This book is so full of life that it should be read by everyone, especially the young, and the leaders of the region, particularly those on both the Israeli and Palestinian side who find and raise every obstacle possible to avoid what Peres so pertinently calls “the necessity of peace.”
"In 1934 eleven-year-old
Shimon Peres emigrated to the land of
Israel from his native Poland, leaving behind an extended family who would
later be murdered in the Holocaust."
Toward the end of his memoirs
he writes:
"I believe in the
inevitability of peace because I understand the necessity of peace. Necessity
... drove the pioneers to settle the land. It pushed them to think creatively -
to turn salted dirt into fertile ground, and transform a fallow desert into a
community that could bear fruit. ...
I believe with all my being
in the virtue of Zionism, and in the historic decision made by Ben-Gurion to
accept the UN resolution for a partitioned Palestine. Even then, Ben-Gurion
understood that in order to retain the Jewish character of our state, we had to
uphold our values, and that our values are fundamentally democratic. Jews are
taught that we are all born in the image of God. To believe this fundamental
tenet, a Jewish state must embrace democracy, which demands full equality
between the Jews and non-Jews. Democracy, after all, is not only the right of
every citizen to be equal, but also the equal right of every citizen to be
different. The future of the Zionist project depends on our embrace of the
two-state solution.
... To give up on democracy is to abandon our Jewish values. We
didn't give up our values even when we were facing furnaces and gas chambers.
We lived as Jews and died as Jews and rose again as free Jewish people. We
didn't survive merely to be a passing shadow in history, but as a new genesis,
a nation intent on tikkun olam, on making the world aright."
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| Rabin and Peres at the peace gathering, Nov. 4, 1995 |
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| Netanyahu in a pre-Rabin assasination demonstration, next to a coffin bearing the name of Rabin |
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