Shimon Peres

Biography

Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski in 1923 in Wiszniew, then in Poland, and moved with his family to Tel Aviv in Mandatory Palestine in 1934. He attended the Ben Shemen agricultural school, lived on a kibbutz and rose through the Labor Zionist youth movement, where David Ben-Gurion took him on as a protege. After joining the Haganah in 1947 he handled personnel and arms purchases.

In the 1950s he ran Israel's defence ministry, as deputy director general from 1952 and director general from 1953 to 1959. He built the arms partnership with France, took part in the secret Sevres talks before the 1956 Suez war, and is regarded as the architect of Israel's nuclear programme. Elected to the Knesset in 1959, he sat there almost without a break until 2007, longer than anyone else, and held many cabinet posts, including defence, foreign affairs and finance.

Peres led the Labor Party for long periods and was prime minister three times: as acting premier in 1977, from 1984 to 1986 in a rotation government with Yitzhak Shamir, when his stabilisation plan ended hyperinflation, and from Rabin's assassination in November 1995 until his narrow defeat by Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996. As Rabin's foreign minister he helped negotiate the Oslo Accords and the 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, and he shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat.

He left Labor for Kadima in 2005. In 2007 the Knesset elected him president of Israel, and he served until 2014, retiring as the world's oldest head of state. He died in 2016 after a stroke.