Jacob Gitlin Library Memorial Lecture, Cape Town, 29 November 2022 – Tony Leon

Leadership Against the Grain – Key Examples from Israel and South Africa

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, if one can still use that term.

The Jacob Gitlin Library under whose auspices we meet tonight has been in existence almost as long as I have been alive, founded in 1959 as an archive and library and at the heart of cultural life for the Cape Town Jewish community. Its continuance and good standing are testament to the importance of both heritage and learning as capstones of communal life in the Mother City.

This library is also very close to my place of work for 20 years, the Parliament of South Africa where I witnessed some great and even grand events and conspicuous leadership on display during the modern history of this country: from the end of apartheid, the election of Nelson Mandela as president, the inauguration of our constitution, the dismissal of Jacob Zuma as deputy president and countless other acts and omissions which shaped the contours of current times.

Although sadly the fire which ravaged our national legislature in January this year serves as a grim metaphor for the immolation of so many institutions and priceless heritage where negligence and misgovernance rather than care and maintenance has become the new order of the day.

I have chosen as my lecture topic this evening, “Leadership Against the Grain -Key Examples from Israel and South Africa.”

There is the well-known story of the five most famous Jews in history who wrote the rules of society.

‘Moses said that the law is everything; Jesus said that love is everything; Marx said that class is everything; Freud said that sex is everything; Einstein said everything is relative. ‘

In more recent times the most important figure to emerge in the founding of the state of Israel was its first prime minister, David Ben Gurion. Of course his outsize, charismatic and difficult personality, his almost messianic zeal and detailed attachment to both the lessons and curves of history and the machinations and minutiae of party politics shaped the Zionist movement and the Yishuv for decades before he declared the establishment of The State on May 14, 1948, a polity he was to dominate yet for another fifteen years.

In his magisterial 1989 book on reporting from the Middle East, “From Beirut to Jerusalem”, Thomas Friedman wrote,
“David Ben Gurion had always understood that his first constituency was the facts and that his second constituency was his people, whose subjective will had to be shaped to the facts.” [i]

There are many examples of his bending the will of his electorate to what he saw as the imperatives of national survival, often against the grain of popular sentiment, a key theme of my lecture this evening.

As an aside, I recall being taken from school to the airport one morning in Durban in 1968 to greet -along with a throng of my fellow Durbanites – a diminutive figure who emerged from the aeroplane and later delivered a speech at the Jewish Club. That was the arrival of David Ben Gurion in my hometown, a figure of almost myth like status in most Jewish households made human with his famed whisps of white hair blowing in the humid breeze. Of his speech I recall nothing, except the excitement his presence generated for reasons largely unknown to my 11-year-old self that day.

Far more recently, in 2019, the historian Tom Segev whom my wife and I entertained in this city some years back when he was reporting on the Truth Commission here, wrote a definitive new biography on Ben Gurion, whose title underlines the clarity and singularity of the political and personal life of Israel’s founder despite all its complexities and his myriad contradictions. A State at Any Cost is the name for his life of David Ben Gurion, an apt and encapsulating term.

His navigation of his country from its founding -which he declared -through wars, controversies and achievements are well canvassed and expertly retold in its pages. There are chapters on his risk taking, countenancing violence and extremism in some situations and compromise and moderation and reason in others.

A career of the highest achievement, allowing him to enter the pantheon of twentieth century greats was also characterised, as any long-lived political life inevitably is, by scandal and intrigue, several of which he fermented and over which once great friendships ended in bitter dispute and unresolved enmity.

There is one issue of his political leadership, of several, which serve the purpose of my theme this evening and which I will briefly recount to illustrate the wider point on how decisive and consequential leaders ‘tackle the tough ones’ to borrow a modern cliché. And ruthlessly drive to conclusion their attachment to a considered outcome.

Cast your mind back to 1950, the Holocaust is a recent and searing event. The single most catastrophic event in thousands of years of Jewish history had cost the lives of six million European Jews, one third of the world Jewish population. It was under the Nazi Reich ‘a methodically planned and executed policy of wholesale execution’ to quote a refugee from Germany, one Dr Henry Kissinger, as he later recounted it. [ii]

150 000 survivors from the death camps had found a home in the new State of Israel, just two years old at the time.

