Uri Avnery, 10.12.05
THIS WEEK I was strolling through
the streets of Athens, at the foot of the Acropolis, when my eye was caught by
a sign bearing one single word in Greek letters: Sisyphus. It was the name of a
taverna.
Perhaps the gods wanted
to remind me of an article I wrote 14 years ago, entitled "The Revenge of
the Gods". Its tragic hero was the man I called "Shimon
Sisyphus".
The original Sisyphus
was, of course, the king of Corinth, a sinful, lying man of intrigue. He ratted
on Zeus, the God-in-Chief, who was, as was his wont, dallying with human
beauties.
As a punishment,
Sisyphus was sent to Hades, condemned to roll a heavy stone up a hill. Every
time the stone was approaching the top of the hill, it slipped down again. And
so on, to the end of time.
That had been the fate
of Shimon Peres at the time I wrote that article, and that has been his fate
since then, too, up to this very day. I don't know what made the Greek gods
mete out this punishment, but throughout the years Peres has proved that he
deserves it.
If there was any doubt
about this, the last few days provided confirmation. Peres committed an act of
political prostitution. If he had just left the Labor Party before the
primaries and joined the competition - well enough. After all, Ariel Sharon has
done the same. But Peres ran for party chairman, and only after he was roundly defeated,
did he go over to Sharon's new party.
No doubt, Peres brought
the curse on himself. He will continue to roll the stone up, and the stone will
continue to slip down every time, just when it seems about to reach the top.
ALREADY IN 1953, when he was a mere 30, he was appointed
Director General of the powerful Ministry of Defense. That was an amazing
promotion. He was the protégé of the almighty David Ben-Gurion, the Prime
Minister and Minister of Defense, who handed him control of the huge defense
establishment. He could well expect that in due course the Old Man would turn
the prime minister's office over to him. In the meantime, in 1959, he was
elected to the Knesset and appointed Deputy Minister of Defense.
And then he was struck
by disaster. In 1963, Ben-Gurion was driven out of office and - quite literally
- into the desert. Peres remained dangling. He made himself agreeable to the
successor, Levy Eshkol, who became Prime Minister and Minister of Defense, and was
busy trying to restore his standing when the stone slipped from his grasp again:
Ben-Gurion returned suddenly from his retreat in the desert and founded a new
party, Rafi. Peres could not really refuse to join him. With obvious reluctance
he resigned his post and left the Labor party (then called Mapai). But he hoped
that with Ben-Gurion's victory he would still reach the top.
He threw himself into
the work of building the new party, setting up local branches, conducting the
election campaign. He was sure that a party led by the legendary Old Man, with
the participation of the glorious Moshe Dayan and several other generals, would
win a resounding victory. How could it be otherwise? But election day, in
November 1965, brought a bitter disappointment: Rafi won only 10 (out of 120)
Knesset seats, and their location on the political map condemned them to
irrelevancy. (This example sweetens the dreams of Likud functionaries, who hope
that the same will now happen to Sharon, who has started a similar adventure.)
After two years, a life-saver was thrown to
Rafi. The savior was none other than the Egyptian leader, Gamal Abd-al-Nasser,
who massed his army in the Sinai desert, threatening Israel. The country was
seized by panic, Rafi was invited to join an emergency government, and its
representative became Minister of Defense. But it was not Peres, who labored so
hard for Rafi, but Moshe Dayan, who had not lifted a finger. The staggering
victory in the Six-day war made Dayan the idol of the masses, while Peres was
left on the sidelines. The stone had slipped again to the bottom of the hill.
Peres understood that he
had no chance in a small party. He brought Rafi back into the Labor Party (now
called Ma'arakh) and received as consolation prize the unimportant Ministry of
Transportation. Ben-Gurion regarded this as an act of treason by his protégé
and founded another small party, the State List.
The great opportunity arrived
in 1974, a few months after the Yom Kippur war. The war looked like a national
disgrace, and the two persons responsible for that, Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan,
until then national icons, were sent packing. The way was clear for a new Prime
Minister, and it seemed as if the job would fall into the lap of Peres like a
ripe fruit. But at the last moment Yitzhak Rabin, a political greenhorn,
appeared out of nowhere and plucked the fruit. He was selected by the party.
Peres, hurt to his
innermost soul, was compelled to make do with the Ministry of Defense. He spent
the next three years working relentlessly to undermine Rabin, who later described
him as an "Untiring Conspirator". For this purpose, and in order to
gain the sympathy of right-wingers, Peres founded Kedumim, the first settlement
in the heart of the Arab population of the West Bank.
The cruel gods decided
to mock him again. Rabin was involved in a trifling affair - contrary to the
prevailing law, his wife had neglected to close a bank account that he had kept
while serving as ambassador in Washington - and resigned. At long last, Peres
became the chairman of the party. At the start of the election campaign of
1977, his victory was assured and he already busied himself with selecting his
ministers, when the unimaginable happened: Menachem Begin, the eternal
opposition leader who had been defeated in one election campaign after another,
won and became Prime Minister. Peres had to bear the responsibility, Rabin's
hands were clean. The stone had again slipped to the bottom.
In the next elections,
1981, the gods played an even more sadistic trick. When the ballots closed, the
pollsters announced that Labor had won. Radiant with happiness, Peres let
himself be declared the next Prime Minister. And then it became clear that
Begin had won after all.
The continuation was
bitter. Begin accepted the advice of his new Minister of Defense, Ariel Sharon,
and invaded Lebanon. The day before the tanks rolled, Peres publicly announced
his support . There followed the occupation of Beirut, the Sabra and Shatila
massacre, the dismissal of Sharon, the mental breakdown of Begin. The public
started to detest the war. Peres was sure that this time he would win. But the
winner was Begin's successor, Yitzhak Shamir.
