Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres (born August 16?, 1923, Wiszniew, Poland [now Vishnyeva, Belarus]; see Researcher’s Note—died September 28, 2016, Ramat Gan, Israel) was a Polish-born Israeli statesman, who served as both prime minister (1984–86 and 1995–96) and president (2007–14) of Israel and as leader of the Israel Labour Party (1977–92, 1995–97, and 2003–05). In 1993, in his role as Israeli foreign minister, Peres helped negotiate a peace accord with Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), for which they, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994.

Peres immigrated with his family to Palestine in 1934. In 1947 he joined the Haganah movement, a Zionist military organization, under the direction of David Ben-Gurion, who soon became his political mentor. When Israel achieved independence in May 1948, Prime Minister Ben-Gurion appointed Peres, then only 24 years old, head of Israel’s navy. In 1952 he was appointed deputy director general of the Ministry of Defense, and he later served as director general (1953–59) and deputy defense minister (1959–65), during which service he stepped up state weapons production, initiated a nuclear research program, and established overseas military alliances, most notably with France. Peres resigned in 1965 to join Ben-Gurion in founding a new party, Rafi, in opposition to the succeeding prime minister, Levi Eshkol.

The Rafi Party was unsuccessful, and in 1967 Peres initiated merger negotiations between the Mapai (Ben-Gurion’s former party) and the Ahdut Avodah, a more leftist workers’ party, which led to the establishment of the Israel Labour Party, of which he became deputy secretary-general. He became defense minister in the Labour cabinet of Rabin in 1974.

In 1977 Peres became head of the Labour Party and, as such, was twice defeated (1977, 1981) by Menachem Begin of the Likud party as a candidate for prime minister before winning access to the post after the indecisive elections of 1984. In September 1984 Peres and Yitzhak Shamir, head of Likud, formed a power-sharing agreement, with Peres as prime minister for the first half of a 50-month term and Shamir as deputy prime minister and foreign minister; the roles were reversed for the second 25-month period. Under Peres’s moderate and conciliatory leadership, Israel withdrew its forces in 1985 from their controversial incursion into Lebanon. After similarly indecisive elections in 1988, the Labour and Likud parties formed another coalition government, with Peres as finance minister and Shamir as prime minister; this coalition lasted only until 1990, when Likud was able to form a government without Labour support.

In February 1992, in the first primary election ever held by a major Israeli party, Peres lost the Labour leadership to Rabin. When Labour won in the general elections in June and Rabin became prime minister of Israel in July, Peres was brought into the cabinet as foreign minister. After the Israel-PLO accord was signed in 1993, Peres handled the negotiations with the PLO over the details of the pact’s implementation. Following the assassination of Rabin in 1995, Peres took over as prime minister. In May 1996 he was narrowly defeated in his bid for reelection by Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud. Peres declined to seek reelection as leader of the Labour Party in 1997 but stayed active in politics, serving as foreign minister (2001–02), deputy prime minister (2001–02), and vice prime minister (2005) in the national unity government led by Likud’s Ariel Sharon. In 2003 Peres resumed the chair of the Labour Party but was unexpectedly defeated in the party’s leadership election in November 2005. A few weeks later he left the Labour Party to join the centrist party Kadima. From 2007 to 2014 Peres served as president of Israel, a largely ceremonial post.

In 2012 Peres was awarded the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom. His books include the memoir Battling for Peace (1995) and Ben-Gurion: A Political Life (2011).