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CNN - Shimon Peres: Israel's warrior for peace dies

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Tel Aviv, Israel (CNN)Shimon Peres, the Israeli elder statesman who shared a Nobel Prize for forging a peace deal between Israelis and Palestinians, has died. He served as a constant force for generations in Israeli politics.

The 93-year-old died after suffering a massive stroke two weeks ago. He was reported to be making progress but doctors said he took a turn for the worse Tuesday.
In top leadership roles over the decades -- including Prime Minister and President -- the Labor Party veteran became a face of the Jewish State, instantly recognized and well-respected in Israel and across the globe.
"There's no corner of this country that he hasn't touched," Zionist Union Chairman Isaac Herzog once said. "Everywhere he goes around the world, people listen to him."
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Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (L), Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres (C) and Israeli Premier Yitzhak Rabin display their Nobel Peace Prizes.

Over 50 years in politics

Peres retired from public office in 2014 after the end of his seven-year term as President. In Israeli politics for more than half a century, he held virtually every position in Cabinet, from minister of defense to Prime Minister, a position he held three times.
He battled Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for Labor Party leadership in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually becoming Rabin's foreign minister.


World leaders react to death of Shimon Peres

In that role, Peres concluded the Oslo Peace Accords, for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 with Rabin and Yasser Arafat.
"I am very grateful to him for a lifetime of thinking big thoughts and dreaming big dreams and figuring out practical ways to achieve them," President Bill Clinton once said of a man he considered a friend.
After Rabin was assassinated in 1995, Peres became Prime Minister, calling early elections so the government would have a mandate to pursue a two-state solution. But a wave of Palestinian suicide attacks left Peres struggling to defend the peace process, ultimately costing him the next election.

Making history

As Israel's ninth President, he addressed the Turkish parliament in 2007, becoming the first Israeli President to speak to a Muslim country's legislature. He called for peace talks in 2011 with the Palestinians and warned the United Nations against recognizing Palestine as an independent state outside a peace plan. He received the US Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012 from President Barack Obama.
After leaving office in 2014 he remained in the public eye, continuing his work for peace in the Middle East.
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Peres was 93.

Story of modern-day Israel
Born in Wisniew, Poland, in 1923, Peres moved to British-mandate Palestine in 1932, where his story became the story of modern day Israel.
During Israel's War of Independence in 1948, he was in charge of purchasing weapons for the Israeli military. He was briefly head of the navy and helped establish the country's aircraft industry. In the 1950s, he founded the country's nuclear program, which remains shrouded in secrecy to this day. He would often refer to it as Israel's "textile industry." Peres also founded Israel Aerospace Industries and Rafael.
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Shimon Peres in IAI.

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Israel's Nuclear Reactor.

Peres held many cabinet positions, including transportation secretary.
Peres entered politics in 1959 as a member of the left-wing Mapai party, a precursor to the modern Labor party. His political career lasted more than half a century, and he held virtually every position in Israel's Cabinet.
He was Prime Minister three times, but never won an election. He became acting Prime Minister in 1977 when Yitzhak Rabin resigned following a foreign bank account scandal. He became Prime Minister again in a unity government with Yitzhak Shamir in 1984. His final term as Prime Minister came when he stepped into the premiership following the assassination of Rabin in 1995.
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'He never got the public love'
Many Israelis considered him aloof -- an intellectual who wore a suit, not a uniform.
"He never got the public love that he was yearning for," said Ethan Dor Shav, an Associate Fellow at Jerusalem's Shalem Center. "He was never hugged by the populace of Israel as our leader."
When Rabin was assassinated, Peres became Prime Minister for the third and final time, calling early elections so that the government would have a mandate to pursue a two-state solution.
But a wave of Palestinian suicide bombings and other attacks tarnished his peace process.
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"I know we are moving on a road full of dangers but we know also this is the right road, the best road, the only road upon which we have to move," Peres said in 1996.
Ultimately, the violence cost Peres the ensuing elections, but he never stopped believing in peace, carrying on the work of rival-turned-colleague Rabin.
"Peace is costly," Peres said in 2015 on the 20th anniversary of Rabin's assassination. "Only thing is, war costs more."

