By any and every measure, the recently concluded state visit to Canada by Israeli President Shimon Peres must be hailed as a pointedly moving and even far-reaching success. As our staff writer in Montreal noted about Peres’ visit there, “Israel’s ninth president was received as a revered and iconic historical figure.”
This observation was true of the Jewish community members with whom the 88-year-old president met in his three-city tour and also of the broader community – politicians, scientists, professionals, academics, entrepreneurs, industrialists and businessmen – with whom he met.
Indeed, Peres’ visit may very well have redefined the notion of bilateral relations between the two sovereign states. To be sure, the conventional markers of Canada’s diplomatic and intergovernmental relations with Israel were heartily and demonstrably confirmed to be strong and sturdy.
But so great a proportion of the president’s visit was spent with men and women steeped in biological sciences, high-tech industries and all manner of knowledge-based spheres of endeavour that the seeds were planted of a new paradigm of bilateral relations comprising a vast life-improving, society-enhancing network between Canada and Israel of myriad, interconnected, science-based filaments of contacts, joint ventures, cooperative explorations and partnered programs.
One of the guests who attended the state dinner in Peres’ honour was so impressed by the non-political, non-conventional nature of the focus of the many public meetings in which the Israeli president took part that he told The CJN “the Peres visit represented a turning point in Canada-Israel relations.”
The president’s participation at the very outset of his visit in the signing of an agreement between the Royal Society of Canada and the Israel Academy of Sciences was a clear indication that this visit would be different than state visits of the past. The emphasis that Peres personally brought to his Canadian hosts was a singular stress on matters of the mind, not of material, on harnessing the vast potential of the human being’s yearning to seek and discover rather than on the human being’s yearning to acquire and possess.
Peres and Gov. Gen. David Johnston painted a new, grand design for bilateral ties between Canada and Israel that reimagines strategic relations resting upon much sounder footing than “mere” pillars of defence and security.
Their design includes far longer-lasting and more profoundly substantive pillars such as bilateral trade in knowledge, partnered technological development, collaborative scientific innovation, binational institutions of joint research and all that yet remains to be discovered and applied in the inexhaustible realm of human need, curiosity, science and knowledge that will lead to mutual economic benefit and, far more importantly, to untold humanitarian benefit for all mankind.