What Really Got Shimon Peres Going

While on the subject of the late Shimon Peres' crocodile tears over Palestinian refugees, it should be pointed out that what really got the old Zionist trooper going was not Jewish suffering as such but that old Zionist dogma, 'the Jewish people.' (This ideological construct of political Zionism, of course, had nothing whatever to do with Jews as a faith/cultural community subjected to anti-Semitism in Europe). Note 'the Jewish people' tropes in this performance:

"Nowhere in the world is there a people who better know the meaning of personal, familial, and national suffering than the Jewish people. We are a nation of refugees. In our collective memory we carry the history of exile from our country, twice taken from our ancestors. We know our wanderings in Europe, Asia [!], and Africa [!]; the medieval expulsions from France and England, from the German principalities and dukedoms, from Spain and Portugal. We lived with the Pale of Settlement of Czarist Russia, the badges of shame and the restrictions on employment and freedom of movement, even in those places where Jews were allowed to live: the restrictions on education and the continual humiliation, the lot of a persecuted minority. Fifty generations of pogroms and slaughter culminated in the atrocities and tortures of the Holocaust. Even before the outbreak of that terrible war, the roads of Europe were choked with Jews who had been expelled or who were seeking refuge. Jews that nobody wanted and no state was prepared to take in. Even the League of Nations committee could find no place for them, which only strengthened the Nazi resolve to carry out their monstrous Final Solution. After World War II, the Jewish refugees appeared again all over the continent, survivors of hell. With no trace left of their old towns or their families, they had no place left to return to. Destitute, they wandered the roads, with dull eyes and numbers tattooed on their shriveled arms. Only one ancient dream gave them the strength to endure the hardships of the journey: the dream of returning to their ancient homeland, the place where Jews could have a life of freedom and honor." (The New Middle East, Shimon Peres, 1993, pp 183-184)

For Peres, the Palestinians, of course, were just your run-of-the-mill, random refugees. European Jewish refugees, however, were sooo much more - "a nation of refugees"! And that's what really got him going.