Shimon Peres dies at 93

Longtime Israeli leader Shimon Peres died in a Tel Aviv hospital Wednesday, two weeks after suffering a debilitating stroke. He was 93.

The death, which fell the last figure from Israel’s founding political generation, was confirmed by the nation’s official Israel Press Agency.

Mr. Peres was the longtime leader of Israel’s former Labor Party, had served in numerous Cabinet posts, was twice the country’s prime minister, and late in life served as the Jewish state’s ceremonial president.

“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,” President Obama said in a statement issued late Tuesday night.

He won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for the Oslo peace accords which held out, for a few years anyway, the prospect of a permanent settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian dispute.

The unraveling of the Oslo accords, from Palestinian violence over the failure to resolve final issues such as Jerusalem and the right of return, deeply disillusioned Mr. Peres. He left partisan politics in 2007 after close to 60 years as one of Israel’s top politicians.

But he went on to win election to a seven-year term as president in 2007, a post traditionally held by elder statesmen, beyond politics, signifying a change in his status.

“In his people’s eyes, he ceased to be a politician. He became a historic figure, larger than politics, larger than everyday affairs, a figure in a league of his own,” Yediot Ahronot columnist Nahum Barnea wrote after Mr. Peres was hospitalized and near death.

Like most other Israelis of his generation, Mr. Peres was not born in Israel, but in Europe — in 1923, as Szymon Perski in Wiszniew, Poland, which itself is now Vishnyeva, Belarus. His family left for Palestine in 1932 when it was a British-administered territory and Zionism a minority position among European Jews.

Even before Israel’s 1948 founding, he was in charge of personnel and arms purchases for Haganah, a paramilitary group that became the Israeli Defense Forces.

A protege of David Ben-Gurion, generally regarded as Israel’s George Washington, his hawkish career continued through the 1950s that included plotting an act of war. He was sent as an emissary to France to help plan the 1956 Suez invasion and later helped Israel negotiate French military purchases and set up its secret nuclear program.

But as the decades wore on, he became more dovish, and his first strong runs for prime minister came from the left, against the newly ascendant Likud coalition of Menachem Begin.

He served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 and from 1995 to 1996, the first time as the head of a unity government alternating with Likud, and then the second time in the wake of the Rabin assassination.

Mr. Peres moved from being an advocate of Israeli settlements in occupied territories to a critic who helped oversee their dismantling. He once said the Palestinians were Israel’s “closest neighbors” and could become its “closest friends.”

Upon being elected president, he resigned from the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, having been a member from November 1959 to June 2007, the longest serving in Israeli political history.

His late-in-life honors including the Congressional Gold Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II.

Mr. Peres and his wife, Sonya, who died in 2011, had three children.