By David Isaac

Shimon Peres has achieved sainthood. It’s not clear how it happened. Maybe it’s just that Israelis have a soft spot for the “pioneering” generation and Peres, a protégée of David Ben-Gurion, is the only one left standing.

It’s ironic as Israel’s current president was, until now, never popular with Israel’s voters. He may have been popular at one time with the Socialist International, of which he was voted vice president in 1978. He may have been popular with the Nobel Foundation, which gave him the prize for peace in 1994. And he may have been popular within his own Labor Party, of which he was chairman from 1977-1992.

But popular with the Israeli people? Not so much.

Peres did serve as Israel’s prime minister three times, but not because the Israelis voted for him. The first time was in 1977 when he stepped in for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, forced out over a scandal involving his wife’s bank account. He then attempted to lead the Labor party to victory in 1977 and 1981, failing both times. In 1984, he shared the top spot with Yitzhak Shamir when a Likud-Labor national unity government was formed. In 1995, he again stepped in for Prime Minister Rabin after the latter was assassinated. In 1996, he ran for prime minister and lost.

Peres was the man who could not be prime minister, at least by election. This didn’t stop him from doing tremendous damage to the state, mainly outside the prime minister’s office. It was as Foreign Minister in 1993 that he negotiated the Oslo Accords behind the government’s back and then presented it to Prime Minister Rabin as a fait accompli. The country still hasn’t managed to extricate itself from the gruesome results.

But the Israelis seem to have forgotten the reasons they didn’t like the man and he’s now treated with reverence – an untouchable according to MK Aryeh Eldad. The favorite public figure in Israel according to a recent poll in Haaretz. Even though he continues to behave just as subversively as president as he did in every other position he held.

His dastardly character must have been evident early on because Moshe Sharett, Israel’s prime minister (1953-1955), wrote in his personal diary: “I have stated that I totally and utterly reject Peres and consider his rise to prominence a malignant, immoral disgrace. I will rend my clothes in mourning for the State if I see him become a minister in the Israeli government ….”

Sharett was a good judge of bad character. Over his career, Peres has made it a habit to undermine Israel’s duly elected governments. Most recently, he did it with the current one. Mr. Obama created a great deal of sturm and drang by calling for Israel to withdraw to the ’67 lines. But less reported was that Mr. Peres reinforced that this was a good idea in a meeting with Obama six weeks before.

Shimon Shiffer reported in Yediot Ahronot on June 10: “Senior sources in the American Government told me that Obama and Peres agreed in a closed meeting between the two that an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians must be based on the principle of Israeli withdrawal to the ’67 borders with border adjustments, or as Peres told Obama: the Palestinians must receive territory equal in size to the ’67 borders. In other words, any territory that Israel demands to annex from the [West] Bank must be paid for by Israel with territory from the Negev.”

This underhandedness is par for the course with Peres. As Shmuel Katz wrote in “Squeezing Israel” (The Jerusalem Post, Oct. 1, 1982), following a visit Mr. Peres paid to Washington to consult in Reagan’s Mideast plans:

Shimon Peres has allowed himself – also in his public appearances in the U.S. – to stray far from the accepted norms of what is morally permissible in the political struggle. He is the first opposition leader in a democracy to campaign openly abroad against the foreign policy of his own country, to intrude himself into the handling of its diplomacy, and to allow himself to be manipulated into giving advice in effect to a foreign leader on how to contend with the policy of his own democratically elected government.

It becomes clear from the same article that Shimon Peres had it in his head that Israel should withdraw to the ’67 borders for many years. As Shmuel writes:

There is, however, a deeper significance in the fact that Mr. Peres has spoken approvingly of the “Reagan plan.” Many people have seen his remarks as an endorsement of the plan. It is certainly very nearly a complete endorsement. What else indeed does it mean when Mr. Peres says (on ABC television) that “we found in the president’s position a rather very close approach to our own?”

A very close approach? To a plan which calls in fact for the surrender of Gaza, of Samaria, of Judea including east Jerusalem? A “very close approach” to the traditional State Department doctrine which denies Israel’s rights beyond the 1949 Armistice Lines? A very close approach to the Rogers Plan – if newly-painted-and-powdered – whose acceptance Labour Prime Minister Golda Meir – in an interview in The New York Times on December 23, 1969 – declared (I wrote in error in a previous article that she had made the statement privately) “would be treasonable.”

Treason is a word Israelis have to dance around unless they want to end up in jail. So let’s use a secret code and call it mischief, for which Peres has an unlimited capacity. In most countries, Peres’ “mischief” would have at the least earned him an early and ignominious retirement. In Israel, he jet-sets around the world as its revered president; last of the pioneering generation, the nearest thing the Jewish State has to a saint.

By David Isaac

A little over a month after former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s fall, Ayman Anwar Mitri, a Coptic Christian, was beaten by Islamists inside his apartment, which they had torched.

“When they were beating me, they kept saying: ‘We won’t leave any Christians in this country,’” Mr. Mitri recalled to The Wall Street Journal.

