Amir Peretz

Origins and early life

Amir Peretz was born Armand Peretz in Boujad, Morocco, on 9 March 1952, into a Sephardic Jewish family; his father was the head of the town's Jewish community. The family made aliyah in 1956 and settled in the development town of Sderot, where he grew up, and he served in the army as an ordnance officer with the paratroopers, reaching the rank of captain.

Work and career

Badly injured in an accident at the Mitla Pass on 22 April 1974, he spent a year in hospital and then, still in a wheelchair, grew vegetables and flowers for export on a farm in Nir Akiva. Elected mayor of Sderot for the Labor Party in 1983, he entered the Knesset in 1988 and became chairman of the Histadrut, the national trade union federation, in 1995. In November 2005 he was elected leader of the Labor Party, defeating Shimon Peres, and in May 2006 he became deputy prime minister and minister of defence.

As minister of defence in 2006 and 2007 he approved the development of the Iron Dome air defence system, and the Jerusalem Post later described him as the father of Iron Dome and of David's Sling. He was minister of environmental protection from 2013 to 2014, led the Labor Party again from 2019 to 2021 and was minister of economy from 2020 to 2021, and he left the Knesset in January 2021. From December 2021 to November 2024 he chaired the board of Israel Aerospace Industries, and in 2023 the Jerusalem Post ranked him, with the company's chief executive Boaz Levy, twenty-first among the fifty most influential Jews in the world.