RNA - Peres was born in modern day Belarus in 1923, and his family moved to Palestine in the 1930s. As a young man, Peres joined the Haganah, the militia primarily responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages in 1947-49, during the Nakba, but several decades later he won a Nobel Peace Prize together with former Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin probably because he had succeded in killing enough Palestinians.
As early as 1948, the Israeli terrorist groups that operated under the umbrella of Haganah were involved in killing tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians, forcibly evicting them from their homes and making them into penniless refugees.
Despite the violent displacement of the Palestinians being a matter of historical record, Peres always insisted that Zionist forces “upheld the purity of arms” during the establishment of the State of Israel. Indeed, he even claimed that before Israel existed, “there was nothing here”.
Just recently a report titled, “Israeli army veterans admit role in massacres of Palestinians in 1948” has the following confession from an Israeli army veteran:
“Amnon Neumann is 82 and from Haifa. He said that he was a member of the Palmach, the elite fighting force of the Haganah, the underground army of the Yeshuv Jewish community during the period of the British Mandate of Palestine. Neumann joined the Palmach in 1946 after he came to Palestine from Poland at the age of 16.
He said that there were no real battles due to Palestinian poverty and lack of organisation, training and arms. The official Israeli account of that period claims that the displacement and killing of Palestinians was the normal result of a war.
Mr. Neumann admitted that he took part in displacing Palestinians from the villages of Simism, Najd, Kawkaba, Burayr and other places which were fully inhabited by their owners; this runs contrary to Zionist claims. Confessing to his participation in the massacre that was committed against the people of Burayr, Neumann noted that they had Czech-made guns which they used to expel the local inhabitants towards the Gaza Strip.
The Haganah forces were surrounding the village on three sides, he recalls, and firing in the air before entering and expelling its people forcefully. The houses were burnt down, as per the orders the armed forces had received. According to the veteran, he heard a confession by a Haganah officer after the occupation of Burayr that he had shot a Palestinian girl in the head after raping her. It was later revealed, said Neumann, that the girl had indeed been raped.”
The endless record of Peres's war crimes and crimes against humanity is so long that needs a Britannica to describe, but those who so fool-heartedly imagine that the Israeli killing machine might have undergone a fundamental change of character and world view ever since he received the Noble Peace Prize should better know that as Miko Peled, the Israeli peace activist and author (“The General’s Son”), wrote after President Obama awarded the Medal of Freedom to Shimon Peres:
“Officially, Peres oversees a state which under his watch has held thousands of political prisoners; a state where people are governed by different laws based on their ethnic and religious background or, in other words, an apartheid state; a state where some children are denied food, medicine, school and freedom because they were not born Jewish but rather Muslim or Christian; a state where the army can drop hundreds of tons of bombs on a civilian population and where a soldier can take aim and shoot a little girl because she is Palestinian and never be brought to justice.
Peres is the head of a state where water is distributed based on a person’s national identity: Israelis, on average, get an estimated 300 cubic meters of water per year, while Palestinians, depending on where they reside in the West Bank, receive between 35-85 cubic meters of water per year. Israelis who agree to settle on stolen Palestinian land receive 1,500 cubic meters of water per year.
Peres heads a state that in the West Bank routinely kidnaps children from bed in the middle of the night. Subjected to beatings and psychological terror, the child’s “testimony” is then used against other Palestinian defendants.”
Peres held numerous positions in the Israeli regime during his seven decades of political life. He served as president (2007-2014) and as the regime’s premier and military chief. Under his presidency, Israel waged one of its most brutal (of many) wars against the Palestinians in Gaza (Operation Cast Lead, 2009-10) that killed more than 1,500 people, a majority of them innocent women and children. Hospitals and schools (including a UN school) were not spared. Under Peres, nearly 2,500 Palestinians were also murdered, and thousands more injured during the first war in 2007.
To this day, under his guidelines, the belligerent Israeli military occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza blockade continues, including the relentless expansion of illegal Jewish settlements. These actions, among many others, have grossly violated international protocols as well as the human rights of the Palestinians and of many other people living in the Middle East - such as in neighbouring Lebanon and the occupied Golan Heights of Syria.
To substantiate, it is sufficient to state that all these violations and war crimes have been documented and testified by Israel’s own soldiers. For instance, according to a report by Israeli veterans NGO Breaking the Silence, not only did the Israeli soldiers deliberately kill civilians, but that they were explicitly ordered by their leaders, including Peres, to do so in both wars.
Strange enough, and despite the damning evidence, the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague has never bothered to step in to investigate. Even now that Israeli army commanders are talking up an even bigger civilian toll in a third war, ICC officials prefer to look the other way.
Along similar lines, the United Nations and numerous human rights organizations and aid groups have also exposed Israeli war crimes. They say Israel deliberately defied international law in its military offensives and that Israeli officials and military commanders should be held to account for their war crimes.
The problem is, many Israeli leaders like Shimon Peres (who founded Israel's nuclear weapons program) and Ariel Sharon (another war criminal) have died. Worse yet, no Israeli commanders or politicians have ever been held accountable for their crimes. The usurper regime has resisted international human rights investigations, from Amnesty International and the United Nations to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
The fact that no one has ever been held to account for war crimes that were evidently committed by Israel is absolutely indefensible. However, this does in no way mean that world organisations now have some excuse not to investigate or ensure justice for Palestinians. On the contrary.
Before another war criminal par excellence dies, someone like Benjamin Netanyahu, the international civil society needs to act. As the death of Peres and his doctrine forcefully reminds us all, Tel Aviv will never commit itself to the implementation of any international treaty or resolution which might face up to its very existence and interests, just as the way they have acted thus far in response to all UN resolutions and peace treaties.
Before the rogue's gallery of Israel's henchmen launch their third war, the UN and the ICC should pro-actively take steps to allow a full and transparent investigation of the entire civilian killing program – Israel’s deliberate policy of force protection - in occupied Palestine.
There should be nothing particularly contentious about an investigation like this, particularly when there are new threats and credible reports about yet another war. This is not the time to put political considerations above the pursuit of justice. Prosecuting perpetrators of genocide is essential to deterring future mass killings.
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