Shimon Peres: The Dreamer Who Built a Nation

From Poland to Palestine

Shimon Peres was born Szymon Perski on August 2, 1923, in Wiszniew, Poland (now Vishnyeva, Belarus). He grew up in a middle-class Jewish family. His father, Yitzhak, was a lumber merchant, and young Szymon attended both secular school and a heder, a traditional Jewish elementary school.

In 1934, when Shimon was eleven, the family emigrated to Palestine, then under the British Mandate. They settled in Tel Aviv, a young city buzzing with Zionist energy. Shimon attended school, learned Hebrew quickly, and immersed himself in the pioneering culture of the Yishuv — the pre-state Jewish community.

Most of the family members who remained in Poland were murdered during the Holocaust. This loss haunted Peres throughout his life and reinforced his commitment to building a secure Jewish state.

Ben-Gurion’s Protégé

As a teenager, Peres joined Kibbutz Alumot and became active in the Haganah, the pre-state Jewish defense force. His organizational skills and tireless energy caught the attention of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s founding father.

Ben-Gurion became Peres’s mentor, and the relationship shaped Israeli history. During the 1948 War of Independence, the twenty-four-year-old Peres was sent abroad to purchase weapons for the fledgling state. He proved remarkably effective, securing arms from France and Czechoslovakia at a critical moment.

After independence, Ben-Gurion placed Peres in charge of the Ministry of Defense. At age twenty-nine, Peres became Director-General — the youngest person ever to hold the position. He used this role to build Israel’s defense infrastructure, including its secret nuclear program at Dimona.

The Defense Architect

Through the 1950s and 1960s, Peres was Israel’s ultimate insider — the man who built the institutions that secured the state’s survival. He developed Israel’s alliance with France, which provided the reactor at Dimona. He built the defense industry that would later produce advanced weapons systems.

Critics called him a hawk. His close relationship with Ben-Gurion created enemies within the Labor movement. Peres lost repeated electoral contests, earning a reputation as an indefatigable political striver who could never quite close the deal with voters.

But Peres was evolving. The 1973 Yom Kippur War, the 1982 Lebanon War, and the grinding reality of occupation gradually convinced him that military strength alone could not guarantee Israel’s future. Something else was needed.

Oslo and the Nobel

The something else was peace. In 1993, as Foreign Minister under Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Peres secretly initiated back-channel negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization through Norwegian intermediaries. The Oslo Accords, signed on the White House lawn on September 13, 1993, were the result — the first direct agreement between Israel and the PLO.

Peres, Rabin, and Yasser Arafat shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize. The image of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands, with Peres standing between them, became one of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century.

The assassination of Rabin in November 1995 devastated Peres and the peace process. Peres served briefly as Prime Minister but lost a 1996 election to Benjamin Netanyahu, partly because a wave of Hamas bombings undermined public confidence in Oslo.

The Final Chapter: President

In 2007, at age eighty-three, Peres was elected President of Israel — a largely ceremonial role that he transformed into a platform for innovation and peace advocacy. He established the Peres Center for Peace and Innovation and promoted Israel’s technology sector internationally.

As president, Peres became Israel’s most beloved elder statesman. The man who had lost more elections than any other Israeli politician finally won the affection of the public through his warmth, optimism, and refusal to abandon his vision of a better future.

Peres died on September 28, 2016, at age ninety-three. World leaders from across the political spectrum attended his funeral on Mount Herzl, including President Barack Obama, who called him “the essence of Israel itself.”

Legacy

Shimon Peres’s seven-decade career spanned the entire arc of Israeli history. He helped build the state, arm it, defend it, and then — most remarkably — devoted his final decades to seeking peace with its enemies.

His famous aphorism — “Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently” — captured the philosophy that sustained him through decades of setbacks. Peres believed that dreaming was not a luxury but a necessity, and that the Jewish people’s greatest contribution to the world was the refusal to accept the world as it is.