Clinton honors Peres in Israel

TEL AVIV, Israel -- A parade of global figures, from Bill Clinton and Mikhail Gorbachev to actress Kathleen Turner, filed into Tel Aviv Sunday to celebrate the 80th birthday of former prime minister Shimon Peres, the Nobel laureate, visionary of peace and oft-failed political candidate.\nThe extraordinary guest list reflected global appreciation for Peres' efforts toward a "New Middle East" -- the title of his 1995 book dismissed by many here as utopian -- and a longing for the days before the Israeli-Palestinian peace process collapsed in violence that has killed thousands in the last three years.\nBut Israeli critics saw an extravaganza whose security costs and general disruption -- at a time when fighting continues and the ranks of poor Israelis and Palestinians are swelling -- suggested an oversized ego and somewhat poor form.\nPeres, whose birthday was actually last month, says he only went along with the party idea to bring some cheer to the region. It was organized by both supporters and the right-wing Likud government whose policies he opposes.\nThe tight schedule included a reception at the Peres Center for Peace in Jaffa, a meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem and a gala at a Tel Aviv concert hall Sunday -- followed by a "Vision and Reality" symposium on subjects from art and culture to geopolitics and the use of water resources.\n"I feel strange," Peres said Sunday, commenting on the unusual event. "But it happens once in 80 years, so you can survive."\nPeres immigrated from Poland at age 11, but he retains a European accent and genteel manner that, along with a penchant for parliamentary maneuvering, lofty pronouncements and electoral defeat, brought him occasional ridicule.\nNonetheless, he has walked the corridors of Israeli power since his 20s, when, as a top aide to its founder David Ben-Gurion, he helped build the young nation's defenses; in the 1960s, he was instrumental in creating the Dimona nuclear facility where Israel reportedly has amassed a stockpile of nuclear weapons.\nAlthough in the 1970s Peres was briefly considered a supporter of the Jewish settler movement, he soon concluded Israel's occupation since 1967 of the West Bank and Gaza was not just unfair to the millions of Palestinians who live in the areas but a disaster for the Jewish state. He now supports a Palestinian state.\nAfter a brief 1977 stint as acting premier, he ran for the job five times and never won outright. He served two years from 1984 to 1986 after a tied election, using the period to bring down hyperinflation and withdraw troops from much of Lebanon -- popular moves that still failed to win him the hearts of the masses.\nIn 1993, as foreign minister, he helped push Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin into interim peace accords on Palestinian autonomy with Yasser Arafat's PLO, and the three shared the Nobel Peace Prize a year later.\n"The peace process is presently in crisis," Peres wrote in a recent opinion piece published in the International Herald Tribune. But he maintained: "Peace will prevail."\nPeres served another eight months as premier after Rabin's 1995 assassination before losing narrowly and unexpectedly to Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu. In 2000, he lost to a Likud backbencher, Moshe Katsav, in a parliamentary vote for the largely ceremonial post of Israeli president.\n"Peres turns 80 in the feeling that he has not enjoyed the credit he deserves," columnist Dan Margalit wrote in the Maariv newspaper. "The thanks of the nation (today) are but a brief respite."\nBut internationally, few Israelis -- or former prime ministers of any kind -- seem to muster more respect.\nAt a gala gathering, Clinton praised the role Peres played in Middle East peacemaking and implored Israel to keep pushing for an accord with the Palestinians.\n"Every year the Palestinians grow larger, younger, poorer and angrier," Clinton said. "We can go on. They will continue to kill, and you will continue to prevail. But they will break your hearts and twist your childrens' future and theirs."\nIn addition to Clinton, who arrived at nightfall, and the last Soviet president, other guests this week included former South African President and fellow Nobel laureate F.W. de Klerk and leaders past and present of countries from Austria to Australia. Also on hand were a host of Palestinian politicians -- a rarity these days in Tel Aviv.