Shimon Peres

Backing the secret Oslo channel and signing Israel's first accord with the PLO

• On 13 September 1993 Peres and the PLO's Mahmoud Abbas signed the Declaration of Principles at the White House, the first accord between Israel and the PLO, built on their mutual recognition.^[13],[19]
• The Nobel Committee said Peres, Rabin and Arafat bore the main responsibility for reaching the Oslo Accords and carrying them forward, and praised the courage this demanded of both sides.^[4],[5]
• His government's 1985 stabilization plan, backed by the Histadrut and employers, cut spending, curbed wages and brought inflation down from about 450% a year to under 20% within two years.^[7],[8],[16]
• He helped bring about the October 1994 peace treaty with Jordan, which ended a 46-year formal state of war and was only Israel's second full peace with an Arab state.^[6],[8]
• As defense minister he pushed for and helped plan the July 1976 Entebbe raid, which rescued passengers of a hijacked Air France flight held in Uganda.^[3],[6]
• The Peres Center for Peace, which he founded in 1996, runs joint Israeli-Arab projects in health, education, agriculture and the economy.^[7],[8]

Most of Peres's impact cannot honestly be counted. No one can say how many lives the Oslo process or the Jordan treaty saved, so this profile, like Yitzhak Rabin's, makes no numerical claim for them. What is documented: he signed the first agreement between Israel and the PLO, helped end 46 years of war with Jordan, led the government that ended runaway inflation, and spent decades arguing that science, education and a shared regional economy could replace war. He also built much of Israel's defense establishment, including its secret nuclear program. The one harm we quantify is Operation Grapes of Wrath in 1996, a discrete operation he launched as prime minister, for which Human Rights Watch documented the civilian death toll. His life traces an unusual arc: the official who armed Israel came to argue, in his Nobel lecture, that peace, not war, was now the path with no alternative.

PeaceEconomy

Each number is the laureate’s credited share of a real-world outcome, cumulative to 2025. The whole outcome, the share of credit, and the reasoning are shown so you can check the arithmetic. Outcomes shared with other laureates are counted once on the impact page.

• HarmMedium confidenceDirectSourced totalPeace

  Lebanese civilians killed in Israel's 1996 Operation Grapes of Wrath, including more than 100 at Qana

  31

  deaths caused, credited share

  That is 20% of 154 deaths caused since 1996.

  How this number was built

  Human Rights Watch, which investigated in Lebanon and Israel in 1996, reports some 154 Lebanese civilians killed and 351 injured in the 17-day operation (11-27 April 1996), more than 100 of them in the artillery barrage on the UN base at Qana. We use 154 as both low and high and leave out fighters, soldiers and the injured. Share 0.2: Peres, as both prime minister and defense minister, launched the operation and its strategy of pressing civilians to leave the south, but army commanders chose specific targets and fire, and HRW found that Lebanese guerrillas, mainly Hezbollah, also bear responsibility for the Qana deaths by firing from near the base. We make no numeric claim for the 1985 Tunis airstrike, whose reported tolls vary widely.^[6],[7],[11]

  Sources: Human Rights Watch; Wikipedia; Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)

• Major

  Architect of a secret nuclear program

  Ben-Gurion put Peres in charge of building a program aimed at producing nuclear explosives. In October 1957 he signed the Dimona reactor deal with France, kept secret from the United States. South African minutes published by the Guardian in 2010 indicate that in 1975 Peres told P.W. Botha that Jericho missile payloads came in three sizes, believed to include nuclear warheads. His office said there were never any negotiations.^[9],[10]

• Major

  Operation Grapes of Wrath and the Qana shelling, 1996

  In April 1996 Prime Minister Peres launched a 17-day campaign against Hezbollah in Lebanon, with some 600 air raids and 25,000 shells. Human Rights Watch counted about 154 Lebanese civilians killed and 351 injured; more than 100 died when artillery struck a UN base at Qana where civilians sheltered. HRW found Israel broke the laws of war there. It said Lebanese guerrillas, mainly Hezbollah, shared responsibility for Qana by firing from near the base.^[6],[11]