Ben Gurion had determined the intense privations of the war-ravaged, immigrant-absorbing and financially- broke Israel economy of the day required assistance from any quarter. Between 1950 and 1952 he obtained first party and then parliamentary support for contact with Germany and the payment of reparations to Israel and the survivors of the Holocaust.

But it was one of the bitterest controversies he had to navigate: his opponents, both inside his own party and in the incendiary opposition led by Menachim Begin described the approach to Germany as a Faustian pact with the devil or worse. Israeli citizens, fanned by the outrage of the newspapers, viewed the prospect as blood money by Germany to expatiate genocidal slaughter.

Debates in both the ruling party committee and in the Knesset were fiercely contested, to put it mildly, and street demonstrations quickly descended into violent attack. The widespread view was that contact and payments from Germany were both an insult to the victims of the Holocaust and to the honour of the Jewish people and the State, barely five years after the end of the war.

For Ben Gurion, a ruthless pragmatism was summed up when he said, “money has no odour.”

As Segev describes it, “ It was the third of a trio of the most sensitive and unrelenting issues which Ben Gurion had to keep returning to his entire life, the other two being partition and religion-state relations. He managed all three of them successfully, combining his persuasive powers with political manoeuvring. He understood the emotional difficulty that motivated his opponents , disdained their political considerations and refused to accept that contact with Germany was immoral. “

After two years of the fiercest contestation in January 1952, in a vote which Menachim Begin declared ‘the most shameful event in our people’s history’, the Knesset voted 61-50 to allow the process with Germany to continue.

In Europe, new German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, another post war titanic leader, received Israel’s request for reparations with approval, in stark contrast to the other Germany, the GDR, which ignored it.

Adenauer told his Bundestag that the reparations were required as ‘moral and material reparation’ and it was Germany’s duty to resolve the issue ‘to ease the way to an inner purification.’ It was also, as Kissinger noted later, ‘unqualifiedly in the German self-interest’ since in some measure the Federal Republic’s future relationship with the West ran through Jerusalem.

The payment of an estimated 124billion Marks in total by the time the reparations ended in 1986 helped ease Israel’s economic imperilment, together with shipments of goods from Germany which amounted to between 10 and 15 percent of all Israel’s annual imports in the 1950’s. [iii]

Ben Gurion’s difficult but ruthlessly pragmatic decision was cemented in an agreement with Germany signed in September 1952 rapidly allowed the besieged country to recover from economic austerity and aided the resettlement of refugees, and provided significant improvements for its European originating Jews, though of course widening the gap between them and the arrivals from the Arab world -a festering inequality which was to change the politics of the country long after Ben Gurion exited the stage. This inequality gap would, ironically, benefit politically Ben Gurion’s bitterest opponent, Menachim Begin, who rode the discontent to power in 1977.

On the policy itself and its consequences, Ben Gurion offered the rationale, “Not every German was guilty of the Nazi crimes just as not every Jew was guilty of killing Jesus.” And as Segev notes of the reproachment with Germany by Israel -with a nod to many other difficult political decisions across the world:

“ It was not a rational and consistent policy making process; instead it involved a bundle of doubts and misgivings, fumblings, intuitions, internal contradictions and a lot of politics. Ben-Gurion took part in all this.”

Let’s pause after this example to consider, briefly, whether in fact it is significant leaders or the sweep of events, or in which combination of the two threads, in the tussle of history, that outcomes are determined.

In their article, Beyond Great Forces: How Individuals Still Shape History, Daniel Byman and Kenneth M Pollack contrast ‘ individual leaders, both famous and infamous’ who drive events on the one hand; and on the other there’s ‘the structural zeitgeist’ where huge sweeping forces trump the power of personality. [iv]

Both clearly matter. Do individual leaders really make much difference to world history, or even to the fate of the two nations (Israel and South Africa) I have chosen to discuss tonight?

