Shimon Peres (born Szymon Perski) – the ninth President of the State of Israel, who has served three times as the Prime Minister, member of twelve cabinets and the Nobel Prize winner.
Born on August 2nd 1923 in Wiszniewo as the firstborn to Yitzhak (a timber trader) and Sara (nee Meltzer, a librarian) Perski, he and his family moved to Palestine in 1934.
In the 1940s he was involved in the kibbutz movement and joined the Haganah in 1947 to fight in the 1948 Israeli-Arab war, where upon the personal order of David Ben-Gurion, he was made responsible for personnel and arms purchase. His developed his career at the Defense Ministry, where in 1953 he was appointed General Director (thereby becoming the ever youngest person on this position in the history of Israel,) being in charge of purchases of arms and military technology for the Israeli army. His also chaired strategic international negotiations (commencing cooperation with France with regard to launching the Israeli nuclear program, setting up the Negev Nuclear Research Center near Diman and purchase of Dassault Mirrage III jet fighters; he also entered a strategic alliance with France and Great Britain consolidating an international position of Israel on the eve of the Suez Crisis.) He was first elected to the Knesset in 1959, where, save for one short three-month interval in 2006, he continued to represent the Mapai, Rafi, Maarch, Labor Party and Kadima parties respectively until 2007, when he was elected President. He held the office of the National Defense Minister. In 1965, together with supporters of Ben Gurion (among others Mosze Dajan, ) he left the Mapai party to join a newly established Rafi party. In 1969, after Mapai, Rafi and other left-wing parties formed the coalition, he was appointed Minister of Immigrant Absorption, Minister of Transportation and Communication, after which he became the Information Minister.
After Golda Meir resigned in the aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, he held the office of the Defense Minister in the cabinet of Icchak Rabin; a rival of Rabi in the run for the party’s leadership. He finally replaced him in 1977. Leader of the opposition after the Likud Party under Menachem Begin won the elections.
Maarach (the Alignment) won the 1984 parliamentary elections but failed to form a government coalition, which forced the leaders of two major parties, Peres from the Alignment and Icchak Szamir from Likud, to arrange for an unusual solution according to which Peres was to serve as the Prime Minister and Szamir as the Foreign Minister for the period of two years, after which they switched the places. In the national unity government of 1988-1990, a subsequent coalition between the Alignment and Likud, Peres served as Vice Premier and Minister of Finance. When the Alignment left the government coalition to consolidate into a single unitary party of Labor Party, he was beaten by Icchak Rabin in the run for leadership. However, he was still an important politician in the office of Foreign Minster in the government headed by Rabin, with whom he chaired negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization, which led to the 1994 Oslo Accords (which legitimized the existence of the Palestinian Autonomy), which was acclaimed by the international community and won Rabin, Peres and Yasser Arafat Nobel Peace Prizes. Following Rabi’s assassination in 1995 he became Prime Minister once again. However, soon afterwards, in 1996, he was defeated by Ariel Sharon in the first direct elections for Prime Minister. Later, he lost to Ehud Barak in the elections for the leader of the Labor Party.
In the 2000 presidential elections, he was beaten by the Likud candidate, Moshe Katsav. It was not until Ariel Sharon defeated in the run for Prime Minister the Labor Party candidate, Ehud Barak, when Peres came back to politics. Peres led the party and successfully carried out his plan to create the national unity government together with the Likud party of Ariel Sharon, whose foreign policy strove to continue the peace process. After this stormy coalition fell apart, Peres left the Labor Party in 2005 and joined the newly founded party of Sharon, Kadima. The Knesset elected him ninth President of the State of Israel on June 13th 2007.
Shimon Peres is the author of several books, including The Next Step (1965), David's Sling (1970), And Now Tomorrow (1978), From These Men: seven founders of the State of Israel (1979), Entebbe Diary (1991), The New Middle East (1993), Battling for Peace: a memoir (1995), For the Future of Israel (1998), The Imaginary Voyage: With Theodor Herzl in Israel (1999).
