The Chairman of the Yesha Council castigated President Shimon Peres for “disgracing the memory” of Israel’s first leader by comparing him to the PA’s prime minister. Both Peres and Palestinian Authority prime minister Salam Fayyad appeared on Tuesday at the Herzliya Conference. Peres, who spoke first, compared Fayyad to the late legendary David Ben-Gurion, noting the pragmatic way he is working to establish a Palestinian state and promote peace. Yesha Council Chairman Danny Dayan released a statement in response, criticizing the president for likening Ben-Gurion to a man who had burnt Israeli goods and wants a Jew-free state. Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first and longest-serving Prime Minister, is credited with being the “founder” of the Jewish State. Peres was one of his top aides, and he and Moshe Dayan were known in the 1950’s as the “Ben-Gurion boys.” Fayyad, in his subsequent speech at the Conference, demanded from Israel a total freeze on all Jewish construction in eastern Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. “The Palestinian state is supposed to emerge precisely where you are building your settlements,” Fayyad said. Just a month ago, Fayyad took part in an Israeli-goods burning ceremony, in protest of the thriving Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria. The goods had been confiscated from Arab-owned stores. Fayyad demanded in his speech that Israel stop carrying out anti-terrorist military activities anywhere in Judea and Samaria, even in areas defined by the Oslo Accords as under total Israeli control. He said that the PA must be allowed to patrol and police these areas, as this would “give us the confidence that Israel really intends” to end the occupation and allow the establishment of a Palestinian state. He emphasized that the PA state must include Jerusalem as its capital, and that Jerusalem is “no less important than the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” "Like you,” he said to the Israeli audience, “we Palestinians have our own history” – though he overlooked the fact that Jewish history spans more than 3,500 years, about 100 times longer than Palestinian-Arab history. In light of the above, the Yesha Council Chairman said that the comparison by Peres was a disgrace to Ben-Gurion’s memory. “Salam Fayyad showed him to be just a little racist who wants a state clean of Jews,” said Danny Dayan. “Peres disgraced the memory of the first Prime Minister when he likened him to a man who just recently burned Israeli goods in a central town square.” “It is regrettable that Defense Minister Ehud Barak, who shared the stage with Fayyad at the Conference, did not explain to him that Shilo, Beit El and Elon Moreh have been the land of the Jewish Nation for thousands of years before the world ever heard of the Palestinians. We are not building our homes in Fayyad’s land, but rather in our own land.” “It is too bad that the Herzliya Conference is becoming an arena for the distortion of truth and the negation of the Zionist idea,” Dayan concluded.
