Why she didn’t report that Shimon Peres sexually assaulted her: Colette Avital tells all

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In 1984, Colette Avital returned to Israel after a three-year stint in Paris on behalf of the Foreign Ministry. Her father, who was waiting for her upon her arrival in Haifa, brought her up to speed: The political impasse in the country had been broken, with Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir agreeing to form a rotation government. Peres would serve as prime minister for the first two years.

When Avital got to Tel Aviv she went to sun herself at the beach, when suddenly she heard a familiar voice. It was the secretary of the incoming prime minister, who had happened by. “I congratulated her on the results of the election, and she told me that just a day earlier they had talked about me at Peres’ place,” Avital recalls now. “What did they say about me?” she asked. The answer threw her for a loop: “He’s looking for a media adviser. A few journalists turned him down, and when your name came up as a possible candidate, he said, ‘I would appoint Colette, but she’s a woman.'”

That same day Avital made her way to the Prime Minister’s Bureau in Jerusalem to verify what she’d been told. “It’s true,” said Yossi Beilin, the cabinet secretary and Peres’ close confidant. “He rejected you out of hand because you’re a woman.”

A month later, Avital was invited to meet with the prime minister himself. “I understand that Foreign Minister Shamir neutralized you because of [your connection to] me and gave you an unimportant job [in the ministry],” Peres said. “Can I help?”

The two had known each other well for many years. Their ties grew closer when Avital served in a diplomatic post in Paris, where Peres frequently visited. The fact that she accompanied him on his visits led senior Likud figures to believe that she was using her position in the Foreign Ministry to serve the interests of the leader of the Labor Party. On her return from Paris, she was not offered any exciting jobs.

“I wanted to be your media adviser or the director of the Government Press Office,” Avital told Peres, disappointed. “But both jobs are taken.”

Peres told her that her gender was an obstacle.

Sexual harassment, too, is part of Shimon Peres’ legacy

Avital: “What he said was, ‘I can’t give you those jobs, because you are a woman and you’re good-looking and people will gossip about us.’ I replied that I didn’t understand. [Defense Minister Yitzhak] Rabin had appointed a woman to that job, as had the head of the National Religious Party, Yosef Burg. What’s there to be afraid of? ‘People will gossip about us,’ he repeated.”

Peres suggested that she become the spokeswoman for Finance Minister Yitzhak Modai. “Not interested,” Avital replied in a huff.

The meeting was drawing to a close. Peres promised to think about it and got up to escort Avital to the door. “I thought for a moment that it was a fine gentlemanly gesture on his part,” she says. But then something happened that she has never spoken about until now. If she had made it known then, she might not have fallen victim to one of the ugliest acts of slander known in Israel, one that haunts her to this day. According to the defamatory story that was disseminated, Avital was Peres’ lover and without the push from him she would not have been appointed to senior positions in the country’s diplomatic service. Over the years, the calumny was whispered among politicians and leading journalists. Before I met with Avital, I asked a few people what they knew.

“Obviously, she was Peres’ lover,” they all agreed, compressing her impressive CV into a footnote in his life. The fact that she was single and attractive dovetailed nicely with that rumor, which many believed was the unvarnished truth. It’s not just Avital’s private story, either. It mirrors a deep-rooted social pathology. A good-looking woman in the top rungs of the ladder? She must have slept with whomever was necessary.

I know something else happened on your way out of the Prime Minister’s Bureau. When he escorted you to the door he was in no hurry to open it.

“He suddenly pinned me to the door and tried to kiss me. ‘People will gossip about us,’ I blurted out, as part of some kind of ironic instinct, as I pushed him away. He went back to his place and I left. My legs shook when I left; it repulsed me. Five minutes earlier he had said that I couldn’t work with him because I’m a woman, and what will people say. So what suddenly changed? What got into you? For something like two years after that incident, I avoided seeing him.”

That wasn’t Avital’s first or last experience of this sort with men of power. Nor was it the first time it had happened with the revered statesman and future president.

