Shimon Peres’s Legacy of Peace or War?

Shimon Peres, who died, was laid to rest as an Israeli prince of peace. Peres certainly would have liked to enter history as a peacemaker, but that’s not how he should be remembered: Indeed, his greatest contributions were to Israel’s military might and victories. Despite his involvement in the Oslo peace process, which earned him a Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was never his primary work. The real Shimon Peres after the Rabin assassination, as prime minister oversaw a bloody assault on Lebanon in 1996 which killed 113 Lebanese civilians (along with three Israeli soldiers, and 21 combatants from Hezbollah and the Syrian army). Most of the dead were killed in the “Qana massacre,” when Israel shelled a UN compound where hundreds of civilians had taken cover. He was also a staunch defender of the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land and the Israeli blockade of Gaza. Peres, who participated in the war that established Israel by violently expelling and displacing the majority of the indigenous Palestinian population in 1948, later tried to erase this history. He also played a key role in obtaining nuclear weapons for Israel. Shimon Peres was a Nobel Peace Prize winner for the West but continues to be a War Criminal for Palestine.

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