Peres,
celebrated around the world as a Nobel Prize-winning visionary who
pushed his country toward peace during a remarkable seven-decade career,
died early Wednesday from complications from a stroke. He was 93.
News of Peres' death was met with an outpouring of tributes from around the world.
"There
are few people who we share this world with, who change the course of
human history, not just through their role in human events, but because
they expand our moral imagination and force us to expect more of
ourselves. My friend Shimon was one of those people," said President
Barack Obama.
Obama
will headline the list of leaders expected at Peres' funeral in
Jerusalem on Friday. Israel's Foreign Ministry said Bill and Hillary
Clinton, Britain's Prince Charles, French President Francois Hollande
and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with senior officials
from Germany, Mexico, Australia and elsewhere, would also attend. It
will be the biggest gathering of international leaders to converge on
Israel since the funeral of Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated by a
Jewish ultranationalist in 1995.
Officials
said that Peres' body would lie in state at the Knesset, or parliament,
on Thursday to allow the public to pay final respects. His funeral will
take place at Mount Herzl, the country's national cemetery in
Jerusalem. Yona Bartal, a former personal aide to Peres, said the
arrangements were in line with his wishes.
Peres'
son, Chemi, confirmed his death Wednesday morning to reporters gathered
at the hospital where Peres had been treated since suffering a
debilitating stroke on Sept. 13.
"Our
father's legacy has always been to look to tomorrow," he said. "We were
privileged to be part of his private family, but today we sense that
the entire nation of Israel and the global community share this great
loss. We share this pain together."
Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his Cabinet for a special meeting,
where he praised Peres despite their deep ideological differences.
"Shimon devoted his life to our nation and to the pursuit of peace," he
said. "As Israel's President, Shimon did so much to unite the nation.
And the nation loved him for it."
Bill
Clinton and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton said they
"lost a true and treasured friend." Clinton was president when Peres
negotiated a historic interim peace agreement with the Palestinians in
1993.
Former Presidents George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush also issued statements of mourning.
While
Western leaders eulogized Peres, the Western-backed Palestinian
Authority in the West Bank remained conspicuously silent. On one hand,
the Palestinians appreciated Peres' commitment to peace. But he was also
controversial for overseeing a war in Lebanon while he was prime
minister in 1996 in which dozens of civilians were killed in an Israeli
artillery strike. Peres, like other Israeli leaders, also allowed
settlement construction to take place during his years in leadership
positions.
In the Gaza Strip, the ruling Hamas militant group expressed happiness.
"Shimon
Peres was the last remaining Israeli officials who founded the
occupation," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a spokesman for the Islamic group.
"His death is the end of a phase in the history of this occupation and
the beginning of a new phase of weakness."
At
home, Peres was the elder statesman of Israeli politics, one of the
country's most admired leaders and the last surviving link to its
founding fathers.
In
an unprecedented seven-decade political career, Peres filled nearly
every position in Israeli public life and was credited with leading the
country through some of its most defining moments, from creating what is
believed to be a nuclear arsenal in the 1950s, to disentangling its
troops from Lebanon and rescuing its economy from triple-digit inflation
in the 1980s, to guiding a skeptical nation into peace talks with the
Palestinians in the 1990s.
Shimon
Perski was born on Aug. 2, 1923, in Vishneva, then part of Poland. He
moved to pre-state Palestine in 1934 with his immediate family. His
other relatives stayed behind and perished in the Holocaust. Rising
quickly through Labor Party ranks, he became a top aide to Ben-Gurion,
Israel's first prime minister and a man Peres once called "the greatest
Jew of our time."
As protege of Ben-Gurion, Peres led the Defense Ministry in his 20s and spearheaded the development of Israel's nuclear program.
He
was first elected to parliament in 1959 and later held every major
Cabinet post — including defense, finance and foreign affairs — and
served three brief stints as prime minister. His key role in the first
Israeli-Palestinian peace accord earned him a Nobel Peace Prize and
revered status as Israel's then most recognizable figure abroad.
And
yet, for much of his political career he could not parlay his
international prestige into success in Israeli politics, where he was
branded by many as both a utopian dreamer and political schemer. He
suffered a string of electoral defeats: competing in five general
elections seeking the prime minister's spot, he lost four and tied one.
He
finally secured the public adoration that had long eluded him when he
was chosen by parliament to a seven-year term as Israel's ceremonial
president in 2007, taking the role of elder statesman.
Peres
was celebrated by doves and vilified by hawks for advocating
far-reaching Israeli compromises for peace even before he negotiated the
first interim accord with the Palestinians in 1993 that set into motion
a partition plan that gave them limited self-rule. That was followed by
a peace accord with neighboring Jordan.
But
after a fateful six-month period in 1995-96 that included Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, a spate of Palestinian suicide
bombings and Peres' own election loss to the more conservative Benjamin
Netanyahu, the prospects for peace began to evaporate.
Relegated
to the political wilderness, he created his non-governmental Peres
Center for Peace that raised funds for cooperation and development
projects involving Israel, the Palestinians and Arab nations. He
returned to it at age 91 when he completed his term as president.
Despite
continued waves of violence that pushed the Israeli political map to
the right, the concept of a Palestinian state next to Israel became
mainstream Israeli policy many years after Peres advocated it.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/israeli-media-former-israeli-president-shimon-peres-dies-023518294.html
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