The atmosphere at the Palestinian ministry was as cold as ice. News had come of the condolence statement issued by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the death of former Israeli President and Prime Minister Shimon Peres.

The press was asking for comments, but no one at the ministry wanted to talk to the press. A senior Palestinian official who spoke to Al-Monitor on condition of anonymity, said, “If we say what we want, we will be going against what the president said. At the same time, no one wants his or her name associated with a whitewashing of Peres’ bloody history.” 

Most of the staff working for the Palestinian government today entered political life around the time Peres and Abbas sat at a table on the White House lawn, on Sept. 13, 1993, to sign the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). That declaration, since called the Oslo Accord, established the very offices in Ramallah and elsewhere in which some of these longtime staffers work today. Oslo — which was preceded on Sept. 9 by an exchange of letters in which Israel and the PLO recognized each other — ushered in the Palestinian Authority as well as controversial Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation.

Suheir Ismail, who trains Palestinian women to be filmmakers, began her work as a camerawoman during the first intifada (1987-1990). In an interview with Al-Monitor, Ismail argued that Peres shrewdly divided the Palestinian national movement while normalizing Israeli relations with the Palestinians and Arabs. “The person claiming to be a peacemaker acted to defend the Zionist plan to establish a Jewish state and turned the effort to resolve the Palestinian cause into an endeavor to manage the conflict,” she said.