Shimon Peres hoped for best, prepared for worst
Shimon Peres, born as Szymon Perski, who passed away on Wednesday, was respected as one of the key architects of the establishment of the state of Israel. With his demise, a generation of people will remember a leader who has left behind a legacy of always looking ahead. His larger-than-life persona played a vital role in seeking to bring peace between Israel and Palestine. In the more than six decades of his political life, a defining political achievement was the historic Oslo peace accord signed in 1993. For this, he, along with then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine liberation Organisation (PlO) chairman Yasser Arafat, was awarded the Nobel peace prize in 1994. With the death of Rabin in 1995, Arafat in 2004 and Peres now, the prospect of peace under the rubric of the two-state formula offered by the Oslo accord, seems to be remote for one of the most protracted conflicts in the world. As Israel was not willing to negotiate peace with the PlO, Peres’ efforts to bring both leaderships together showed how he broke the taboo and the impasse. His role as the Prime Minister and the Minister in charge of defence, foreign affairs, finance and transportation; and President until 2014, brought out the true nation-builder and a statesman in him. He helped found the country's defence industry, including, the arms-maker Rafael, and forged a strategic partnership with France when he was just 40. He worked with the US Government to save the country from hyper-inflation. The list is long.
Some of his iconic words will pass on, not merely as political statements but as guiding principles to resolve global conflicts of our time: “If you have children, you cannot feed them forever with flags for breakfast and cartridges for lunch. You need something more substantial. Unless you educate your children and spend less money on conflicts, unless you develop your science, technology and industry, you don't have a future.” This reflects how he genuinely believed in the power of science and technology for transforming a society, and frowned on spending money on conflicts. His constant search for peace and accommodation with the Arab world, despite having serious differences with many of its leaders, was admirable. But the Arab Spring of 2011 disillusioned him, as he saw no hope for engagement in the region, with change in leaderships there.
His longing for forward-thinking was reflected in his ambition to make Israel a technologically powerful nation, while connecting with and protecting the cultural diaspora of the country. To that end, he was successful, as he rescued several Ethiopian Jews from persecution and starvation in the regime of communist leader Haile Mariam Mengistu. Shimon Peres will remain an enduring personality who believed: “If a problem has no solution, it may not be a problem, but a fact — not to be solved, but to be coped with, over time.”