up of Israelis in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, Haifa. It
might have been expected that a leader of Hamas would declare to his guests that the recent Osama bin
Laden tape had been "fabricated" ("All your sophisticated technology and you can't make the voice
clearer?") and that the mass murder of September 11th in New York and Washington could easily have
been the work of Israeli intelligence agents. Less obvious was his rationale for killing Israeli children.
"You must understand," al-Zahar said, "that no one in Israel who reaches eighteen can bypass the Army,
unless he is crippled, and he will serve at least two or three years as a soldier in the occupation. One-third
will remain soldiers and the rest will be in the reserves. This is a country of six million people, and it can
mobilize a million in twenty-four to forty-eight hours! Also, all the settlers can be considered military.
"Look," he continued. "Nobody enjoys killing children. Nobody. But we cannot forget the blood of our
children. And, remember, as the Koran makes clear, an eye for an eye."
In Israel, December had begun with suicide bombings at the Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, in downtown
Jerusalem. The next day, a bomber detonated himself aboard a bus in Haifa. In all, twenty-six Israelis were
killed. These were hardly the first terror attacks of the season: since late October, there had been, among
other incidents, shootings in Hadera and a suicide bombing on the Nazareth-to-Tel Aviv bus. After the
murders in Jerusalem and Haifa, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon declared war and threatened not only to
eliminate Hamas and Islamic Jihad but also to undermine the Palestinian Authority, whose armed
supporters had been involved in some of the attacks. By mid-December, Israeli tanks and armored
personnel carriers had rolled into cities throughout Gaza and the West Bank; there were frequent gun
battles and arrests; F-16s and helicopter gunships had fired on numerous targets, including the Gaza
airport, Arafat's helicopters, and Palestinian security outposts all over the territories. Arafat, who had
wanted to visit Oslo for a reunion of Nobel Prize winners, could barely leave his compound in Ramallah.
There were intermittent marches and riots in the territories and threats of more "major events" being
planned in terrorist outposts and bomb laboratories in the West Bank cities of Jenin and Nablus. At the
same time, the Israelis said that they would continue their policy of "targeted" assassinations of known
Palestinian terrorists, and would continue to build more settlements in the occupied territories.
Tactically, it was clear that Sharon wanted to destroy Hamas and weaken Arafat. Less clear was his
longer-term strategy. And what made the picture even more complicated was the fact that the most
prominent member of his Cabinet, Shimon Peres, is his ideological opposite.
Most nights on Israeli television, after the reports of violence, there is the political news and the tableau of
two aging men at the Cabinet table. To the right (literally and politically) is the Prime Minister, a great lump
of a man, a bluff Negev farmer and retired general who is known to his admirers as a commander in every
Israeli-Arab war since 1948 and to his detractors as a brutal adventurer in Israel's war against the P.L.O.
in Lebanon twenty years ago ("the butcher of Beirut"). To the left is the Foreign Minister, Peres, winner of
the Nobel Peace Prize, regal and vain, who wears fine suits and speaks with a Polish accent.
Peres, who negotiated the Oslo peace accords with the Palestinians, is the Labor Party linchpin in Sharon's
Likud-led unity government. Their partnership—to say nothing of their friendship—has been a curiosity
from the start, as discordant as George McGovern signing on as Richard Nixon's Secretary of State; and
now, at an utterly despondent moment, their relationship is an obsession of the Israeli papers. Sharon has
always hated Arafat; as a soldier, he tried to kill him many times. But while Sharon wages his military
campaign against the various Palestinian armed groups, Peres, who shared his Nobel with Arafat, carries
on secret talks with Arafat's deputies and worries that his side has not done enough to sustain Arafat's
"sense of prestige."
Sharon's motives for dancing this tango with Peres are fairly simple. On the right, Benjamin Netanyahu has
greater support in the Likud Party, and Sharon, in order to govern from the center, or seem to, feels he
needs Peres, the iconic dove. What Peres seeks is less obvious. Neither discretion nor charity is a feature
of Israeli political life, and it is nearly impossible to find anyone prepared to think kindly of Peres and his
motives. The rare sympathetic view comes dressed as pity. One old friend and liberal ally in the Knesset,
Colette Avital, told me, "Shimon is a tragic figure. He is ending his brilliant career with everything he has
worked for in collapse. And now? Now he thinks he can manipulate everyone. He can't let go."
Those on the right view Peres as hopelessly, even dangerously, naïve; he is the initiator of an agreement,
they say, that threatened the very existence of the state. While Sharon is always quick to compliment
Peres and feed his hungry ego, the other right-wingers in the Cabinet have little patience for him. Uzi
Landau, Sharon's Public Security Minister, told me with ill-concealed disgust that Peres "constantly"
counsels restraint after terrorist attacks. Landau cannot understand why Sharon does not pursue
Palestinian terrorists with the same "overwhelming force" with which the Bush Administration has
prosecuted the war in Afghanistan. "But what can I do?" Landau said, throwing up his hands.
