Shimon Peres told woman with American accent to go back home
The Jerusalem Post
December 24, 1993
by Moshe Kohn
Peres favors the transfer of certain Israeli Jews who oppose the capitulation process he is leading - especially the transfer of those who do not speak Hebrew with his kind of accent, most particularly of those who speak with an "Anglo-Saxon" accent.
On the evening of December 8, Peres came to a Shas banquet at the Jerusalem Ramada Renaissance Hotel. He was greeted by about a dozen demonstrators who blamed him and the government for the murder of the two Lapid men near Kiryat Arba two days earlier, because they [Peres etc.] had branded all the Jews there as anti-Arab provocateurs.
Peres turned to the leader of the group, Ruth Matar, organizer of Women for Israel's Tomorrow, and asked her angrily in Hebrew: "Where are you from?"
The Austrian-born Matar, who is a Holocaust survivor, lived in the US and 18 years ago came with her husband and four children to live in Jerusalem, gave her organization's name in Hebrew. Apparently detecting her Anglo accent, Peres switched to the Polish-accented English in which he defends the "Piss Process" before the foreign news media, and demanded angrily: "No, where do you live?' Matar [in Hebrew]: "Yerushalayim." Peres: "No you don't! You don't belong here! Go back where you came from!"
The Jerusalem Post
February 24, 1995
by Moshe Kohn
He never apologized for that racist remark. At the time, his spokeswoman, Bahira Bardugo, told me he would apologize only after Matar apologized (for a remark she says she never made).
Shortly afterwards Bardugo told a correspondent, Bruce Brill of Tekoa, that (in Brill's paraphrase), "although (Peres) regretted making the remark, he prefers not to make an apology that would attract unwarranted public attention to the incident.
A similar incident in the U.S. would promptly have set off an uproar and brought about an abject apology from the guilty official and/or his resignation, or his dismissal by the president. Here the incident passed virtually unnoticed by the Association of Americans and Canadians in Israel or anyone else.
Peres has somewhat similarly avoided giving an unequivocal; reply to a request from the Jewish War Veterans of America that he apologize for equating the "two holocausts -- the Jewish holocaust and the Japanese holocaust [the atom-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki]" in a speech in New York last May.
In September Shlomo Gur, deputy chief of mission at the Israeli Embassy in Washington, sent the JWV national commander the text of a cable from Peres: "In my remarks I quoted an author who stated that nuclear weapons represent a threat to mankind. No Jew, indeed no right-minded individual, can even entertain the thought that two such totally different issues as the Holocaust against the Jews and the events in Hiroshima can be compared to each other."
This and several other "explanations" sent in Peres's name have not satisfied the JWV, which demands "a formal apology . . . to the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust and to the hundreds of thousands of American Gentiles and Jews (who) died fighting the Japanese in the war to save world freedom."
Bardugo's assistant has just told me that Peres stands by the statement conveyed by Gur. She added: "We're sorry if the JWV doesn't understand the spirit" of Peres's statement.
