Shimon Peres obituary: the essence of Israel
Israeli statesman Shimon Peres has died, aged 93.
At every corner of Israel’s tumultuous history, Shimon Peres was there.
He was a young aide to the nation’s founding fathers when the country declared independence in 1948, and he played a key role in turning Israel into a military power. He was part of the negotiations that sealed the first Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, garnering a Nobel Peace Prize. He was welcomed like royalty in world capitals.
But only at the end of a political career stretching more than 60 years did Peres get what he truly wanted: admiration from his own people. He died at 93 yesterday.
Across a seven-decade career, Peres served as prime minister, president and Labor Party chief. He was the last of the founding fathers, a group of leaders who witnessed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, including David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir and Ariel Sharon.
“Shimon was the essence of Israel itself,” said US President Barack Obama, who is reportedly set to attend his funeral. “No one did more over so many years as Shimon Peres to build the alliance between our two countries.”
When he was 83 Peres began a new chapter, assuming the nation’s presidency following a scandal that forced his predecessor to step down. The job cemented Peres’s transformation from down-and-dirty political operator to elder statesman.
“After such a long career, let me just say something: my appetite to manage is over. My inclination to dream and to envisage is greater,” Peres said in an interview on July 15, 2007, moments before he was sworn in as president.
He said he would not allow his age, or the constraints of a largely ceremonial office, to slow him down. “I’m not in a hurry to pass away,” Peres said. “The day will come that I shall not forget to pass away. But until then I’m not going to waste my life.”
As president, Peres tirelessly jetted around the world to represent his country at conferences, ceremonies and international gatherings.
He was a fixture at the annual World Economic Forum gathering in Davos, Switzerland, where he was treated like a rock star as the world’s rich and powerful listened breathlessly to his every word on topics ranging from Middle East peace to nanotechnology to the wonders of the human brain.
He also became Israel’s moderate face at a time when the nation was led by hardline Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Peres sought to reassure the international community that Israel sought peace, despite concerns over continued settlement construction in the occupied West Bank and the paralysis of negotiations under Netanyahu. He never tired of speaking of peace.
It was his 1994 Nobel prize that established Peres’s man-of-peace image. He proudly displayed the prize, which he shared with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, on his presidential desk.
As foreign minister, Peres secretly brokered the historic Oslo interim peace accords with the Palestinians, signed at the White House on September 13, 1993.
Accepting the award, he told assembled dignitaries: “War, as a method of conducting human affairs, is in its death throes, and the time has come to bury it.”
Despite the assassination of Rabin, the breakdown of peace talks, a second Palestinian uprising in 2000, wars in Lebanon and Gaza, and Netanyahu’s continued re-elections, Peres maintained his insistence that peace was right around the corner. “I’m sure I shall see peace in my lifetime. Even if I should have to extend my life for a year or two, I won’t hesitate,’‘ he said in a 2013 interview marking his 90th birthday.
Peres was born Shimon Perski on August 2, 1923, in Vishniev, then part of Poland and now in Belarus. He moved to pre-state Palestine in 1934 with his family, where he changed his surname to Peres, or songbird, in Hebrew. Relatives who remained in Poland, including his grandfather, a prominent rabbi, were killed when Nazis set a synagogue on fire during the Holocaust. Peres often spoke lovingly of his grandfather in speeches. Actress Lauren Bacall was a cousin.
Still in his 20s, Peres rose quickly through the ranks of Israel’s pre-state leadership and served as a top aide to Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, after independence in 1948. Peres once called Ben-Gurion “the greatest Jew of our time”. At 29, he served as director of Israel’s Defence Ministry, and is credited with arming Israel’s military almost from scratch. He later worked with the French to develop Israel’s nuclear program, which today is widely believed to include a large arsenal of bombs.
Still, he suffered throughout his political career from the fact he never wore an army uniform or fought in a war.
Peres was elected to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in 1959, serving in nearly all major cabinet posts during his long career. He also was an early supporter of the Jewish settler movement in the West Bank, a position he would later abandon.
