Barack Obama evoked the “unfinished business” of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as he delivered a pointed and moving tribute at the funeral of the former Israeli president and Nobel peace prize laureate Shimon Peres in Jerusalem on Friday.
Speaking in front of almost 80 world leaders gathered at Mount Herzl cemetery, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Obama said Peres had understood that “the Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people”.
Peres, who was regarded as the last of Israel’s founding generation, was buried between two other prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir. The ceremony was Israel’s largest gathering of international dignitaries since the funeral of Rabin, Peres’s partner in peace, who was assassinated by a Jewish nationalist in 1995.
Obama’s remarks were the most political at a sombre occasion where the ghost of the failed Middle East peace process loomed large, referred to as well by the former US president Bill Clinton and the Israeli novelist Amos Oz.
Abbas said to Netanyahu as the two men shook hands at the ceremony: “Long time, long time.”
Obama said the presence of the Palestinian leader at the funeral was “a gesture and reminder of the unfinished business of peace”.
He said Peres “never saw his dream of peace fulfilled … And yet he did not stop dreaming, and he did not stop working. Even in the face of terrorist attacks, repeated disappointments at the negotiating table, he insisted that Palestinians must be seen as equal in dignity to Jews and therefore equal in self-determination. He believed thatIsrael would be best protected when Palestinians had a state of their own.”
Obama concluded: “The last of the founding generation is now gone. Toda rabah haver yakar” – Hebrew for “thank you so much, dear friend.”
Other dignitaries at the funeral included Prince Charles, Boris Johnson, David Cameron and Tony Blair, as well as François Hollande and other heads of state.
Abbas’s attendance, leading a Palestinian delegation, sparked anger in some Palestinian quarters, reflected in a cartoon circulated on social media showing him in Israeli military uniform with his name altered to sound Israeli, weeping over Peres’s grave.
In an unprecedented security operation for the funeral, roads including the main Tel Aviv to Jerusalem highway were closed and thousands of police officers were deployed.
The day began with Peres’s coffin carried out of the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, just after 8.30am by eight military pallbearers, followed by his family. The procession was led by another member of Israel’s armed forces reciting the kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.
The coffin was loaded into a hearse to travel to Mount Herzl cemetery shortly after Obama’s jet set down at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv. Obama was accompanied on Air Force One by the vice-president, Joe Biden, the secretary of state, John Kerry, and 18 members of Congress.
Clinton, who was US president when Peres negotiated an interim peace accord with the Palestinians in 1993, praised Peres as a “wide champion of our common humanity”.
Describing their 25-year friendship, Clinton dismissed critics who described Peres as a naive dreamer. “He started life as Israel’s brightest student, became its best teacher and ended up its biggest dreamer,” he said.
Clinton has now attended the funerals of all three of the figures who signed the Oslo peace accords and shared the Nobel peace prize – Rabin, the former Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and now Peres.
Netanyahu called Peres “a great man of Israel. He was a great man of the world. Israel grieves for him. The world grieves for him.”
He said they had “never glossed over” their differences of opinion, and described the fundamental difference between their approaches. “In one of our nearly night-long discussions, we addressed a fundamental question: from Israel’s perspective, what is paramount – security or peace?” he recalled.
“Shimon enthusiastically replied: ‘Bibi, peace is the true security. If there will be peace, there will be security.’ And I responded to him: ‘Shimon, in the Middle East, security is essential for achieving peace and for maintaining it.’”
Oz, who knew Peres for 40 years, recalled his “capacity to change” and called him “a trailblazer who had been ridiculed, who seemed a big dreamer until the future came and proved him right”.
He added: “When some say peace is not possible, it is possible, and it is necessary and inevitable because we are not going anywhere. That is why we have no option but to divide this house into two apartments. Where are the leaders, the brave leaders, who will make this dream come true and continue his vision?”
Peres’s death on Wednesday at the age of 93 led to an outpouring of tributes. In a career spanning seven decades, Peres held nearly every major office in Israel, serving twice as prime minister, and as president from 2007 to 2014. He was also an architect of Israel’s undeclared nuclear programme and defence industries.
While those in the west and within Israel have hailed Peres as a peacemaker, many Palestinians and those from Arab nations have questioned his record, citing his involvement in successive Arab-Israeli wars, the occupation of Palestinian territory and his support for settlement building before his work on Oslo.
He was prime minister in 1996 when more than 100 civilians sheltering at a UN peacekeepers’ base in the Lebanese village of Qana were killed when it was fired upon by Israel.
Despite his reputation as a statesman, Peres never managed an outright win in a national election. Many in Israel opposed to the Oslo accords blamed him for what they saw as their failure. But in later life, especially during his time as president, he came to be widely embraced.
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