Shimon Peres of Israel Dies at 93; Built Up Defense and Sought Peace

A look back at the life of Shimon Peres

It did not end until Arafat died in 2004, bringing new leadership to the Palestinians and a new effort at coexistence led by Mr. Sharon, a former hawk who had been elected prime minister. He withdrew Israeli settlers and soldiers from Gaza and small parts of the West Bank.

Mr. Peres had tried before to get a peace settlement, in 1987, between Israel and Jordan. He was foreign minister in a coalition government with Yitzhak Shamir when he proposed an international peace conference on the Middle East. But Mr. Shamir and his Likud faction scuttled the plan.

Mr. Peres had sought to settle the future of the West Bank and Gaza, which Israel had occupied since the Arab-Israeli War in 1967. As a first step, he proposed that Jordan and Israel could either divide the land or share the government but that Israel should not control the area forever.

Photo Mr. Peres, left, with Yitzhak Shamir in 1988 in Jerusalem. Credit Anat Givon/Associated Press A Coalition, and Calm

Mr. Peres became prime minister at the head of an unusual coalition of Israels two major political parties, his own Labor Party, and the Likud, the party led by Yitzhak Shamir, who served as deputy prime minister and foreign minister. In accordance with the coalition agreement, the two men exchanged posts after 25 months.

Mr. Peres brought a period of tranquillity to the social environment, which had been frayed by animosities between European and Middle Eastern Jews and between religious Jews and secular Jews.

He presided over the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon after an invasion that had generated unprecedented controversy, and he became the first Israeli prime minister to take the difficult steps required to deal with the nations fundamental economic problems and ruinous inflation.

During his time in office, Israel airlifted some 7,000 Ethiopian Jews who had trekked to refugee camps in Sudan to escape famine, anti-Semitism, forced conscription of boys and other threats that had made their lives in Ethiopia precarious. Mr. Peres called the clandestine rescue operation a daring and wonderful act of self-redemption.

Photo During Mr. Peress time in office, Israel airlifted some 7,000 Jews from Ethiopia in what he called a daring and wonderful act of self-redemption. Credit Sven Nackstrand/Agence France-Presse Getty Images

Taking over what was expected to be a government of national impasse, Mr. Peres left office with an image as a dignified, self-confident statesman.

But while he was prime minister, severe strains developed in relations between the United States and Israel growing out of a major spy scandal involving an American, Jonathan Jay Pollard, and the disclosure in 1986 of Iranian arms deals.

A man of medium height and slender, athletic build his dark hair turned gray and then white in his later years Mr. Peres always exuded vitality, despite a schedule that kept him going 18 hours a day. When, on his 88th birthday, he was offered a traditional Jewish greeting, May you live till 120, he retorted without missing a beat, Dont be stingy.

Mr. Peres was married to the former Sonya Gelman, who shunned the spotlight to the point of refusing to move into the presidents house when he took his last public post. She died in January 2011. They had three children: a daughter, Zvia, and two sons, Jonathan and Nehemya. They and Mr. Peress eight grandchildren and three great-grandchildren survive him.

Mr. Peres was an effective speaker, comfortable in front of large audiences as well as the television camera. He cultivated party members remembering their names and attending their weddings and bar mitzvahs and nurtured his relationship with the intelligentsia.

He also wrote poetry and was given to quoting the ancient Greeks and Flaubert and Churchill. He published a dozen books, including The New Middle East, in 1993, and Battling for Peace, a memoir, in 1995. His last book was an affectionate political biography of his mentor, the countrys founding prime minister, David Ben-Gurion.

Photo A picture of David Ben-Gurion was on the wall of Mr. Peress office in Tel Aviv. He became known as one of Ben-Gurions boys. Credit Associated Press A Journey From Poland

He was born Shimon Persky on Aug. 16, 1923, to a merchant family in the small village of Vishniewa, Poland. His parents, Yitzhak and Sara Persky, took him to Palestine when he was 11, where he studied in Tel Aviv and then entered an agricultural school.

In 1941, he helped found Kibbutz Alumot in the eastern Lower Galilee, where he worked as a herdsman and was elected kibbutz secretary. He soon became active in the Mapai, which was to become Israels Labor Party, and at 18 was appointed the coordinator of the youth movement of the Histadrut, the General Labor Federation.

He rose rapidly, getting experience in the intricacies of Israeli political life. In 1944, Ben-Gurion, then the head of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, sent Mr. Peres with a small reconnaissance group to Eilat on the Red Sea to survey the Sinai Desert and make maps, which became important strategic assets during the 1948 war of independence.

