Daring to dream

Peres always asks asks what to do and not what to be

By GREER FAY CAHSMAN
Shimon Peres 521 (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SALEM)
Shimon Peres 521
(photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SALEM)
No Israeli leader personifies the nation’s history more than Shimon Peres, Israel’s ninth president, who was already an adult and a promising young star in the political firmament when the State of Israel came into being.
No one has held more ministerial portfolios than Peres, and no one has bounced back with as much vigor after a string of failures – including his first bid for the presidency and previous campaigns for prime minister and leadership of the Labor Party.
But he has also had many triumphs, not the least of which are the founding of Israel Aircraft Industries, which developed into Israel Aerospace Industries; the conception of Israel’s nuclear program; the cultivation of France as the prime supplier of planes, boats and armaments to Israel; the facilitating, in his capacity as defense minister, of the Entebbe rescue mission in 1976; and later as finance minister, the mega whittling of inflation which had risen to more than 400 percent.
Peres said many times that he much preferred being president to being a politician. When he was a politician and he asked for something, the response was almost always negative. When he asks for something as president, “everyone rushes to volunteer. No one refuses,” he says.
Peres – when asked how he maintains his eternal optimism – replied that perhaps it was because he was able to achieve what he did against all odds. Many of the proposals he made were rejected by others as not do-able. But he nonetheless got things done, because he remained true to his dreams.
He had no experience in diplomacy when he started wooing France early in his career, and yet he succeeded in getting the French government to go out of its way in providing Israel with military support.
Peres had neither experience nor training as an economist, and yet he took Israel out of an extreme inflationary era. He had no background in engineering, and when he suggested that tiny Israel build a nuclear reactor, everyone jeered and told him that he didn’t know what he was talking about.
With hindsight, the president can see that he was right on these and many other counts, “so why shouldn’t I be an optimist?” he asks. “Optimists may be wrong, but so are pessimists. There’s no life without mistakes.” He was fortunate, he says, in that he had been given extraordinary opportunities by founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion, who to this day remains his mentor.
Like Peres, Ben-Gurion had no experience in economics, and basically relied on his gut feelings. Peres could come to him with a project and Ben- Gurion, who wasn’t enamored of that particular idea, would ask how much it cost, and Peres would say $1 million. To which Ben-Gurion would reply, “That’s a lot of money,” and that would be the end of the proposed project. A few days later, Peres would come with another project and Ben-Gurion, who approved of the new idea, would ask how much it would cost and Peres would reply “$50 million,” to which Ben-Gurion’s response was, “Oh, that’s nothing.” This was how Peres learned economics.
There were many things he learned from Ben-Gurion, but the most important lessons, he says, were never to lie and always to be daring, even if you make mistakes.
Another lesson he learned was that all experts “are experts for what did happen, not for what may happen.”
Peres still has more than a year in which to complete his seven-year term of office. Unless the law is amended to enable him to continue, it will be the first time in decades that he will find himself without a title – although conceivably he would instantly be named president of the Peres Peace Center, with which he has an abiding relationship.
Peres is not concerned about losing a title. “All my life, the problem has not been about what to be, but what to do.”
Although his leadership qualities had already surfaced when he was a teenager, he had no political aspirations at the time, and might never have developed them had Ben- Gurion not decided to take him under his wing. Peres had dreamt of being a kibbutznik and cultivating the land with his own hands. He was not interested in money or comforts, but in noble ideals that also embraced literature.
As an adolescent, Peres was sent by Hanoar Ha’oved (founded in 1924, now known as Hanoar Ha’oved Vehalomed, working and studying youth) to the Ben-Shemen Agricultural Youth Village, which he describes as a “republic of young people aged 15- 16.” He worked in the fields and the stables, wrote poetry in his spare time, and also played a role in the running of the republic. This may well have been his internship for later life.
Peres wasn’t the most disciplined of students and tended to cut classes in chemistry and physics, because these were subjects he didn’t like – though today he is one of Israel’s leading advocates for science and technology. The subjects that interested him as a youth were history, poetry, and social affairs.
Whether or not he has a title after July 2014 is immaterial to him.
Peres will just continue to do what he believes will help make Israel a greater nation than it already is. Many people who have won elections haven’t achieved much afterwards, he observes. “I lost elections, but never lost my dreams.
Most of them were realized. Most of what I did was not because of a title, but because of a dream.”
Peres, who has lived through wars, political battles, and personal defeats, has absolutely no intention of retiring from public life when he turns 91 – soon after the end of his tenure.
“I like difficult things,” he says.
“I don’t like vacations and I don’t like to be pampered. It’s boring. I prefer challenges that make life interesting. There is no important thing that you can achieve easily.”