Shimon Peres

Shimon Peres served in twelve Israeli cabinets over a career of seventy years, was twice prime minister and finally president, and changed his mind about the central question of his country's politics in public. He was born Szymon Perski in what is now Belarus and came to Palestine at eleven; most of the family who stayed were murdered in the Holocaust. Ben-Gurion made him director-general of the defence ministry at twenty-nine, and in that role he built the arms relationship with France and the nuclear reactor at Dimona, the foundation of Israel's undeclared nuclear capability. For most of his career he was a hawk on settlements and security and, by common account, a poor campaigner who lost more elections than he won. The turn came late. As foreign minister under Rabin he authorised and then drove the secret talks in Norway that produced the Oslo Accords of 1993, and shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat the following year. He became prime minister on Rabin's assassination in 1995 and lost the 1996 election narrowly to Netanyahu after a wave of bombings and the Qana shelling in Lebanon. He was president from 2007 to 2014, a largely ceremonial office he used to argue for a two-state settlement that had by then gone out of fashion. He founded the Peres Center for Peace after leaving the premiership and remained publicly optimistic about a settlement long after most Israelis had stopped being so, which made him more admired abroad than at home for much of his life. He was still working at ninety-three and died of a stroke in 2016.

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