Shimon Peres funeral: Obama evokes ‘unfinished business’ of peace talks

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Barack Obama evoked the “unfinished business” of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process as he delivered a pointed and moving tribute at the funeral of the former Israeli president and Nobel peace prize laureate Shimon Peres in Jerusalem on Friday.

 

Speaking in front of almost 80 world leaders gathered at Mount Herzl cemetery, including Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, Obama said Peres had understood that “the Jewish people weren’t born to rule another people”.

 

Peres, who was regarded as the last of Israel’s founding generation, was buried between two other prime ministers, Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir. The ceremony was Israel’s largest gathering of international dignitaries since the funeral of Rabin, Peres’s partner in peace, who was assassinated by a Jewish nationalist in 1995.

 

Obama’s remarks were the most political at a sombre occasion where the ghost of the failed Middle East peace process loomed large, referred to as well by the former US president Bill Clinton and the Israeli novelist Amos Oz.

 

Abbas said to Netanyahu as the two men shook hands at the ceremony: “Long time, long time.”

 

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