But he had trouble breaking into the prime minister’s post, the top job in Israeli politics. He was hampered by a reputation among the public and fellow politicians as a utopian dreamer and a political schemer. He ran for prime minister in five general elections, losing four and tying one, in 1984, when he shared the job in a rotation with rival Yitzhak Shamir.
His well-tailored, neck-tied appearance, sweptback grey hair and penchant for artists and intellectuals seemed to separate him from his more informal countrymen. He never lost his Polish accent, making him a target for mimicry.
One of the lowest points of his political career came in 1990, when he led his Labor Party out of a unity government with Shamir’s hardline Likud on the strength of promises from small factions to support his bid to replace Shamir. At the last minute, several members of parliament changed their minds, approving a Shamir government without Peres and Labor.
The incident became known in Israeli political lore as Peres’s “stinking manoeuvre”. Rabin scorned him as a “relentless meddler” and in 1992 replaced him as party leader. The two eventually repaired their relationship and worked together on pursuing peace.
After Rabin’s assassination by a Jewish ultranationalist opposed to Israel’s peace moves, Peres became acting prime minister.
But he failed to capitalise on the widespread sympathy for the fallen leader and lost a razor-thin election the following year to Netanyahu.
In one famous incident, an angry Peres rhetorically asked a gathering of his Labor Party whether he was a loser. Resounding calls of yes rained down on him.
Peres later blamed a wave of suicide bombings for his defeat. He described his visit to the scene of a deadly bus explosion in Jerusalem, where people started screaming “killer” and “murderer” at him. “I knew that I lost the election,” he said.
He suffered another humiliation in 2000 when he ran for the presidency, a largely ceremonial position elected by parliament. Peres believed he had wrapped up the election, but the ultra-Orthodox Shas Party broke a promise to him and switched its support to Likud candidate Moshe Katsav. Peres was a loser once again.
Even so, he refused to quit. In 2001, he took the post of foreign minister in a unity government led by his rival Sharon, serving for 20 months before Labor withdrew from the coalition. In Peres’s final political defeat, Labor overthrew him as party leader in 2005, choosing instead the little-known Amir Peretz.
Peres subsequently followed Sharon into a new party, Kadima, serving as vice-premier and maintaining that post under Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert. He attained the presidency when Katsav was forced to step down weeks before his term ended to face rape charges. Katsav was later convicted and sent to prison.
Seeking to stabilise the cherished institution, parliament turned to Peres and elected him president.
Peres cultivated an image as a grandfatherly figure, frequently inviting groups of children and teens to the presidential residence. He embraced social media and promoted Israel’s hi-tech industry in meetings with top officials at Google, Facebook and other companies.
“It was only in his latest version as a president that they loved him,” says Anita Shapira, the author of Israel: A History. “Overall, he was a tragic figure. He wanted to do more than he could.”
Peres’s President’s Conference became an annual gathering in Jerusalem of artists, thinkers and business leaders from around the world. Derided by critics as extravagant and unnecessary, the gathering drew some of the world’s most powerful personalities. The 2013 conference also became a 90th birthday party, with Bill Clinton, Barbra Streisand and Robert DeNiro in attendance.
Peres also exhibited a humorous side. When he left the presidency in 2014, he appeared in a video his granddaughter produced where he jokingly tried out jobs including supermarket cashier, service station attendant and stand-up comic, peppering his comments with puns and visionary slogans.
Peres’s death comes at a low point for efforts to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The last round of peace talks collapsed in 2014. Palestinian leaders now refuse to enter negotiations unless Netanyahu freezes construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
When asked about his secret to longevity, Peres said he never dwelled on the past. “What happened until now is over, unchangeable. I’m not going to spend time on it. So I am really living in the future,” he said. “I really think that one should devote his energies to make the world better and not to make the past remembered better.” He never gave up on trying to advance peace with the Palestinians.
His wife of more than six decades, Sonya Gelman, died of heart failure in 2011. The couple had been estranged for several years. He leaves behind two sons and a daughter.
In 2012, Peres accepted the Medal of Honor in Washington. “The duty of leaders is to pursue freedom ceaselessly, even in the face of hostility, in the face of doubt and disappointment,” Peres said. “Just imagine what could be.”
AP, The Wall Street Journal
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