The next years were a
series of ups and downs. Again and again Peres almost reached the top. Once he even
became Prime Minister for some time, but only owing to a peculiar Israeli invention:
a rotating Prime Ministership in a "national unity" government after an
impasse with Shamir at the polls. As Prime Minister he had one real success:
together with a talented Finance Minister, Yitzhak Moda'i, he brought inflation
down from 400% to normal.
But the urge to become
Prime Minister by his own efforts was too strong: he organized a putsch in the
national unity government to displace Shamir and to seize power with the help
of the religious ministers. But they betrayed him at the last moment and he had
to leave the government altogether. Rabin, in his inimitable style, called the
episode, "Peres's stinking exercise".
On the eve of the 1992
elections, Peres' chances looked good. The public was fed up with the Likud.
Victory was beckoning the Labor Party. But the fruit was again snatched from
him: the party nominated Rabin. Peres had to be content with a secondary post -
as Foreign Minister, who in Israel is less important than the Defense and
Finance ministers.
People who talked with
Peres at that stage got the impression that he had finally given up the
ambition of ever getting to the top of the hill. For the first time, he really
cooperated with Rabin, and the two together created the miracle of Oslo. Both
had been long-term advocates of the "Jordanian Option" (handing the
occupied Palestinian territories to the Jordanian king), but the intifada
finally convinced them to recognize the Palestinian people and come to an
agreement with the PLO. When it was decided to award the Nobel Peace Prize to
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, Peres moved heaven and earth to be included as
well. Since the prize can be given to three people at most, the fourth partner,
Mahmoud Abbas, was unjustly left out.
BUT THE gods did not relent. In November 1995, Rabin was
assassinated. The assassin, who was waiting at the foot of the staircase, let
Peres, who was within touching distance, walk safely by. He was appointed by
the party to take Rabin's place as Prime Minister.
This was the opportunity
of his life. He could call for new elections and surely ride to a landslide
victory on the wave of public outrage at the murder. But Peres did not want to owe
his election to Rabin's memory. He postponed the election for a few months,
during which he started a small war in Lebanon that ended in disaster - the
massacre of refugees by mistake. Then he okayed the assassination of a Hamas
militant, the legendary bomb-maker Yihyeh Ayash, provoking a series of bloody retaliatory
suicide attacks that ruined Peres' chances.
On election day, the
gods repeated their sadistic trick: it looked as if Peres had won. Late in the
night it became clear that the opposite had happened. A new phrase was born:
"We went to sleep with Peres and woke up with Netanyahu!"
At one of the party meetings, Peres asked what
was meant to be a rhetorical question: "What, am I a loser?" and was
dismayed by a chorus of replies: "Yes! Yes!"
It seemed as if the gods
had lost interest. Binyamin Netanyahu assumed power and was soon detested by
the public. The government fell, and Labor won the elections. But the hero was
not Peres, but Ehud Barak, a former army Chief-of-Staff, whose election aroused
wild enthusiasm, which, in turn, turned quickly into bitter disappointment that
degenerated into a despair of peace and the collapse of the Left. In 2001 Barak
lost to Sharon by a landslide, the party luminaries could not agree among
themselves on a successor, and asked Peres to assume the party leadership "temporarily"
as a stop-gap. As usual, he immediately
began turning "temporary" into permanent.
On the way, another
accident befell him. The post of President of the State fell vacant. Peres
lusted for the position, which is empty of practical content but full of
prestige. The President is elected by parliament in a secret vote. Most members
assured Peres of their support. The alternative candidate was a second-rank
Likud functionary, one Moshe Katzav. But when the envelopes were opened, it
appeared that the impossible had happened again: Peres had lost this contest,
too.
In order to keep his
international standing, Peres led his party into the Sharon government, in
return for a newly invented title: "Vice Prime Minister". For this
empty appellation, he sold the soul of the party. He used his international
prestige to cultivate respectability for Sharon throughout the world, where
Sharon was remembered as the man of Sabra and Shatila. For this alone, Peres
deserves everything that was coming to him.
The Labor ministers
supported not only the Gaza withdrawal - a good thing in itself - but also all
the acts of oppression in the West Bank: the expropriation of land, the expansion
of the settlements, inaction on the "removal of the outposts", the
construction of the monstrous wall and the campaign of targeted assassinations,
while boycotting the Palestinian Authority. Peres himself condemned the
Thatcherist economic policy of the government as "swinish
capitalism", while continuing to support it unstintingly in practice.
The end - for the time
being - came a few weeks ago. In the past, Amir Peretz had left the Labor Party
to found his own small workers' party. Peres himself had convinced him to come
back into the fold. Now he contested Peres' post as party chairman - and won. Taking revenge on the party,
Peres left it for the second time in his life and joined Sharon, as he had once
joined Ben-Gurion.
NOW SHARON uses Peres as bait to lure fish from the Labor
party, but would not dream of putting him on his list of party candidates for
the Knesset. That would have repelled a lot of Likud members from joining him. It
is doubtful whether he will really honor his promise to Peres to give him a
respectable job if he wins the elections - perhaps the post of President, after
Katzav finishes his term.
There is something deeply
tragic in this story. All his life, Peres has pined for the love of the public,
and every time he has been jilted. This man, a professional and incredibly
persevering politician from the age of 18, has never won an election. Israelis
wonder why he enjoys so much prestige throughout the world. The rest of the
worlds why he cannot win an election in Israel.
Was it because he was an
immigrant in an era of native-born Sabras? Was it the Polish accent, that he was
unable to get rid of? Something in his character? The lack of charisma? The
fact that he never served in the army? Perhaps some combination of all these?
The gods surely know.