Former Israeli President Shimon Peres slapped Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu behind the back on Sunday for encouraging terrorized Jews to make Aliyah instead of doing so without being pushed by hatred.
Speaking in New York at an event by the Times of Israel newspaper, Peres insisted, “Jews can live all over the world. Just keep your children Jewish.”
The intermarriage rate in the United States is approximately 60 percent. It is above 70 percent in most of Europe, and Israel’s premier president of platitudes can’t connect the dots. The reason is that Peres refers never miss an opportunity to knock Netanyahu. even if at the expense of Aliyah.
The Prime Minister commented after this week’s murder of a Jewish guard at a Copenhagen synagogue, “I would like to tell all European Jews and all Jews wherever they are: Israel is the home of every Jew.”
Last month, at the funerals in Israel for French Jews murdered by a terrorist in an attack on kosher deli, in Paris, Netanyahu told mourners, ”Today we have a state of our own, one that is blossoming and advanced, one that spreads great light like a lighthouse of morality; a state that takes its fate in its hands.”
But Peres, instead of promoting Israel’s “lighthouse of morality” and encouraging people to have the desire to make Aliyah, preferred to exploit the event in New York to jab his long-time political enemy Netanyahu while broadcasting the old-time Israeli smugness that Israel does not have to ask anyone to come to the country.
“Come because you want to live in Israel,” Peres said, which would have been a reasonable statement if it weren’t for the fact that although Peres’ father and family were Zionists, no one made the move to Israel until anti-Semitism hastened their emigration from Europe..
Peres was born in White Russia and was ruled by Poland between the world wars. As anti-Semitic violence escalated, Peres’ father traveled to Tel Aviv in 1932 to put down stakes in Israel and then called for his family, including the future president of Israel, to make Aliyah in 1934. Those who remained behind were massacred by the Nazis.