In recent days, I have thought of one of the most stirring performances I have ever seen — in the political arena, roughly speaking. It came from a source I would not have expected: Shimon Peres. It occurred at Davos — the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum — in 2009. I wrote it up here (“A Great and Stirring Hour”).
My write-up is in the present tense:
One session is devoted to Gaza, where the Israelis have recently completed a major operation, designed to set back Hamas. We will hear from four speakers: Ban Ki-moon, secretary general of the United Nations; Recep Tayyip Erdogan, prime minister of Turkey; Amr Moussa, secretary general of the Arab League; and Shimon Peres, president of Israel. Serving as moderator is Washington Post columnist David Ignatius.
More:
Ban goes first, chastising Israel, if slightly indirectly: Gaza is miserable, a hell on earth, he says, which is certainly true. And he implies that Israel bears full responsibility. He does not say that Hamas triggered the recent fighting.
More:
Next comes Prime Minister Erdogan, who is in a decidedly anti-Israeli mood. . . . Like Ban, he acknowledges no Hamas responsibility at all. To hear him tell it, Israel went back into Gaza (after withdrawing in 2005) for the simple and single-minded purpose of killing.
More:
Amr Moussa is a perfect representative of the Arab old guard — a guard that liberals and reformers long to replace. And, from this Davos stage, he gives a speech — a rant — more suited to the “Arab street” than to a rarefied international conference. He talks about the “carnage” that Israel has inflicted on the Palestinian people, the Israeli “assault” on them, Israel’s daily brutalization of them. He condemns the “military occupation” of which Israel is guilty. He gives no hint that, when the Israelis left Gaza in 2005, they left those Palestinians to self-government, something they had never been afforded.
All right. Now things get interesting:
All of this time, Peres has just sat there. I think he must be a masochist to attend conferences like this, and place himself in situations like this. And will he deliver, here in Davos? There is a lot on his shoulders: the burden of speaking for Israel, and the truth of recent events. He is now 85 years old, and Davos’s kind of Israeli, usually: the ultimate dove.
And here is what happens: Peres, the old Labour warrior — the old peace-processer — rises up magnificently, in maybe the most stunning and gratifying public performance I have ever witnessed.
He begins, “I heard them talking about Israel, but I couldn’t recognize the country I know.” He continues, “It’s very difficult when a democracy has to contend with a terrorist group,” bent on the democracy’s destruction.
Television loves to show pictures of suffering Palestinians, but it does not show pictures of Israeli mothers, as they sit with their children through a night of rocket attacks. Before the recent operation, Hamas rockets rained down on Israelis, at random. The government showed great forbearance. But eventually it had to act.
“What else could we do? People were coming to us and saying, ‘Where are you? Why aren’t you protecting us?’ What else could we do? We had no choice.”
Correct. No choice.
I’ll continue:
Peres then reads Moussa, Erdogan, and all of us the Hamas charter: which calls for the murder of Jews, as a holy command. As he proceeds from that, Peres gets more and more emotional, shouting into the microphone, perhaps not realizing how loud his voice is in the hall. Passion — indignation, idealism, and some despair — pours out of him, as he defends his country and, in a way, his life [i.e., how he has spent it, what he has devoted it to].
He explains that Israel left Gaza “completely” in 2005, at considerable cost: It was not easy to convince the Israeli public of the wisdom of it. And Israel left infrastructure there, including new infrastructure — greenhouses, for example, meant specifically for Palestinians. And militants immediately destroyed this infrastructure. They also immediately began to attack what some call “Israel proper.” There was no interest in building a state, or providing a decent life for Palestinians.
Despite the chaos, says Peres, “there was never a day of starvation in Gaza.” The only items that Israel did not permit to be brought in were “rockets from Iran” — and Hamas built tunnels for those.
Peres reminds his audience that Israel made peace with Egypt and Jordan, the second those countries were willing. But Hamas has no such desire.
None at all.
Further on:
He talks about the millions of dollars he has helped raise to care for sick Palestinian children, in Israel. He talks about his lifelong commitment to peace and reconciliation. And he is quite clear about the Hamas practice of placing its fighters and weapons in kindergartens, hospitals, etc. “They hide behind innocent families,” Peres says. Israel placed 250,000 phone calls in 20 days to Palestinian civilians, pleading with them to evacuate, for Israel would shell Hamas. “What else could we do?”
Peres is visibly anguished at what Moussa has rightly called “carnage.” And I think of something Golda Meir said, years ago: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children; we cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”
Okay. My concluding two paragraphs:
After this performance, Prime Minister Erdogan is prepared to speak again. He says, “President Peres, you are old, and your voice is loud out of a guilty conscience. When it comes to killing, you know very well how to kill. I know well how you hit and kill children on beaches.” Erdogan wants more time to speak, but the moderator, Ignatius, says we are out. Erdogan stalks off the stage, saying, “Davos is over for me,” not just for this year but for all time. Peres says to him, as Erdogan makes his exit, “What would you do if you were to have in Istanbul every night a hundred rockets?”
In short order, Erdogan will return to a hero’s welcome in Istanbul, where people wave placards that read “Conqueror of Davos.” The prime minister’s wife, Emine, will declare, “Everything Peres said was a lie.” But the opposite was true. Shimon Peres rose up to speak important truths, in an atmosphere that cried out for them. It was a great and stirring hour, probably impossible to forget.