British contemporary historian, Dominic Sandbrook, asks the question and provides a half answer:

“Would the world today be the same if Churchill had been dead and buried in 1940, or if Lenin had never boarded his sealed train to the Finland Station in 1917, or if Mikhail Gorbachev had never become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1985? Was Thomas Carlyle right when he claimed that history was simply the ‘practical realisation of and embodiment of Thoughts that dwelt in the in the Great Men sent into the world.” Or was Tolstoy right when, in War and Peace he argued that kings and emperors were no more than the ‘slaves of history’?”[v]

It was Sandbrook’s review of a recent book by historian Ian Kershaw, one of the definitive biographers of Adolf Hitler which prompted the question.

Kershaw’s Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe, published in September[vi], commences its interrogation of the dichotomy and synergy between leaders and events with a reminder from Karl Marx, mentioned above who cautioned, “men make their own history, but not as they please, in conditions of their own choosing”. As the exponent of class-based structural determinism, doubtless in the words of Mandy Rice-Davis, “he would say that wouldn’t he?”

Still, I think Kershaw is correct in noting that while leaders’ matter, context is no less important. An individual matters most, he argues, during crisis points such as wars and revolutions, ‘when existing structures of rule break down or are destroyed.” Hence his sub-title of’ builders and destroyers’.

This then brings me or this lecture closer to home, and to two personalities I got to know well during the epic transition here from apartheid to democracy. They certainly led from the front at a time of existential crisis in this country when the hinges on the door of history could have, metaphorically, perhaps literally, swung in the direction of either renewal or immolation.

Let me turn, first, to the improbable imploder of the old system, a house he both inherited and then helped to dismantle, FW de Klerk.

You can in tracing his ascent to the leadership of his party and this country in 1989, play the ‘what if’ game by asking the likely outcome had nature not intervened in 1989 and felled reluctant reformer and hard-line securocrat President PW Botha, via ruptured blood vessel in his brain, paving the way for FW de Klerk; and you can take this further by wondering the outcome some four years later in May 1994 had de Klerk not stepped down from the presidency as he did. Byman and Pollak, the historians I reference earlier, chose de Klerk as one of their case studies for their thesis on how individuals still matter in shaping history, are correct when they note –

“If de Klerk had remained committed to apartheid, the most likely outcome would have been South Africa’s descent into even greater racial violence or quite possibly an all-out civil war not much different from what is happening in Syria and Venezuela today.”

If Ben Gurion’s deal with Germany for reparations in the early 1950’s represented an extreme act of political apostasy, de Klerk’s singular decision on my first day in Parliament on 2 February 1990 to dismantle the house of racial privilege he inherited and turn three and a half centuries of South African history on its head in one 40-minute speech was even more far reaching. It changed both his political fortunes, his party’s future existence and the trajectory of history for the country.

Regarding history, FW de Klerk’s role in it remains bitterly contested. For example, in February 2020, on the thirtieth anniversary of the release of Nelson Mandela from prison after his 27-year confinement, current president Cyril Ramaphosa said that it was the forces arrayed against de Klerk that had compelled the release of Mandela -and the commencement of constitutional negotiations. In his view,

“It owed nothing at all to the kindness of [De Klerk’s] heart.”[vii]

I cannot but help here recounting the recent impish comment at a seminar in Cape Town a few weeks ago by acclaimed holocaust historian, Professor Deborah Lipstadt who noted, “What lies in a man’s heart is between him and his cardiologist.”

But Ramaphosa, who had at least the good grace to preside over de Klerk’s state funeral service in December 2021, was simply engaging in spectacular historical revisionism.

The motives, as with all history makers of which de Klerk is a prime exemplar, which led to his political denouement over 30 years ago, are undoubtedly mixed.

But what is frankly beyond argument is that at the time of the sweeping changes which de Klerk inaugurated that summer Cape Town day on 2 February 1990, and for the next four years he held the levers of formal power in the country and the reins of the most battle-ready defence force in the country.

The forces arrayed against him were indeed formidable and many and the winds of history were blowing in his face, rather than behind his back, but Mandela did not walk out of Pollsmoor Prison on 9 February that year on his own volition; he did so on the orders of President de Klerk.

