Even Ben-Gurion gets protested....

Everything must be protested....

For President Shimon Peres, one of the crowning achievements in a six decades plus career as a politician and statesman was the inauguration on Thursday of the Ben Gurion Promenade in Paris.

However, the dedication ceremony was not without incident. For several months prior to the event there had been attempts by Communists and pro-Palestinian elements to prevent the naming of the promenade after Ben Gurion. Moreover there was frustration on the part of the same elements because Delanoe would not agree to name a square or promenade after PLO leader Yasser Arafat.

Anti-Israel demonstrators lined the banks of the Seine and some even boarded a pleasure boat from which they displayed banners and posters with anti-Israel slogans. Some of the demonstrators called Ben Gurion a criminal, shouted that he had been responsible for expelling Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 and charged the Netanyahu government with continuing a policy of seizing Palestinian property and indulging in needless killing of Palestinians.

Despite the fact that Peres is widely recognized throughout the world as a peacemaker, and notwithstanding the fact he and Yitzhak Rabin received the Nobel Peace Prize together with Yasser Arafat, his peacemaking efforts were not recognized by the demonstrators who claimed that he was no less a criminal than Ben Gurion.