Remembering Shimon Peres and his hopes for a ‘new’ Middle East

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• JUDY WOODRUFF:

  One of Israel's founding fathers died last night. Shimon Peres was present at the country's very beginning, and served in just about every high-level office in the Jewish state.

  William Brangham has this remembrance.

  We invite Shimon Peres to come up.

• MAN:

  Shimon Peres to come to the rostrum to receive the gold medal.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  It was a moment of great promise, Shimon Peres, then the Israeli foreign minister, accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

  Peres had helped negotiate the so-called Oslo Accords. And, accepting the award, he spoke of his hopes for a new Middle East.

• SHIMON PERES, Israeli Foreign Minister:

  A Middle East without wars, without enemies, without ballistic missiles, without nuclear warheads.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Born in present-day Belarus, Shimon Peres was a boy when his family emigrated to Tel Aviv in 1934. He joined the Jewish resistance in the 1948 war of independence, and became a protege of David Ben-Gurion, Israel's very first prime minister.

  He went on to hold numerous top defense jobs, helping build the Jewish state's military and its top-secret nuclear weapons program. With Ben-Gurion's backing, Peres won a seat in the Israeli Parliament in 1959, launching a political career that extended for over five decades.

  As defense minister under prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, he oversaw the dramatic 1976 rescue of Israeli hostages at Entebbe Airport in Uganda. Peres himself went on to serve as prime minister, first in 1977, and again as part of a unity government in 1984.

  He took a conciliatory stance toward the Palestinians, and later, with Rabin back in power, he conducted the Oslo negotiations in secret. The resulting deal, signed in 1993 in Washington, aimed at establishing mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestinians and setting them on a path toward peace.

• SHIMON PERES:

  From this green, promising lawn of the White House, let's say together in the language of our Bible, peace, peace to him that is far off, and to him that is near.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Just two years later, Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist, and Peres again became acting prime minister for a time.

  But amid renewed confrontation with the Palestinians, a harder-line Israeli government took power, led by Benjamin Netanyahu. The conflict soon deepened, and the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising, erupted.

  In early 2002, as the fighting began to peak, Peres, who was again serving as foreign minister, sat for an interview with the "NewsHour."

• SHIMON PERES:

  It's very hard upon us, and even our eyes are full of tears. But the Palestinians are killing their political existence.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Still, Peres continued advocating for peace after his 2007 election as president, which, in Israel, is a largely ceremonial role.

  Shimon Peres left Israeli politics for good in 2014. In recent weeks, he suffered a stroke that finally took his life.

  Prime Minister Netanyahu reflected today on their long, sometimes contentious relationship.

• BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, Prime Minister, Israel (through translator):

  We had disagreements, but, even in those cases, the respect I had for Shimon was never affected in any way.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called Peres a partner, one who strived to find a just peace.

  Shimon Peres was 93 years old.

  Joining me now to help us understand more about Peres' life and the legacy is a man who knew him well, journalist and New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

  Welcome.

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN, The New York Times:

  Thank you.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  You knew the man. You traveled with him. He was your friend. Tell us a little bit about the man you knew.

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  Well, I think the thing that stands out about Peres most from other Middle East leaders who I have covered over the years is that, at the end of his days, as he grew older, he could stand in another man's shoes, another woman's shoes.

  That's very unusual in the Middle East. The iron rule of Middle East politics, William, is, I'm weak, how can I compromise? I'm strong, why should I compromise?

  Rarely do you get a leader who actually said, maybe we could actually find a middle ground. And as he grew older as a statesman, Peres was that person.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Help me understand what, to my mind, seems something of a contradiction.

  This is a man who spent the early part of his life building Israel military, its weapons programs, its settlements, its defenses, and then spends the last half of his life trying to promote peace and, in essence, not have to use those weapons.

  Is that a contradiction, or is that just progression?

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  Well, I think he came to realize that, in that part of the world, it's so easy to keep letting the past bury the future.

  And I think, after doing that for enough years — he was really in politics, you know, for 70 years of his life. He saw the military solution on both sides fail and fail and fail. He decided to see if he could get the future to bury the past.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  We saw Netanyahu and Abbas both speak very movingly of him after he died.

  But the bitter truth is that we are a very, very long way from a two-state solution or any peace process. From the Palestinian point of view, what does his legacy look like to them?

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  Well, from the Palestinian point of view, Peres was a defense minister. He helped Israel win the 48 war. He helped as a young man. But then, in '56, he was actually part of the British-French takeover of the Sinai.

  He was one of the, frankly, promoters early of the settlement movement in the West Bank, and lost control of it, and eventually turned against it. He wasn't a dove, from the Palestinian point of view.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Given all of that, given that he sort of created the germ that, in essence, is the irritant of the peace process now, how did he reconcile that later in his life?

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  Well, he was a believer in the right of the Jewish people to stay in their ancestral homeland.

  He wasn't a dove in that sense. But he also understood that the Jews would never be at home, never be able to take their shoes off unless Palestinians could as well in a two-state solution that would grant them a state as well.

  So, that's where he was at the end of his life. You know, he spent the early part of his life building walls and really believed that they were essential to protect and defend the enterprise of the Jewish state.

  But, at the end, I think he came to realize that it was only webs, only an integration of Israel into the region that was going to ultimately make it secure.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  Given that he was one of the founding fathers really of — for the first century of Israel's existence, he was there. Where does he fit, and where does his legacy fit into Israel today?

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  Well, you know, there was something about Peres and his generation. There was something big about all those people, and, on the Palestinian side, Arafat as well.

  And what you feel today, William, is that there is just nobody that big anymore, and, because there is nobody that big anymore, very hard for anyone to make big compromises. We're in the age of incremental movement, at best.

  But the titans that started this conflict, that pursued it, that fought each other all those years, they have now all passed from the scene. And, therefore, we're kind of missing anyone who could really call it quits.

• WILLIAM BRANGHAM:

  All right, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, thank you so much.

• THOMAS FRIEDMAN:

  My pleasure.