Literary inspiration

Colette Avital, 81, was born in Romania as World War II was breaking out, the only child of a mother who had studied law and a father who owned a leather factory. Her parents, and her mother especially, were estranged from Judaism and Zionism. The family had a Christmas tree every year. Her mother, who admired French literature, named her for the writer Colette.

After hundreds of thousands of Romanian Jews began to be deported to their deaths by the Nazis, Avital and her mother fled from the city of Bacau to Bucharest. Her father was rescued thanks to a ransom paid by her affluent and well-connected grandfather. However, even after they survived and the war ended, things did not return to normal: The Nazis were succeeded by the Stalinists.

“They took over my father’s factory,” she relates. “Because he was a capitalist, he was branded a traitor, a bloodsucker. He was persecuted and they wanted to imprison him.”

The secret police carried out nighttime searches in her parents’ home, looking for foreign currency and interrogating her father. Avital had an important role in this ritual. At the time, she had received a prize from the regime for being an outstanding student – a red tie. She was part of the new generation that sprang up in Romania, with a revolutionary self-image. “People saluted us in the street,” she relates. “When there would be a knock on the door when they came looking for my father, I would quickly put on the red tie and open the door. I’d put on a whole show and they saluted me. In the meantime, my father would escape out the back door.”

The family fled to Israel in 1950. Avital’s mother decided to send her to school in a French convent in Jaffa. “In my mother’s view, the ‘sabras’ possessed a Levantine culture. The biggest punishment they used to threaten me with was that if I didn’t behave properly, they would send me to a kibbutz.”

Avital and Peres in New York, in 1994. “I had an ambivalent attitude toward him. On one hand, I had plenty of reasons not to like him, but on the other, I esteemed him.”
David Karp / ASSOCIATED PRESS

Like other Romanians who immigrated to Israel at the time, her parents lived in a foreign bubble. They spoke French and kept to themselves to the point where, when she was 16, their daughter still knew only a few words in Hebrew. She attended her first Passover seder ever seven years later, when she was serving at the Israeli consulate in Montreal. In the meantime, she had been forced to leave the convent and switch to a regular high school after her mother received an explicit threat at her workplace. “The owner of the cooking-oil factory where she worked heard where I was going to school and gave her an ultimatum: If you don’t give her a Jewish education, you can go,” she says.

Avital didn’t fit in with the young Tel Aviv crowd; her dream was to go to France and study journalism. Her parents’ constant bickering was also more than she could bear. “My father failed in every business he tried. My mother accused him of being one big failure.”

So life at home was a nightmare?

“Yes. There were times when my mother asked me to kiss her, because it might be the last time she would see me.”

Because they would kill each other?

“No, because she wanted to kill herself. She also kept explaining to me that she it was because of me that she didn’t get a divorce. She tried to incite me against my father. She portrayed him as an animal and she also did horrible things to me.”

She lived in hell and you were to blame.

“Yes, it was my fault. Since then, if there’s one thing I can’t stand it’s when people try to make me feel guilty. Later I understood that the relations between my parents were what turned me off marriage. My mother was a very strong and very opinionated woman – beautiful, a true intellectual. She succeeded in trampling my father underfoot and decided that she needed to mold me according to her desires.”

Following her army service, Avital got a bachelor’s degree in political science and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and earned a living working as a secretary in the Foreign Ministry. Jerusalem was a temporary city of refuge for her, and she hoped the ministry would be her escape hatch. However, her mother took a dim view of her plans and recruited Stroia Lupescu – a wealthy patron who was a prominent figure in Tel Aviv’s Romanian community – to help thwart them. Lupescu, unmarried and in his 60s, the founder of the Supergas natural-gas company, was a distant relative but was known as the “uncle.” He employed Avital’s father and paid for a long trip abroad for Collette when her mother became concerned that she was thinking about becoming a flight attendant. After Avital had been hired by the Foreign Ministry, her mother alerted the influential uncle, “and without my knowing about it he showed up for a meeting at the ministry with the deputy director general, Maurice Fischer. Fischer asked me afterward whether I liked working there. I said I did. ‘Then why does your uncle want me to fire you?’ he asked. Why? Because he wanted to control me.”

