Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski on August 2, 1923, in Wiszniew, a small, largely Jewish town then in eastern Poland and today the Belarusian village of Vishnyeva ^[1]. His father, Yitzhak Perski, traded in timber; his mother, Sara, worked as a librarian and encouraged her son's early appetite for books and Russian literature. The household was religiously observant, and the young Szymon was especially close to his grandfather, a Talmudic scholar who taught him Hebrew and whose parting words at the railway station, urging him to remain a Jew, stayed with Peres for the rest of his life ^[2].

The family emigrated in stages. Yitzhak Perski left for Mandatory Palestine in 1932, and Shimon followed with his mother and younger brother Gershon in 1934, settling in Tel Aviv ^[1]. The move proved to be a rescue: nearly all of the relatives who remained in Wiszniew, including his grandfather, were murdered during the German occupation, many of them burned alive in the town's wooden synagogue ^[2].

In Palestine, Peres attended the Balfour elementary school and the Geula commercial school in Tel Aviv before enrolling at the agricultural youth village of Ben Shemen, where students combined farm work with study and rudimentary military training ^[3]. As a teenager he joined the socialist Zionist youth movement HaNoar HaOved, became one of its organizers, and helped found Kibbutz Alumot in the Lower Galilee, where he worked for a time as a shepherd and dairy farmer ^[1]. It was in the youth movement that he met Sonya Gelman, whom he would later marry, and where he caught the attention of David Ben-Gurion, the dominant figure of Labor Zionism ^[3].

Anyone asking who was Shimon Peres in the 1940s would have found not a soldier at the front but a gifted young administrator. Ben-Gurion drew him into the Haganah, the main pre-state Jewish defense organization, in 1947, and put him to work on manpower and arms procurement ^[1]. When Israel declared independence in May 1948, the twenty-four-year-old Peres was made head of the navy's services department, and soon afterward he was sent to the United States to buy weapons and study, taking courses at the New School for Research and at Harvard ^[3].

His rise inside the defense establishment was rapid. In 1952 he became deputy director general of the Ministry of Defense, and in 1953, still in his twenties, Ben-Gurion appointed him director general, the ministry's top civil servant ^[1]. In that role Peres cultivated a close arms relationship with France, a partnership that supplied Israel with fighter aircraft and tanks and that produced the secret coordination surrounding the 1956 Suez campaign ^[4].

The French connection also yielded his most consequential project: the nuclear reactor at Dimona in the Negev desert. Peres negotiated French assistance for the facility in the late 1950s and oversaw its construction, laying the foundation of what foreign analysts have long described as Israel's undeclared nuclear capability, a subject on which Israel maintains official ambiguity ^[4]. He also pushed the growth of Israel Aerospace Industries and the domestic arms sector. Elected to the Knesset in 1959 for Mapai, the forerunner of the Labor Party, he served as deputy defense minister until 1965, when he followed Ben-Gurion out of the party into the breakaway Rafi faction ^[1].

After Rafi merged back into the new Israel Labor Party in 1968, Peres held a string of cabinet posts: immigrant absorption, transportation, communications, and information ^[3]. The 1973 Yom Kippur War upended Israeli politics, and in its aftermath Peres became defense minister under Yitzhak Rabin in 1974. During his tenure the ministry managed the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation, in which Israeli commandos freed hostages from a hijacked airliner in Uganda ^[1].

His rivalry with Rabin defined Labor politics for two decades. When Rabin resigned in April 1977 over a bank account his wife held abroad, Peres stepped in as acting prime minister, only to lead the party into its first ever electoral defeat that May, when Menachem Begin's Likud swept to power ^[1]. Peres spent seven years as opposition leader, losing again in 1981, and acquired a reputation as a perennial runner-up: he never won an outright national election victory despite five attempts ^[5].

The deadlocked 1984 election produced an unusual remedy. Labor and Likud formed a national unity government with a rotation agreement, and Peres served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 before swapping places with Yitzhak Shamir and becoming foreign minister ^[1]. His two years in office brought two substantial achievements: the phased withdrawal of Israeli forces from most of Lebanon to a narrow southern security zone, and an economic stabilization plan that broke an inflation rate which had been running at several hundred percent a year ^[5]. He remained in senior posts, as foreign minister and then finance minister, until the unity arrangement collapsed in 1990.

Any account of Shimon Peres achievements gives a central place to the Oslo process. After Rabin defeated him for the Labor leadership and won the 1992 election, Peres became foreign minister and threw his energy into a secret diplomatic channel with the Palestine Liberation Organization, conducted in Norway with the help of Norwegian intermediaries and his deputy Yossi Beilin ^[6]. The talks produced the Declaration of Principles signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, establishing mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO and creating the Palestinian Authority with self-rule in Gaza and Jericho ^[6].