It is also true that de Klerk was assisted in this process by internal pressures and resistance, world opinion, the authoritarian nature of the ruling party which allowed its leader great leeway in making, and in this case, reversing decades of settled policy. The fact that he represented not the liberal or so-called ‘verligte’ wing of his party, but its opposite assisted his credibility and the process he unleashed.

As with’ Nixon-in-China’ it is far easier for leaders of the conservative political establishment to reverse course than for those who stand outside the status quo. They tend to be more trusted by the ancien regime -the very interests most threatened by the changes initiated. In this regard, the two Israeli leaders who ceded conquered lands back to the Arabs and Palestinians from whom they were seized were also princes of the conservative establishment -Menachim Begin and Ariel Sharon in different eras: in Sinai and Gaza respectively.

I spent quite a lot of time in personal and in public conversations across the world and here ( Harvard University in 2007, Argentina in 2010, and finally up the road at a gathering of international business families at the Mount Nelson in 2019) discussing with de Klerk both the motive forces for the changes he made and the consequences, intended and accidental, of the transformations wrought by the process he unleashed.

We had in these interactions moved on from our time as opponents to something, given the distance in years and ideology between us, approaching a friendship. And while I had, during our time together in Parliament called him out for what I thought were missteps and even blunders during the long constitutional negotiations and his brief unhappy political afterlife in the government of national unity, I never for a single moment doubted his immense courage.

Courage, not hubristic disregard for danger and heedless pursuit of unachievable goals, is the necessary basic ingredient for political leadership to move against the grain and the limitations of present circumstances.

Perhaps its finest exemplar in the 20^th century, Winston Churchill said this as his country stood alone initially against the might of the Nazi Reich. He said:

“Courage is the first of all human qualities because it is the quality that guarantees all the others.”

If you compare Churchill to most politicians of today who relentlessly consult focus groups, pander to their donors and often to the basest instincts of the faux outrage of social media, Churchill appears like an antique relic.

A historian observed that his predecessor gave his country what it said it wanted “peace in our time” which was immensely popular at the time of Munich in September 1938, but that Churchill provided the public with what it really wanted -leadership in a time of crisis. And it is difficult to think of a political slogan less appealing than his promise of ‘blood, toil, sweat and tears’

Without panel beating historical analogy to the point of distortion, PW Botha was more in sync with his political constituency, as he understood them, when in 1987 he won a resounding electoral victory on the slogan, “Reform Yes, Surrender No.’

Two years later, de Klerk did far less well at the polls, but he then swiftly moved from the temporising half measures of Botha to the full leap across the political abyss: Recognising the hard truth that the survival of the volk required them to relinquish power to survive.

Of the many forces de Klerk faced, perhaps the strongest pillar of resistance from within was the securocrat establishment which surrounded the state and its president. De Klerk said in one of our encounters, that many of his top generals had told him that the government could tough it out for years to come, despite the growing civil insurrection and the impact of global isolation and sanctions against his regime. He said of this prospect, “I ultimately only saw disaster if we had dug in our heels.”

I never doubted that he was by origins not only a scion of the National Party establishment and a proud member of leader of its cause and that he was by inclination a conservative nationalist. But that not only made his reforms more extraordinary, but also provided him with the forward cover to sustain them.

In Dr Henry Kissinger’s recent and eponymous book on Leadership, written at the extraordinary age of 99, that the most adaptive and effective political leaders, and he studies six in his survey, display neither ideological rigidity nor are imprisoned by impractical commitment. Rather, he writes –

“A leader in order to succeed [has to] offend entrenched interests and alienate important constituencies. Such is the price of making history.”[viii]

An even greater history maker than de Klerk was Nelson Mandela, the reforms of the former yielding to the political pre-eminence of the latter although his outsize and heroic role in the decades before 1990 had immortalised him in his absence from the public stage.

He stepped onto that stage in February 1990 encrusted by myth and legend and the fervent imaginings of friend and foe, and how he navigated the treacherous shoals of a country in the rapids of both transition and danger were indeed epic.

More gridfuls of electrons and forests of pages have been devoted to interrogating the life and leadership of Mandela than any other single South African. In part, because his life and times were indeed extraordinary and his emotional intelligence and public grace of such rare vintage.