The so-called uncle also perpetrated a first sexual assault on Avital: “He had an apartment on Rothschild Boulevard here in Tel Aviv. One day he called me as though he wanted to talk, and he tried to rape me. He pulled me by the hand and by the hair, and explained that he had to teach me, to get me in the know. I fled. I felt disgust; I was nauseous. After that the relations between us were severed.”

Avital in the 1980s. After initially being turned down, she got her dream job: consul general in New York.
Yaron Kaminsky

Thereafter she underwent similar experiences of harassment in the Foreign Ministry as well.

In the early 1960s, when Avital began her rise to the top, the gender roles in the ministry were clearly defined: The overwhelming majority of junior posts were held by women, while the glamorous jobs went to men. “And I wanted diplomacy,” she sighs. There were a few rare pioneering women in the diplomatic service at the time. Outstanding among them was Esther Herlitz, who in 1966 became Israel’s first female ambassador, to Denmark.

“She viewed me as her successor,” Avital says.

Herlitz also did not establish her own family, nor did the next woman who received an ambassadorship – Hava Hareli, who was posted to Norway in 1978. “Hareli is unmarried,” the newspaper Maariv reported at the time. “The ambassador’s residence in Oslo will be managed by a housekeeper. That’s a job the ambassador’s wife usually does for free.”

Is it a coincidence that none of you had families of your own?

“The conditions didn’t exist for it back then. I don’t want to talk about my predecessors, because I’m not familiar with their intimate lives. I will talk about myself: If I had married, would I have been able to take my husband abroad with me? That would have messed things up.”

It was either family or a career?

“Yes. Starting a family was on the agenda at several junctures in my life, but I knew I would have to leave the Foreign Ministry. And to give up my career in the ministry, it would have had to be for someone who was really worth it.”

Esther Herlitz.
Moshe Milner / GPO

Ongoing gender gap

Our conversation is taking place in Avital’s home in central Tel Aviv. She has had a long career as both a diplomat and as member of Knesset, she holds a master’s degree in public administration from Harvard, and she speaks seven languages. She was actually only the third female ambassador who came up through the ranks of the Foreign Ministry. The gender gap in Israel’s foreign service has narrowed somewhat since then, but even today the vast majority of the country’s ambassadors are men, and no woman has ever served as the Foreign Ministry’s director general.

In her second year in the ministry, Avital was the secretary of deputy director general Ehud Avriel, who was very close to Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion. Avriel had engineered the 1948 arms deal with Czechoslovakia that helped tip the balance for Israel in the War of Independence. He was now in charge of establishing relations with African countries, and he strongly encouraged Avital, giving her a free hand to read classified materials and to hold talks with the rulers of Kenya and Ghana. But she aspired to more.

Avital: “I completed my university studies. Men who graduated together with me moved automatically into the diplomatic corps and I requested to do the same. I met with the ministry’s deputy director for human resources, Yaakov Nitzan, who told me: ‘You are a successful secretary. Why do you need to aspire to another type of work?’ He also gave another reason: ‘Women are hysterical. We would have to calm them down all the time. You are young and pretty, but what will you do if you get married? Take your husband abroad? He won’t go with you. And if you don’t get married, you’ll end up a bitter old maid.”

In 1963 she was posted to Israel’s consulate in Montreal as a secretary, but in practice engaged in hasbara – public diplomacy – vis-a-vis the French Canadians and local Jewish community. She returned to Israel six years later, to the Foreign Ministry’s hasbara department, and launched a program to explain Israel and its policies to a hostile young force that had sprung up at that time: the so-called New Left in Europe.

“I was given the rank of a third secretary, which is the lowest diplomatic rank at the ministry.”

Even after having diplomatic experience, the attitude toward women was still that they were less qualified than men?

“Obviously. I could engage in hasbara and culture. But diplomatic affairs? Forget it.”

In addition to the discrimination, were there also cases of sexual harassment by senior figures in the Foreign Ministry?

