Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize, will present a talk titled "What Risks Must a Nation Take for Peace?" on Tuesday, Feb. 11, at 4 p.m. in Battell Chapel, corner of College and Elm streets. The talk is free and open to the public.
Mr. Peres' visit to campus is jointly sponsored by the Chubb Fellowship of Timothy Dwight College and the David and Goldie Blanksteen Lectureship in Jewish Ethics of Yale Hillel.
Born in Poland (now Belarus) in 1923, Mr. Peres came to Palestine with his family in 1934. In 1947 he joined the Haganah, a Zionist military organization under the direction of David Ben-Gurion, who became his political mentor. When Israel achieved independence in 1948, Mr. Ben-Gurion became the state's first prime minister and appointed Mr. Peres, then only 25 years old, head of Israel's navy. In the 1950s, Mr. Peres was elected to the Knesset and named director general of the Ministry of Defense. He has been a prominent figure in Israeli politics ever since.
In 1968 he helped found the Labor Party. In the 1970s, as Israel's minister of defense serving under Yitzhak Rabin, he engineered the raid against Palestine Liberation Organization terrorists who were holding 100 hostages captive at the Entebbe airport in Uganda. In the 1980s, he shared leadership of the country in a Labor-Likud coalition with Yitzhak Shamir. As prime minister, Mr. Peres brought the Israeli economy back from near collapse and withdrew Israeli forces from their controversial incursion into Lebanon.
In 1992 he lost his party's leadership to Mr. Rabin, who became prime minister and appointed Mr. Peres to the cabinet as foreign minister. Mr. Peres played a key role in the secret negotiations that led to the signing of a peace agreement in September of 1993 between Israel and the PLO. For their efforts, Mr. Peres, Mr. Rabin, and Palestinian leader Yasir Arafat were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in October of 1994. Following the assassination of Rabin in November 1995, Mr. Peres became prime minister. In a close election last May, he was unseated by Benjamin Netanyahu, head of the Likud Party. In his recently released autobiography, "Battling for Peace," Mr. Peres describes his evolution from youth movement leader to prime minister. He tells about bitter quarrels with Golda Meir and Mr. Rabin, and of his admiration for Mr. Ben-Gurion, Moshe Dayan, and Francois Mitterand.
The Chubb Fellowship Program was established in 1936 through the generosity of Hendon Chubb (Yale 1895). Based at Timothy Dwight College, the Chubb Program encourages and assists students interested in government and public service.
The Lectureship in Jewish Ethics was established by David and Goldie Blanksteen to provide members of the Yale community the opportunity to engage in discussion of the critical ethical questions of the moment with leading contemporary thinkers and activists. Deeply committed to Judaism and to education, the Blanksteens were founding donors of the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.