Shimon Peres, in Memoir, Takes on Israel Past and Future<br />Mr. Peres completed work on the book in his final weeks, Chemi Peres said, using it as "his last voice"<br />and as "a call to dream, to dare, to be optimistic, to transition ourselves into a new era." Mr. Peres sat and recorded the memoir in English to reach as wide an audience as possible, in the hope, his son said, of inspiring future leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs.<br />that It<br />that He knew that there is a certain amount of time he was given on earth,<br />So Mr. Peres, a protégé of David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, describes his exploits procuring weapons for the 1948 war over Israel’s creation, and says the distance between their offices was, for a time, "only the width of a thin piece of plywood."<br />But he makes no mention of the Palestinians who became refugees, or of the traumatic chapter of the Altalena, the ship organized by Mr. Ben-Gurion’s right-wing rivals to bring fighters and weapons to Israel.<br />In the final chapter Mr. Peres describes the assassination of Prime Yitzhak Rabin, an old rival<br />who once described Mr. Peres as an "indefatigable schemer" for his political manipulations.<br />In the early 1960s, in Washington on a mission to buy weapons from the United States government — this time legally — Mr. Peres was unexpectedly<br />invited to meet President John F. Kennedy, who put him on the spot, inquiring about Israeli intentions regarding nuclear weapons.<br />7, 2017<br />JAFFA, Israel — The ousted French prime minister had just signed the letter authorizing the sale of a nuclear reactor<br />to Israel — for peaceful purposes, he had been assured — even though he no longer had the authority to do so.