• Moderate

  Planning the 1956 Suez war

  As director-general of the defense ministry, Peres negotiated the secret French-Israeli arrangements behind the 1956 war on Egypt, agreed with France and Britain at Sèvres. Israel invaded Sinai to give the two powers a pretext to intervene; American and Soviet pressure forced all three to withdraw.^[6],[9]

• Moderate

  Early support for West Bank settlements

  As defense minister in the 1970s Peres supported West Bank settlers and let them set up settlements of doubtful legality. Critics on the left later blamed the settler bypass roads built under Oslo II, which he negotiated, for making a contiguous Palestinian state harder to achieve.^[6],[8]

• Moderate

  Airstrike on PLO headquarters in Tunisia, 1985

  In October 1985, after gunmen said to be from the PLO's Force 17 killed three Israelis on a yacht off Cyprus, Peres's government bombed the PLO headquarters near Tunis. Reported death tolls range from 41 to 71, including Tunisian bystanders. The UN Security Council condemned the attack as a flagrant violation of the UN Charter; Peres called it self-defense.^[17]

• Moderate

  Abduction of a nuclear whistleblower

  In 1986, after Mordechai Vanunu revealed details of Dimona to a British newspaper, the government Peres led decided to seize him. Mossad lured him from Britain to Rome, drugged him and took him to Israel, where he was convicted in a closed-door trial and spent 18 years in prison.^[10],[18]

• Minor

  Remarks on the Armenian genocide

  In 2001 Turkish media quoted Foreign Minister Peres as rejecting comparisons between the Holocaust and the Armenian genocide and calling the Armenians' fate a tragedy rather than a genocide. Israel's Foreign Ministry later said he had not used those words, but he did not retract the reported statement.^[6]

• —

  Antisemitic attack

  Vishneva, the largely Jewish town where he spent his early childhood, suffered frequent antisemitic raids.^[8]

• 1942

  Family killed

  Relatives who stayed in Vishneva, including his grandfather Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, were murdered when German forces and local collaborators massacred the town's ghetto of about 1,000 Jews and set fire to the building where many were thrown.^{[6],[8],[14],[15]}

• —

  War

  His father, a volunteer in the British Army, was captured in Greece and spent most of World War II as a prisoner, hiding his Jewish identity in a prisoner-of-war camp attached to Auschwitz.^[6]

• 1944

  Imprisonment

  Jailed for two weeks and heavily fined by the British authorities for leading an unauthorized expedition into the Negev, then a closed military zone.^[6]

• 1995

  Other

  Was a few metres away when Yitzhak Rabin was shot dead at a Tel Aviv peace rally; the assassin, a Jewish extremist opposed to Oslo, had also marked Peres as a target.^[6],[8]

Peres was born Szymon Perski to Jewish parents, Yitzhak and Sara Perski, in Vishneva, a largely Jewish town then in Poland. His parents were not observant, but his maternal grandfather, Rabbi Zvi Meltzer, taught him Talmud, and as a boy Peres was more religious than they were. The family moved to Tel Aviv in 1934, and he grew up in the Labor Zionist youth movement and on kibbutzim. In his Nobel lecture he noted that no Jewish life remains in his birthplace, and defined being Jewish as a blend of faith, history, land and language.^{[2],[3],[6],[8]}

1. August 16, 1923

   Born Szymon Perski in Vishneva, Poland (now Belarus), to Yitzhak and Sara Perski.^[1],[6]

2. 1934

   Emigrates with his mother and brother to Tel Aviv, joining his father, who had settled there two years earlier.^[3],[6],[15]

3. 1938

   At 15 enters the Ben Shemen agricultural youth village; he later helps found Kibbutz Alumot.^[2],[3],[6]

