Shimon Peres, Former Israeli Leader and Nobel Winner, Dies at 93
Shimon Peres, the Israeli statesman who earned a Nobel Prize for his tireless efforts to forge peace with Palestinians, died on Tuesday. He was 93.
Over a seven-decade career, Mr. Peres served as prime minister, president and Labor Party chief. He was the last surviving member of a group of leaders who witnessed the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, including David Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, Golda Meir and Ariel Sharon, among others.
At the height of his career, he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for negotiating the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal that became known as the Oslo Accords. He shared it with Yitzhak Rabin, a rival Labor leader, and Yasser Arafat, the longtime Palestine Liberation Organization chief.
The accords outlined steps toward a two-state solution to the decadeslong Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- a vision that still hasn't been realized.
"We have to make peace with the Palestinians," Mr. Peres said in a video interview posted in 2015 by the PeresCenter for Peace, a nonprofit organization he set up in 1996. "There's no way to achieve it in my opinion without a two-state solution."
In 2012, President Barack Obama presented Mr. Peres, then 88 years old and Israel's president, with the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the highest civilian award in the U.S. Mr. Obama said the Israeli leader, when recently asked what he wanted his legacy to be, quipped: "Well, it's too early for me to think about it."
Known as the father of Israel's aerospace and nuclear programs, Mr. Peres was first elected to the Knesset, or parliament, in 1959. He was the country's longest-standing parliamentarian and served in 12 governments. At age 83, he was chosen to serve a seven-year term as president, a largely ceremonial post.
Initially, Mr. Peres supported Jewish settlement in the West Bank and Gaza -- land captured during the 1967 Middle East war. But he focused his later years on promoting a peaceful resolution with the Palestinians based on separate states.
Mr. Peres became acting prime minister in 1977 when Mr. Rabin was forced to step down over a scandal about his wife holding a bank account overseas, which was illegal at the time in Israel.
As acting prime minister, Mr. Peres lost national elections later that year, the first time the Labor Party was defeated since the founding of the state under Mr. Ben-Gurion. The election marked the beginning of a period of political dominance for the winners, the Likud party, led today by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
After the Labor Party returned to power in 1992, Mr. Peres was appointed foreign minister under the premiership of Mr. Rabin, with whom he had a strained relationship. The two of them conducted negotiations with the PLO, headed at the time by Mr. Arafat. Those contacts led to the signing in 1993 of the first Oslo Accord.
Upon receiving the Nobel Prize in 1994, Mr. Peres said he wished for "a Middle East that is not a killing field but a field of creativity and growth."
A year later, Mr. Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist. Messrs. Peres and Rabin hugged each other at a rally for peace in Tel Aviv, moments before Mr. Rabin was shot dead, recalled Yossi Beilin, a longtime ally of Mr.Peres and former deputy foreign minister.
"They hated and respected each other right until the last moments of Rabin," said Mr. Beilin.
In the wake of Mr. Rabin's assassination, Mr. Peres ran for prime minister in 1996 against Mr. Netanyahu. Initially commanding a wide lead in the polls, he and his party soon lost their footing. Hamas launched a string of suicide bomb attacks and voters responded to Mr. Netanyahu's tough talk on security. Mr. Peres lost the race by a small margin.
"Wonderful," Mr. Beilin remembers Mr. Peres saying.
He never gave up on trying to advance peace with the Palestinians.
Write to Rory Jones at rory.jones@wsj.com and Orr Hirschauge at Orr.Hirschauge@wsj.com