“All kinds in the ministry pounced on me – okay?”

More than once?

“Of course. I remember how one day I returned home to Jerusalem after a vacation. The doorbell rang and one of my bosses, who shall remain nameless here, was standing there. He came in and attacked me. I showed him the door, and of course from that day on, he sent back to me every cable I needed to have sent out. I consulted with male friends, who told me: Maybe you’re provocative? So I started to dress more demurely and put my hair in a ponytail and came across as the most modest person in the world. One day I’m in the corridor of one of the Foreign Ministry’s cottages [in its old compound in Jerusalem], and I feel someone from behind pulling my ponytail, shoving me into a room and attacking me.”

Who was it?

“Another boss of mine from the past.”

So what do you do in that kind of situation?

“Nothing. I pushed him away and walked out the door.”

Subsequently, in 1973, Avital was sent on a second mission abroad, to Belgium, as press officer and cultural attache in Brussels, but that stint was curtailed after three years following a peculiar incident.

“The only Eastern Bloc country we had diplomatic relations with at that time was Romania,” she recalls. “I was invited to the Independence Day celebrations at the Romanian Embassy. A guy comes up – and, by the way, I remember that he was quite handsome – and I am asked if we know each other. I say no, and he’s presented as the Russian press attache. He gave me his business card. I reported this with excitement to the ambassador, because we didn’t have relations with Russia. A few days later, I leave the house and pass a cafe down the street. This press attache is sitting there with a girl and he asks me to join them. I refused. I reported that to the ambassador, too, and he told me, ‘Write to Israel.'”

A letter was sent and led to a visit by a representative of the Shin Bet security service, who questioned her. A few months later the ambassador told her that she had to return to Israel “for security reasons.”

“It was like a brick fell on my head,” she relates now. “They wouldn’t tell me why. Only months later did they reveal to me that they were concerned the Russians were trying to target me. They thought this guy would start up with me and I would fall in love with him, and then they [the Russians] would photograph me and try to get information out of me.”

Avital’s next destination was Boston, in 1975. No red carpet awaited there, either. She was promoted, in another small step, to the rank of consul, a development that drove her new boss crazy.

“The consul general was Shimshon Inbal, and I knew him as a young poet and a translator of African poetry into Hebrew. I was delighted that I would be working with him. He welcomed me at the airport unshaven, with a cigar in his mouth, and put me into a car filled with cartons, papers scattered all over and potato chips. I sit down next to him and he says, ‘You should know that there will be problems between us.’ I ask, ‘Shimshon, what problems?’ He says, ‘You’re young and pretty and I’ve been here five years, and people will think you came to replace me. You have the title of consul. I suggest we call you deputy consul.’ I said: ‘It hasn’t been very easy for me to advance in the Foreign Ministry. I’m not willing to go backward.'”

Thereafter, Inbal effectively compartmentalized her and restricted her activities, she says: “One day he showed me two drawers with name cards. He said that the white cards contained the names of people we were in contact with, while the blue cards had the names of our enemies, and I must avoid being in contact with them.” One of the names on the blue cards was that of a young architecture student, Benjamin Nitay.

What did he mean by “our enemies”?

“I understood that they were people who opposed the policies of Mapai” – the ruling party and forerunner of today’s Labor.

A few months later, Avital encountered Benjamin Netanyahu (aka Nitay; he used that alias, as did his father at times, while living in the U.S. in the 1970s): It was she who dispatched him to give talks on campuses and to his first television appearance.

“He was super-charming and businesslike,” she recalls. “I didn’t see the political ambition there until Yoni fell” – a reference to the former prime minister’s brother, who was killed in the Entebbe rescue operation in 1976. It was also Avital who called Netanyahu after that incident and asked him to remain at home and wait for a representative of the consulate, who brought him the bad news.

Golda Meir. “She cast doubt on my intelligence. I was so offended by her that my hands shook on the steering wheel.”
AP

In 1977, Golda Meir arrived in Boston for eye treatment. Avital – who admired the former prime minister, who had served as Israel’s diplomatic representative in Russia briefly during the state’s early days – was late picking her up at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel for dinner.