It is also a reflection on how low leadership standards fell after he departed the political stage in 1999 that the gauze of nostalgia provides some comfort for the current hollowed out, unimaginative, and feckless leadership which has allowed previous challenges to metastasise into full blown crises today.

I thoughtfully added to the burden of Mandela-lore and its pages by producing my own account of my encounters with this icon, when “Opposite Mandela” was published in 2014 just after Mandela died in December 2013.

I will tonight not share the many personal encounters described between its covers, although my publishers, Jonathan Ball, will be indeed delighted if you acquaint yourself with its contents!

But in keeping with my chosen theme of leadership against the grain, I will share three brief examples from his storied presidency. Mandela was at one level the most partisan of politicians. Paradoxically, he was also able to look beyond the interests of the party to make the tough calls on it to meet the country-in-the-making.

There are numerous examples, from U-turns on economic policy to his famed reconciliatory spirit and his quest to place human rights at the centre of foreign policy which set Mandela apart from his successors. But the three instances I highlight here deal with perhaps slighter matters but equally stamp his leadership in primary colours, not in the shades of grey compromise and dull partisanship which today is the default position of ANC leaders.

In May 1994, the historic first democratic election was held in chaotic circumstances, many of which are airbrushed from contemporary accounts of Freedom Day which touch the event with shades of miracle and wonder.

In truth, for those of us involved in it, it was a far more jagged affair replete with unverified ballots, violence, pirate polling stations and other jarring irregularities. In the long and contested counting process the very future hung in the balance with extreme electoral infringements in key places, especially Kwa Zulu Natal, ground zero of a violent war between Mandela’s ANC and the IFP of Mangosuthu Buthelezi.

Senior ANC officials met in Johannesburg amidst demands that the party act against what many insiders regarded as ‘grand theft’ which had robbed them of victory there and elsewhere. There were strong calls to denounce the polls. An American eyewitness at the meeting, ANC pollster Stan Greenberg, describes its conclusion.

“Mandela said nothing during the discussion. Then he brought the room to a full stop. ‘Tell the comrades to cancel the press conference. We will not do anything to make the elections illegitimate. The ANC will not say the election is not ‘free and fair’. Prepare our people in Natal and the Western Cape to lose.” [ix]

Mandela followed this through when, toward the end of his presidency, when he had already relinquished his party leadership to Thabo Mbeki. In October 1998, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission prepared to publish its interim report.

It made damning findings against the party and person of his predecessor, FW de Klerk and his successor and his own party, the ANC. Both de Klerk and Thabo Mbeki rushed to court in attempts to either amend or suppress its findings. Mandela by contrast said the equivalent of ‘publish and be damned’ and attended the event at which the TRC report was published.

As his authorised biographer, Anthony Sampson noted of this and other interventions, “As head of state he saw himself as having loyalties which went beyond the ANC..” [x]By contrast, the leader of the ANC today, President Cyril Ramaphosa told the country in August 2020 that he would rather be a weak president than the person who presided over the disunity of his party. [xi]

For some South Africans rugby is not a game -it is more important than life and death -to borrow a phrase -and is hard wired, along with the Springbok symbol into their very consciousness if not their DNA. Especially, in 1995, the group which objectively just the year before had lost their monopoly on political power, white Afrikaners.

Leaving aside controversies of today such as Rassie Erasmus and his comments on refereeing, some of us were privileged to have been at Ellis Park on 24 June 1995 and witnessed the moment when Mandela won the hearts of white South Africa.

By appearing on the field in a Springbok cap and the captain’s no 6 green and gold jersey, Mandela not only earned a roaring ovation from the overwhelmingly white crowd, but almost certainly helped edge the team to an against-the-odds victory, achieved with a heart stopping drop goal in extra time, against the more fancied New Zealand All Blacks.

There was of course an even more dramatic back story to the glittering and gritty final that day, and Mandela’s role as the team’s unofficial 16^th man. A friend of mine, the great journalist John Carlin, who reported from South Africa during its transition, wrote about the World Cup epiphany, Playing the Enemy, which was made into the movie Invictus, directed by Clint Eastwood, some years later.