The resentment among liberals is no less intense. Yossi Beilin, who was a key player during the Oslo talks,
is one of Peres's closest friends, but now Beilin says that his old mentor has brought the "mark of Cain" on
himself. "Sharon feels immune with Peres there," Beilin told me. "Without him, Sharon would have to face
the U.S., Europe, and the Arab world. Everyone knows who Sharon is. This is somebody who has
opposed every peace process, including with Egypt and Jordan. He refuses to shake Arafat's hand. He was
forced out as Defense Minister by the government in 1983 after the massacres at Sabra and
Shatila"—when Israeli forces stood by as their allies the Christian Phalangists stormed into two camps and
killed hundreds of Palestinians. "To do what he is doing now he needs a rabbi to make it all kosher," Beilin
said. "In Shimon Peres, he got the most kosher rabbi in the world."
I met Peres at his Tel Aviv office on a sunny December morning. He was riffling through the pages of the
latest Osama bin Laden biography.
"Have you heard much about it?" he said, extending his hand. "I don't know, I find it a little
sensationalistic."
Peres had already had his morning briefings and had spoken with the Prime Minister. At one point, I began
to recount for him the comments of the many people I'd talked to, and he cut me off by closing his eyes
and nodding.
"Look, I stay because maybe I have a hope, maybe an illusion, that I can influence Sharon," he said. "I
feel, maybe wrongly, that Sharon is interested in keeping me in the government because he needs me.
What is the price? That people criticize me? Ach." He waved his hand. "I'm working honestly," he said.
"So what if I lose some popularity? You can't take popularity to your grave."
Peres is seventy-eight, though he looks no older than he did when he, Arafat, and Yitzhak Rabin sealed the
Oslo peace accords on the White House lawn and ushered in what seemed to be the first period of promise
in the region since Anwar Sadat's trip to Jerusalem in 1977. But Oslo is dead. Peres's vision of a "New
Middle East"—a transformed world in which Israel would trade with a democratic Syria and join the Arab
League—has proved so chimerical that it is never mentioned anymore except as a way to mock him.
Beginning, perhaps, with the assassination of Rabin, in 1995, by a right-wing Israeli extremist, violence,
division, and uncertainty seem to have corroded the national spirit. The economy, which had been
booming, is in sharp decline. Twenty-three thousand businesses closed in 2001; thirty-five thousand more
closings are expected in the first six months of 2002. There are no tourists. The hotels are dark. My hotel
in Jerusalem was so empty that it resembled Jack Nicholson's echoing mountain lair in "The Shining." Far
worse, political talk has taken on an ominous tone: not only is the Palestinian question more complicated
than ever but among intelligence analysts and military planners there is alarm about a wider, regional
conflict. Well before the shock of September 11th, the trends were evident: the increasingly anti-Semitic
and anti-Israeli tone of the government press in Egypt; the accelerated development of weapons of mass
destruction in Iran and Iraq; the instability of the regimes in Riyadh, Cairo, and Amman.
And yet for his latest American visitor Peres put on a bright face, his New Middle East face. It was not
long before he began to talk as if it were the early nineties again. He leaned back in his chair, his Nobel
certificate displayed behind him, and set off to discuss, in his peculiar aphoristic style, globalization and the
need for an open society, women's liberation and China's liberalization. Peres is the most bookish of Israeli
politicians—he consumes biographies, political science, and fiction; his closest and most loyal friend
outside politics is the novelist Amos Oz—and yet he is bookish in a perennially undergraduate sort of way,
full of enthusiasms. He seemed relieved to leave aside the daily concerns of casualties and green lines,
proposal and rejection. As he talked, he appeared happy or masked or both, and I interrupted him to ask
how he could sustain such a buoyant mood.
"My mood?" he said. "My mood?" The smile he'd worn since greeting me sagged and then disappeared.
"My mood doesn't have to represent the situation. I am usually a self-controlled person. Don't expect me
to open up all my buttons and show you how much hair I have on my chest. I am explaining to you how I
think, not how I feel."
"How do you feel?"
"I feel terrible! I feel like the ships are in a terrible storm."
"When is the last time you felt this way?"
"On several occasions," Peres said. "There was the terrible wave of terror in 1996, when I was Prime
Minister. I went to the square and saw the stones covered with blood, ambulances, and thousands of
people surrounding me shouting 'Traitor!' 'Killer!' You think this was a happy moment in my life? The next
day, I went to Tel Aviv. It was the same thing. The third day, in Jerusalem, the same reaction. These are
awful moments. I don't wish anyone to live through that. There were thousands of people who really felt
that way. And on many occasions I was called these things and threatened. But, no matter what others
will say, I am not afraid to die, I'm not afraid to be unpopular. As long as I am around, I'd like to be
honest with myself, I would like to come home and tell myself that I didn't falsify, I didn't put on a false
face. Clearly, I see these funerals, I see a family that lost three of its members. It's not an easy feeling. But
it doesn't change the need to decide what to do."
