Serving in the Knesset for 48 years and holding every top cabinet post yet never winning an election, Shimon Peres was a profile in paradox
THE UNEXPECTED Serving in the Knesset for 48 years and holding every top cabinet post yet never winning an election originally a hawk yet morphing into the icon of the Israeli left Peres defied expectations (Photos: Flash90 GPO)
S himon Peres was a study in complexity and contradiction. He grew up in an Orthodox family in Europe became a secular Zionist yet spearheaded and defended the policy of IDF draft exemptions for Torah scholars.
Shimon Peres fathered Israel’s nuclear program in the 1950s accidentally authored the term “nuclear ambiguity” in the 1960s and proactively supported Israeli settlement activity in the 1970s and ’80s on land Israel captured during the Six Day War.
By the 1990s he had changed his tune humming bars of Yitzhak Rabin’s famous peace song committing Israel to the Oslo Accords and withdrawal from those very lands. In the process he won a Nobel Peace Prize became the icon of the Israeli left the darling of the international community and the goat of the Israeli right who blame him for the bloodshed that stemmed from allowing PLO terrorists to establish an entity in Israel’s biblical heartland.
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