Retired, sort of
In 2007, Peres became Israel's ninth President, serving in the role until his retirement from politics in 2014 at the age of 91. He wasn't done yet. After his retirement, he devoted his time to the Peres Center for Peace, an organization that works to build better ties between Israelis and Palestinians.
"The greatness of Shimon Peres is that he is beyond age," Herzog said.
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Of all the Palestinians, PLO Secretary-General Saeb Erakat may have known Peres the best.
"When I met him 25 years ago, I was a young professor," Erakat said in 2002. "I was angry about something, and he looked at me and he said, 'Saeb, negotiation in pain and frustration for five years is cheaper than exchanging bullets for five minutes.'"

Hope for children
When asked how he wanted to be remembered, Peres didn't mention a life of civil service.
"I would like that somebody would write about me that I saved the life of one single child," Peres said in 2004. "This will satisfy more than anything else."
Perhaps a better answer came a decade earlier.
"I feel like a person that has served this country rightly and properly," he said. "And that is, in my judgment, the highest degree a person can feel."
On this day, there are few Israelis who would disagree.

Tributes from home and abroad
"There are few people who we share this world with who change the course of human history, not just through their role in human events, but because they expand our moral imagination and force us to expect more of ourselves," U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement from the White House. "Shimon was the essence of Israel itself."
Peres' contemporary, former US President Bill Clinton, said that "Israel has lost a leader who championed its security, prosperity, and limitless possibilities from its birth to his last day on earth."
"He was a genius with a big heart who used his gifts to imagine a future of reconciliation not conflict, economic and social empowerment not anger and frustration," Clinton added.

Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu released a statement expressing his sadness for the country's ninth leader.
"(Prime Minister) Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife Sara express deep personal sorrow for the passing of a man cherished by the nation, the (Former) President of Israel Shimon Peres," the statement read.
It added that the Prime Minister will deliver a special statement Wednesday morning, and will convene his cabinet for a special session of mourning.
Earlier Tuesday, a visibly shaken minister Aryeh Deri, Israel's defense minister, told reporters that he had been praying for Peres at his bedside.
Canadian Prime Minister added his voice to the tributes, calling Peres "above all, a man of peace."
CNN's Joe Sterling and John Vause contributed to this report.
 
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Mr. Peres was remarkable for his vision: always looking to the future. Although a witness to and shaper of history, he did not dwell upon what great things Israel had achieved but what more great things Israel could do. For example, he foresaw back in the early 1980s that Israel could become a great technological powerhouse of what he called "nanotechnology" - and, indeed, Israel today is a world leader when it comes to the design of large-scale commercial microprocessors.
 
No Pakistanis commenting. Not much on Pakistani news sites, either. Tasting the wind, it seems...

Well, since both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have praised Shimon Peres, my guess is that you're allowed to do so too, without having to wait for your government to comment first.
 
Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana
Peres said the massacre came as a ‘bitter surprise’. It was a lie: the UN had repeatedly told Israel the camp was packed with refugees

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The Israeli politician has died at 93, two weeks after suffering a major stroke AP
When the world heard that Shimon Peres had died, it shouted “Peacemaker!” But when I heard that Peres was dead, I thought of blood and fire and slaughter.

I saw the results: babies torn apart, shrieking refugees, smouldering bodies. It was a place called Qana and most of the 106 bodies – half of them children – now lie beneath the UN camp where they were torn to pieces by Israeli shells in 1996. I had been on a UN aid convoy just outside the south Lebanese village. Those shells swished right over our heads and into the refugees packed below us. It lasted for 17 minutes.

Shimon Peres, standing for election as Israel’s prime minister – a post he inherited when his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated – decided to increase his military credentials before polling day by assaulting Lebanon. The joint Nobel Peace Prize holder used as an excuse the firing of Katyusha rockets over the Lebanese border by the Hezbollah. In fact, their rockets were retaliation for the killing of a small Lebanese boy by a booby-trap bomb they suspected had been left by an Israeli patrol. It mattered not.