It was on that mission that a friend sighted a nest of eagles, peres in Hebrew. Persky, he said, why dont you change your family name to Peres? He accepted the suggestion, though the bird they saw was in fact more a vulture than an eagle.

When Israel became independent in 1948, Mr. Peres was named head of the naval service. Within two years, he was sent to the United States to lead a defense supply mission in New York. He was 27 and spoke no English, but within three months, after rounds of intensive private lessons, he was fluent. He took courses at the New School for Social Research and New York University, and later at the Harvard School of Public Administration.

In 1951, Ben-Gurion, then prime minister and minister of defense, appointed Mr. Peres director general of the Defense Ministry, where he used his Harvard training to reorganize the department. Mr. Peres became known as one of Ben-Gurions boys protgs of the Old Man a group that included Teddy Kollek and Moshe Dayan.

Those years may have been the genesis of a lifelong rivalry with Mr. Rabin, who at the time was chief of the operations branch, the second-highest position in the Israeli Army. He complained of what he called Mr. Peress excessive authority.

At the Defense Ministry, Mr. Peres was in charge of a substantial portion of the nations total budget, and he played a central role in developing the young nations industry, particularly in aeronautics and electronics.

He stressed domestic weapons production, but when Egypt received advanced military equipment from the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, Mr. Peres began to cast about for new sources of supply. He finally turned to France.

His timing was excellent. The French believed the Algerian revolutionaries fighting for independence were fueled by President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and saw Israel as a source of intelligence about Egypt. Mr. Peres negotiated a $1 billion arms deal and acquired a reputation as a canny bargainer.

The arms negotiations formed a basis for the Franco-Israeli alliance that led to Israels lightning capture of Sinai in 1956. Zeev Schiff, for many years the military editor of the newspaper Haaretz, said, There is no doubt that Peres was one of the brains behind Suez.

Ben-Gurion felt that a pre-emptive war was bad for Israel in terms of public opinion and was reluctant until the last. Mr. Peres saw it as an opportunity to get a better position among the superpowers, a special relationship through a joint venture of going to war together.

Out of that joint venture came French help in building a nuclear reactor in Dimona, which provided Israel with the ability to build nuclear weapons.

I reached the stage in France where I was trusted by everybody, and really the sky was the limit, Mr. Peres said many years later.

Photo In 2012, President Obama presented Mr. Peres with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, one of many international distinctions that Mr. Peres received. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Power Struggles

In 1957, Mr. Peres was awarded the French Legion of Honor, one of many international distinctions. In 2012, President Obama presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

The American honor partly reflected Israels shift in alliance to the United States from Europe in previous decades. While under Ben-Gurion, and his successor, Levi Eshkol, Mr. Peres had negotiated with the West German defense minister, Franz Josef Strauss, to get arms and continued to get weapons from France as well. But he came to rely increasingly on the United States. He visited Washington frequently and met with Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson.

Mr. Peres ran for the countrys Parliament, the Knesset, in 1959, in his first bid for national elective office. With the support of Ben-Gurion, he was given a position high enough on his partys electoral list to be assured of victory.

In the political turmoil that preceded the 1967 Middle East War, Mr. Peres tried to negotiate a return to power for Ben-Gurion, who had retired. In the course of his negotiations, he proposed a coalition to Menachem Begin, the head of the right-wing Herut Party, despite Ben-Gurions belief that if Mr. Begin ever came to power, he would bring Israel to the precipice of destruction.

Shabtai Teveth, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University and the biographer of Ben-Gurion, said in an interview, I believe Peres will go down in Zionist and Israeli history as the man who legitimized Begin and the Herut.

Ten years later, in 1977, when Mr. Peres challenged Mr. Rabin, the split in the Labor Party opened the way for the election of Mr. Begin as prime minister.

When Israels top leaders were discredited because of the countrys lack of preparedness for the 1973 Yom Kippur War, Mr. Peres made a bid for power. To block him, Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir recruited Mr. Rabin, who had been ambassador to the United States and bore no responsibility for the wartime failures. Mr. Rabin named Mr. Peres defense minister, a decision he later came to regret. In his memoirs, Mr. Rabin called him unscrupulous and untrustworthy. He wrote that he could not believe a word Mr. Peres said.

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Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/28/world/middleeast/shimon-peres-dies-israel.html