Last update - 00:00 14/09/2006
Olmert's poodle
By Yossi Sarid
I like all dogs, but especially big, bold dogs. Therefore, I will evince understanding for the taste of those who use "poodle" as a term of dismissal.
In recent weeks there has been increasing domestic criticism of British Prime Minister Blair, who visited Israel this week, and last week the British Labor Party was on the brink of revolt. Seventeen members of Parliament protested openly against their leader's refusal to retire in the near future, as he had promised. Promised-promised, but tarrying-tarrying. And in the meantime Labor is sinking fathoms deep in the public opinion polls.
Blair's rivals and multiplying critics - in the public, in the party and in the media - are comparing him to a poodle. "Bush's poodle," they are calling him. And in truth, it is difficult to grasp how it is that the prime minister of an important country, and an important personality in his own right, is allowing the president of the United States to drag him around on a leash, as though his collar were looped around George W. Bush's neck. And the latter is dragging him into his adventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and also Lebanon, as America, with British support, is allowing Israel to destroy Lebanon and itself instead of promoting an immediate cease-fire. It is difficult for the British to comprehend how a charming and gifted person like their prime minister is effacing himself before another person, whose intelligence quotient is lower than that of all his predecessors in the White House during the past century, as was revealed this week by a comparative study done by the University of California.
The impression is that most of the public is fed up with Blair after 10 years of what has been, by and large, a successful tenure, whereas the Israeli public is never fed up with Vice Premier Shimon Peres even after 55 years, and his glory endureth forever. It is one thing to be the imperial Bush's poodle - and quite another thing to be the provincial Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's poodle. And he who poured water for David Ben-Gurion is prepared to serve the 12th prime minister of Israel, and does this with tail-wagging submissiveness. At one time he was accused of indefatigable subversiveness, whereas now he can be accused of indefatigable self-effacement.
And Olmert knows the soul of his vice premier; he misses no opportunity to stroke his fur. He flatters him, stresses his special status in this country and the world and sends him abroad every week on missions of hasbara (propaganda) and fundraising.
In writing about Peres there is no impulse and no passion. To the contrary: The writer is sated and even a bit bored. To what can this be compared? To writing on ice in the polar regions? It would definitely have been possible to have relinquished writing yet another article, if Peres himself were to have relinquished a little and not showered us night and day with the rain of his bequests and insights. And these insights are so very profound or so very sublime that it is hard to plumb them or ascertain their meaning.
Israel Radio, for example, apparently believes that we will have difficulty opening our eyes in the morning without Peres' shining light. And Sever Plocker, a journalist of the first rank, waits upon the vice premier, and the philosopher-statesman graciously grants him and us pearls of his wisdom, such as in an interview that was published last week in the mass-circulation daily Yedioth Ahronoth.
For his part, Peres did not disappoint this time, either: To everyone's delight he did not reject the possibility that when the day comes, he would return to lead the Labor Party on condition that he will know precisely "where to lead it - to which goal." After all, Peres himself knows whence he comes, and he comes from every position in his past: There does not exist a single position that Peres has not held at one time or another. It is not he who is to blame for the variance in circumstances that change positions like those garments the British call "unmentionables." As everyone knows, great statesmen are not destined to shape reality, but rather to subordinate themselves to it and to dance to its pipe.
And where is Peres heading now? We get the full details, the vacuum, further along in the interview: "The idea of the unilateral convergence is over ... There will not be a massive evacuation of settlements" - this is the gospel. And if there is no evacuation, why shouldn't there be construction and "thickening" at this time. Indeed they are building in the settlements today like in the good old days of Peres when he was defense minister at Sebastia. Thus for him the circle of tower-and-stockade is closing, and therefore it is superfluous to mention even by implication the uprooting of the illegal settlements.
The plum in the interview for the weekend is something else: "A new Israel Defense Forces is needed." The IDF, which until yesterday was the best-army-in-the-world, did not do its job and good riddance to it and all its planes and artillery and tanks. It will be replaced by a different army that is based on "a technology of miniature parts called nanotechnology ... Why send a fighter into the battlefield if it is possible to send in a robot equipped with sophisticated sensors?" And the interviewer listens patiently to all the bubbles that Peres blows - patiently and with more than a smidgen of admiration.