A few days later, Israeli troops inside Lebanon came under attack close to Qana and retaliated by opening fire into the village. Their first shells hit a cemetery used by Hezbollah; the rest flew directly into the UN Fijian army camp where hundreds of civilians were sheltering. Peres announced that “we did not know that several hundred people were concentrated in that camp. It came to us as a bitter surprise.”

Israel’s Shimon Peres dies aged 93: Tributes from around the world
It was a lie. The Israelis had occupied Qana for years after their 1982 invasion, they had video film of the camp, they were even flying a drone over the camp during the 1996 massacre – a fact they denied until a UN soldier gave me his video of the drone, frames from which we published in The Independent. The UN had repeatedly told Israel that the camp was packed with refugees.

This was Peres’s contribution to Lebanese peace. He lost the election and probably never thought much more about Qana. But I never forgot it.



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When I reached the UN gates, blood was pouring through them in ********. I could smell it. It washed over our shoes and stuck to them like glue. There were legs and arms, babies without heads, old men’s heads without bodies. A man’s body was hanging in two pieces in a burning tree. What was left of him was on fire.

On the steps of the barracks, a girl sat holding a man with grey hair, her arm round his shoulder, rocking the corpse back and forth in her arms. His eyes were staring at her. She was keening and weeping and crying, over and over: “My father, my father.” If she is still alive – and there was to be another Qana massacre in the years to come, this time from the Israeli air force – I doubt if the word “peacemaker” will be crossing her lips.

There was a UN enquiry which stated in its bland way that it did not believe the slaughter was an accident. The UN report was accused of being anti-Semitic. Much later, a brave Israeli magazine published an interview with the artillery soldiers who fired at Qana. An officer had referred to the villagers as “just a bunch of Arabs” (‘arabushim’ in Hebrew). “A few Arabushim die, there is no harm in that,” he was quoted as saying. Peres’s chief of staff was almost equally carefree: “I don’t know any other rules of the game, either for the [Israeli] army or for civilians…”

Peres called his Lebanese invasion “Operation Grapes of Wrath”, which – if it wasn’t inspired by John Steinbeck – must have come from the Book of Deuteronomy. “The sword without and terror within,” it says in Chapter 32, “shall destroy both the young man and the virgin, the suckling also with the man of grey hairs.” Could there be a better description of those 17 minutes at Qana?

Remembering the Israel-Gaza conflict
Yes, of course, Peres changed in later years. They claimed that Ariel Sharon – whose soldiers watched the massacre at Sabra and Chatila camps in 1982 by their Lebanese Christian allies – was also a “peacemaker” when he died. At least he didn’t receive the Nobel Prize.

Peres later became an advocate of a “two state solution”, even as the Jewish colonies on Palestinian land – which he once so fervently supported – continued to grow.

Now we must call him a “peacemaker”. And count, if you can, how often the word “peace” is used in the Peres obituaries over the next few days. Then count how many times the word Qana appears.

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices...orget-no-peacemaker-robert-fisk-a7334656.html
 
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This was the "it" moment , I thought "it" was finally done Clinton did it.
Now , we are moving towards ww3 unfortunate but true

  • Before another war started against Palestinians
  • More crisis in Lebonon
  • War between groups in Israel /Palestine (one sided , as only 1 has F16)
  • 911
  • ECONOMY CRISIS
  • War on whatcamacall it , terror
  • Wasted years in Afhanistan
  • Wasted years in iraq
  • Economy CRISIS
  • Confusing civil war in Libya no gain but destruction
  • Minor escalation in Georgia
  • Conflict in Ukraine
  • Conflict in Syria
  • More conflict in Syria unprecedented levels
  • Now more issues , Bill against Saudi Arabia , more conflict with Region
 
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Memorial ceremony for Shimon Peres at UN
UN secretary general, ambassadors convey condolences; Israeli Ambassador Danon: 'We remember President Peres as full of energy and a willingness to work for a better future.'
J. S. Herzog|Published: 29.09.16 , 23:28

Israel’s mission to the United Nations held a memorial ceremony at 9am local time in the UN headquarters to commemorate Shimon Peres, the ninth president of the State of Israel who died early on Wednesday morning at the age of 93.

