‘Peres’ Lacks Drama of Israeli Leader’s Life

Perhaps no one embodies Israel’s historic internal struggle between the impulses for peace and war as well as current Prime Minister Shimon Peres, who nevertheless remains a murky figure to American eyes. Producer-director Julie Gal’s film, “The Battle for Peace: Shimon Peres,” removes some of the veils from a career full of back channels and covert diplomacy, but rarely has an exciting history been told this stolidly.

As a good biographical film should, Gal’s portrait dutifully takes us through Peres’ roller-coaster life with a clear chronology, a sprinkling of seldom-seen archival footage (especially of some of his many secret negotiations with Israel’s avowed enemies) and smart comments from observers ranging from Palestinian peace advocate Hanan Ashwari to former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Samuel Lewis.

Peres served as point man for the first Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to secure military weapons by any means necessary--which often meant smuggling under the noses of unfriendly governments in London and Moscow, the program says. Ironically, as Lewis notes, Peres’ genius for secret deals (his pact with France was the key to victory in the 1967 Six-Day War) gave him the air of a sneaky con man with the electorate.

Despite a prosperity boom under his Labor-led government in the mid-’80s, voters generally preferred Peres’ bitter Labor Party rival, Yitzhak Rabin. And even though Peres’ move in recent decades from Zionist hawk to land-for-peace advocate reflected general Israeli public sentiment, it was used by his rivals and his virulent right-wing enemies as another sign of his shiftiness.

This bitterness and tension is described to us (mostly care of narrator Itzhak Perlman), but never expressed on camera by the men themselves. Gal’s this-happened-then-this-happened approach doesn’t help us come closer to Peres, either, resulting in a curiously stilted report for such an inherently dramatic and emotional story in which a leader and a nation are so inextricably linked.

* “The Battle for Peace: Shimon Peres” airs at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28.