The giant of Israeli politics who never won an election
Shimon Peres 1923-2016
Shimon Peres, who has died aged 93, was a giant of Israeli politics, and the last of Israel’s founding generation. During his seven-decade career, he was involved in almost all the defining events of Israel’s history, said Tzipi Livni in The New York Times. Peres played a leading role in building Israel’s military strength, yet he was also one of the three architects of the Oslo Accords – the first peace treaties made between the Israeli and Palestinian leadership. Negotiated in secret, and signed in 1993 and 1995, these laid the groundwork for realising Peres’s dream of a two-state solution: two separate states living amicably side by side. For his efforts, he won the Nobel Peace Prize and was feted in Western capitals. Yet at home, this urbane and courteous man was widely distrusted, said The Daily Telegraph: Palestinians were not at all convinced by his dovish assurances, and Israelis considered him conniving and opportunistic. Indeed, though he served twice as prime minister, he never won an election, and lost several. “Am I a loser?” he once rhetorically asked the crowd at a party rally, to which the crowd roared back: “Yes!”
The son of a timber merchant, Shimon Persky was born in the town of Wiszniew in Poland (now Vishniev, Belarus) in 1923. (Among his cousins was one Betty Perske, who would find fame of her own as Lauren Bacall.) His parents were nonobservant, but Shimon was heavily influenced by his grandfather, a rabbi, who instilled in him a lifelong love of literature and taught him religion. Aged ten, the young Shimon caught his parents listening to the radio on the Sabbath and duly smashed the radio. In 1934, the family sailed to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine, where they settled in Tel Aviv. Every one of their relatives who stayed behind, including Shimon’s beloved grandfather, perished in the Holocaust. Having been rounded up by the Nazis in 1941, they were force marched, along with the rest of the town’s Jews, into a wooden synagogue, and burnt alive.
In the 1940s, Peres worked on a Kibbutz and became actively involved in the Labor Zionist youth movement. His talents were soon noted by his fellow Pole, David Ben-gurion, later to be Israel’s first PM, who found him a staff job for Haganah, the Jewish underground defence force. During the 1948 Arab-israeli war, Peres worked behind the front line, acquiring heavy weapons, often in defiance of arms embargos. His lack of combat experience – plus his membership of the old East European elite – would later count against him, politically. But at the time it was a role that enabled him to hone his diplomatic skills, said The Times, to make alliances overseas and to display his dogged determination to succeed. As he told his son: “If you want to achieve great things, you must cross deserts. When you cross deserts you suffer from the heat, the sun is blazing, there’s no food, no drink, but if you keep walking – finally you’ll make it.”
Peres, aged just 29, was then made deputy director of Israel’s defence ministry in the newly formed state, and continued to build up Israel’s military might – buying aircraft, boats and weapons from Colombia, Canada, Cuba and whoever else was prepared to sell them. A man of boundless energy (he got up at 4.30am each day), he had immense faith in his ability to make the impossible possible, a faith put to the test in his four years of negotiations with the French in the early 1950s, which culminated in France supplying Israel with the plutonium reactor that would enable it to build its own nuclear deterrent. Peres went on to be a central figure in the 1956 Suez crisis, when Israel, Britain and France joined forces to prise control of the newly nationalised Suez canal from Egypt’s President Nasser. The military operation was a success, but under severe pressure from the US and the USSR, France and Britain were forced to retreat.
Peres was also hawkish in his attitude to settlement building on the West Bank, a policy he vigorously advocated after the 1973 Arab-israeli war, despite the misgivings of his great rival, Yitzhak Rabin, who felt it risked turning Israel into an apartheid state. It was only later that Peres came to identify the settlements as one of the two main obstacles to the peace he’d hoped to achieve, the other being terrorism.
Peres served as an MP for 48 years – he was first elected to the Knesset in 1959 – moving from post to post as coalitions formed and fell. But his path to the top was constantly thwarted by Rabin – chief of staff in Israel’s victorious Six Day War. It was Rabin who beat him in the 1974 leadership election to replace Golda Meir and who – reluctantly – appointed him minister of defence. Peres, shedding his earlier hawkish attitudes, was now beginning to feel that Israel’s security depended not on fighting its Arab neighbours, but on making peace with them. He held secret talks with King Hussein of Jordan and Egypt’s Anwar Sadat, and met Palestinian leaders. “It’s impossible to rule over another people against its will,” he liked to say. But his critics – and there were many – complained he did little of practical value to promote Palestinian freedom.
Peres finally achieved his goal of becoming leader in 1977 when Rabin was forced to stand down. But two months later he led his Labor party to its first electoral defeat, against Menachem Begin’s right-wing Likud. And though he did serve as PM for two years from 1984, when Labor formed a unity government with Likud, he was later ousted as leader by Rabin, who then led Labor to victory in 1992. This time Rabin made Peres foreign minister, and in that capacity he spearheaded the secret talks with the PLO’S Yasser Arafat that ended in the Oslo Accords, the creation of the Palestinian Authority and – in 1994 – the award of a Nobel Peace Prize shared with Rabin and Arafat. But the following November, Rabin was assassinated by a far-right nationalist and Peres became PM for a second time. Only briefly, however. Seven months later, he lost the office to Likud’s Benjamin Netanyahu.
Even so, he wasn’t finished yet. He failed in 2000 to get elected as Israel’s president, but the next year, during the Second Intifada, he became foreign minister in a new national unity government with Likud, now led by Ariel Sharon. He then joined Sharon’s centrist Kadima Party, and in 2007 finally did become Israel’s president. Aged 83, Peres was the world’s oldest head of state, and a figure who seemed at last to have won the affection of his countrymen. But for his wife of 62 years, Sonya, it proved the last straw. She refused to move with him to the presidential palace.
“He told his son: ‘If you want to achieve great things, you must cross deserts’”