Shimon Peres

Origins and early life

Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski in Wiszniew, then in Poland and now Vishnyeva in Belarus, in August 1923, the son of Yitzhak and Sara Perski, and followed his father to Tel Aviv in 1934. He grew up close to his grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Melzer, and addressing the German Bundestag on 27 January 2010 he recalled the rabbi's parting words to him at eleven, “My boy, always remain a Jew”, and how the Nazis later burned him alive with the Jews of Vishniev inside the synagogue.

He studied at the Ben Shemen agricultural school, helped found Kibbutz Alumot, and after an expedition into the Negev in 1944 took the Hebrew name Peres, the bearded vulture.

Work and career

In the War of Independence he was in charge of arms purchases and recruitment, and from 1953 to 1959 he was director-general of the Ministry of Defence, building the close alliance with France. Elected to the Knesset in 1959, he was minister of defence from 1974 to 1977, the years of the Entebbe rescue, and prime minister of a national unity government from 1984 to 1986, when Israel withdrew from Lebanon and adopted an economic stabilisation plan.

Foreign minister again from July 1992, he led the Israeli side of the secret Oslo negotiations of 1993, signed the Declaration of Principles at the White House on 13 September 1993, and helped bring about the Jordan peace treaty of 26 October 1994.

Recognition

The 1994 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded jointly to him, to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and to the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat “for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East”. After Rabin was assassinated in November 1995 he led the government until June 1996, founded the Peres Center for Peace that year, and was the ninth President of Israel from July 2007 to July 2014. He died in Ramat Gan on 28 September 2016, two weeks after a stroke, and was buried on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem, between Yitzhak Rabin and Yitzhak Shamir.