The BBC is reporting that Shimon Peres has died (h/t LAO). Here’s the BBC’s obituary for him:
He held almost every public office, including those of prime minister and president, although he never led a party to an election victory.
Born Szymon Perski in Wiszniew, Poland (now Visnieva, Belarus), on 2 August 1923, Shimon Peres was the son of a lumber merchant.
His parents were not Orthodox Jews but the young Shimon was taught the Talmud (compendium of Jewish law and commentaries) by his grandfather and became a strong adherent of the faith.
In 1934 the family moved to the British Mandate of Palestine (Peres’ father had emigrated two years earlier) and settled in Tel Aviv.
After attending agricultural school Peres worked on a kibbutz (agricultural commune) and became involved in politics at the age of 18 when he was elected secretary of a Labour Zionist movement, Hanoar Haoved Vehalomed.
In 1947 Israel’s founding Prime Minister, David Ben Gurion, put him in charge of personnel and arms purchases for the Haganah, the predecessor of the Israel Defense Forces.
He secured a deal with France to supply the new state with Mirage jet fighters and also set up Israel’s secret nuclear facility at Dimona.
Peres was elected to the Knesset (Israeli parliament) in 1959, standing for the Mapai party, the forerunner of the modern Labour movement in Israel, and was appointed deputy defence minister.
In 1965 he resigned after being implicated in a reopened inquiry into Operation Susannah, an Israeli plan to bomb British and US targets in Egypt in 1954 to try to influence Britain not to withdraw its troops from the Sinai.
A review of the original inquiry into the operation found inconsistencies in the testimony, and Peres, together with Ben Gurion, left Mapai to form a new party.
When Golda Meir resigned as prime minister in 1974 after the Yom Kippur war, Peres unsuccessfully fought Yitzhak Rabin for the vacant post.
Secret negotiations
Rabin stood down as the Alignment party leader in 1977 after a currency scandal involving his wife but a quirk in the Israeli constitution meant he could not resign as prime minister.
Peres became party leader and unofficial prime minster before leading the coalition into a defeat by the Likud party under Menachem Begin.
He suffered five further election defeats, all of which resulted in him being given ministerial positions as part of a coalition government.
In 1992 Peres failed to win the leadership of the Israeli Labour Party after being defeated in the preliminary stages of the contest by Rabin.
As Rabin’s foreign minister, Peres began secret negotiations with Yasser Arafat and the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which led to the historic Oslo peace accords of 1993.
For the first time the Palestinian leadership officially acknowledged Israel’s right to exist.
A year later Peres became a joint winner of the Nobel Peace Prize along with Rabin and Arafat.
Once an advocate of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, Peres became a leading political dove, often speaking of the need for compromise over territorial demands in Palestinian areas .
“The Palestinians are our closest neighbours,” he once said. “I believe they may become our closest friends.”
Peres became prime minister in 1995 after Rabin’s assassination but held office for less than a year before being defeated by Benjamin Netanyahu of Likud.
Reconciliation
In 2000 he failed in his effort to secure the ceremonial post of president, losing to the relatively obscure Moshe Katsav.
When his successor as Labour leader, Ehud Barak, was defeated by Ariel Sharon in the 2002 elections, Peres led Labour into a coalition with Likud and won the post of foreign minister.
He was able to extend a “safety net” in parliament to Sharon, enabling the latter to pursue a plan to disengage from Gaza and parts of the West Bank in the face of opposition from his own Likud party.
In 2005 Peres announced his resignation from Labour and his support for Sharon, who had formed a new party called Kadima.
When Sharon suffered a major stroke there was speculation that Peres might have become leader of Kadima but he was blocked by former Likud members who were the majority in the party.
In June 2007 he was elected president of Israel, resigning form the Knesset where he had been the longest-serving member of parliament in the country’s history.
His served seven years as president, before stepping down in 2014, the world’s oldest head of state.
Miss Bianca
Whoa. My God. A giant of a man has passed.
