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Shimon Peres, Israeli Statesman and Nobel Peace Prize Winner, Dies at 93
(Washington Post) Robin Shulman - Shimon Peres, an Israeli statesman who helped build his country into a regional military power, shared a Nobel Peace Prize for laying out a short-lived framework for peace with the Palestinians and more recently defended Israel's military actions in Gaza and Lebanon, died Wednesday in Tel Aviv at 93. Peres held nearly every high office and his influence spanned 10 U.S. presidencies. As director general of the Defense Ministry in the 1950s, Peres negotiated with Germany for arms, cultivated a secret alliance with France, fathered Israel's aircraft industry and made his country a nuclear power by building a reactor in the Negev desert. In 1993, Peres and Rabin sealed peace accords with Arafat on the White House lawn under the gaze of President Bill Clinton. Peres was born Shimon Persky on Aug. 2, 1923, in Vishneva, in what was then Poland and is now Belarus. He attended a Zionist school that advocated the return of Jews to the biblical land of Israel - then under British rule - and his family immigrated to Palestine in 1934. In 1947 he joined the Haganah, a Jewish militia, and was assigned responsibility for manpower and arms. Peres lived a life like that of his country, struggling to find a balance between security and peace.