CHRISTOPHER DICKEY
09.28.16 4:12 AM ET
PARIS —Shimon Peres is recognized as a great statesman and will be remembered after his death early Wednesday morning at age 93 as a passionate advocate of peace between Israel’s Jews and the Arabs of the Middle East.
With a longer view, historians will note that he managed to become prime minister twice and president of the State of Israel, but he never clearly won the powerful premiership in popular or parliamentary votes. He was always admirable, but in the end, proved almost unelectable, a brilliant rhetorician, but not nearly as successful a politician as, say, long-serving Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Even as a peacemaker, or perhaps especially as a peacemaker, Peres could articulate brilliantly and beautifully the desires for peace, the reasons for peace, the benefits of peace, and indeed he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with then-Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and the PLO’s Yassir Arafat. But Peres could not bring home the goods, and the relative calm that exists in Israel and the occupied territories for the moment is far from the peace that Peres so often and so eloquently described.
So it is ironic that his greatest single accomplishment — the one that has protected his nation decade after decade in the savage landscape of the Middle East, is one the Israeli government still, as a matter of form, will not acknowledge. Because it was Peres who brought home to Israel the nuclear weapons and the ballistic missiles that were and, for better or worse, still are the ultimate guarantor of its survival.
One key to the Israeli nuclear-weapons program launched in the mid-1950s was France, where the young Peres — still in his thirties and serving as the director general of Israel’s defense ministry — cultivated a vast array of important political and scientific contacts.
The other key was the systematic deception of the United States, which at first opposed Israel’s development of a nuclear-weapons capability, then failed to connect the dots that showed that’s what it was doing, then tried to buy it off with a huge increase in conventional weapons shipments, and finally, in 1969 accepted tacitly what it had failed to prevent explicitly.
Avner Cohen’s book Israel and the Bomb, published in 1998, still offers some of the most detailed and thoughtful information about what he calls Israel’s “nuclear opacity,” the refusal to admit what the world knows and what is, in fact, a vital source of deterrence. To study that history of 60 years ago is also to understand why Israel is so suspicious of Iran’s nuclear deceptions. It’s been there, done that, and Peres led the way.
That said, Israel’s perilous situation in the 1950s was hugely different than it is now. Today it is seen, rightly, as the region’s pre-eminent military power, with solid, massive, unequivocal backing by the United States. Read more here: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/09/28/how-shimon-peres-got-nukes-for-israel.html