Amal Donqol said in his poem ‘Do Not Reconcile': They will say We came for you to stop the bloodshed We came for you to be the judge For we are cousins Tell them You did not respect that kinship And plant your sword in the desert Until nihility responds Shimon Peres was born on August 2, 1923. He is 85 years old. He was the eighth prime minister of Israel from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996. He became the ninth Israeli president on July 15, 2007 for a term of seven years. Peres was born in Poland. His original name is Shimon Persky. His father was a timber merchant, and his mother was a library curator and a teacher of the Russian language. His family migrated to Palestine in 1934 at the time of the British Mandate. They settled in Tel Aviv, the center of the Zionist Jewish community in those days. He studied at the Ben Shemen Agricultural School, and was one of the founders of Kibbutz Alumot in 1940. In 1947, he was responsible for arms purchases and recruitment. He worked with David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol, who became the top leaders of the State of Israel after it was founded in May 1948. He regards Ben-Gurion until today as his political mentor. In the fifties and sixties, Peres worked as a diplomat in the Israeli Ministry of Defense. In 1949, he was appointed head of that ministry's mission to the United States. He became Deputy Director-General of the ministry in 1952, and Director-General in 1953.
Peres managed to get from the French the Mirage 3 fighter plane and to get them to help building Israel's Dimona nuclear reactor. He also organized the military cooperation with France during the tripartite aggression against Egypt in October 1956. Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, sharing it with Yasser Arafat and Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. And in 1997, he founded the Peres Center for Peace. Peres today is one of the oldest Israeli politicians, yet he is regarded as still lively and active despite his age. I say all this just to remind Al-Azhar Grand Imam Mohamed Sayed Tantawi of Peres and his secret plot to trap Arab leaders and symbols, just as he trapped him on the sidelines of the Dialogue Conference in New York. It is a shame for the Grand Imam to shake hands with the highest Israeli official without knowing who he is. I may believe the Imam when he said he did not know him, but I also believe that there are others who know him and know well the consequences of such a handshake. They should not have left the Imam to become a prey to the Israeli wolves without warning him.
How could the Imam participate in a conference without knowing who else will attend? While it is true that the handshake will not complicate or solve the Palestinian problem, it is provocative to the tilt. Do not reconcile!
