Israel's ninth president, Shimon Peres, was born in 1923 in Poland, and came to the Holy Land when he was 11 years old. He served in many and varied positions in the Haganah and Israeli government, and received the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, together with Yitzchak Rabin and arch-terrorist Yasser Arafat, for his role in forging the Oslo Accords.
Peres has served in the Knesset for 48 consecutive years, since the 4th Knesset, except for a few weeks last year; after he jumped from Labor to Kadima, he was forced to resign in order to be eligible to run in the next election.
Though he has held many positions in the government, the only Knesset committee on which he has ever served is the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. He served on this committee in the 9th, 10th, 12th and 14th Knessets - because he was not a government minister at those times.
Peres served as Deputy Defense Minister for his first ten years in the Knesset, until 1969. He then assumed his first ministerial post as Minister of Absorption under Prime Minister Golda Meir. In September 1970 he assumed two Cabinet portfolios, Transportation and Communications. In the 8th Knesset, Peres was Minister of both Defense and Information - and in the 11th Knesset, he became Prime Minister for the first time. It occurred in 1984, when neither his Labor Party nor the Likud was able to form a government on its own. Instead, they formed a national unity government, with Peres serving as Prime Minister from 1984-6, followed by Yitzchak Shamir of the Likud for two years. (Shamir won the next election and remained Prime Minister until 1992.)
The next time Peres headed the government was as Acting Prime Minister, following the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin in November 1995. In may 1996, Peres lost the ensuing national elections to Binyamin Netanyahu.
In 1992, when Labor returned to power with Yitzchak Rabin's election as Prime Minister, Peres was again appointed Foreign Minister - and used his position to initiate and conduct secret and then-illegal negotiations with PLO representatives. These talks led to the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993.
In 1996, the same year he lost in national elections to Binyamin Netanyahu, Peres founded The Peres Center for Peace. The Center's stated mission is to "help build an infrastructure for peace by and for the people of the Middle East that promotes socio-economic development, while advancing cooperation and mutual understanding. These goals are pursued by developing joint, cooperative projects between Israeli and Arab partners" in various fields.
Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick wrote this week that in 1999, the Peres Center for Peace gave Terje Roed-Larsen, the UN special coordinator for the Middle East peace process, and his wife, Norwegian ambassador Mona Juul, a cash payment of $100,000. "Larsen was then a board member of the Peres Center," Glick wrote, "and the Norwegian government was one of the center's major donors. Investigative reporter Yoav Yitzchak at the time reported statements by Labor party members claiming that the payment to Larsen and Juul was a kickback for their intervention on Peres's behalf with the Nobel Peace Prize Committee in 1994."
At various times, Peres also served as Minister of Interior, Finance, Foreign Affairs, Religious Affairs, Regional Cooperation, and Development of the Negev and Galilee.
Peres served as chairman of the Labor Party for three different periods. In 1999, he was made Honorary President of the Socialist International. In late 2005, then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, who had just formed the new Kadima Party, appointed Peres, who had just quit Labor, to the newly-created position of Vice Premier.
Of late, Jonathan Pollard has accused Peres of lying and incriminating him as an Israeli agent. Pollard is currently in his 22nd year of imprisonment in the US for passing classified information to Israel when Peres was Prime Minister. In a letter delivered to all the Knesset Members earlier this month, Pollard wrote that Peres actually told then-US Secretary of State Schultz that he had not known of Pollard's activities, and denied that he was an Israeli agent. Peres also had all the Pollard documents returned to the US, where they were used to incriminate Pollard and send him to a life sentence in prison. Pollard also claimed that Peres later lied to an Israeli government committee, headed by Abba Eban, about his above actions.
"My case is the first and only case in the history of modern espionage in which a prime minister actively assisted in the indictment and prosecution of his own country's agent," Pollard wrote.
Peres is well-known for coining new phrases and expressing himself in a unique manner. Some of his more interesting quotes can be seen here. Others, collected in 2001 by Roger A. Gerber and Rael Jean Isacc for "Americans for a Safe Israel", include the following:
"The world is changing from a world of enemies to a world of dangers." - a briefing to the foreign press, Sep. 10, 2001 (He made a similar remark four years earlier, quoted in the Australia/Israel Review, June 1997)
"Israeli children should be taught to look to the future, not live in the past. I would rather teach them to imagine than to remember." (Jerusalem Post, May 4, 2000)
"We cannot solve anyting with force." (at Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 2, 2001)
"In almost every foreign war, [the U.S.] has conquered territories. But in none of them has it even attempted to retain either territories or resources, or to rule over another nation." (his book Battling for Peace, p. 74) Editors Gerber and Isaac do not mention the Indians in their "correction" of Peres, but do list Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, Texas, California, Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillippines as areas that, partially or totally, were conquered and overtaken by the U.S.
Peres has authored ten books, including Entebbe Diary and The New Middle East. He and his wife Sonya have a daughter, two sons, and six grandchildren.