Mattityahu Peled

Mattityahu "Matti" Peled (מתתיהו "מתי" פלד; born Mattityahu Ifland, 20 July 1923 – 10 March 1995) was a well-known Israeli public figure who was at various periods of his life a professional military man who reached the rank of Aluf (Major General) in the IDF and was a member of the General Staff during the Six-Day War of 1967; a notable scholar who headed the Arabic Language and Literature Department of Tel Aviv University; a radical peace activist and a leading proponent of Israeli dialogue with the PLO and of complete withdrawal from the Occupied Territories in whose conquest he personally had a major role; and a member of the Knesset who often expressed controversial views considered "extreme left" in Israeli terms, yet was treated with considerable respect by political peers.

Peled was born in 1923 in Haifa, then the main port of the British Mandate of Palestine, and grew up in Jerusalem.

Like many youth of that period, he was involved in one of the Socialist Zionist youth movements.

At the age of 18 he joined the Palmach, the newly created Jewish paramilitary defense organization, as Palestine was becoming threatened by Rommel's rapid advance across North Africa.

After Rommel's defeat in 1943 however, Peled was involved in various acts against the continuing British rule.

He served in the Palmach's Jerusalem Platoon together with Yitzhak Rabin, with whom Peled was to maintain lifelong contact.

In 1946 Peled started law studies in London, but the outbreak of civil war, following the Partition of Palestine brought him back to the military.

With the ensuing 1948 Arab–Israeli War in May, he was among the cadre of militia officers who became the backbone of the newly founded Israeli Defence Forces, as the newly created state of Israel had to transform its collection of militias into a single, full-fledged, regular army, in the midst of heavy fighting on multiple fronts.

With many still in their twenties, Peled and his fellow-officers were often entrusted with highly responsible positions, which in most armies are entrusted to older and far more experienced officers.

As the military commander of the Jerusalem region following the 1949 Armistice Agreements, Peled participated in a project to resettle Palestinian refugees, in which a small group of villagers were allowed to cross the Green Line from the Jordanian-held West Bank back into Israel; this act was a marked exception to the government's policy of outright rejecting the return of Palestinian refugees.

These refugees, however, were not allowed to return to their original village—Ein Neqova west of Jerusalem—but were resettled at a nearby location, the village of Ein Rafa.

Peled, an officer with wide-ranging intellectual interests, was marked early-on as a potential staff officer and in the early 1950s was sent to study at the British Staff and Command College, together with Rabin and others, who later held senior positions in the IDF over the following decades.

During his stay in Britain, Peled met and befriended some Jordanian officers, who also had been sent there; some of these officers were to gain senior positions in their own, opposing military.

Aside from Avnery (a journalist and Knesset member who had confronted the Israeli establishment since the early 1950s) most founders of the ICIPP—like Peled himself—were dissident members of the establishment who had moved leftward in the early 1970s.

Peled served as the military commander of Gaza during the half-year Israeli occupation of the Gaza Strip, which followed and extended the Suez Crisis in 1956.

Though lasting only briefly, it was a crucial turning point in his life, as he was to recount on numerous later occasions; he found himself the "lord and master" over hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.

While his daily decisions as governor profoundly affected their daily life, sometimes with life-and-death significance, he commanded without any personal knowledge of their language, and only the most vague idea of Palestinian culture and their way of life.

This experience led to his decision to study Arabic, and the more general idea that Jews and Arabs who share a single small country should know each other's language.

This conclusion, however, was not yet based on any particular political concept, and it was only many years later when he formulated his alternative political ideas that characterized his later career.

During the severe political crisis of May 1967, in the lead-up to the Six-Day War, Peled—then at the rank of Aluf (Major General) and in charge of the IDF Supply Division—was considered a hawk.

At the time when the government of PM Levi Eshkol seemed to be hesitating whether or not to launch a pre-emptive attack on the Egyptian armies concentrating in the Sinai, Peled was among a group of generals who demanded that the government start a war, and threatened to resign if it did not.

Others involved in this Generals' Protest (which only became known to the general public many years later) were then Major General Ariel Sharon and Major General Israel Tal.

Sharon later became Defence Minister and Prime Minister and held positions then diametrically opposite Peled's. Tal, who later also became a dove, but a less radical one, never entered active politics.

Some historians credit the Generals' Protest with a decisive role in Israel's making the decision to launch the Six-Day War—a crucial turning point in the history of the country and of the entire Middle East to the present day.

Others, however, assert that the Eshkol Government had already decided to go to war and that its apparent hesitation was mainly aimed at gaining international (and specifically, American) support.

When later asked about this incident—as he was on numerous occasions during his later career on the Left—Peled expressed no regret.

He stated that having been in charge of the Supply Division, he was aware that prolonged mobilization, with the IDF reserves comprising a significant percentage of Israel's overall workforce, would severely cripple the country's economy, which was already suffering from a severe, years-long recession.

Therefore, Peled asserted, he was duty-bound to tell the government that the country could not afford a long mobilization and that it had to strike "a sharp decisive blow," after which the reserves could be discharged—which is what Israel proceeded to do in the June 1967 Six-Day War.

Peled reiterated, however, that he had conceived of this as a purely military operation to counter a military threat, and that he had no idea that Israel would maintain occupation of the territories captured for decades afterwards, or establish settlements designed to effect their annexation and permanently change their demographic character.

He had opposed these tendencies as soon as they appeared after the war.

Peled retired from military life in 1969.

In that period he visited Vietnam as an official guest of the U.S. Army and was cordially received by American generals.

At the time he still supported the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War, a position that was to change in subsequent years.

Peled had already studied Arabic literature during his military service, and soon after being discharged he completed and submitted to UCLA his Ph.D. thesis on the Egyptian Nobel Prize laureate Naguib Mahfouz.

Subsequently, Peled was one of the founders of the Arabic Literature Department at Tel Aviv University, which he headed for several years, and soon gained a reputation as a serious and innovative scholar in his chosen field.

At the same time, he started regularly publishing articles in the weekend edition of Maariv, in which the clear leftward change in his political stance was evident.

He also joined the Israeli Labor Party, though holding no office on its behalf, and in the 1973 elections was among a group of prominent doves who called upon voters to vote for Labor, despite its faults, rather than for the more radical small left-wing parties (which, under Israel's system of proportional representation had a good chance of gaining some seats in the Knesset).

Peled later reversed this position, becoming a leading member in several such left-wing parties in succession, and on numerous occasions expressing sharp criticism of Labor.

Still, until his last day, he considered himself a Zionist, irrespective of the biting skepticism voiced by his political opponents on that point.

In 1975 Peled was one of the founders of the Israeli Council for Israeli-Palestinian Peace (ICIPP), together with Uri Avnery, Yaakov Arnon, Yossi Amitai, Amos Keinan, Aryeh Eliav and others.