Mike J
עליו השלום
Omnes Omnibus
RIP
SiubhanDuinne
One of the most memorable afternoons of my life was when I got to interview him, along with several other journalists from the U.S. and Canada, in March 1980.
Damn. And rest in peace. A true giant.
Smiling Mortician
Thank you, Adam.
Major Major Major Major
@SiubhanDuinne: cool.
RIP. A great man.
I predict days of “if people only paid attention to this as much as they did kaepernick…” insufferable social media posts.
tobie
I only became aware of Shimon Peres some time in the late 1980s but from that time onward he seemed to me to be the conscience of the nation. I’m not sure who else can lead Israel to peace. Rabin and Peres had such big shoulders. I hope his memory will move people. He will be sorely missed.
Mike J
WordPepe trashes comments with Hebraic chars. Sad!
aláv hashalóm
Mai.naem.mobile
Another of the good guys has passed. RIP
The Ancient Randonneur
RIP
Adam L Silverman
@Mike J: I found it and dug it out. It went right to spam because of the Aramaic block characters.
chopper
baruch dayan emet.
DivF
Kaddish is both a prayer for mourners and a prayer for peace. Particularly appropriate in this case.
Mike in NC
A giant compared to Bibi the midget.
Splitting Image
I’ve always thought of Peres as a competent administrator and an incompetent politician, and I blamed him for quite awhile for letting the Labor Party dwindle away and allowing the Likud, especially Netanyahu, to rise to power.
In hindsight, that’s probably unfair to Peres, like blaming Carter for the rise of Reagan. You can’t blame the guy with his finger in the dam for not being able to hold back all the water.
Adam L Silverman
@Splitting Image: Peres was kind of caught between a rock and a hard place. Unlike Rabin and many of his contemporaries he hadn’t served in the Israeli War of Independence – he was involved, but not militarily. And then he got caught, by outliving almost all of his contemporaries, between that generation of Israeli leaders and the successive ones made up of the children and grandchildren of his contemporaries.
HRA
May he rest in peace.
Villago Delenda Est
@Splitting Image:
This is true, and describes the Augean Stables task Shimon Peres was asked to perform.
RIP.
Keith P.
I’m guessing he OD’d on a speedball.
rikyrah
RIP, Mr. Peres??
SiubhanDuinne
@Keith P.:
WTF?
Lyrebird
@Villago Delenda Est: Hear, hear.
From J Street (PAC lobbying for two-state solution and not putting matches in the tinderbox of US-Iran relations):
Yutsano
ברוך דיין אמת
Brachiator
Peres reminds me a bit of Ben Franklin, who also lived a long and complex life, who had a supple mind able (with some prodding at times) to evolve as his country grew and changed, and who was always willing to serve his country.
Rest in peace.
chopper
@Yutsano:
that’s a lot easier than trying to type the transliterated version into an iphone.
dayan. DAYAN, you fuck smellers, not ‘data’. no, not “dairy”. SWEET MOTHER OF PUSSY, NOT “DAILY”
Adam L Silverman
@chopper: Oy vey!
Prescott Cactus
“The Palestinians are our closest neighbours,” he once said. “I believe they may become our closest friends.”
Peace be with you.
Punchy
It a Peres that he has indeed passed away. This Israeli true, unfortunately. Jew know, living to 90+ is a sign of great genes; I bet he smoked, Hebrew his own beer, and he could Haifa any burial plot in town…
Mary G
RIP.
Keith P.
@SiubhanDuinne: 93 year old men don’t just drop dead.
Tom Q
The man seemed to be on the side of the angels, but, as Spitting Image said above, it was very frustrating watching him from my (distant) vantage point: his every rise to temporary power seemed to quickly lead to Likud victory. (I mentally lumped him with Neil Kinnock and NY’s Mark Green: guys it seemed could lose any election.) It probably was, as SI says, he was just fighting against inevitable electoral forces. In any case, a good soul, who at least disproves the “good die young” adage.