Peres insisted that he did have limits. "If I shall see that I do not have an alternative, then I shall go," he
said. "But to work out an alternative I need a lot of patience. And I need to swallow many criticisms. But I
could care less. I am not depressed. I am never depressed."
It is hard to name any active politician in the world with a longer and richer experience in public life than
Shimon Peres. He has held every high office imaginable: Defense Minister, Foreign Minister, Finance
Minister, Prime Minister. Between 1984 and 1986, he proved to be one of the most skillful leaders the
country has ever had, solving triple-digit inflation and extricating Israel from its disastrous incursion into
Lebanon. And yet every time he has faced the country as a candidate for Prime Minister—five times
between 1977 and 1996—he has failed to win. (He has held the office only through a unity-government
arrangement with Yitzhak Shamir in the mid-eighties and through tragedy, with Rabin's death.) The
explanations for his losses have been the political talk of Israel for decades: he is somehow inauthentic, too
formal, not a "real Israeli." He never served as a combat soldier. He speaks with an accent even though he
immigrated sixty-eight years ago. He is a Francophile, a dandy, a dreamer. He is an opportunist, he
changes positions. He is "soft on the Arabs," too close to the Americans, better on CNN than in the pages
of Ha'aretz. He is, in the words of Yitzhak Rabin, an "inveterate schemer."
In the spring of 1997, a year after he lost a twenty-point lead in the polls, and the premiership, to
Netanyahu, Peres faced a convention of the Labor Party. He has always had a maddeningly righteous view
of his defeats—"I have lost elections, but never a campaign"—and at the convention he intended to gloss
over his weak showing and hold on to his role as Party leader. He recited his many achievements over the
years and then asked, "So, they say I'm a loser! Am I a loser?"
"Yes!" came the answer.
Peres was born in Vishneva, Poland, in 1923. (The family name was originally Persky.) His father, a
well-to-do merchant, left for Palestine in 1932, and the rest of the family joined him two years later. Peres
attended school in Tel Aviv, where he began to hear of the great Labor Zionist leaders Berl Katznelson and
David Ben-Gurion, and, rather than pursue his studies, he left after ninth grade and went on to help build a
kibbutz overlooking the Sea of Galilee. When he was a teen-ager, Peres met the woman who would
become his wife, Sonia Gelman, and he courted her by reading aloud passages from "Das Kapital." Before
he was twenty, he started working as a youth organizer for Ben-Gurion. Nahum Barnea, whose column in
the newspaper Yediot Ahronot is the most widely read in Israel, told me that, while other fledgling Zionist
leaders like Rabin and Moshe Dayan were maturing as combat soldiers, Peres was sent into action as a
Party apparatchik. "The others were on the battlefield, and Peres was persuading young people to leave the
more Marxist faction of the youth movement and be loyal to Ben-Gurion," Barnea said. In 1942, when the
Nazis threatened to invade Palestine and destroy the Jewish population, Peres and a few dozen other youth
leaders climbed Masada—the desert fortress where, in the first century, Jews committed suicide rather
than submit to the Roman invaders—and there recited the enduring Zionist oath "Masada shall not fall
again."
Peres's autobiography, "Battling for Peace" (1995), ends with his negotiations in Oslo and his almost
mystical vision of a pacific Middle East, but the early chapters portray an ambitious young hawk who
travelled the world for Israel's nascent defense forces in search of missiles, tanks, and fighter planes. At
the age of twenty-eight, Peres, as director general of the Defense Ministry under Ben-Gurion, went on a
string of successful shopping expeditions abroad, especially in France. (The defense relationship with
Washington did not begin until the sixties.) Undoubtedly, Peres's singular early achievement was to
overcome the objections of Dayan and Golda Meir and push Ben-Gurion to build a nuclear reactor near the
Negev town of Dimona. The Dimona project, carried out with French help, brought nuclear deterrence to
a tiny and relatively poor country surrounded by hostile states.
Despite his early successes, Peres's rivals and peers began to see him as slick and untrustworthy. Avishai
Margalit, a scholar and a well-known writer on Israeli politics, told me that Rabin and Peres were once
invited to visit the Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta in Nairobi: "On the way, they stopped in France, and
Peres told Rabin how awful it was that he could not find a copy of Kenyatta's autobiography. He was in
despair. Finally, when they got to Kenya and they approached Kenyatta, Peres said, 'Mr. President, I was
so touched by your autobiography. Especially the chapter about your childhood in the village. It moved me
to tears.' Kenyatta was so happy, because the book had not been especially well received. After the
meeting, Rabin said with admiration and disgust, 'When did you read it?' 'I didn't,' Peres answered. 'So
how did you know about his childhood in the village?' Peres said, 'I didn't. But what else can he write
about besides his life in the village?' " In his memoir, Peres admits that as a young politician he was "seen
as dangerously ambitious."