“What was so important that you were late?” Meir scolded her.

“[Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat announced on television that he is ready to come to Jerusalem,” Avital reported emotionally.

“And you believed him?” Meir responded disdainfully. “It’s probably cheap propaganda. How many years have you been working in the Foreign Ministry?”

“She cast doubt on my intelligence,” Avital says, “on my understanding of English. I was so offended by her that my hands shook on the steering wheel.” When they arrived for dinner, the only thing everyone was talking about, naturally, was the historic gesture by the Egyptian president. “What do you think about it?” everyone asked Golda.

“She told them that if it was correct,” Avital says, “it was the beginning of the end of the State of Israel.”

Turn to politics

In 1981, Israel was roiling from a violent, passionate election campaign. Prime Minister Menachem Begin was hoping to win a second term, running again against Shimon Peres. Avital had returned from Boston and was assigned to the Foreign Ministry’s hasbara department. Her work there didn’t prevent her from enlisting openly in the Labor Party’s campaign. “I worked in the Foreign Ministry until the afternoon, and from there I would go to the Deborah Hotel in Tel Aviv, Labor’s campaign headquarters, working until the night,” she admits.

After Begin was reelected, Avital was sent to Paris, in 1982, and put in charge of hasbara and culture. At the time, Paris was a venue for assassinations of Israelis by Palestinian terrorist organizations. On the eve of her trip, Avital asked to undergo practice at a shooting range so that she could be issued a revolver: “The security officer told me there was no chance of that happening, that women are hysterical and that there was concern they might turn the weapon on their children. I asked for training in self-defense or to be issued tear gas, and the answer I got was, ‘Take a copy of Psalms and of the Traveler’s Prayer with you.'”

During her three-year tour of duty in Paris, the Lebanon War erupted and the terrorist attacks intensified. “The agricultural attache at the embassy lost his legs when his car was blown up,” she remembers. “A Mossad man was killed in front of his house 10 minutes after we had seen each other in an elevator.” A bomb was found under her car, too, but was neutralized by a bomb-disposal team.

The Israeli politician most closely connected to the highest French echelons during that period was opposition leader Peres, who visited Paris occasionally.

Avital: “Every time Peres came to Paris, Beilin would call and ask me to prepare his itinerary. I did it gladly, because I learned a great deal from him [Peres], and that’s how I forged excellent connections with people. Peres had ties with the French security establishment dating back to the 1950s, and later with President Francois Mitterrand as well. Mitterrand visited Israel frequently in those years; it was like a second home. He would come for a weekend and disappear with a girl. He tried 17 or 18 times to become president of France, before succeeding. For Peres, he was a sort of model.”

Avital’s connections with Peres and the French socialists almost cost her her career: Ovadia Sofer, Israel’s ambassador to Paris at the time, was among the superiors who developed hostile feelings toward her: “He sent letters to Jerusalem with complaints that I was working for Peres and the Labor Party.”

During the 1980s, Israel was making an effort to reestablish relations with African countries that had broken ties with in following either the 1967 or 1973 wars. The Foreign Ministry wanted to send Avital to Washington, to enlist the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby for the cause. “I arrived in Israel to prepare for the mission, but was told that Foreign Minister Shamir had canceled my trip,” she recalls. “I asked to meet with him. ‘I understand that you’re angry with me,’ I told him, and he replied that it was true and that he wanted to fire me because I was working for the Labor Party. I explained to him that Peres had excellent ties with the French hierarchy, and that we were exploiting his connections more than he was exploiting us. Shamir looked at me, thought for a moment, and said, ‘You’re doing the right thing. Go back to Paris in peace.’ He was very matter-of-fact and understanding.”

Francois Mitterrand. “He would come [to Israel] for a weekend and disappear with a girl. For Peres, he was a sort of model.”
Reuters

During one of Peres’ visits in the French capital, Avital was invited to have breakfast with him in his hotel. When she arrived she was told that the meeting would take place in his room for “security reasons.” At the door she discovered that Peres was waiting for her “in pajamas,” she says. He prodded her toward the bed, and she resisted and fled the room distraught.

