To paraphrase the bard, they came — dignitaries, statesmen and diplomats from around the world — not just to bury former Israeli president and prime minister Shimon Peres, but to praise him as well. Now they have all gone back home, not realising the damage this man, and other men like him, have done to our homeland.
Eulogies at funerals of Israel’s founders, as those at Simon Peres’s last week, are proof of how little-informed the world remains — or chooses to remain — about the cruelties that those Zionist leaders have inflicted on Palestinians. They are equally uninformed about the nature of the colonial enterprise they have crafted on Palestine. Yet, the amnesia here is necessary: You have to see Israel in isolation of the impact that Israel’s creation has had on the lives of the native people of that land.
You have to be amnesic. Otherwise, Zionism will surely be exposed as one of the most brutish and wicked enterprises of the 20th century. An argument about the Palestine conflict, where deep originality and richness of meaning are implicit, cannot ignore the jeering totem of evil that has been unleashed on the land by the advent of the Zionist movement, whose success was conditioned on the alienation and expulsion of the indigenous population from its ancestral home.
Peres was no different from other Zionist leaders, war criminals one and all. He was in the vanguard of the colonisation of Palestinian land, the imposition of vile laws on an occupied people who could not defend themselves and, as defence minister, for the building of the nuclear reactor in Dimona, marking the introduction of nuclear weapons to the Middle East — weapons that were later offered for sale to apartheid South Africa, a close ally of Tel Aviv at the time. All these in addition to the key role Peres had played in the 1956 tripartite aggression against Egypt.
The blood on his hands — and he had plenty of that — comes from his complicity in the 1996 Qana massacre at a United Nations compound in South Lebanon, about which he lied. “We did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp”, he later claimed. “It came as a surprise”. Oh, he knew! They all knew, those who were flying the drones over the camp long before the shelling started.
“I saw the results”, wrote the peripatetic journalist Robert Fisk, of the Independent, who had been on a UN convoy just outside the village. “Most of the 106 bodies — half of them children — were torn to pieces by Israeli shells. When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through in torrents. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces from a burning tree. What was left of him was on fire.” (A UN inquiry later determined that the slaughter was decidedly not an accident.)
Oh, yes, peacemakers have a way about them.
Elaborate obituaries and solemn eulogies have accompanied all other not-so-dearly-departed Israeli leaders. Remember Yitzhak Rabin, the former Israeli prime minister, lauded at his funeral as a “courageous peacemaker”? Well, he was the man behind one of the most brazen acts of ethnic cleansing in the 20th century, an act already in the history books, including several written by Israeli historians.
In July 1948, Rabin, then commander of the Jewish troops operating outside the area designated for a Jewish state in the 1947 UN Partition Plan, issued orders for the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population of the twin cities of Lydda and Ramleh, and to do it quickly, “without attention to age”. Roughly 100,000 Palestinian men, women and children, were driven out, and to hasten the process, Jewish soldiers went about hurling grenades into homes. Many of the residents, who ran out in panic, were shot at indiscriminately.
Even as prime minister during the first intifada (uprising) in 1988, Rabin never really shed his uniform as a soldier. He issued orders to his troops about how to treat young, stone-throwing protesters: Go out there, he told them, and “break their bones”. Even after 1993, following the signing of the Oslo Accords, he showed himself as a mastermind of land theft.
Yet, to eulogists at his funeral in 1995, Rabin was — yes, you guessed it — a selfless peacemaker. To Palestinians, however, he was a war criminal, just as Peres was.
And Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister? Well, the less said about him the better — a man who had set the gold standard in warmongering, brutality and wanton cruelty, including the time when he evinced that in the West Bank village of Qibya in 1953. He had led his troops in the massacre of 68 villagers after they, all civilians, had had their homes demolished by dynamites — with them inside. And let’s not, please, bring up what he did in 1982: The massacres in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Beirut. The horror is unspeakable.
When Sharon died in January 2014, after being in a stroke-induced coma since 2006, his funeral was attended by United States Vice-President Joe Biden, former British prime minister Tony Blair, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and other statesmen from Germany, Holland and elsewhere. Oh, Ya, gotta pay your respects.
And then, former prime minister Menachem Begin — head of the Urgun Gang in the 1940s, mastermind of the Deir Yassein massacre in April 1948. His vindictiveness is beyond understanding. Yet, he gloated about it in his memoir, The Revolt. At his funeral too, in 1992, eulogies flew left, right and centre.
Surely, the passing away of political leaders, whose moral compass had sprung from historical realities and habits of vision in late 19th century colonial Europe, when the “subjugated” people were seen as lesser species — a moral compass that remained anchored there — should not be mourned, let alone eulogised.
Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.
