One of the founding fathers of Israel, Shimon Peres, has died at the age of 93. For more than sixty years, Peres helped build Israel into an international power. He was Prime Minister twice and served as president of the country from 2007 to 2014. Peres is credited with creating Israel’s defense industry, and was the main force behind the development of nuclear weapons in Israel. But while he was fortifying the defense of Israel, he was also building bridges to a region often hostile to the goals of the Jewish state. Peres shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Yasser Arafat for negotiating the 1993 Oslo Accords, the deal that made way for the PLO to take power in Gaza. In an Op-Ed in the New York Times, Israel’s former foreign minister Tzipi Livni wrote that it would be difficult to imagine Israel’s past without Shimon Peres, and that it will be even harder to imagine its future now that he’s gone.
KCRW
