JERUSALEM — I had just graduated from journalism school when I met with Shimon Peres in a ramshackle, one-story building off Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street on a mild spring day in 1992.
The Cold War had just ended and optimism reigned in the wider world — but I didn’t expect to find much cheeriness in the smallish office Peres had occupied after losing Labor’s leadership to his rival Yitzhak Rabin, in a primary election the previous winter.
And yet, as soon as he opened his mouth, optimism poured out, uncontrolled. He didn’t yet know that Rabin would unseat Likud the following month and make him foreign minister; even Rabin didn’t know it at the time. But Peres had peered beyond the horizon and what he had seen was the rise of a New Middle East.
“There are only two alternatives,” he told me that day. “Benelux or Yugoslavia.” The contrast was between the lowlands’ model integration and the former Balkan republic’s violent breakup.
A local version of Benelux, he prophesized, would emerge between Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians. The West Bank would bustle with biblical tourism, the Palestinians would build a seaport in Gaza, and Jordan and Israel would share an airport at the Red Sea’s tip. They would ring the Dead Sea with resorts flanked by Masada and Petra and build a power-generating canal between the two seas.
The land-for-peace deal would pacify the entire region, give rise to a Middle Eastern common market, a NATO-like military alliance, and a regional development bank. A super-highway would link Casablanca and Alexandria, fast trains would run from Cairo to Istanbul through Tel Aviv, Beirut and Latakia. Electricity grids would ignore political borders, and a new Riviera would span the azure Red Sea shores of Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.
I was captured by his vision.
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Peres, who set out to implement that vision through the 1993 Oslo Accords, could not be dismissed as a daydreamer. This was the man who built, out of nothing, the military and aerospace industries that produced radars, tanks, battleships, rockets, satellites and jets. This was the man who created Israel’s nuclear program.
A photograph of former Israeli president Shimon Peres is displayed before the start of a special cabinet meeting to mourn his death, in Jerusalem, on September 28, 2016 | Ronen Zvulun/AFP via Getty Images
As prime minister, Peres faced a Greek-style economic collapse. He imposed a 20 percent budget cut on the army, wage cuts on the unions, fiscal austerity on all ministries, and monetary discipline on the Treasury. He also slashed subsidies and cut taxes, all of which defeated 415 percent inflation, produced a solid currency, and ushered an antiquated socialist economy to capitalist stardom.
I emerged from that first meeting as an apostle of Peres’ new faith, and later even backed a compromise in Jerusalem, the city where my children and I were born and where my parents are buried.
The following winter, as I sat down to dinner with my children to the sound of Palestinian mortar salvos fired from Bethlehem’s outskirts, I began to despair of Peres’ vision, along with the rest of the swing vote that shrank Rabin’s 44 Knesset seats to Labor’s current 24.
Faced with the subsequent 138 suicide bombings, and scores of shootings, knifings and bomb attacks that took more than 1,000 Israeli lives, I joined the class of newly disillusioned former Oslo believers in academia, politics and media.
Amid violence fanned by Islamist fundamentalists and their secular rivals, we grimly concluded that Peres’ vision would not materialize in our lifetimes.
Peres disagreed.
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“There will be a New Middle East,” Peres told me in 2003. By then, he was a minister in the cabinet of hardliner Ariel Sharon, whose very arrival at Israel’s helm was widely seen as reflecting the demise of Peres’ vision of a new Middle East.
I recalled how, in 1992, he had explained why be believed that opponents of a land-for-peace deal would ultimately come around. “It’s like the man who said he didn’t understand why everyone in London drives on the left lane,” he said, “until he got there and drove on the right lane.” In 2003, the man on the wrong lane seemed to be Peres.
The next year, when Sharon announced that he would pull out of Gaza unilaterally, Peres told me, “This retreat is an extension of the Oslo Accords.” My protestation — that Oslo was about making sure peace deals came before retreats, and retreats happened with Arab-Israeli cooperation — fell on deaf ears. Like a biblical prophet, even when apostasy abounded around him, Peres continued to believe.
So do we. Yes, we disagreed with Peres when it came to the present. But the future he foresaw remains the one we crave.
Peres, like former South African President F. W. de Klerk, former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, as well as former U.S. President Ronald Reagan and former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, had a clear vision of the future and would not tolerate the status quo. Collectively, these leaders were the clear-minded and courageous statesmen that the world so glaringly lacks today.
Perhaps, in the aftermath of the current civil wars, a New Middle East will emerge after all, the way a new Europe emerged from the ashes of World War II — after everyone got tired of fighting.
And when it emerges, with people, goods, and credit crossing the region freely on new highways and railways that run by new universities, hospitals, vocational schools, factories, canals and airports, some will recall that Shimon Peres saw it all before anyone else.
Amotz Asa-El is senior commentator and former executive editor at the Jerusalem Post.