President Reuven Rivlin: You were our heart
I am writing to you for the last time, Shimon, "one president to another," as you would say every time you called to lend me support and advice, after I followed you into this office. As a young boy, you proposed adopting the surname "Ben Amotz," the name of the prophet Isaiah, a man of vision.
You, however, were not only a visionary, but a man of action as well.
You had the rare ability to formulate an idea that seemed unbelievable and turn it into reality. Your gaze was affixed far afield, your hands worked ceaselessly, and your feet traveled boundlessly on the path of Zionist and Jewish history. Your steps, Shimon, were always pointed upward and onward.
Like a mountain climber who first plants a stake in the ground and then assaults the summit, you lived your life, Shimon. First you dreamed, picturing the summit in your mind and your soul; and like a professional climber, once you were able to envision the State of Israel on the next summit -- you would begin the arduous climb, dragging us all with you, toward the objective.
You were able to move the most intractable of statesmen and thaw the hearts of our toughest adversaries. You strove toward the pinnacle of the Zionist dream -- an independent country living in peace with its neighbors -- and you received the most distinguished recognition, the Nobel Peace Prize.
Shimon Peres: A Life for Israel
The death of Shimon Peres yesterday at the age of 93 is a moment to take stock not only of one of the most remarkable Jewish figures of the last hundred years but of the history of the state of Israel, which he served for his entire adult life. As a longtime aide to Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, who then went on to serve in just about every significant position of authority in the state, Peres’s story is very much that of his nation. And it is in that context, rather than solely through the prism of some of the policy choices he advocated, that his enormous contributions to Israel must be judged.
As one of Ben Gurion’s “boys,” it was Peres more than any other person, in his capacity as the director general of the Defense Ministry, who helped build Israel’s security infrastructure and its defense industry. His diplomacy was key to the alliance Israel struck with France in this period. That not only led to the Suez Campaign of 1956 (a great success for Israel even if it was a disaster for Britain and France), Israel’s acquisition of its first generation of sophisticated weaponry, and the birth of its nuclear program. He went on to follow his boss out of government and into opposition but he resurfaced as a leader of the Labor Party and served in a variety of posts, including minister of defense and two stints as prime minister despite never winning a national election in his own right.
But it is not for his role as the organizer of Israel’s defense in an era when its security hung by a thread that he is best remembered. Rather, his political legacy rests more on his actions as foreign minister, when he served in the government of his longtime bitter rival Yitzhak Rabin in the early 1990s. Peres was the driving force behind the decision to reach out to the Palestine Liberation Organization and to try and end the conflict with the Arabs that had begun long before Israel’s founding. Though he shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Rabin and the PLO’s Yasir Arafat, he was the one who not only pushed hardest for the agreement that would be known as the Oslo Peace Accords but was also the one who actually believed in what they were doing.
Peres liked to describe himself as more of a philosopher than a politician. This label explained his devotion to the idea that a land-for-peace deal could end decades of warfare in the face of facts that persuaded more sober figures it was bound to fail. His goal was not so much a security agreement as the creation what he hopefully described as a “New Middle East”—the title of the book he wrote about his objectives published in the midst of the post-Oslo euphoria in 1994—in which the dangerous neighborhood in which the Jewish state dwelled would be transformed into a Benelux on the Mediterranean.