From an arms sale to pushing for peace: Peres’s long relationship with Canada

OTTAWA – Shimon Peres visited Canada countless times during a career that spanned more than six decades and included holding virtually every single position in the Israeli government. But it might be his first, in 1950, that was the most notable.

While Peres is being remembered as a champion for peace, one of his first jobs was to purchase arms for Israel, which at the time was under threat of attack by its Arab neighbours. The task was made more difficult by the fact the U.S. and other countries had imposed an arms embargo on Israel.

Canada, however, had indicated said it was willing to sell a number of surplus artillery pieces from the Second World War to Israel because they were “defensive” weapons. The only problem: Canada wanted $2 million for the guns, which the Israelis felt was too much.

In an interview with Newsweek magazine in 2008, Peres explained how he enlisted the help of a prominent Montreal businessman and Jewish leader Samuel Bronfman.

“Being a businessman, he asked me how much they were asking,” Peres recalled. “I said, ‘Two million dollars.’ He said, ‘It’s too much. We can cut it.’”

Together, the two men drove to Ottawa in Bronfman’s Cadillac — stopping at one point for a belt of whisky — before arriving at the office of Canada’s powerful minister of commerce and industry, C.D. Howe.

“In Howe’s office, he started to argue,” Peres recalled. “The poor Howe said, ‘OK, we shall halve it. Instead of $2 million, $1 million.’”

In the following years, Peres would visit Canada many times and strike up relationships with a number of Canadian prime ministers.

In one interview, for example, he recalled having a picnic with Pierre Trudeau. He also called Brian Mulroney a “declared friend” of Israel, but worried Joe Clark was too pro-UN. In Israel, the UN is seen as biased against the Jewish state.

”Mr. Mulroney has a declared friendship toward Israel and Mr. Clark is very much committed to the United Nations,” Peres said during a visit to Ottawa in January 1991.

During a visit to Canada in 2012., Peres also personally praised Stephen Harper — himself no UN cheerleader — by calling the prime minister’s support for Israel “outstanding,” saying, “It really moved our hearts of our people.”

Peres attended numerous events hosted by Canada’s Jewish community as Israel’s foreign affairs minister and president. Many of his speeches, such as one he delivered in Toronto in March 1993, urged peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

”They were shouting and I felt there was hate in their voice,” Peres told an audience of about 650 at the Canadian Club after being greeted at the event by demonstrators.

”In spite of this demonstration I do not feel any hatred … I want to say from the outset that as far as my country is concerned and I am concerned, our enemies are not the Arabs, not the Palestinians. What we are fighting against is wrong policies, not people.”

Yet even as he pushed for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, Peres worried about the threat posed by Iran. When the Conservative government severed diplomatic ties between Canada and Iran in 2012, Peres was quick to praise the move.

“Canada has proven once again that morals come before pragmatism, Canada has demonstrated that policy must reflect principles and values,” Peres, who was Israel’s president, said in a statement at the time.

“(I) hope that other nations will see Canada as a moral role model. The diplomatic isolation of Iran is an important step for the security and stability of the entire world.”

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