President Obama on Friday delivered an expansive tribute to former Israeli president and Nobel peace prize laureate Shimon Peres at a Jerusalem funeral, using the occasion to bring up the “unfinished business” of achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Obama made his remarks in the presence of Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, who joined 80 world leaders gathered at the Mount Herzl cemetery. Other leaders included Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, as well as major a U.S. delegation that included former President Bill Clinton and Secretary of State John Kerry.
The event was the largest gathering of world dignitaries in Israel since the funeral of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Peres’ predecessor, who was assassinated in 1995 by an extremist opposed to the peace efforts.
Obama said at one point that Peres believed that “the Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people.”
Peres was the last surviving link to Israel’s founding generation, having been mentored by Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion. Obama said Peres, “never saw his dream of peace fulfilled. The region is going through a chaotic time. Threats are ever present. And yet he did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working.”
Obama was the 10th U.S. president since John F. Kennedy to sit down with Peres, he said, and the 10th to “fall prey to his charms.”
“I think of him sitting in the Oval Office, this final member of Israel’s founding generation, under the portrait of George Washington, telling me stories from the past, but more often talking with enthusiasm of the present — his most recent lecture, his next project, his plans for the future, the wonders of his grandchildren,” he said.
He went on to compare him to other “giants of the 20th century” – men like Nelson Mandela and women like Queen Elizabeth.
“Leaders,” he said, “who have seen so much, whose lives span such momentous epochs, that they find no need to posture or traffic in what’s popular in the moment – people who speak with depth and knowledge, not in sound bites.”
Peres, Obama said, accomplished enough things in his life for a thousand men.
“But he understood that it is better to live to the very end of his time on earth with a longing not for the past but for the dreams that have not yet come true — an Israel that is secure in a just and lasting peace with its neighbors,” he said. “And so now this work is in the hand of Israel’s next generation, in the hands of Israel’s next generation and its friends.”
Obama then quoted scripture about Moses’ last words.
“I call upon heaven and earth to bear witness this day that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse; there choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”
“Uvacharta Bachayim,” Obama said in Hebrew. “Choose life. For Shimon, let us choose life, as he always did. Let us make his work our own.”
“May God bless this memory. And may God bless this country, and this world, that he loved so dearly.”
