The Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the elephant in the tent at Peres funeral

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, center, attends the funeral of former Israeli president Shimon Peres on Friday at Mount Herzl national cemetery in Jerusalem. (Stephen Crowley/AFP/Getty Images)

By Sudarsan Raghavan September 30 at 3:09 PM

JERUSALEM — It was the elephant in the tent at the funeral of Israeli statesmen Shimon Peres on Friday, a ceremony that eulogized his life as a peace builder.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that is.

It emerged before the funeral in the brief, but much-talked about, handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. It was a rare moment of possibility and hope, if imagined, that Peres would have applauded. But that swiftly vanished when Netanyahu walked past Abbas at the funeral without acknowledging him. It was reinforced later when Netanyahu noted in his eulogy the presence of world leaders, even the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, but failed to mention Abbas or the word “Palestinian.”

[The world mourns Shimon Peres as Israel considers his legacy]

The absence of Arab leaders at the ceremony illuminated the shadow cast by the conflict. At the 1995 funeral of assassinated Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Peres and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for signing the Oslo Peace Accords two years earlier, nine Muslim nations dispatched their representatives. They included then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan’s King Hussein. Both their nations had inked peace deals with Israel.

 

Those agreements are still intact, but neither heads of state from Egypt or Jordan came on Friday, preferring to send senior officials instead. It was an unsubtle testament to the divisions between Arabs and Israelis and their different perceptions of Peres’s legacy in the Middle East. And it shed light on the extent to which Peres’s aspirations for peace remain distant, perhaps even unattainable.

Indeed, at moments, Friday’s ceremony seemed like a eulogy to his long and elusive quest to create a secure Israel neighbored by a Palestinian state. Among all the Jewish leaders, Peres was the one who most sought a “two-state solution” to the decades-long war between the Arabs and Jews.

The ceremony was also a plea to complete Peres’s unfinished dreams.

“There are some who say that peace is not possible. But peace is not only possible, it is an ineluctable necessity,” Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and close friend of Peres, declared in his eulogy. He added that “since the Israelis and the Palestinians can’t become one big happy family now, they can’t simply hop into a conjugal bed and embark on a honeymoon together. So there is no choice but to divide this home into two apartments and turn it into a two-family house.”

“In their heart of hearts, almost everyone, on all sides, knows this simple truth. But where are the leaders with the courage to come forward and bring it to pass? Where are the heirs of Shimon Peres?”

The only speaker to acknowledge Abbas, seated to the far left of the podium, was President Obama, who said his “presence here is a gesture and a reminder of the unfinished business of peace.”

Obama, who made finding a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a key foreign policy goal, sought to reinforce Peres’s vision of both sides living together as equals, saying that he refused to believe Peres was “naive” as his critics have suggested.

 

“Even in the face of terrorist attacks, even after repeated disappointments at the negotiation table, he insisted that as human beings, Palestinians must be seen as equal in dignity to Jews, and must therefore be equal in self-determination,” Obama said.

“Because of his sense of justice, his analysis of Israel’s security, his understanding of Israel’s meaning, he believed that the Zionist idea would be best protected when Palestinians, too, had a state of their own.”

And even though the region is turbulent, and “threats are ever present,” Obama said that Peres “did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working.”

[Shimon Peres, Israeli statesman and Nobel Peace Prize winner, dies at 93]

The question on many minds — American, Israeli and Arabs — is whether Peres’s vision for a peaceful Middle East are now buried alongside him.

In his eulogy, Netanyahu acknowledged his deep-rooted disagreements with Peres on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially the question of what is most important for Israel — security or peace.

Peres, he said, argued that “peace is the true security.” But he told Peres that “security is essential for achieving peace and maintaining it.”

“We were both right,” Netanyahu told the mourners. “In a turbulent Middle East in which only the strong survive, peace will not be achieved other than by permanently preserving our power. But power is not an end in itself. It’s a means to an end. That goal is to ensure our national existence and coexistence.”

The presence of Abbas on Friday also threatens to work against him at home. Palestinians were deeply divided over Peres, with many viewing him as a key engineer of the conflict and the loss of their lands and rights. At a time when peace talks have all but faded, some Palestinians took to social media, declaring that “paying respect for Peres death is a betrayal” while others called him a “sellout.”

“What are you crying for Abbas?” read one tweet alongside a televised image of him in a solemn moment at the funeral. “Is Peres’ passing this painful?”

William Booth and Ruth Eglash contributed to this report.