(29 Sep 2016) On September 27th the Former Israeli President Shimon Peres died aged 93, two weeks after suffering major stroke, Israeli media reported.
Peres, , who led a sceptical Israel into peace talks with the Palestinians in the mid-1990s, was celebrated as a Nobel prize-winning visionary abroad but was unloved in his own country until his final years as the nation's ceremonial president.
Israel's ninth president was rushed to the hospital in Ramat Gan earlier this month after suffering a stroke.
Despite his many achievements - Peres created Israel's nuclear deterrent, disentangled troops from Lebanon, rescued the economy from triple digit inflation - Peres was unable to rally broad electoral support.
His only election victory came when he was chosen as president by the parliament, taking office on July 15th 2007.
Peres has spent his political career consistently several political steps ahead of his colleagues in the dovish camp - and vilified by hawks.
He has advocated far-reaching Israeli compromises for peace with the Palestinians long before the first interim accord in 1993.
Along with questionable internal political moves that tarnished his image, his long-range vision has cost him political support.
He competed in five general elections, losing four and tying one, in 1984, when he became prime minister for two years before trading places with his rival Yitzhak Shamir.
In November 1995, he took office again after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin, and served until May 1996, when he was defeated by hard-liner Benjamin Netanyahu.
It was as Rabin's foreign minister that Peres achieved the goal he said was most important to him.
Peres helped engineer a mutual recognition agreement between Israel and the PLO in September 1993, an accord that ended the six-year Palestinian uprising against Israeli occupation and paved the way for a gradual Israeli troop pullback from parts of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
On December 10th 1994, Peres returned to Oslo, Norway, the site of the secret Israel-Palestinian negotiations that led to the agreement, to receive a Nobel Peace Prize, along with Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
Accepting the award, he told assembled dignitaries that "war, as a method of conducting human affairs, is in its death throes, and the time has come to bury it."
The low point of his political career came in 1990, when he led his party out of a unity government with Yitzhak Shamir's hardline Likud, on the strength of promises from small factions to support his bid to replace Shamir.
At the last minute, several members of parliament changed their minds, approving a Shamir government without Peres and his Labor Party.
The incident became known in Israeli political lore as Peres' "stinking manoeuvre." Rabin scorned him as a "relentless meddler," and in 1992 replaced him as party leader.
Peres was born in 1923 in Vishneva, then part of Poland. He moved to pre-state Palestine in 1934 with his family.
Rising quickly through Labor Party ranks, he became a top aide to David Ben-Gurion, Israel's first prime minister. Peres once called Ben-Gurion "the greatest Jew of our time."
Peres said he was amazed that Ben-Gurion worked with him. "I started to work with Ben-Gurion when I was a 24 year-old boy. I don't know why Ben-Gurion took me, because I have all the weaknesses," he said. "For example, I didn't know a word of English until the age of 26. I couldn't speak a word."
At 29, he was the youngest person ever to serve as director of Israel's Defence Ministry, and is credited with arming Israel's military almost from scratch.
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