minister, Peres helped negotiate a peace accord with Yasir Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), for which they, along with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1994.

Peres immigrated with his family to Palestine in 1934. In 1947 he joined the Haganah movement, a Zionist military organization, under the direction of David Ben–Gurion, who soon became his political mentor. When Israel achieved independence in May 1948, Prime Minister Ben–Gurion appointed Peres, then only 24 years old, head of Israel’s navy. In 1952 he was appointed deputy director–general of the Ministry of Defense, and he later served as director–general (1953–59) and deputy defense minister (1959–65), during which service he stepped up state weapons production, initiated a nuclear research program, and established overseas military alliances, most notably with France. Peres resigned in 1965 to join Ben–Gurion in founding a new party, Rafi, in opposition to the succeeding prime minister, Levi Eshkol.

In 1977 Peres became head of the Labour Party and, as such, was twice defeated (1977, 1981) by Menachem Begin of the Likud party as a candidate for prime minister before winning access to the post after the indecisive elections of 1984…

In 2003 Peres resumed the chair of the Labour Party but was unexpectedly defeated in the party’s leadership election in November 2005. A few weeks later he left the Labour Party to join the centrist party Kadima. In 2007 Peres was elected president of Israel, a largely ceremonial post. His memoir, Battling for Peace, was published in 1995.”

Encyclopaedia Britannica Online.
http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/451349/Shimon–Peres (accessed June 15, 2009)