The more one contemplates Peres' pearls of wisdom, the more one is dumbstruck. Peres does not get insulted by lowly articles like this one: "They always ridiculed me when a generation ago I initiated the establishment of our defense industries for electronics and aeronautics and other weapons systems," he says, preempting any scorn. In other words, Shimon initiated everything here, and without his initiatives this country would still be a barren desert and its inhabitants tent-dwellers, who upon leaving their tents would ride camels. If Peres himself were to write about himself - we would be as grasshoppers in his eyes. From the lofty heights of his age and his status he would write about how a man made of china feels in a shop of bulls like us.
No, he is not interested in being president of the country: "No, and that's final. I feel good in what I am doing now. What do I need another title for?" As a matter of fact, here there is nothing new: After all, it is very well known that Peres has never asked anything for himself - neither office nor position. And had he not bowed, not to his own benefit, to the will of the movement and the will of the country, he would have retired to his home long ago, amused himself with his grandchildren and read and written books. It was only cruel life - "the circumstance" - that compelled him, entirely against his will, to run in his day against Moshe Katsav or Amir Peretz.
And if he lost in these miserable races, it is only because he didn't really want to win, indeed from the outset he did not want the position, and was forced to take it. Now it is necessary to hope and to wish for him that malevolent and ungrateful circumstances will not force him yet again to run against Ruhama Avraham for a slot that opens up and needs to be filled in a hurry.
And an emotional call should also go forth from here to the general public and its representatives: Enough, enough harassment of our most senior statesman, who with all his heart wishes to be demobilized, whereas we are shackling him to our welfare, to his total distress. Our wickedness knows no bounds: An innocent visit to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is immediately interpreted as a bid for Shas' support for his candidacy for president. Stuff and nonsense - the subject never even came up in their conversation. And as for his signature at the end of that meeting on the protest against the gay pride parade in Jerusalem - it also was accompanied by ugly innuendos. Of course not, there is no connection except in the imaginations of evil people.
When, in the way of all flesh, everyone is occupied with the travails of this world, Shimon Peres is occupied with the mysteries of the future, the next world that is all good, a brave new world. And our future in this country lies in the Negev and in the Galilee, which have been awaiting their redemption for years on end. Peres has made up his mind to devote himself to the forgotten south and the remote north, thus distancing his testimony and his endeavors from the puddle.
And behold, a war happened: Katyushas in the north and Qassams in the south, and the circumstances - those circumstances again! - are compelling Peres to set out urgently and frequently to lands across the sea to raise funds. And the funds are already flowing like water after Peres smote the rock. Soon they will supersede the national budget and exempt the government from a headache. Thus far he alone and by the might of his hand has raised $300 million, wants to increase the sum to $500 million and "it is possible we will reach $1 billion."
And there is more: "In the Middle East" - Peres goes on to report - "$1,000 billion is circulating and looking for investments. I see no reason why its owners should not take reasonable risks and come to invest in a project like the Peace Valley, which spreads for Eilat and Aqaba to the Sea of Galilee, or in the joint development of locales on both sides of Israeli-Lebanese border."
In light of these marvelous things, it was hard to understand about why and wherefore the inhabitants of the north, in whose unmediated view there is not yet a trace of rehabilitation of the ruins, were complaining this week. And it was hard to understand why and wherefore the financial pillars of the south were all excited this week when to their astonishment, they discovered that in the 2007 budget they and their Negev appear at zero, zero, zero. Okay, folks. You don't have a budget, but you have Shimon Peres and his flights. Why should you moan like folk of little belief, hysterical people, who do not know the taste of vision? And just before this went to press it was reported that at the last moment, NIS 150 million were rescued for the development of the Negev, instead of the NIS 1.8 billion that were promised a year ago - less than 10 percent of spit in the eye.
It seems to me that I have succeeded in identifying Peres' problem, which was perhaps my own problem. He is strongly drawn to the past, and at the same time he is drawn to the future; whereas in between, between nostalgia and vision - there is nothing, a black hole, dead space to the horizon of longings. It is just a pity that life itself is in between; between the past and the future glimmers a present that insists on its needs and demands.
As the reality of life declines, Peres' vision rises, and as the vision is more ridiculous and more divorced from the reality, its owner increases in stature as the prophet of the generation. When life is looking like a rusty drainpipe, Peres looks like a rider on a cloud with his head aloft in the sky. No wonder then that he looks larger than life - too large. Shall we not be grateful to Peres if he comes down to us sometimes, to the puddle? In his descent, he can make use of the drainpipe as a ladder.
True, without a vision a nation goes wild, but when the vision is lofty and cut off and receding into the distance like a birthday balloon filled with helium, it cannot soothe a nation going wild and it cannot assuage existential anxieties.