“It lasted a few seconds,” she says.

Did you tell anyone?

“I told Beilin, who was in the next room. I said: ‘The next time Peres comes to Paris, I’m not going to be left alone with him. You will be there with me.'”

Was he astonished?

“No. He responded with a poker face. He understood.”

Did you share what happened with any close friends?

“Yes, of course. I went to cry that day on the shoulder of my friend Tamar Golan,” a Paris-based journalist, diplomat and student of African countries, who died in 2011. “She comforted me and told me the same thing had happened to her.”

With him?

“With him.”

Do you think it was a planned ambush?

“I don’t know. I have no idea what he was planning. The fact that he ordered breakfast to his room was obviously planned.”

Did you change your behavior in any way after that incident?

“I decided that I wouldn’t be alone with anyone in a room anymore, least of all with him.”

And despite what happened you wanted to work with him when he was elected prime minister, in 1984? Why?

“I didn’t dream that he would try again. I admired him quite a bit at that time, both for his thinking, his skills and his creativity. For me he was a model of an open, thinking Israeli statesman. Because I accompanied him closely even after the incident, and he didn’t try again after that time in Paris – I didn’t think it would happen again.”

Why didn’t you make it public then?

“Because I would have been laughed at. People make light of things like that, those were the norms.”

A few months ago, Avital published an autobiography, in Hebrew, entitled “The Girl with the Red Tie.” In the book, which reveals quite a few interesting episodes in her life, she makes no mention of the incidents involving Peres or of the sexual harassment she endured over the years.

“I knew how to defend myself, to push away and repel the people who tried things, time after time,” she explains. “I didn’t make a tragedy of it. It was part of what you had to go through.”

‘Hardly any Jews’

Two years after she returned from Paris, Avital was appointed head of the Foreign Ministry’s hasbara department. Her dream – to become the first female consul general in New York – was thwarted, she says, by a confidant of Peres who maintained that appointing a woman to the post would likely generate opposition among rabbis in the United States. Beilin, the ministry’s director general, offered her the post of ambassador in a country “in which there are hardly any Jews at all.” Portugal was not a preferred diplomatic destination. “I went there because I had no choice,” she says.

On the eve of her departure, in 1988, a senior Shin Bet official met with Beilin and conveyed the security service’s opposition to the appointment. “She is a woman and is liable to be subjected to blackmail,” he told Beilin, who asked whether there was any concrete information to back that up. The agent said there was none, and Beilin decided to ignore the request.

During her tour of duty in Lisbon, Avital forged close ties with President Mario Soares and furthered the establishment of the Portuguese Embassy in Israel. After four years she was given the post she had sought: the consulate in New York.

“Peres was very hesitant,” she says, “but Beilin persuaded him.”

On November 4, 1995, she hosted Israeli author Amos Oz and the ambassadors of Morocco, Qatar and the Palestine Liberation Organization in honor of a visit by Beilin, who had in New York attending an economic conference. “He told us that regional peace had broken out,” she recalls. It was a naive, euphoric gathering of an elite group who raised a toast and celebrated the illusion of the New Middle East. One of those present asked Oz how he saw the new Israeli identity that was taking shape, now that the country would no longer need an army.

Colette Avital.
Daniel Tchetchik

After the guests left, the phone rang. “He’s been shot,” the security officer told her. Avital was the one who informed Oz, Beilin and also Interior Minister Ehud Barak, who was in the city as well, about the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.

“Maybe it’s not nice to say this, but I mourned for Yitzhak Rabin more than for my own father,” she admits.

Avital says she received offers of bribes during the time she spent in New York. Her old ties with African countries fired the imagination of Israeli tycoons and American Jews alike, and on several occasions she was told that if she were to organize meetings with the right people, who would help set up weapons or other deals in Africa – she would be rewarded.

