Perez: Iraq and the schizophrenia of the European Left

Until the very last minute we didn’t know whether our delegation was going to meet with Shimon Peres as had been scheduled.  The program of our group of Italian journalists, politicians and ordinary citizens on a solidarity trip to Israel, didn’t foresee the fall of Sharon’s government together with the Labor party and with Peres as Foreign Minister.

As far as we were concerned, of course, his new status as ex-minister certainly didn’t make the encounter any less enticing, and Peres didn’t disappoint our expectations.  He took it for granted that in several days dense with meetings with governmental and non-governmental authorities, that we’d probably heard enough speeches.  Therefore, after a brief introduction in which he thanked us for the gesture and the significance of our visit, the historical leader suggested that we go straight to our questions.  He decided that he wanted to speak in English rather than Hebrew, which meant that I was called upon to interpret for the rest of the Italians who didn’t know English.  I can’t tell my readers what an emotional experience it was to share a microphone with Peres!

Lucid and ironic, he said he didn’t think there would be any hope of forming another Likud-Labor government.  When asked if the failure of the government of national conciliation had surprised him, he said what was surprising to him was not that it had failed, but the fact that it had been formed in the first place, an almost unique experience in Hebrew history.  Almost, because there was one precedence:  Adam and Eve.  When Adam discovered that Eve was the only woman and Eve discovered that Adam was the only man, they decided to form a government of national conciliation and they called it Paradise.  It went quite well for a while, until a serpent came along, and the rest of the story, well, we all know how it went.  Today the serpent has a first and last name, that is, Yassir Arafat.

With this amusing metaphor he had us all laughing, a witty way to reveal a crude reality, a political tragedy for him and his party:  Peres gives Arafat the blame for the undoing of the Israeli left.  His words were conciliatory with those we’d heard two evenings earlier from the mouth of the official government spokesman, Avi Panzer:  every concession made to Arafat, like the gold platter (never mind silver platter!) offered to him at Camp David, is seen, not as a gesture of generosity and desire for peace, but as a sign of weakness.

When asked to comment on the attitude of the Europeans toward the situation in the Middle East, he expressed his profound disappointment toward the sinister morality of the Left.  He found it hard to fathom the fact that the Europeans decided to intervene in Kosovo, but they are bent on refusing an intervention in Iraq.  How can the crimes committed by Saddam Hussein against his own population be considered any less grave than those committed my Milosevic against his own?  With one important distinction that ought to make all the difference:  Milosevic didn’t have an arsenal of arms of mass destruction, nor any atomic ambition or potential.  How can the European Left use such a double standard when the weight of danger is so dominant in the case that threatens us today?  This is what the former minister asked us, and all we could do was pass on his question.

December 2002

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