Shimon Peres, the former Prime Minister and former President of Israel, and recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize (jointly with Yassir Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin), passed away early this morning. He was 93 years old, and had suffered a stroke around two weeks ago.
The passing of Peres is the passing of an era. He was Prime Minister three times; from April to June 1977, 1984 to 1986 and November 1995 to June 1996. He was also President from 2007 to 2014.
But he was far more influential in his other positions. He was Minister of Foreign Affairs three times, from 1986 to 1988, 1992 to 1995 and 2001 to 2002. He was also Minister of Defence from 1974 to 1977 and during his premiership in 1995 and 1996. He also held posts of Minister of Finance and Minister of Transportation in the 1970s and 1980s. He was elected to the Knesset in 1959 and was a member until 2007.
Perhaps his most fundamentally influential post was when he was appointed in 1952, aged only 29, to be the Director-General of the Ministry of Defence and stayed in that position until 1958. One of his major achievements was the deep cultivation of ties between the French and Israeli militaries, and building of close relations between the left-wing governments of France of the 1950s and the Israeli government (for Israel in the 1950s was an extremely left-wing country, the military particularly). As a result of that relationship, Peres was able to open the way to France providing advanced military technology to Israel, the most important examples being France's provision of a nuclear reactor to Israel to allow it to build atomic bombs (and Israel's access to brilliant Jewish physicists permitted Israel to also contribute research data to France's atomic bomb project) and also Israel's acquisition of the advanced Mirage III fighter.
The Mirage III was the lynchpin of Israel's exceptionally successful operation to take out the air forces of Egypt and Syria to pre-empt a threatened Egyptian/Syrian attack. As a result, Israel destroyed the Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies and captured huge amounts of land. It was around 1967 that the French decided to draw away from Israel, and only then that the United States became's it's primary supplier of military equipment*(see note at bottom).
Peres was quite centrally involved in early reforms to Israeli intelligence structures that saw the current dispensation (foreign intelligence provided by Mossad, and domestic/security intelligence by Shin Bet, both directly accountable to the Prime Minister, and military intelligence provided by Aman, which is part of the Ministry of Defence).
He went on, of course and as mentioned above, to hold high ministerial positions and be Prime Minister. During the 1990s he worked closely with Yitzhak Rabin to try to bring about peace and a Palestinian state; unfortunately Yizhak Rabin was felled by a bullet from an extreme Israeli right-winger, and Hamas took the opportunity hit Israel with a wave of suicide bombings that frightened the population and led them to elect Benjamin Netanyahu (for his first time as Prime Minister); thereafter the peace deal was effectively dead.
It's hard to believe that someone who was so centrally involved in world events in the 1950s was still alive until yesterday. Yitzhak Rabin was a true Zionist and an Israeli hero.
*Even though Israel co-operated with the British in the Suez Crisis, at that very time the British had a treaty with Jordan that obligated the UK to attack Israel if Israel invaded Jordan, and the Royal Navy had prepositioned ships in the area to launch raids on Israel if that happened. So the oft-advanced grievances of the evil British being in Israel's pocket is ahistorical)