Vice President Joe Biden awarded outgoing President Shimon Peres with the Congressional Gold Medal Thursday for his decades of dedication to saying the word “peace,” especially with Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas but not so much with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
Peres again took the opportunity to heap admiration on Abbas, only weeks after the head of the Palestinian Authority regime in Ramallah embraced the Hamas terrorist organization with a unity pact.
Peres has made a career of telling Western leaders what they want to hear, mainly that he is willing to sell out all of Judea and Samaria and parts of Jerusalem in return for praise. Peres backed the expulsion of Jews from Gush Katif in 2005 and then showed his remarkable ability for being out of touch with reality by expressing out loud his amazement that Hamas responded by attacking Israel with missiles.
Equally amazing is that Western leaders and media still headline Peres every time he says, as he did on Thursday, “President Abbas is clearly a partner for peace.
“There were people who thought otherwise, I feel they are now closer to my judgment than their own.”
It is not clear what people he meant because Peres has been preaching to a dwindling chorus for decades.
There is Talmudic passage in Baba Metzia (page 66) that illustrates the meaningless of Peres’s declarations.
“Reuven” sold land to “Shimon” but without any responsibility to compensate Shimon if a creditor were to step in and take the land. Seeing that Shimon was so sad over the possibility, Reuven promises, “If it is taken from you, I will return any improvements of crops that you grew on it by giving you my best property.”
The Gemorrah concludes that the promise consists of “empty words’ and were said only to make Shimon feel better.
That has been Peres. Everyone makes him feel so good that he has no idea of what is going on in the world outside of his presidential residence and room of trophies, award, certifications, medals and honors, the least of which is the Nobel Peace Prize that he won along with arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat.
With peace partners like that, Israel indeed had no enemies.
By insisting that Abbas is “peace partner” despite his his regime’s maps showing that all of Israel is “Palestine” and despite his glorification of ”martyrs,” Peres is uttering empty words that the Netanyahu government does not honor.
In return, he is showered with empty words that bring Israel lots of faint praise that means, “We love you, Israel, and now please be good Jews and do as we say and stop being Jewish and Israeli.”
Speaking of empty promises, President Barack Obama said farewell to Peres with a promise that he would not let Iran obtain a nuclear weapon.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Peres said, “I am leaving the office, but I am not leaving the battle for peace,” which he threatens to take to the corporate world.
“We can combine the Israeli companies with other global companies. Companies go without nationality; you don’t have to raise your national flag. Governments are suspicious; companies are not.”
Companies are not suspicious?
Peres really said that?
Probably so because he is good at “empty words.”