In 1997, when she was getting ready to return to Israel, following the rise to power of Benjamin Netanyahu, his wife Sara was interviewed by journalist Yael Dan for Army Radio. When Dan asked her about the affair of the “hot tape” – referring to accusations by the prime minister that a top Likud figure had threatened that if Netanyahu did not bow out of the party’s leadership race, a video of him having sexual relations with a woman who was not his wife, would be made public. Sara Netanyahu responded with rage: “Anyone who cheats is scum, but what do you want from my husband? Is there a man who doesn’t do things like that? What does Shimon Peres do when he’s in New York? He’s with Colette Avital.”

The interviewee then abruptly stood, ended the conversation and subsequently demanded that the comments about Peres not be broadcast. The mention of Peres and Avital was thus left on the cutting-room floor, but the rumor about the supposed relationship between the two, which was already making the rounds in the corridors of power, exploded in full force. Avital demanded and received an apology from Sara Netanyahu, but it didn’t really help.

How did that slander affect your life?

“The truth is that from that very moment, it began to have a very bad effect on my life, because I was constantly harassed by people and the rumors didn’t stop, and I had to be on the defensive. People didn’t believe the denials – they would tell my friends: ‘What are you talking about? I saw them together.’ What bothered me most was that people would think I was beholden to him, heaven forbid, that he was my patron and that it was because of him that I had moved ahead in life. Secondly, people pestered my parents no end.”

What do you mean?

“People would call my mother and say, ‘Look, I have a problem, so if you could ask Colette – you know, she’s with Peres – to pass it on to Peres.’ It drove my mother wild.”

Perfume ritual

Though the rumors were rife, Avital enjoyed good relations with the Peres family. “During every visit I made to Israel, Sonia [Peres’ wife] would invite me for dinner at their place. I was like a member of the family. Their daughter, Ziki [linguist Tsvia Walden], was also like a member of the family in my home. And her daughter Mika [the actress and writer Mika Almog] stayed with me for a few months in New York.”

One of the high points in this drama of the absurd occurred after Avital returned from New York to her home in Jerusalem, she says: “The phone rang. It was the journalist Ron Ben-Yishai. He asks me, ‘Can I speak to Shimon? What – he hasn’t moved in with you?'”

Did you ever speak to Peres about these rumors?

“Of course. After it had been going on for some time, and it became more and more annoying, I told him I wanted to see him. When I arrived, his daughter Ziki was there, and she said jokingly, ‘Well, are you my stepmother?’ I go inside and say: ‘Mr. Peres, there are rumors about us, are you aware of them?’ He replied, ‘Yes, does it bother you?'”

Did he find it flattering?

“I didn’t ask. I told him that yes, it bothered me. He asked me why, and I replied: First, because it’s not true, and second, because I am not available for anyone else because of it. He asked me what I wanted him to do. I said, ‘People are saying you left home and are living with me. I have no way to refute that, but you have. Take your wife out, go with her to a movie, to the theater.’ ‘Fine,’ he said, ‘I’ll deal with it.’ After that conversation, when he saw me in different places, he didn’t say hello. Totally ignored me. When a delegation arrived from France and we all stood in a row [to greet them], he shook hands with everyone else and skipped me.”

And the rumors have continue to this day?

“Absolutely. To this day people say to me, ‘You were, after all, with Peres.'”

And afterward, when you became a Labor MK, how did he treat you?

“He took a utilitarian approach. Meaning that where I could be of service to him, everything was all well and good. He didn’t help me in the party primaries, but he called me when he needed something. One day he called and said, ‘You know [Nobel laureate for literature] Jose Saramago. I need you to call him.’ He tried obsessively to promote a Nobel Prize for Amos Oz, and he needed support. On those occasions he was capable of speaking to me very nicely – ‘Talk to Saramago, blah, blah’ – and the next day I would walk by him and he barely knew me. That was Peres.”

