Peres, caught in the amber between life and death

It almost seems fitting that the death of Shimon Peres, the Israeli giant who in many ways embodied the (somewhat wishful) transformation of the country from a hawkish security-minded dinosaur into a peace-loving technology wunderkind, is caught Wednesday morning in the amber between the past and the future.

The heartbreak in Israel is palpable. But on the front pages of almost all of the country’s print dailies, he still lives, surrounded by his loved ones, snatching his final breaths before being flung from this mortal coil. He is still imagining a future full of hope, a future he helped build. Before history happens, any dream is possible, and Israel had no greater dreamer than Shimon Peres.

The heartbreak in Israel is palpable. A 93-year-old man died, as 93-year-old men do. This was not a surprise to anyone. The obituaries had been edited and revised, again and again for years, the remembrances of his journey, the impact this meteor who left a crater in the country for time immemorial, already set in type. One needed only to hit “publish.” Yet his death came at 4 a.m., one more star to brighten the darkest night, when newspapers had already been sent to the printer, full of news that he could go at any moment but hadn’t yet, full of commentaries on the US presidential debate that now seems another world away. It was timely, it was untimely.

The heartbreak in Israel is palpable. The one newspaper with the resources to recall its presses and print a second edition with the news of Peres’s death was the one newspaper that isn’t really a newspaper at all: Israel Hayom, a mouthpiece of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and in many ways the polar ideological opposite of Peres’s chimerical peace-pursuing later years. Yet after death all are holy, as the sages say, and the tabloid lays aside any quibbles with the beloved elder statesman to compile a pyre of memorials for the late leader.

The heartbreak in Israel Hayom is palpable. From the first of the 17 pages it fills with coverage of Peres’s death and remembrances of the man, he is mourned as a lost symbol of everything good in the country, the last of a generation that made the desert bloom.

“The story of Shimon Peres’s life symbolizes in many ways the story of the state,” obituary writer Yuri Yalon pens under the headline “The man who lived in white and blue.” “The ninth president took on public roles in many fields, signed off on important breakthroughs, and seemed like part of the landscape of our lives forever, and not just because of the fact that until almost his last days he refused to rest and insisted on continuing to work in Israel and abroad. Yesterday, in the hospital, the beautiful life story came to an end.”

Even editor Haim Shine, so often the ideological opposite of Peres, feels the pain, writing that Israel “has lost a leader and a captain.” But even in the face of near-universal mourning, Shine and his mawkish pen cannot help using opportunity to chide Peres’s peacenik friends.

“Personally, Peres was my life teacher in two main facets that characterize me: optimism and decisiveness,” he writes. “Unfortunately, many of his friends and inheritors chose the opposite way. The meaning of optimism is the ability to carry the burdens of the present in the belief that the future will be better. There is no way to beat the difficulties along the way without a large dose of optimism. Real freedom isn’t given to depressives and melancholy types. Peres internalized that from the dawn of his public activities.”

The heartbreak in Israel is palpable. Even the papers that didn’t report on his death knew the end was near and their pages feel like a death rattle (and not only of the printed press). He is still alive, the papers say, Israel still has its rudder, the pages will read forever as they yellow and fade away, the last gasp of the still naïve world of 11:59 p.m. on September 27, 2016.

“Last goodbye,” reads the top headline of Yedioth Ahronoth. The words refer to Peres’s family and closest friends being summoned the hospital to take their leave from the man who was not a symbol, who was a man, just a man, a father, a husband, a grandfather, a jokester, a buddy, a mentor, a boss, a human, but they are also the paper’s way of telling Peres goodbye for the country, where he was a symbol of the greatest dreams we can achieve.

The heartbreak in that 11:59 p.m. world, a world at once solid and ephemeral, is palpable. “This is a very tough and painful farewell for the children, the grandchildren and his close staff,” the paper quotes a hospital spokesperson saying. “These are his last hours. He is leaving us,” one of his aides says.

The heartbreak across the world is palpable. The paper reports that even with Peres still alive, still breathing, everyone is preparing for the worst.

“The world is following with great worry the deterioration of Peres, and in the meantime, behind the scenes, plans are being made for the funeral of the ninth president and the arrival by air of world leaders asking to come and pay him last respects,” it reports.

That world, that naïve world, where Peres, sucking in his last breaths, is only a three-paragraph story, as unsentimental as Peres’s earlier years as a politician, an opponent, a scandal-maker. Thus Haaretz, its front page festooned with a picture of presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump on the debate stage, has as its main headline an analysis of the showdown, handing Clinton the victory.

“Trump gave Clinton a real fight in the first half hour of the debate, but after that started to lose it and proved the pundits’ forecasts right,” analyst Chemi Shalev writes. “Under an unstoppable shower of blows from a professional politician who prepared for the debate, he lost his attention and self-confidence and started to mumble garbage that was hard to decipher even hours later.”

Another headline in the paper reports that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is making plans to bring Isaac Herzog and his Zionist Union faction into a unity government.

“Haaretz has learned that before Netanyahu departed for the UN General Assembly in New York, his people were in contact with Herzog and his team, but that the contact has not been renewed since his return,” the paper reports. “Despite Netanyahu’s comments on Tuesday, the prevalent opinion among the political echelons is that without a diplomatic breakthrough – such as the holding of a regional conference – Herzog will be hard pressed to bring in at least a third of his party, which numbers 24 MKs.”

The scene is slightly reminiscent of one of Peres’s own political ploys, remembered as the stinking maneuver, a failed bid to fell the government in 1991. The paper itself is a reminder that there will be another 11:59 p.m. That the world will continue spinning in a month, when the pain of Peres’s death is only a memory and Americans going to the polls and Israelis engrossed in Knesset scuttlebutt are the future. Tomorrow, the papers will be filled with eulogies, but today, Peres, and hope, are still alive.