Shimon Peres (2 August 1923-28 September 2016), born Szymon Perski, was Prime Minister of Israel in 1977, from 1984 to 1986, and from 1995 to 1996, while he served as President from 15 July 2007 to 24 July 2014, succeeding Moshe Katsav and preceding Reuven Rivlin.
Biography[]
Szymon Perski was born on 2 August 1923 in Wiszniew, Poland (now Vishnyeva, Belarus), and his grandfather raised him at his home and taught him the Talmud. In 1932, his father moved to Mandatory Palestine, and Perski and the rest of the family followed him there in 1934. He changed his name to "Shimon Peres", and his family settled in Tel Aviv. Peres joined the Mapai social democratic party and joined the Haganah in 1947, giving him the task of procuring arms for the Israeli cause as well as giving him leadership over Haganah's limited naval forces.
Peres would later enter the Defense Ministry and be schooled in the United States during the early 1950s, and his great oratorical skills led to David Ben-Gurion making him his protégé. In 1956, he helped in negotiating the Protocol of Sevres with the United Kingdom and France, forming a secret alliance against Egypt in order to seize the Suez Canal. In 1963, he achieved another diplomatic breakthrough when he negotiated the first US sale of arms to Israel, and he served in multiple cabinet posts as an Israeli Labor Party member from 1968 to 2005. He served as Prime Minister three times and once as President, and Peres was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating a peace treaty with Palestine in the Oslo Accords of 1996. Peres served as President of Israel from 15 July 2007 to 24 July 2014 as the Kadima party's candidate, and he presided over a lull in Israeli-Palestinian violence between the Second Intifada (which ended in 2005) and Operation Protective Edge (which started in late 2014). Peres was a popular president and was beloved by many, and he died in 2016 at the age of 93.