Palestinians call him "Father of Peace": Who is Mattityahu Peled?
Matityahu Peled also fought in the 1948 war and served as a general in the 1967 war. But in 1975 Peled began to question his political views. He directed harsh criticism towards the Labor Party, of which he was a member for a while... And:
In the photo, Peled is on the left, and Egyptian writer Necip Mahfouz is on the right.
Mattityahu (Matti) Peled (1923-1995)…
He was born in Haifa and grew up in Jerusalem.
He took part in the socialist Zionist youth organization.
He joined the Palmach, a Jewish paramilitary defense organization founded to resist Nazi occupation. Here his close friend was (future Israeli prime minister) Yitzhak Rabin.
While studying law in London after World War II, he returned to Jerusalem to take part in the civil war that broke out after the partition of Palestine.
He joined the militia officers, the backbone of the Defense Forces in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. Then came his professional military service:
In the early 1950s, he was sent to England (with Rabin again) to receive training at the Staff and Command College...
Mattityahu "Matti" Peled (July 1923 – 10 March 1995), born Mattityahu Ifland, 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 staunch political people.
During Israel's occupation of Gaza in 1956, he served as the region's military commander and governor. This was the turning point; He had no interest, knowledge, or relationship with Palestinians, he first learned Arabic...
He served as a Major General in the Arab-Israeli 6-Day War in 1967. It was "Hawk". He dealt with the army's legal and illegal logistics purchases. He retired two years later. He was sent off as a great hero. But he did not give up on military service:
-He trained American soldiers in Vietnam...
-Dictator Mobutu Seko trained his soldiers against the leftist Lumumba in Congo...
-Shah Pahlavi trained his soldiers against Mossadegh in Iran...
Next…
He wrote a thesis on Egyptian Nobel Prize winner Najib Mahfouz (with whom he would later become a friend) at the American University of UCLA. He founded and chaired the Department of Arabic Literature at Tel Aviv University. He translated many Arabic works into Hebrew.
In the recent period, Peled began to question his political views. He directed harsh criticism towards the Labor Party, of which he was a member for a while...
And:
Year 1975:
Peled was one of the founders of the Israel-Palestine Peace Council (ICIPP). He called for Israel's withdrawal from the lands it occupied in 1967, the establishment of an independent Palestinian state in these lands, and the sharing of Jerusalem among them. In other words, he was a supporter of the "two-state" solution...
Peled established a relationship with PLO/Arafat. (The contact persons, PLO member Dr Sartavi and Egyptian Jewish communist H. Curiel, were assassinated.)
Because of these relationships and what he wrote in the press, Peled began to be seen as a "collaborator" by his friends. He did not give up. In 1977, he was elected as a member of the “White Dove” Israeli Left Camp Party…
He persuaded his friend Rabin to attend the Oslo peace talks. However, he did not refrain from harsh criticism against Rabin for serious human rights violations in the occupied territories. Their relationship broke down…
He supported reservists who refused to take part in the war organized by the Yesh Gvul movement, which was founded in 1982 during the First Lebanon War. (200 of them were imprisoned.)
Peled declared his friends, with whom he once fought, "war criminals who bombed civilians". Where did life take Peled...
Peled, who died in 1995, is still highly respected in Israel.
Her daughter, Prof Nurit Peled-Elhanan, lost her 14-year-old daughter Smadar in a suicide bomb attack in Jerusalem in 1997!
Despite this... Peled's son (Israel-Palestine single state supporter, anti-Zionism) Miko Peled wrote about his father's and his own peaceful struggle in a book: "The General's Son"...