Shimon Peres, Israel's defense and peace leader, dies after stroke

Shimon Peres, Israel's most senior statesman who fought in the country's war of independence, died Wednesday, two weeks after he had a major stroke. He was 93.

Peres spent his final days fighting for his life in a Tel Aviv hospital after suffering the stroke Sept. 13. Doctors said Peres had severe organ failure Tuesday, as well as irreversible brain damage, as a result of the massive hemorrhagic stroke, the JerusalemPost reported.

His son, Chemi Peres, said, "He was one of the founding fathers of the state of Israel and served our people before we even had a country. He worked tirelessly for Israel from the very first day of the state to the last day of his life."

The former soldier turned politician who initiated the country's nuclear program, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994 for his role in crafting the Oslo Accords, an agreement that called for a Palestinian state at peace with Israel.

In a statement from the White House, President Obama described Peres as a friend and a leader who changed the course of history.

"Shimon was the essence of Israel itself — the courage of Israel’s fight for independence, the optimism he shared with his wife Sonya as they helped make the desert bloom, and the perseverance that led him to serve his nation in virtually every position in government across the entire life of the State of Israel," Obama said in the statement.

Over a 55-year political career, Peres' roles included prime minister (three terms), foreign minister, finance minister and deputy defense minister. He served as president, a largely ceremonial role, from 2007 to 2014. He played a major role in developing Israel's defense and security industry, which now supplies the U.S. military and other armed forces around the world with cutting-edge technology and innovations such as missile defense, cyber security and drones.

In his later years, Peres was a champion of economic and cultural exchange between Israelis and Palestinians. He also founded the Peres Center for Peace in 1996 to promote coexistence between Arabs and Jews in Israel.

Former U.S. president George H.W. Bush said in a statement: "Barbara and I join Shimon Peres' countless admirers around the world in saluting his singular life of service — to the universal cause of freedom, to the timeless cause of Israel, to the noblest cause of peace. By his unyielding determination and principle, Shimon Peres time and again helped guide his beloved country through the crucible of mortal challenge."

Born Shimon Perski in 1923 in a Polish town now known as Valozhyn in Belarus, Peres immigrated to Palestine in 1934 with his family. He joined the Haganah Jewish underground in 1947. He was a protégé of David Ben-Gurion, who later became Israel's first prime minister and named Peres at age 24 to head Israel's navy.

As deputy defense minister from 1959 to 1965 of a country surrounded by enemies sworn to destroy it, Peres expanded Israel's state-owned weapons industry.

He was appointed director-general of Israel's Ministry of Defense at the age of 29, according to his biography at the Peres Center. During that time, Peres also helped negotiate military agreements with France, the United Kingdom and Germany, which helped arm Israel's military and its vaunted air force. He also started a secret nuclear research program, with nuclear reactors in Dimona and Sorek, that would later develop what proliferation experts believe is the region's only nuclear arsenal.

The nuclear reactors and the program they represent remain "central to the defense and deterrence capabilities of Israel to this day," according to the Peres Center.

While Peres helped build the industrial foundation of Israel's defense, he was also a peacemaker, which gained him international accolades and some notoriety at home.

As defense minister in 1974, Peres negotiated an interim agreement with Egypt over the Sinai Peninsula, which Israel seized in 1967 and Egypt sought unsuccessfully to retake in 1973. The two countries signed a peace treaty in 1979 that returned the Sinai to Egypt.

Peres also held secret meetings with Jordan's King Hussein that led to the signing of a peace treaty in 1994 between Israel and Jordan under the government of Yitzhak Rabin.

As prime minister, from 1984 to 1986, Peres worked to free thousands of Jews and dissidents from the Soviet Union before its collapse, and oversaw "Operation Moses," which airlifted 8,000 African Jews from war-torn Ethiopia to safety in Israel.

Despite his Nobel Prize, the failure of the Oslo Accords to achieve a lasting peace with the Palestinians has tarnished Peres' legacy in the eyes of some Israelis.

The Oslo agreement, between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, legitimized a terrorist organization whose leaders were in exile in Tunisia rather than elevating local Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza who were more interested in the practical benefits of peace, said Efriam Karsh, a professor of political studies at Bar Ilan University in Jerusalem.

As foreign minister, Peres helped talk then Prime Minister Rabin into "surrendering the West Bankers and Gazans to an unreconstructed terror organization," Karsh said.

Contributing: Jessica Durando