4. 1942

   The Jews of Vishneva's ghetto, among them his grandfather and the relatives who stayed, are murdered in the Holocaust.^{[6],[14],[15]}

5. 1953

   Becomes director-general of the Ministry of Defense at 29 and builds Israel's alliance with France and its defense industry.^[3],[7]

6. October 1957

   Signs the package deal with France for the Dimona nuclear reactor, the heart of Israel's secret nuclear program.^[9]

7. July 4, 1976

   As defense minister, drives the planning of the Entebbe raid that rescues hostages held in Uganda.^[3],[6]

8. July 1, 1985

   Prime minister since 1984, he wins cabinet approval for the economic stabilization plan that ends runaway inflation.^[3],[8],[16]

9. September 13, 1993

   As foreign minister, signs the Oslo Declaration of Principles with the PLO's Mahmoud Abbas at the White House.^[6],[13]

10. October 14, 1994

    Awarded the Nobel Peace Prize with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat for their efforts to create peace in the Middle East.^[1],[4]

11. November 4, 1995

    After Rabin is assassinated, becomes acting prime minister and then prime minister, and carries out the Oslo II agreement.^[6],[7],[8]

12. 1996

    Launches Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon, narrowly loses the election to Benjamin Netanyahu, and founds the Peres Center for Peace.^[6],[7],[11]

13. June 13, 2007

    Elected Israel's ninth president by the Knesset, the first former prime minister to hold the post; serves until 2014.^[6],[7]

14. September 28, 2016

    Dies at Sheba Medical Center near Tel Aviv, aged 93, two weeks after a stroke; leaders from about 75 countries attend his funeral.^[1],[6]

1. 1.Shimon Peres - Facts · NobelPrize.org (Nobel Prize Outreach)
2. 2.Shimon Peres - Nobel Lecture · NobelPrize.org (from Nobel Lectures, Peace 1991-1995, World Scientific, 1999), 1994
3. 3.Shimon Peres - Biographical · NobelPrize.org (from Les Prix Nobel 1994, Nobel Foundation, 1995), 1995
4. 4.The Nobel Peace Prize 1994 - Press release · Norwegian Nobel Committee / NobelPrize.org, 1994
5. 5.The Nobel Peace Prize 1994 - Award ceremony speech · Norwegian Nobel Committee / NobelPrize.org, 1994
6. 6.Shimon Peres · Wikipedia
7. 7.Shimon Peres · Jewish Virtual Library (American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise)
8. 8.Shimon Peres obituary (Lawrence Joffe) · The Guardian, 2016
9. 9.The Eisenhower Administration and the Discovery of Dimona: March 1958-January 1961 (Electronic Briefing Book No. 510, ed. Avner Cohen and William Burr) · National Security Archive, George Washington University, 2015
10. 10.Revealed: how Israel offered to sell South Africa nuclear weapons (Chris McGreal) · The Guardian, 2010
11. 11.Israel/Lebanon: "Operation Grapes of Wrath": The Civilian Victims (Vol. 9, No. 8(E)) · Human Rights Watch, 1997
12. 12.The Oslo Accords and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process · Office of the Historian, U.S. Department of State
13. 13.Remarks at the Signing Ceremony for the Israeli-Palestinian Declaration of Principles (William J. Clinton, 13 September 1993) · The American Presidency Project, UC Santa Barbara, 1993
14. 14.Kehilalinks: Vishnevo (community history, including the Holocaust period) · JewishGen KehilaLinks
15. 15.Vishnyeva · Wikipedia
16. 16.1985 Israel Economic Stabilization Plan · Wikipedia
17. 17.Operation Wooden Leg · Wikipedia
18. 18.Mordechai Vanunu · Wikipedia
19. 19.Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization Agreement: 1993 (Declaration of Principles text) · The Avalon Project, Lillian Goldman Law Library, Yale Law School