Israel’s Permanent Representative to the UN Amb. Danny Danon, Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, US Amb. Samantha Power and ambassadors from more than 40 countries gathered to show their final respects for the man who often represented Israel on the global stage over the past sixty years, also serving as prime minister, foreign minister, defense minister and a handful of other portfolios.


The Israeli Mission also opened a condolence book for the ambassadors to share their thoughts in memory of Peres, which will later be available to the general public.




L-R: Ban Ki-moon, Danny Danon & Samantha Power stand in silent commemoration alongside a portrait of Shimon Peres

At the ceremony, Danon mourned the loss of Israel’s elder statesman: "President Peres, one of our founding fathers, was a man of vision and optimism who dedicated his life to the State of Israel. He contributed so much to Israel’s safety and security and never lost hope. This symbolizes the story of Zionism.


"After years of representing the true face of Israel to the world, today the parliament of nations has gathered to pay their respects. We will remember him as he lived his life until his last days, full of energy and a willingness to work for a better future for Israel. President Peres will continue to inspire us all. May his memory be a blessing."

Ban addressed the ceremony, saying, "I join in the sorrow for loss. I had the privilege to benefit from his wisdom. His leadership will be missed as someone who worked to realize the dream of security and peace for Israel."




Ban Ki-moon signs book of condolence as Danny Danon looks on


Power spoke of Peres's involvement in the establishment of the State of Israel and his hope for the future, commenting, "He made it his personal duty to ensure that others—particularly the younger generations—would not feel despair. He never lost his own youth. I had the privilege of seeing President Peres in February in Israel. And he said what worried him most about the region was that so many young people had lost their hope. This, he understood, was perhaps the greatest threat to peace. And he understood that a future without the prospect of peace was a horizon without light."


Peres was famously keen on working, and the American ambassador ended by highlighting his devotion to his country, saying "To his last day, he never gave up on his belief that the greatest service to both was working to make the dream of peace a reality. He saw that the pursuit of peace was the highest form of patriotism. May his vision of Israel’s future long define Israel’s present."


Peres, who laid in state before the Knesset on Thursday, is to be buried on Friday. His funeral is being attended by representatives from some 90 countries, including US President Barack Obama, former US President Bill Clinton, French President François Hollande, and Spanish King Felipe VI.
 
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Opinion: Shimon Peres’s greatest achievement: Transforming Israel’s economy
Published: Sept 30, 2016 10:48 a.m. ET

The socialist who spearheaded the transition to capitalism was a monetarist poster boy

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Reuters
Shimon Peres in this 2013 file photo
By

AMOTZASA-EL
COLUMNIST
It was worse than the Greek crisis.

With inflation raging at 415%, foreign-currency reserves were dwindling so fast that by the summer of 1985 the Jewish state was on the verge of losing the ability to buy abroad even one barrel of oil.

Underpinned by the banking system’s collapse and nationalization two years earlier, the crisis stemmed from the public sector’s swelling to 76% of the economy and from public debt’s ballooning to 221% of gross domestic product through continuous union pressure on employers, government borrowing, and printing of money.

After several rounds of ineffective symptomatic treatments, Prime Minister Shimon Peres gathered a team of economists, heard their analyses of the crisis, broke them into smaller groups with specific assignments, and had them work for several weeks under full secrecy before producing with them a blueprint for action.


Shimon Peres, Statesman-Turned-Social Media Star
(1:23)
The late Israeli statesman Shimon Peres had a political career spanning seven decades — he served as the country's president and twice as prime minister. After he retired, Peres became a social media star, using Snapchat and Facebook. Image: Yedioth Ahronoth.

Then, together with his finance minister, Peres called a cabinet session, which he held awake for more than a full night. “No one is leaving this room until we get this business done,” he told several angry ministers who complained they were falling asleep.

Peres, then 62, was wide awake all along, and when the meeting was over it turned out that symptomatic treatment had given way to open-heart surgery.

Peres imposed a 20% budget cut on the military. He slashed all food and transport subsidies, thus raising sharply prices, but also disabusing the government of a major expense. He then imposed on the unions a hiring freeze across the public sector while freezing wages and prices and abolishing the indexations that made salaries rise in tandem with inflation. He then passed a law forbidding the government to print money to finance deficits. Finally he made monetary policy the apolitical Bank of Israel’s exclusive responsibility, taking it away from the Treasury and its politicians.