Nina Shea, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Religious Freedom, recently wrote: “Since [late February], a heightened campaign of violence is being directed against Egypt’s Copts and is presaging a mass exodus from the country…”

You’d never guess this listening to President Obama’s speeches. In a major speech on the Middle East in May he declared: “In Tahrir Square, we heard Egyptians from all walks of life chant, ‘Muslims, Christians, we are one.’” Apparently Obama didn’t get the memo that they are no longer one.

Egypt’s Copts are not alone. The war against Iraq’s Christians began when the U.S. invaded Iraq. U.S. troops were unable to protect the Christians, an estimated half of whom had fled the country by 2009. Ironically, they were safer under Saddam Hussein. President Obama seems to have missed this development as well. In that same speech he declared: “In Iraq we see the promise of a multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian democracy.”

To be sure, Christians of the region have long ceased expecting support from Western (ostensibly Christian) nations. When Lebanon’s Christians suffered a similar fate in the 1970s, the West ignored their plight.

As Shmuel writes in his book “Battleground: Fact and Fantasy in Palestine”, (Bantam Books, 1973):

Here was the only Arab state in which the Moslems had to share power and even to accept a minor share in it. Indeed, the original raison d’etre and the whole modern history of Lebanon was primarily of a Christian enclave, of a haven for Christians in an unfriendly Moslem environment. In recent years in particular, with the increasing discomforts and unease suffered by Christians in some of the Arab states, Christian immigrants from those countries were being absorbed by Lebanon. By the agreed Lebanese Constitution of 1943, the President and the Commander in Chief of the Army were always Christians, while a Moslem was Prime Minister. A Moslem was also Speaker in the Parliament, but the Christians held a majority of its seats.

But Muslims could not abide a status less than domination. Shmuel wrote in “Hypocrisy in Lebanon” (The Jerusalem Post, August 31, 1979):

That, after all is the source and root of the horror and destruction the Moslems have brought down upon Lebanon. It began early in 1975 with the combined onslaught by Lebanese Moslems and Palestinian Arab terrorists to crush the Christians and destroy their power in the country. The attack was sponsored by the Syrian Government, who had two objects in view. Following closely upon the crushing of the Kurdish revolt in Iraq, the attack in Lebanon dovetailed into the overall purpose of extinguishing the pockets of non Arab-Moslem independence in the “Arab world.” The second purpose was to establish specifically Syrian hegemony over Lebanon—which they claim as part (like Palestine) of “Greater Syria.”

Brigitte Gabriel, founder of ACT! For America, describes what it was like living in Lebanon in the 1970s: “When the Moslems and Palestinians declared Jihad on the Christians in 1975, they started massacring the Christians, city after city. I ended up living in a bomb shelter underground from age 10 to 17, without electricity, eating grass to live, and crawling under sniper bullets to a spring to get water.”

As Shmuel relates in “Battleground” (updated edition, 1985):

Large sections of [Beirut] the once flourishing westernized city, banking and business metropolis of all the Arab states, were reduced to rubble, and day after day tens, and later hundreds, of people, mostly civilians, were killed. After a year of civil war, at least twenty thousand people had perished.

By then the political objective of the Moslem onslaught had been accomplished. Whatever the precise organization of the country turned out to be, Christian predominance had been brought to an end. The army had been broken up into its religious components and had in fact disintegrated as a viable force. The Christian President, whose resignation was demanded by the Moslem insurgents, was finally replaced by a cowed majority vote in a besieged Parliament; his successor was a Christian nominated by the Syrians. …

The Christian nations, who with more or less embarrassment had throughout the months kept silent and turned their faces from the slaughter that Syria had generated and sustained, now welcomed her, and the troops she sent into Lebanon, as a “Peacemaker”.

One might say that the coup de grace to this decades-long process begun in 1975, (and delayed for a time by Israeli intervention), took place this Monday. Lebanon announced the formation of a new government dominated by the terrorist organization Hezbollah. Thus is a new Syrian-Iranian client state born out of the ashes of a formerly peaceful Christian country.

The Christian world did nothing for Lebanon’s Christians. It did nothing for Iraq’s Christians. It will do nothing for Egypt’s Christians. The reason, for the most part, is that the Christian world has stopped considering itself Christian, whereas the Muslim world has not stopped considering itself Muslim. In “No Solution to the Arab-Palestinian Problem” (Dawn Books, 1985), Shmuel wrote:

In the Arabs’ view, they were humiliated for hundreds of years, especially in the 18th and 19th centuries, by the Western Christian powers – even though they, as Muslims, are the bearers of a superior religion.

The Arabs never lost that feeling that they should rule by divine right. Indeed, in the midst of an Islamist resurgence they believe this more than ever. The Christian West, on the other hand, has replaced its Christianity with a toxic blend of multiculturalism, environmentalism and assorted politically correct pieties.

Given the imbalance, which side do you think will win?