Movie Review: “Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres”

 Netflix put the film “Never Stop Dreaming: The Life and Legacy of Shimon Peres” on its streaming service on July 13, 2022. The movie is a documentary about the Israeli politician and prime minister, who died in 2014.

I had a mixed reaction to the film. It is a good but selective review of the history of Israel through the experiences and activities of Peres. The film makes no attempt to take a balanced view of its subject; no matter the historical episode, Peres is always right. Alternative perspectives are not offered, and, Israel being Israel, you know they exist. 

One episode near the beginning of the film focuses on Peres’ efforts to get French help in getting arms in the 1950s and on the subsequent Suez Crisis. The narrator (an off-screen George Clooney) explains that Peres reasoned that Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was anti-Israel, was also supporting the Algerians fighting for their independence from France, and that this would incline the French to be helpful. Peres was not wrong, but the film makes no mention of the atrocities the French were committing in Algeria nor does it mention the political havoc the war caused in metropolitan France (if you think Vietnam was bad domestically, you should read about France during this period). The war ultimately led to Charles de Gaulle returning to power after years in the political wilderness as the last premier of the Fourth Republic in order to liquidate it and replace it with the Fifth.  

As for the 1956 Suez Crisis, this started as a conspiracy between Israel, France, and Britain. The British and the French wanted to reverse Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal and Israel was motivated to undo the Egyptian blockage of the Straits of Tiran, the passageway from the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba. (Israel and Jordan have the neighboring port cities of Eilat and Aqaba at the top of the Gulf of Aqaba, which Israel calls the Gulf of Eilat). Israel was also motivated by the Egyptian-supported commando raids into Israel. 

The plan was that Israel would send troops into the Sinai and that the French and the British would then send troops under the pretext of keeping the peace and would, in the operation, seize the Suez Canal. The major error of the plan was that none of the parties had bothered to inform or find out what U.S. President Eisenhower thought of this. It turned out that he was opposed, and the U.S. successfully pressured the parties to pull back. As it turns out, this was a disaster for Britain and France. The documentary, though, only mentions the Israeli success in getting the Straits of Tiran reopened and deterring terrorist acts until 1967. It does not mention the British and French humiliation or how this episode affected Israeli relations with the Eisenhower Administration. 

The lack of context given on these events near the beginning of the film makes one suspicious of what the documentary presents later. For those episodes I know something about, the facts are accurate, but sometime important aspects are omitted. However, one learns a lot about Peres from this documentary. Particularly interesting is the failure of the 1987 London Agreement between Peres, then foreign minister, and King Hussein of Jordan. This was an enlightened agreement to the Palestinian issue, and the documentary argues convincingly that if it had been put in place, the subsequent history in the Middle East would have been substantially different. It was undercut by Yitzhak Shamir, then the prime minister. Given the importance of this initiative, it would have been useful for the documentary to have included the reasons for Shamir’s opposition.