In June 2012 I attended Israel’s Fourth Presidential Conference in Jerusalem as a guest of the government. The theme of the conference was Tomorrow 2012.
The late Shimon Peres was president of Israel. The conference was deeply reflective of him. Peres had been active in Israel’s politics and public life in one capacity or another roughly forever. In his remarks at the conference on its final morning Peres referred to David Ben-Gurion as his mentor. Indeed, he had just written a new biography of Ben-Gurion. Among the founding generation of Israel, President Peres must have been the last still active in Israel’s public life. Despite his characteristic focus on Tomorrow, Peres carried a lot of Israel’s history in his bones.
In the course of his long public life President Peres had met and befriended just about everybody. See, for example, his memoir Battling For Peace (1995). In any event, there can’t have been many invited speakers who declined the opportunity to appear at the 2012 conference under Peres’s auspices. Among the distinguished speakers were Henry Kissinger, Tony Blair, Google’s Eric Schmidt, Cisco’s John Chambers, and the great Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
Among the few members of the world community who might not have responded favorably to an invitation from President Peres was Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, for whom Peres had a few choice words at Davos in 2009 in one of the transcendent moments of his career. Peres’s 2009 remarks are available on YouTube in three videos here, here, and here.
Many of the conference speakers must have been handpicked by President Peres. Here I am thinking of Princeton’s Nobel Prize-winning Daniel Kahneman, Harvard’s Michael Sandel, and others including the business leaders. The conference seemed to me to reflect President Peres’s vision of Israel’s future in the Middle East. It is a somewhat utopian vision, as set forth in his book The New Middle East (1993).
Reflecting President Peres, the conference presented an intellectual feast. It tilted to the left. It envisioned Israel as a model for the region. To speak colloquially, it was big into the peace process. It focused on the future. It was celebratory of technology and entrepreneurship.
Peres spoke at events throughout the conference. On the conference’s final morning he spoke at a plenary session panel on the subject of learning from mistakes. Peres had of course won a Nobel Peace Prize for his involvement in the Oslo Accords that resulted in the return of Yasser Arafat from his Tunisian exile to rule over the Arabs on the West Bank and Gaza. I think this was a profound mistake deriving from idealism and cynicism, but President Peres did not count it as such.
Indeed, President Peres glancingly reaffirmed it in his comment: “In order to make peace, you have to close your eyes. You cannot make love or peace with open eyes.” I am quite sure that this is an aphorism that will not bear comparison with “At the summit true politics and strategy are one.”
English must have been President Peres’s third language, after Polish and Hebrew, yet he was eloquent in English. He spoke without notes in thoughts stated in the form of aphorisms. I found his intellectual gifts and verbal facility to be staggering.
After he spoke at the plenary session, President Peres held a press conference limited to “bloggers,” of whom Israel has many. I was honored to be invited to ask the first question. I asked the gentleman sitting next to me if he would grab my phone and snap a photo of me asking the question. I didn’t realize until I got home and reviewed the photos on my phone that he had done so.
Citing a recent CNN interview with him, I asked about Iran and started the video running a few seconds into his answer. I am posting the video because I think what I caught may still be of interest. Peres’s answer was quite uncompromising. You will have to turn up the sound to give it a listen.
