Israeli statesman who served as the ninth President of Israel, 2007-2014. Peres served twice as the Prime Minister of Israel and twice as Interim Prime Minister, and he was a member of twelve cabinets in a political career spanning nearly 70 years. At the time of his retirement in 2014, he was the world’s oldest head of state. He was considered the last link to Israel’s founding generation.
In 1932, Peres’ father immigrated to Mandatory Palestine and settled in Tel Aviv. The family followed him in 1934. All of Peres’ relatives who remained in Wiszniew in 1941 were murdered during the Holocaust, many of them burned alive in the town’s synagogue.
From a young age, he was renowned for his oratorical brilliance, and was chosen as a protégé by David Ben Gurion, Israel’s founding father. He began his political career in the late 1940s, holding several diplomatic and military positions during and directly after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. His first high-level government position was as Deputy Director-General of Defense in 1952 which he attained at the age of 28, and Director-General from 1953 until 1959. In 1956, he took part in the historic negotiations on the Protocol of Sèvres.
In 1963, he held negotiations with U.S. President John F. Kennedy, which concluded the sale of Hawk anti-aircraft missiles to Israel, the first sale of US military equipment to Israel. On 26 October 1994, Jordan and Israel signed the Israel–Jordan peace treaty, which had been initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. Peres won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize together with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for the peace talks that he participated in as Israeli Foreign Minister, producing the Oslo Accords.
Peres was polyglot, speaking Polish, French, English, Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew, although he never lost his Polish accent when speaking in Hebrew. In his private life, he was a poet and songwriter, writing stanzas during cabinet meetings, with some of his poems later being recorded as songs in albums.
In 1945, Peres married Sonya Gelman, who preferred to remain outside the public eye. They had three children. On 13 September 2016, Peres, aged 93, suffered a “massive stroke” and was hospitalized. He died on 28 September 2016.
Link to Wikipedia biography