For that work, Peres shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat. The Nobel Committee cited the three men's efforts to create peace in the Middle East ^[7]. Peres continued to negotiate the follow-up agreement known as Oslo II, signed in September 1995, which extended Palestinian self-government across additional West Bank towns ^[6].

The assassination of Rabin by a Jewish extremist on November 4, 1995, put Peres back in the prime minister's office under the worst possible circumstances. He advanced the peace agenda but faced a wave of Hamas suicide bombings in early 1996 and ordered the Grapes of Wrath operation against Hezbollah in Lebanon, during which Israeli shelling killed more than one hundred civilians sheltering at a United Nations compound in Qana ^[1]. In the May 1996 election, the first in which Israelis voted directly for prime minister, he lost to Benjamin Netanyahu by less than one percentage point ^[5].

Peres married Sonya Gelman in May 1945 at Kibbutz Alumot. The couple had three children: a daughter, Tsvia, and two sons, Yoni and Chemi ^[2]. Sonya Peres shunned public life almost entirely, giving no interviews and declining ceremonial roles; when her husband became president in 2007 she chose not to move into the official residence in Jerusalem, and the two lived apart until her death in 2011 ^[2].

Away from politics, Peres was a committed reader and writer. He published more than a dozen books, ranging from policy arguments such as The New Middle East (1993) to memoirs, including No Room for Small Dreams, which appeared shortly after his death in 2017, and he wrote poetry throughout his life ^[3]. Friends and biographers described a man who slept little, read constantly in several languages, and kept an unfashionable optimism about technology, from desert agriculture to nanoscience, as the answer to the region's problems ^[8].

His foreignness never fully faded as a political liability. Opponents mocked his Polish accent and his bookish manner, and his standing with the Israeli public for most of his career lagged far behind his reputation abroad. Only in his final decade, as president, did domestic affection catch up with international acclaim ^[5].

The defeats of the 1990s did not end his career. Peres served as regional cooperation minister under Ehud Barak, returned as foreign minister in Ariel Sharon's unity government from 2001 to 2002, and in 2005 left Labor after losing its leadership contest to Amir Peretz, joining Sharon's new centrist party Kadima ^[1]. As vice premier he supported the 2005 disengagement from Gaza and promoted development projects in the Negev and Galilee.

In June 2007 the Knesset elected him the ninth President of Israel, a largely ceremonial post that suited the elder statesman he had become. He had sought the presidency once before, in 2000, and lost to Moshe Katsav; the second attempt succeeded, and he served a full seven-year term until July 2014, leaving office days before his ninety-first birthday as one of the world's oldest heads of state ^[1]. As president he championed scientific innovation, hosted an annual Presidential Conference in Jerusalem, and in 2012 received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Barack Obama ^[3]. The Peres Center for Peace, which he had founded in 1996 to promote cooperation between Israelis, Palestinians, and their neighbors, remained his institutional base after leaving office ^[8].

Peres suffered a major stroke on September 13, 2016, and died two weeks later, on September 28, at the Sheba Medical Center at Tel HaShomer, aged ninety-three ^[1]. His funeral on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem drew dozens of world leaders, among them Barack Obama, Prince Charles, and Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, whose attendance itself made news ^[9].

Peres's career contained an unusual arc: the arms buyer and nuclear architect of the 1950s became, in old age, his country's most recognizable voice for peace. Both halves were real. The defense industries and the Dimona reactor he built shaped Israel's strategic position for decades, while the Oslo agreements he negotiated, however contested their outcome, created the framework of Israeli-Palestinian relations that still exists ^[4][6].

Assessments of the man divide along the same line. Admirers point to the inflation cure of 1985, the Lebanon withdrawal, the Nobel Peace Prize, and a seventy-year record of service unmatched in Israeli history; he sat in the Knesset for forty-eight years, itself a national record ^[1]. Critics note that the Oslo process collapsed into violence, that he never won a general election, and that his early career was spent building the very arsenal he later argued mattered less than economics and science ^[5].

The basic Shimon Peres facts nevertheless secure his place in the record: a boy from a Polish shtetl who reached Tel Aviv at eleven, ran Israel's defense ministry at twenty-nine, and held the offices of prime minister, president, and nearly every major ministry in between. Ben-Gurion International Airport's namesake generation has passed, and Peres was its final representative in high office. His name now attaches to the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation on the Jaffa shoreline, a museum of Israeli technology that reflects the future-facing creed he preached to the end ^[8].