Everybody following events in the Middle East will have heard of Shimon Peres, one of the most prominent men in the region. At the age of eleven, he had arrived in 1934 from his native Poland, in time to live through the years of crisis and violence while British Mandated Palestine was evolving into Israel. Along with Yitzhak Rabin and Moshe Dayan, he was one of the clever and personable young men — colleagues and rivals all — to catch the eye of David Ben-Gurion, the new state’s founding father and first Prime Minister. Israel needed armaments, and it fell to Peres to obtain them. In Paris in 1956, he colluded with the French over the Suez campaign jointly fought against the Egypt of Gamal Abdul Nasser, and then got them to build the Israeli nuclear reactor at Dimona. This is his claim to fame. Israel’s possession of the nuclear bomb has never been confirmed but rightly or wrongly Peres has always been credited with its development.

A member of the Knesset almost throughout his long life, Peres suffered from the vagaries of Israeli politics. Although he never actually won an election, he held all the high offices. Joint prime minister with Yitzhak Rabin, he put pressure on him to sign the Oslo Treaty. This won him his moment on the White House lawn with Yasser Arafat and the award of the Nobel Prize, but it split his own party and handed government to the opposition under Menachem Begin and Ariel Sharon. Peres found himself maneuvering into the position of a peacenik, reversing his former policy of armament into disarmament. He thought he detected the self-same switch in the Arab world, and in a book with the title The New Middle East he forecast that in the future tourists would be more important in the region than tanks. In his final position as president of Israel, he seemed determined to go down in history as an intellectual who could hold his own with any scholar. The praise that most Israelis heaped on him for his lengthy public career in the end was tempered with a shrug and a smile. Unexpectedly perhaps, the glamorous film star Lauren Bacall was his cousin. At his death he was 93. R.I.P.