Only taking this approach, noted Peres, in lieu of providing weapons or monetary donations to the PA, which only served to increase corruption and bureaucracy, will truly bolster chances for a lasting peace in the region….
Displaying the full length map proudly adorning his parlor, Peres also introduced the German chancellor to his “Peace Valley” project, proudly noting the new industrial zone to be established in [the Palestinian town of] Jenin thanks to a major monetary contribution from Berlin.
This view – that economic development and cooperation are the primary means to achieve peace and reconciliation – is consistent with what Peres argued in his 1993 book The New Middle East. There he suggested that common markets and free-trade zones could help to achieve in the Middle East what the European Economic Community achieved for the war-ravaged nations of Western Europe after 1945. If France and Germany, once bitter enemies, could be brought together in this way, why not Jews and Arabs?
This may sound like a neo-liberal vision (neo-liberal in the European sense of free markets and free trade), but it reflects an assumption inherited from Shimon Peres’s political roots in socialist Zionism. As Karl Marx put it: “In the social production of their life, men enter into … relations of production” that constitute “the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.” Peres, it is worth remembering, started his political career as a protégé of the great socialist, trade unionist, and Zionist statesman David Ben-Gurion. And, as Shlomo Avineri notes in his book The Making of Modern Zionism, Marx’s materialist conception of history was central to Ben-Gurion’s thinking: “Ben-Gurion always realized the prime importance of economic infrastructures.” This was the basis for Ben-Gurion’s vigorous opposition to the right-wing Revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky, which sought to establish a Jewish state through military power rather than the slower and less glamorous work of establishing a viable economic foundation. Interestingly, this old debate now seems to shape contemporary discussions of how to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While Israel’s right wing (the ideological successors of Jabotinsky) emphasizes above all the use of military power to counter Palestinian terrorism, Shimon Peres focuses his attention on building what he hopes will be an economic foundation for peaceful coexistence.
Peres (left) and Ben-Gurion (center) in 1969.
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