Between one foreign post and the next, Avital was twice appointed a deputy director general of the Foreign Ministry. When Foreign Minister David Levy made her deputy director general for Western Europe in 1996-97, she was the only woman at the table of the ministry’s top management: “I got these ‘What is she doing here?’ looks. And I had a ritual before the meetings: I sprayed myself with plenty of perfume, in order to press home the fact that there was a woman present.”

From the Foreign Ministry she moved on to a lengthy period of activity in the Knesset. After she’d been a lawmaker for several years, the influential lobbyist Boris Krasny, who represented some of the country’s powerful business people, asked to meet with her. “He told me: ‘If you’re thinking of your career, then be careful, don’t mess with the wrong people.'” Krasny recommended to Avital that she try not to provoke the strongest economic force in the country: the banks. At the time, in 2000, Avital headed a parliamentary committee that was investigating the location and restitution of bank holdings and property belonging to victims of the Holocaust.

“The banks insisted that they didn’t have any such accounts,” Avital recalls. “They denied the whole thing and piled up huge obstacles for the investigatory committee, including concealment of documents, threats and attacks. Later I got all kinds of offers like: ‘We’ll give you 75 million shekels [around $18.7 million at the time] and you can distribute the money [to the survivors]. Knesset Speaker [Reuven] Rivlin also received similar offers and turned them down. We were afraid that we wouldn’t find any proof that the bank accounts existed. In the end, after the banks’ sweeping denial, the assets were found in Britain.” At present, Avital is serving, on a voluntary basis, as secretary of the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany.

In 2007, Moshe Katsav resigned as president of Israel in the wake of charges of sexual misconduct. The political arena braced for another run by Peres for the position, but before he revealed his intentions Avital announced that she intended to become the first woman to contest the office. (The president is elected by the Knesset.) She was then approached by Peres’ friend, the film producer and tycoon Arnon Milchan. “He said it would be very bad if we both ran.” Subsequently, Milchan invited Avital and Peres to his home in Herzliya Pituah. “He told us, ‘Come to an agreement between you.’ Of course, the expectation was that I would drop my candidacy.'”

But Avital remained in the race, leading to a nasty call from another billionaire, S. Daniel Abraham, the U.S.-based philanthropist and creator of the SlimFast diet brand. “He simply told me angrily: ‘Drop your candidacy.’ Journalists asked me the same thing: ‘How can you do this to Peres? He’s your patron, he made your career for you.'” Avital stayed in the race almost until the end, dropping out only during a second round of voting.

Shortly after Peres was elected, the two chanced to meet at an event in the Knesset. “People were saying that he was down in the dumps, living alone in the President’s Residence [his wife did not move there with him]. I went over and suggested that if he wanted, I would send him food on Fridays. He replied coldly: ‘All right.'”

After everything that happened, and despite the way he treated you – you extend a hand to him?

“You have to understand that I had an ambivalent attitude toward him. On one hand, I had plenty of reasons not to like him, but on the other, I esteemed him. At the time everyone was talking about how dejected he was, that he was alone on Friday evenings, and I pitied him a bit. I can’t explain it. I have a very peculiar trait: I don’t bear grudges, certainly not in the long term. It was my esteem for Peres that prompted me to support him politically even after everything that had happened between us.”

You were able to make a very rational and very cold distinction between things.

“Correct.”

Avital may not have bore a grudge against Peres, but one cannot really say the same about him.

“After the story of the [race for] the presidency he would go by me as though I didn’t exist,” she says. Peres was invited to visit French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and when he discovered that Avital had also been invited, he was scandalized. “A senior figure in the embassy told me that Peres had shouted at them: ‘Who invited Colette here?'”

As one of the female pioneers in the diplomatic service, what do you think about the change that has occurred in how women are represented in the Foreign Ministry? It would be hard to say that the revolution is close to ending.

“True. I would like to see a woman as the ministry’s director general, or as Israel’s ambassador to Washington. I am the only woman to have served as consul general in New York. When the first delegation left for Dubai, I saw a photograph showing [only] men. I was outraged and I sent a letter to the foreign minister about it. They replied that they were moving many women up now. They tried to pull the wool over my eyes.”