There is one piece of dialogue in that film which, perhaps better than any other presidential encounters memorialised in celluloid or in books, distilled the efforts of Mandela’s self-appointed task as builder of a new nation and why he was uniquely equipped for the role. Mandela played on screen by his impressive cinematic Doppelganger Morgan Freeman is seen engaging with the ANC’s National Sports Committee, which is keen on dumping both the Springbok name and emblem, precisely because the committee saw them as cherished symbols of the white overlords of the apartheid era.

Mandela/Freeman rejects the decision, admonishing the NSC: “That is selfish thinking. It does not serve the nation.”

Then, facing the camera, and presumably speaking to South African whites for whom the Springboks had an almost religious significance, he says, “We have to surprise them with our restraint and generosity.”

Today decades later, much of Mandela’s legacy has been abandoned, revised and contested as the country conditions deteriorate precisely because ‘restraint and generosity’ are in such short supply. But the Springbok name and emblem remain as one of the few bonding features in a fracturing nation.

The final statesman I choose for my quartet of leaders who went against the grain is the late Israeli president Shimon Peres.

There are other Israeli leaders who would certainly fit the mould of consequential politicians who broke the mould of orthodoxy and surprised their country and the world with new thinking and daring initiative.

Yitzhak Rabin, the military hard man who paid the ultimate price when his vision for peace cost him his life is one exemplar. Ariel Sharon would be another. His hard-line hawkish credentials won in daring battles with his country’s enemies and his political provenance as the architect of the modern right in the form of the Likud Party, did not prevent him from abandoning both his ideological inclinations and partisan affiliation.

He abandoned both Likud and the occupation of Gaza when he thought neither were sustainable in what he described to me at our single meeting in his office as Prime Minister in Jerusalem in 2004. He told us, “I see my essential task as the guardian of the Jewish people in this corner of the world.”

I thought that for an Israeli nationalist and (Israeli native) ‘Sabra’ an interesting and revealing formula. And he never hesitated to act on his inner convictions, in an often-tumultuous way, to achieve his ends. But of course, Sharon at the height of his powers was felled by an irrecoverable stroke in January 2006, and we have no idea of whether his brilliant and daring political tactics were part of an overall strategy for peace or the outer limits of it. And we can only speculate whether he would have changed the political course of his country from the trajectory on which it appears now set.

It is also worth observing that Ben Gurion, Sharon, Peres and in South Africa de Klerk, all at some stage left the political homes they had helped build and with which they were so closely identified when the believed, for different reasons, they were no longer fit for purpose.

Ben Gurion and Peres founded a breakaway party from Labour, Rafi. And Peres in later life left the Labour Party, which he led in various elections, to join Kadima founded by Sharon. Sharon in 2005 broke with Likud when his brand of peace through territorial retrenchment met with internal opposition. Even the ultimate partisan, Mandela, often found reason, especially in retirement to contest fiercely the policy choices of his successors. De Klerk resigned from the New National Party when it joined the ANC in 2004.

Peres, by contrast with Sharon and Rabin, lived a full and extraordinary political life, one filled with more defeats than victories, dying at the age of 93 in September 2016.

Peres to me, and based on many encounters, offers a leadership portrait etched by resilience, imagination, vast elements of creative eloquence and humanised by petty minded low politics and scheming, all in spanned to service of nation and self and very often the two were utterly intertwined and indistinguishable.

His great contemporary rival and the man who beat him in elections for the highest office, Prime Minister Netanyahu observed on the morning of Peres’s death, “Today is the first day of the State of Israel without Shimon Peres.”

I first encountered Peres in 1991 when I was a backbench MP here attending a conference in Israel. I could not believe that someone for whom English was just his third language (of the five he spoke) could be so compellingly eloquent in my mother tongue. Of course, eloquence alone was hardly a determinant for longevity in the rough and tumble of Israeli politics, as the humiliating end of the political career of Abba Eban, proved.

But there was more to Peres than that. He offered a vision of leadership which I have never forgotten and of deep metaphorical meaning. He said at the meeting, “To be a winning nation is hard. The price of admission to the front row of leading nations is steep, where the view of the world stage is close up. Faraway from the stage is the overcrowded balcony of the also-ran countries. There the price of admission is cheap, but the view of the stage is poor.”

