Mahmoud Abbas still believes in Shimon Peres’ myth

If Palestinians wept during Shimon Peres’ funeral, it was for the sorry spectacle of Mahmoud Abbas’ attendance.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum being held in the Dead Sea area in Jordan, March 2013 [EPA]
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Shimon Peres at the World Economic Forum being held in Jordan [EPA]

International reaction to the death of former Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres has highlighted a stark gap between the West and the Middle East. While current and former western leaders are fawning over him, those in the Middle East have remained largely silent.

However, media and social media there have been very vocal. This is unsurprising, given that the people of the Middle East are the ones who have had to face the catastrophic consequences of a record that outsiders are now eulogising.

In this respect, Peres has posthumously managed the seemingly impossible, largely uniting a region riddled with divisions. Voices from rival camps – from Gulf states on the one hand, to Iran and Hezbollah on the other – are strongly condemning Peres’ legacy and those who are romanticising it.

Israel’s Shimon Peres laid to rest

Even Egypt’s president and Jordan’s king – whose countries have peace treaties with Israel, and whose predecessors attended Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral – did not issue statements of condolence or attend Peres’s funeral.

Regional anger

That even Israel’s few friends in the region have kept a low profile over his death may well indicate their awareness of the extent of domestic and regional anger over Israeli policies in general, and those of Peres in particular.

That anger is entirely justified. Until his death, no other living figure had had such a prolific role in almost every aspect of Israeli aggression, occupation and colonialism.

OPINION: Drop the farcical obits, Shimon Peres was no peacemaker

These include literally wiping Palestine off the map in 1948, attacking Egypt in 1956, acquiring and proliferating nuclear weapons, illegally colonising Palestinian, Syrian and Egyptian land, the 1996 onslaught against Lebanon that led to the massacre of civilians at a United Nations shelter in Qana, the ruthless suppression of the Palestinian independence struggle, and the blockade and invasions of Gaza. The list goes on, and Peres’ fingerprints are all over it.

While people throughout the Middle East have been reminding the world of the suffering Peres inflicted on the Palestinians, their own President Mahmoud Abbas attended his funeral and paid tribute to an architect of their oppression.

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Even the aspect of his legacy that is most remembered in Israel and the West – his pivotal role in the Oslo Accords, which began the illusory Israeli-Palestinian “peace process” – is worthy only of scorn. The agreement represented nothing more than a diplomatic fig leaf to relentlessly entrench the occupation and colonisation of Palestine.

The creation of a viable, contiguous Palestinian state is now all but impossible – that can be traced back to the accords, which were ushered in with such misguided fanfare, and an even more misguided Nobel peace prize for Peres.

In effect, he was rewarded for his role in devising a plan that would entail the unending oppression of the Palestinians, and whitewash the blood on his hands.

‘A Zionist and a criminal’

Yet while people throughout the Middle East have been reminding the world of the suffering Peres inflicted on the Palestinians, their own President Mahmoud Abbas attended his funeral and paid tribute to an architect of their oppression.

Peres’s death is “a heavy loss for all humanity and for peace in the region”, Abbas gushed on Twitter.

This earned an apt response from Abdulkhaleq Abdullah, an adviser to Abu Dhabi’s royal court, who tweeted: “Might be a loss to you, but not a loss to humanity, peace, and surely not a loss to the Palestinian People. He was a Zionist and a criminal.”

Israeli President Reuven Rivlin meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during the burial ceremony at the funeral of Shimon Peres [EPA]
Israeli President Reuven Rivlin meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during the burial ceremony at the funeral of Shimon Peres [EPA]

Abbas sent a letter to the Peres family expressing “sorrow and sadness” over “a partner in forging the peace of the brave”, who “exerted persistent efforts to reach a just peace from the Oslo agreement until the final moments of his life”.

No peace was forged, let alone a “peace of the brave”. Bravery requires sacrifice. Peres sacrificed nothing for peace – he exploited its pursuit, and benefited his country and himself in the process. It was never about justice or freedom for the Palestinians.

Israeli approval

Abbas, ever-more out of touch with his own people, is either somehow still oblivious to this, or as a fellow architect of the Oslo Accords, he still feels the need to justify an agreement and a process that won him privileges at the expense of Palestinians’ basic rights.

OPINION: Gone is Shimon Peres, but so is his era

His admiration of Peres is yet another example of his shameless prioritising of Israeli approval over his own people’s needs and aspirations. How else can one explain his insistence on maintaining “security” cooperation with Israel, despite opinion polls consistently showing the overwhelming majority of Palestinians opposed to this?

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Israel has merely subcontracted the occupation to someone who is supposed to strive to end it. Abbas is Israel’s policeman, clamping down on his own people and vowing that there will be no uprising under his watch.

“The Middle East is ailing,” said Peres. “The most virulent cause” of this “malady” is “the absence of freedom”.

How right he was, and yet how much he invested in denying freedom to the Palestinians, his job – and that of his Israeli peers – made easier by the subservience and obedience of Abbas and his Palestinian Authority.

This was a PR skill that Peres possessed: using soundbites and one-liners to impress and deceive. It certainly worked on Abbas. Palestinians may have wept during Peres’ funeral, not for his passing, but for the sorry spectacle of their president’s attendance, mourning and misplaced loyalty.

Sharif Nashashibi is an award-winning journalist and analyst on Arab affairs.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.