Neither War Nor Peace: Shimon Peres, Israel and History

‘We learned from the British,” explained the late Shimon Peres in The Guardian in 2011, “what democracy means, and how it behaves in times of danger, war and terror. We thank Britain for introducing freedom and respect of human rights both in normal and demanding circumstances.”[1]
This student of history was the pitch perfect representation of the Israeli narrative, one born in brutality, maturing in it, and then, in time, considering the option of peace through necessity. The realisation that the Jewish state would have to make concessions from its imperial loft was not a point he wished to make. Circumstances dictated it.
All of this was part of the role of making history, to count in its annals, to matter in the books. Each Israeli leader has been obsessed by that theme: to achieve something supposedly unprecedented, the next stage, a form of outdoing the impossible, namely, Ben-Gurion’s own effort in establishing the state of Israel.’
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