I was blown away by both his profundity and eloquence and enthused on the encounter with my political minder hosting me, the then witty but obscure right-wing Member of Knesset, Ruvi Rivlin. He waspishly told me, “That’s his problem with Peres; he impresses everyone from overseas, and few at home.”

There was a double irony in that remark: Rivlin would in 2014 land up as Peres’s successor as President of Israel and in 2015 gave an impassioned speech on the ‘four tribes of Israel’ in which he included Israeli Arabs. He also forged a close friendship with Peres in later years. And of course, it was Rivlin who in his first attempt to win the presidency of Israel in 2007 lost out to the so-called ‘loser’ Peres who won on his second try.

But of the political loser label he branded on Peres there was much truth. Peres, with his foreign accent, his reputation for double talk, his lack of a military fighting record, his deep intellectual bent, was not a vote winner. Indeed, aided by Mr Google, it seems that in seven elections for the leadership of the Labour Party, he lost four of them (thrice to his great internal rival, Rabin) and his attempts to win direct election as Prime Minister foundered in his rejection at the polls in 1996. (He obtained the post twice, first courtesy of a grand coalition rotation with Likud in 1984, and then finally after the assassination of Rabin in 1996).

Yet his persistence in politics, often in the face of humiliating defeats was characteristic.

Twelve years after that first encounter, I was present at the Mann Auditorium, Tel Aviv in 2003 as a guest at Peres’s 80^th birthday celebration. It was a glittering event attended by such eminences as Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, FW de Klerk and Barbra Streisand and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, at the time on the opposite side of the political aisle from the guest of honour.

In truth though it appeared to be a celebration of past accomplishment not future achievement, a gilded epitaph to a storied career. Yet, just four years later at the age of 84, he was elected -on his second attempt – as President of Israel.

Beyond his extraordinary comeback persistence, there was back in 2003 an encounter with him which at the time I dismissed as over sophisticated and unrealistic. Peres invited me after the event to a meeting at the office he maintained at his nanotechnology institute. It was a field of which I was and remain woefully ignorant.

After an exchange of pleasantries and mutual salutations, Peres asked me for an update on the situation in South Africa and the continent in which, of many areas of interest, he had a keen curiosity.

After I finished my spiel, he said to me, words along the lines, “You know Africa with all its problems has great potential. Because of its sunshine and vast waterfalls and riverine systems, it simply needs technologies to harness these natural attributes to provide alternative and much cleaner energy. Your continent has the supply side, it just needs the delivery mechanisms, and believe me in a few years they will be to hand.”

Bear in mind this conversation occurred nearly 20 years back. My scepticism was wrong, his vision was right. Wind, solar and green energy and the transition from fossil fuels are now front and centre of the world with technologies adapted for them. It was foreseen by him decades back.

Although Peres was criticised by many as a party-hopping opportunist who discarded his political homes when opportunity beckoned elsewhere, his primal political loyalty was in fact to David Ben Gurion, his mentor and the key advancer of his career. He once described himself as a “Ben Gurionite”.

In fact, beyond personal loyalty, there was another aspect of the Ben Gurion character infused in Peres. The latter liked to quote the former who observed, “All the experts are experts on what was. There is no expert on what will be.”[xii] Peres suggested that to become an ‘expert’ on the future, vision must replace experience and nostalgia must give way to a forward-looking orientation.

As he wrote, “People prefer remembering to imagining. Memory deals with familiar things; imagination deals with the unknown. Imagination can be frightening – it requires risking a departure from the familiar.” [xiii]

I am reminded that German Chancellor, Helmut Schmidt, advised that “people with visions should go to the doctor” but it is precisely his ability until the end of his life as a nonagenarian, to dream the future which explains, beyond raw ambition, his persistence.

He of course, along with Mandela and de Klerk was awarded a Nobel Prize for Peace; in his case for his imaginative endeavours to attempt settlement of the intractable issue of settling the conflict with the Palestinians. By some measure and viewed from today, this could be added to the list of his heroic failures and a case of his imagination trumping hard reality.

