Shimon Peres

The Israeli President [1] has joint the felicitators around Barack Obama sending the people of Iran New Year greetings. In an audio message, the 1994 Nobel laureate (with PLO leader Yasser Arafat) doesn’t conceal, however, his deep antipathy for the current administration. He urges the Iranian people to shake off the rule of “an oppressive and fanatical regime” and return to relations of peace and harmony with Israel, which the two countries enjoyed when the Shah was in power, as the Jerusalem Post writes.

 

Peres’ initiative has been criticized in the meantime by European diplomats as diluting Obama’s endeavor.

 

In their respective addresses, neither Peres nor Obama mention, by the way, the 2008-2009 Israel-Gaza conflict where most probably more than one thousand Palestinian civilians lost their lives. It took place during the so-called transition period when the outgoing U.S. President Bush was still in office and Barack Obama was President-elect. Israeli soldiers have, in the meantime, confessed war crimes [2].

 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] The Israeli technician Mordechai Vanunu has compared Shimon Peres with the Pakistani dealer of nuclear equipment Abdul Qadeer Khan. Vanunu, who has spent 18 years in prison in Israel for revealing details of Israel’s covert nuclear weapons program, has recently asked the Peace Nobel Committee in Oslo to remove him from the list of nominees.

 

[2] Why do they (the Iranians, the Arabs) hate us? A question, many naïve Americans still ask. The video by mead2000 with text and music by Brian Eno (from Another Day on Earth, Opal Ltd. 2005) may in fact be revealing. The monologue by Aylie Cooke is, as Eno states “emotionally brutal”. The movie is congenial.

 

 

 

Palestine Wiped Off the Map