PERES ISRAELI NEW PRESIDENT

Shimon Peres becomes Israeli president
Veteran politician urges withdrawals from strategic territory
June 13, 2007 - 12:28 p.m. Eastern - By Aaron Klein - 2007 WorldNetDaily.com

Shimon Peres

TEL AVIV – Former Prime Minister Shimon Peres – a leading proponent of giving strategic territory to the Palestinians, Syria and Lebanon – today became the ninth president of the state of Israel. The president is elected by the 120 members of the Knesset. Peres ran against Reuven Rivlin from the opposition Likud party and the leftist Labor party's Collette Avital. Rivlin and Avital withdrew their candidacy after a first round of Knesset voting showed a majority to Peres. The former prime minister is known in Israel as a serial loser of elections. His senior government positions have almost entirely been appointed or elected by politicians and not the public. Today's major Israeli dailies featured front page portraits of Peres after each one of his eight major electoral defeats ranging back to the early 1970s.

Although never elected, Peres served twice as prime minister, once following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and another time in which he served for two years in a rotating unity government. A smiling Peres today pledged to give my all to serve Israel.Peres said he saw his new role as a unifier of Israel's fractured society. The president's role is not to deal with politics and partisanship, but to represent what unites us in a strong voice, he said. A president must represent the people's desire to be a united nation, he said. The Knesset chose to prove today that elected figures represent the people.Peres, a secularist, was successful during the Knesset's first round of voting largely because of the support of the ultra-religious Shas party. Peres last month formally announced his decision to run after Moshe Katsav resigned from the presidencey amid allegations he sexually assaulted four female employees.

Peres' in recent months attempted to push through the Knesset an amendment, titled the Peres law, that would have seen the Israeli president elected by open ballot instead of the current secret ballot. The effort was widely regarded as a scheme to intimidate Knesset members and get Peres elected. The former prime minister is widely believed to have lost the previous presidential election, in 2000, because a number of Knesset members who publicly gave him their support instead voted for Katsav.

Peres was considered the driving force of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which invited late-PLO leader Yasser Arafat to rule the Palestinians and take over territory within rocket range of Israel's major population centers. The Peres Peace Center, headed by the former prime minister, advocates the division of Jerusalem and Israeli withdrawals from the strategic West Bank and Golan Heights. The West Bank borders Jerusalem while the Golan looks down on Israeli population centers and twice was used by Syria to mount ground invasions into the Jewish state.

Peres repeatedly has come under fire by critics for policies and plans many say would greatly undermine Israel's security. An official biography of the elderly statesman released earlier this year, entitled Shimon Peres,revealed a draft agreement he hammered out with West Germany in 1961 to allow the creation of German military bases on Israeli soil less than two decades after the Holocaust.
The biography also detailed a controversial plan Peres concocted to lease French Guyana from France and create an Israeli colony there at a time when the 9-year-old Israel was desperate for immigrants and struggling to establish itself.