It is beyond the scope of this lecture, and your endurance to listen, to attempt here to outline why the Oslo Accords essentially failed or remain today beyond realistic attainment.

But in terms of the theme of leadership against the grain, Peres attempts to help create what he dubbed ‘the new Middle East’ offer some lessons. Here are just two of them.

First, Peres allowed circumstance to evolve his thinking and strategy. He was a young man in his 20’s who was entrusted by his great mentor Ben Gurion with building the Israel Defence Force (IDF) into one of the best equipped and most capable armies in the world. He was front and centre in the same decade of the 1950’s of birthing Israel’s, initially secret, nuclear weapons program centred at Dimona.

He was also the leading political force behind the Entebbe Raid of 1977. And in 1975, in contrast, to his later image, he was the minister of defence who allowed the first group of Israeli settlers to remain on in the West Bank. He then green lighted other settlements which in view of his critics simply laid the first obstacles to the so-called two state solution.

Yet, paradoxically, he was the architect of an enduring peace agreement with Jordan, and of course of the Oslo Accords of 1993. The very accord which attempted to square the occupation- security conundrum. Some critics complain that the compromises embedded in the latter were all a piece with his equivocal personality and politically compromising style. Tom Segev wrote in his obituary on the controversy over Oslo,

“The right called Mr Peres a defeatist for ceding some control of the West Bank and the left called him an expansionist because the agreement didn’t end the occupation. Both sides were not entirely wrong. In fact, Mr Peres was trying to please everyone, settlers and peace activists alike. That was the story of his political life.”[xiv]

But not the entirety of it. There is evidence in his five decades of political struggle to support the notion of him as an inveterate, principle-splitting schemer. But then there is the quality of his imagination and his unshakeable optimism, surely key items in the leadership survival kit for which he was exhibit “A” in Israel and the wider world. He was in other words a complex paradox. And in both paradox and complexity true leaders confront great events. That would be a second takeaway from him.

I do not doubt that his defence of the Oslo Accords and the now disappearing consensus on a two-state solution also is a sort of last will and testament to his own political endeavours and an offer to the future. He said, “There was no alternative. We had to do it. An ancient Greek philosopher was asked of the difference between war and peace. ‘In war’ he replied, the old bury the young. In peace, the young bury the old’. I felt that if I could make the world better for the young, then that would be the greatest thing we can do.” [xv]

He never lived to see the prophecy realised. It remains thus today, six years later. But, the acclaim after his death, from across the bitter divides of his country, does suggest that endurance, flexibility, optimistic leadership and most of all the quality of imagination can make a profound and lasting impact. And offer a light to the future.

Conclusion

It is a predictable and wearying complaint to excoriate the quality of today’s leadership in South Africa, Israel and indeed the world. Ramaphosa is neither a Mandela nor a de Klerk. Binyamin Netanyahu beyond his extraordinary winning political longevity bears little resemblance to Ben Gurion, Peres or Sharon. Joe Biden is no John Kennedy. And while Rishi Sunak is vastly improved on his fellow conservative Liz Truss, he pales by comparison with Margaret Thatcher for example.

One of the reasons for this is that circumstances today are so fraught and complex, and politics today is a far less appealing career for talented people than it was in yesteryear. Then there is the generational component. Most of the leaders of South Africa certainly and even in Israel today have known no career outside politics, and only very few, if any, did anything of real consequence before entering the political fray.

Still, there are elsewhere such as in war-ravaged Ukraine exemplars of real and courageous and against the odds leadership to inspire us. And there is always hope that better alternativeness might emerge.

Henry Kissinger wrote of how the present age is ‘unmoored’ because it lacks ‘a moral and strategic vision’ and the leaders to steer the ship of state.

He writes, “The vastness of our future as yet defies comprehension. The increasingly acute and disorienting steepness of the crests, the depths of the troughs, the dangers of the shoals -all these demand navigators with the creativity and fortitude to guide societies to as yet unknown, but more hopeful, destinations.”[xvi]

As we journey onward, let us hope to discover and rediscover such navigators.

Thank you.

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