No one showed more contempt for Peres than his fellow peace-prize winner Rabin. In Israel's almost
unbearably intimate political culture, the two men struggled for the leadership of the Labor Party, and the
country, for nearly thirty years, and yet could not escape working together. In 1974, after the Israelis had
suffered the shock and losses of the Yom Kippur War and Golda Meir stepped down, Rabin took over as
Prime Minister and, "albeit with a heavy heart," appointed Peres Defense Minister. Peres helped rebuild the
armed forces and campaigned strongly in the Cabinet for a program to create Jewish settlements in the
occupied territories. "Settlements everywhere" was his slogan. Although Rabin and Peres had their
differences over policy, their animosity more often had to do with intrigues, power, and a general lack of
trust. In his memoirs, Rabin described Peres as "constantly and tirelessly attempting political subversion. .
. . He not only tried to undermine me but the entire government, trusting in the old Bolshevik maxim that
'the worse the situation, the better for Peres.' "
Even by the mid-nineties, with Rabin again Prime Minister and Peres Foreign Minister, the two men
sometimes could resolve their differences only by employing a mediator—a trade-union lawyer named
Giora Eini. On the morning of September 11, 1993, two days before the Oslo accords were to be signed in
Washington, Peres, as the chief Israeli negotiator, thought that he was going to represent his country.
Rabin had been in no hurry to go. Bill Clinton, however, wanted as high-level a group as possible and
persuaded Rabin to come. That day, two reporters from Yediot Ahronot, Barnea and Shimon Shiffer,
visited Peres at his official residence in Jerusalem. Peres had just heard on the radio that Rabin would lead
the delegation. He was furious. "Why didn't he have the decency to call and tell me?" he said. He took a
telephone call and asked the two journalists to step outside for a moment. "But we had a new
voice-activated tape recorder and I didn't remember to turn it off properly," Barnea recalled, laughing.
With the reporters out of the room, Peres referred to Rabin as "the man who has ruined my life" and said
that he was going to stay home or resign from the government, or both. It was only that afternoon, when
Rabin came from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem to pacify Peres, that the crisis passed.
Not just Rabin but Golda Meir, Yitzhak Shamir, and Ehud Barak disliked Peres, even as they worked with
him; only Sharon, the most vivid of his ideological opponents but a colleague since the Ben-Gurion days,
knows how to woo him. Sharon lets Peres carry on limited negotiations with the P.L.O., although he is
likely to end up crushing those talks. Ari Shavit, a leading writer for Ha'aretz, the most serious of the
Israeli papers, says, "Sharon understands Peres's need for love and affection. They are like an old married
couple and, after they fall out, Sharon calls the old girl and they have a candlelight supper and he speaks
sweetly and everything is O.K. At seventy-eight, Peres is finally being courted and loved. Sharon sends
him flowers."
Shimon Peres was laughing. "All this stuff, that I don't seem Israeli or that I am too eloquent. Please! If
I've changed my policies, it's because the situation has changed. I was a hawk, but when we could make
peace I was a dove. I've never wanted to be the governor of the Palestinian people." We spoke for half the
day, first in his office, then in the back seat of his car—an official white Volvo—and then over lunch,
calamari and a bottle of wine, at Raphael, a chic new restaurant overlooking the sea that Peres had been
interested in trying.
It is hard to overestimate the sharpness of Peres's ideological turn and the way it affected Israeli history.
When the Begin government took power, in 1977, Peres led the Labor opposition and became the Party's
representative to the Socialist International. He began spending more time with European leftists: Bruno
Kreisky, of Austria; Willy Brandt, of West Germany; Olaf Palme, of Sweden. In the following years, with
the Lebanon war in the headlines, Peres began to agree, in large measure, with those leaders'
condemnation of Israeli overreach. He had also witnessed on frequent trips to the United States the
influence of the antiwar movement. "Shimon could see that this was no longer the Churchill-de Gaulle
world he'd grown up in, and the kind of patriotism which he had regarded as the ultimate value was losing
its exclusivity as a value of the West," Amos Oz said, at his spartan home in the desert city of Arad. "He
became more aware of the validity of the Palestinian claim. The idea that we were the good guys repelling
a flood of cruel, bloodthirsty enemies—an archetype of the Zionist mythology—became more
complicated. Not to say that he lost his Zionist zeal or became 'pro-Palestinian,' but the simplifications
gave ground."
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