Shimon Peres: “War criminal” who won Nobel Peace Prize

Seems the world’s got an axe to grind with former Israeli Prime Minister Simon Peres.

Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister. The talks led to the signing of Oslo Accords — a set of agreements between the government of Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

*A at the White House on June 13, 2012, President Barack Obama (left) presented Peres with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest award given to a civilian in peacetime. Photo: AP.*

“He changed the course of human history,” US President Barack Obama said in tribute to the man who died Tuesday aged 93.

“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,” Obama wrote.

*Shimon Peres was an Israeli statesman and the ninth President of Israel, serving from 2007 to 2014. He also served as Prime Minister twice.*

Tributes continue to pour in for the elder statesman who worked to establish the State of Israel from its birth in 1948.

But that has not stopped some from calling the dead man out over his role in Qana’s bloodshed.

Robert Fisk wrote in an opinion piece for the Independent: “Shimon Peres was no peacemaker. I’ll never forget the sight of pouring blood and burning bodies at Qana.”

*Peres (center), PLO chairman Yasser Arafat (left), and then-prime minister Yitzhak Rabin (right) are awarded the Nobel Prize in Oslo on December 10, 1994.*

“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.

“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.

Peres (left) with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton during her trip to Jerusalem on July 16, 2012. — *Peres (left) with US Secretary of State now Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton during her trip to Jerusalem on July 16, 2012.*

Fisk is not alone.

Peres “epitomised the disparity between Israel’s image in the West and the reality of its bloody, colonial policies in Palestine and the wider region,” Ben White wrote in The Middle East Monitor.

He pointed to the late PM’s “key role in the military regime imposed on Palestinian citizens until 1966, under which authorities carried out mass land theft and displacement”.

He also noted that Peres supported the settlements in the West Bank which the UN now considers illegal.

And Qana…

*1996 shelling of Qana: Of 800 Lebanese civilians who had taken refuge in a Qana village compound, 106 were killed and around 116 injured.*

He wrote: “Peres ordered and oversaw ‘Operation Grapes of Wrath’ when Israeli armed forces killed some 154 civilians in Lebanon and injured another 351. The operation, widely believed to have been a pre-election show of strength, saw Lebanese civilians intentionally targeted.”

Fisk and White suggest Peres’ legacy may be that of a war criminal, not peacemaker as major news outlets tout.

Can Peres’ “gentle” soul rest in peace?