The US president, Barack Obama, evoked the ‘unfinished business’ of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as he delivered a pointed and moving tribute at the funeral of the former Israeli president and Nobel peace prize laureate Shimon Peres in Jerusalem today.
Speaking in front of almost 80 world leaders gathered at the city’s Mount Herzl cemetery, including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, Obama insisted that Peres had understood that ‘the Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people’.
Obama delivered his address shortly before Peres – who was regarded as the last of Israel’s founding generation – was buried between two other Israeli prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Friday’s funeral was Israel’s largest gathering of international dignitaries since the funeral of Rabin, Peres’ partner in peace, who was killed by a Jewish nationalist in 1995.
Obama’s intervention during his whistle stop visit to Israel for the commemoration was the most political at a sombre occasion where the ghost of the failed Middle East peace process loomed large, referred to as well by former US president Bill Clinton and the Israeli novelist Amos Oz.
And in an event heavy with reminders of the collapsed peace process, perhaps the most striking was the presence of Abbas who told Netanyahu as the two men shook hands: “Long time, long time.”
Referring to Abbas’s presence as he began his eulogy, Obama said the presence of the Palestinian leader was “a gesture and reminder of the unfinished business of peace” adding that Peres: “never saw his dream of peace fulfilled…And yet he did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working.”
“Even in the face of terrorist attacks, repeated disappointments at the negotiating table, he insisted that Palestinians must be seen as equal in dignity to Jews and therefore equal in self-determination.”
“He believed that Israel would be best protected when Palestinians had a state of their own.”
He concluded, “The last of the founding generation is now gone,” adding: “Toda rabah haver yakar,” Hebrew for “thank you so much dear friend.”
Other dignitaries who attended at the funeral for Peres, who died aged 93 on Wednesday, were Prince Charles and the British foreign secretary Boris Johnson, as well as the French leader, François Hollande, along with other heads of state and 15 foreign ministers.
Abbas’s attendance, leading a Palestinian delegation, sparked anger in some Palestinian quarters reflected in a cartoon circulated on social media, showing Abbas in Israeli military uniform with his name altered to sound Israeli, weeping over Peres’s grave.
The funeral, which saw foreign figures fly from across the globe, saw an unprecedented security operation to protect the commemoration which saw roads closed, including the main Tel Aviv to Jerusalem highway, and thousands of police deployed.
The morning began with Peres’s coffin carried out of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, at just after 8.30am by eight military pall bearers, followed by his family, with the procession led by another member of Israel’s armed forces reciting the kaddish – the Jewish prayer for the dead.
The coffin was loaded into a hearse to travel to Mount Herzl cemetery shortly after Obama’s jet set down at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Obama was accompanied on Airforce One by the vice-president, Joe Biden, and the secretary of state John Kerry.
Others attending the funeral included former British Prime ministers Tony Blair and David Cameron and the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.
Clinton, who was president when Peres negotiated a historic interim peace accord with the Palestinians in 1993, praised Peres as a “wide champion of our common humanity.”
Describing their 25-year friendship Clinton dismissed critics who described Peres as a naive dreamer. “He started life as Israel’s brightest student, became its best teacher and ended up its biggest dreamer,” said Clinton.
Clinton has now attended the funerals of all three of the figures who signed the Oslo peace accords and shared the Nobel peace prize – Rabin, former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and now Peres.
In his own appreciation of Peres, his former fierce political rival Netanyahu called Peres: “A great man of Israel. He was a great man of the world. Israel grieves for him. The world grieves for him.”
Oz, who had known Peres for 40 years, described Peres’s “capacity to change” and called him “a trailblazer who had been ridiculed, who seemed a big dreamer until the future came and proved him right.”
“When some say peace is not possible it is possible,” he added, “and it is necessary and inevitable because we are not going anywhere.”
He continued: “That is why we have no option but to divide this house into two apartments. Where are the leaders the brave leaders who will make this dream come true and continue his vision?”
Peres’s death led to an outpouring of tributes worldwide for Israel’s last remaining founding father.
In a career spanning seven decades, Peres held nearly every major office, serving twice as prime minister and as president, a mainly ceremonial role, from 2007 to 2014. He was also an architect of Israel’s undeclared nuclear programme and defence industries.
While those in the west and within Israel have hailed Peres as a peacemaker, many Palestinians and those from Arab nations have questioned his record, citing his involvement in successive Arab-Israeli wars, the occupation of Palestinian territory and his support for settlement building before his work on Oslo.
He was also prime minister in 1996 when more than 100 civilians were killed while sheltering at a UN peacekeepers’ base in the Lebanese village of Qana when it was fired upon by Israel.
Despite his reputation as a statesman, Peres never managed to outright win a national election. Many in Israel opposed to the Oslo accords also blamed him for what they saw as their failure.
But in later life, especially during his time as president, he came to be widely embraced.
