On History

General Comment: Peres says that he is totally uninterested in the past and there is nothing to be learned from it - an amazingly anti-Jewish attitude. Professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Salo W. Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University, points out that "Only in Israel . . . is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people."

Yerushalmi also notes that Jewish tradition "assigned a decisive significance to history" (Zakhor, Univ of Wash. Press, 1982, pp 8-9). And there is the admonition of the Baal Shem Tov, "Forgetfulness leads to exile, while Remembrance is the secret of redemption." Nor of course is recognition of the importance of history confined to Jews. Thomas Jefferson said the the basic education of citizens in a democracy should be "chiefly historical."

What makes Peres' denigration of history particularly bizarre is that he often invokes history as the guarantor of his own forecasts. Peres believes in the Marxist notion of an immanent force that determines how history will unfold (and to which he, Peres, is privy).

"I think violence is the intervention of the past in the attempt to change the future."
(Speech at the Peres Center for Middle East Peace and Economic Cooperation, April 2001)

"Instead of dwelling in the history of the past, we have to look to the history of the future."
(Speech to American Jewish Committee, May 3, 2001)

"Generally I have very little patience for history. I am bored with history, for the simple reason that you cannot change it. You can analyze it, and people say if you don't learn the past, you will repeat the mistakes of the past. Okay, learn the past - then you will not repeat the mistakes of the past, you will make new mistakes."
(Interview, The Jerusalem Post, July 12, 2001)

"There is no single politician or party or government that can stop the march of history. And history is moving clearly in the direction of peace."
(On being given honorary doctors of laws degree from San Diego State University, San Diego Union Tribune, August 29, 1997)

"PERES: I think that a person like me should be completely devoted to the future. The past interests me like last year's snow.
REPORTER: You certainly know better than all of us that it is possible to learn much from history.
PERES: It is a great mistake to learn from history. There is nothing to learn from history.
REPORTER: How can you say such a thing?
PERES: Human history is built on material rather than intellectual things. We are now going from the material to the intellect in the 21st century. The sources of strength are not territorial, or national, or mineral or numerical. The sources today are science, technology, imagination, creativity, education. This can't be bought with armies. History is written with the red ink of spilt blood.
(Maariv, May 23, 1996)

COMMENT: Compare Peres "There is nothing to learn from history" to Deut. 32:7 "Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past."

"I am totally uninterested in the past. If you wouldn't ask me I wouldn't talk about it. The past bores me. Listen, it bores me for two reasons: it never repeats itself and secondly it is unchangeable. So why should I concern myself with it?
(Interview with Michael Kapel, Australia/Israel Review, June 6-June 26, 1997)

COMMENT: The Hebrew word "zakhor" (remember) appears in the Bible no less than 169 times "in its various declensions" (Yerushalmi, Zakhor, p. 5).

"We are in a new age. Nobody can turn his back on history. It is nonsense.
(Interview with David Makovsky, Jerusalem Post International Edition, April 20, 1996)

COMMENT: Now we have history as "immanent force" with Peres reading the tea leaves on its imperatives.

"Israeli children should be taught to look to the future, not live in the past. I would rather teach them to imagine than to remember."
(Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2000)

COMMENT: History interferes with the free rein of "imagination." Peres' style is to "imagine" what suits his fancy (e.g. a new Middle East) and then invoke the alleged forces of history (but not history in the history books) to proclaim that what he imagines is inevitable.

QQ "I have become totally tired of history, because I feel history is a long misunderstanding." (Wall St. Journal, September 30, 1994)

QQ "In almost every foreign war, it (the U.S.) has conquered territories. But in none of them has it even attempted to retain either territories or resources, or to rule over another nation.
[Battling for Peace, p. 74).

COMMENT: Among the numerous territories retained by the United States as the result of war are:

(1) West Florida (i.e. parts of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi, retained after the war of 1812); East Florida, ceded by Spain in the aftermath of the Seminole War

(2) Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah and part of Colorado and Wyoming after wars with Mexico in the 1840s

(3) Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines after war with Spain in 1898.