Peres died on Wednesday at age 93. His funeral on Friday in Jerusalem will be attended by many world leaders, including President Barack Obama.

Most of Peres’s eulogists now say his deepest imprint on history was the Oslo Accords that sparked the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The few who disagree say his deepest imprint was as the builder of Israel’s defense and aerospace industries and as the mastermind of Israel’s nuclear program.

They are wrong. Peres’s biggest legacy is his economic leadership in 1985.

From socialism to capitalism
The stabilization program soon proved a spectacular success.

Inflation plummeted to less than 20%, and then continued declining, until becoming in the following decade one of the world’s lowest. The shekel’s depreciation USDILS, -0.1731% was stemmed, soon allowing its reissuance with three of its zeroes deleted, and later emerging as one of the world’s strongest currencies.

The budget deficit became among the lowest in the world, the debt-to-GDP ratio is now lower than most of the richest economies’, including the U.S., Britain and France, the trade deficit has morphed into a surplus, foreign investments are among the world’s highest, and unemployment, now 4.6%, is among the world’s lowest.

Before all this maturation, Peres touched off Israel’s privatization process when he forced the unions to restructure their debt-ridden holding company, Koor, which at the time was Israel’s largest employer. Having fired 30% of its employees and sold a third of its assets the company soon repaid its debts, went public, and was later bought by American investors.

At the same time, Peres discontinued an expensive project to build an Israeli fighter jet. Thousands of engineers and technicians were fired amid much public outcry, but Peres insisted that what could not be financed will no longer be held.

The result of these mass layoffs, the largest Israel had known, was astonishing.

Rather than leave Israel, as many feared they would, the newly jobless engineers either found new jobs in the reprogrammed economy, or launched the high-tech startups that soon became the hallmark of Israeli society’s new entrepreneurial frenzy. Before long Israeli high-tech firms were selling shares abroad, and Israeli stocks became the most common non-U.S. shares on Wall Street after Canada’s.

Peres, the Labor leader and former kibbutz member who as a teenager read Karl Marx in awe, had thus shepherded Israel’s socialist economy to capitalist ambitions, methods, and stardom.

Monetarism’s finest hour
The economic journey Peres led was part of monetarism’s golden age. What began with Paul Volcker’s defeat of the Carter-era’s stagflation and then proceeded to Margaret Thatcher’s and Ronald Reagan’s defeats of the unions, happened in Israel as well, only more dramatically.

The monetarist dictum, that a government’s supreme economic duty was not to spend until everyone has a job — as the previous era’s Keynesian faith claimed — but to defeat inflation, had been tested in Israel and proven valid.

While at it, Peres also willed a lesson in political economics.

His program’s success was owed largely to its delivery as a bipartisan effort in which the finance minister belonged to Labor’s rival, Likud, while the defense minister who made the big cut in military spending was Peres’s rival within Labor, Yitzhak Rabin.

Having made his demand for public sacrifice while flanked by his own rivals, the people were inspired, and readily backed his struggle. It was this kind of political solidarity that Greece’s politicians failed to display this decade, while their economy arrived where it still remains unredeemed.

Then again, the monetarism that Peres improbably embraced and helped spread has since lost its shine, as the 2008 meltdown’s quantitative easing and slashed interest rates calmed the markets, but left unhealed structural ailments like income gaps, deflation, and industrial flight.

Having previously produced Keynes’ social democracy and then Milton Friedman’s monetarism, academia will hopefully soon produce the next great economic idea. Yet in itself the idea will not be enough. To impact, it will need political leaders with courage, wisdom and resolve; leaders like Shimon Peres.
 
Rest in peace my old friend. Never would I have thought one day we will be without you. Having grown under your shadow, we took you for granted but you were always there.
Thank you for the service for all the generations that grew under you.
Shalom....

i wish we were aprthied no single arab was left in israel
Man you are an ignorant fool. Instead of cherishing the diversity, you want to go through Apartheid. Put yourself on the other shoe pal. Live one day in the settlements or back in the townships here in 1984 - we will then ask.
 

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