Step by Step with Shimon Peres

With the downfall of Yitzhak Rabin and the emergence of Shimon Peres as leader of the Labor Party, Israeli citizens have been deprived of their favorite blood sport: the ferocious, nonstop struggle for power and prestige between their Premier and their Defense Minister. For the past three years virtually every Israeli domestic, foreign and military policy issue has engaged the two contestants in loud public attacks and counterattacks, which occasionally subside into sotto voce snarling and low-key muttering.

The dispute between the two men has often been more a matter of style than substance. Dour and woefully inarticulate, Rabin has frequently been outshone by Peres, 53, an elegant, personable and cultivated man of the world, whose eloquence is legendary in Israel. Though sometimes dismissed by U.S. diplomats as a lightweight, Peres is in fact a hardheaded, pragmatic and dedicated statesman. Not even his worst enemies would begrudge him credit for his critical contribution to Israel's formidable defense establishment.

Born in Poland, Peres was taken to Palestine at eleven. While still in high school, he joined the Haganah, the famed underground Jewish self-defense organization. In his early 20s, he persuaded the Histadrut youth movement to support David Ben-Gurion. The statesman soon began to groom Peres for a political career. Wearying of desk jobs in the newly established Ministry of Defense, Peres took off for a brief vacation in the U.S. in 1950. He learned English in three months and took advanced courses in philosophy and economics at New York City's New School for Social Research, New York University and Harvard.

When Peres, at 29, returned to Israel in 1952, Premier Ben-Gurion appointed him to top posts in the Defense Ministry. For the next 13 years, he played the key role in organizing the Israeli Defense Forces, developed the nation's arms industry and nuclear-research program. He traveled abroad constantly to purchase arms and conduct delicate military negotiations. Peres quickly acquired a reputation as a canny, effective and realistic bargainer. His great coup came in 1955, when he brought off the Franco-Israeli military alliance, involving more than $1 billion in arms purchases from France that made possible the Israeli victories in 1956 and 1967.

Later elected to the Knesset under Ben-Gurion's patronage, Peres built a political power base that reinforced his strong position among the military. Still, in 1965 he made enemies by joining Ben-Gurion in a group opposing the government of then Premier Levi Eshkol. Not until 1968 was Peres' faction reintegrated into the Labor Party. Subsequently Peres began broadening his expertise. He held such diverse jobs as Minister for Economic Development of Occupied Territories, Immigration, Transport and Communications and Information. When he lost a close race to Rabin for the premiership in 1974, Peres accepted the post of Defense Minister in his rival's Cabinet.

Indefatigable, Peres nowadays begins touring military installations at dawn and frequently works until midnight. Despite his heavy work load, he finds time to write poetry, which he keeps to himself, and has published two books, including David's Sling, an autobiographical account of his role in building Israel's defenses. At home in his small, book-lined apartment in Tel Aviv, where he lives with his wife Sonia and two of his three children, he speaks mainly of literature; his tastes range from Norman Mailer to Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Yukio Mishima.

Though widely regarded as a hawk, Peres in his recent pronouncements takes an increasingly moderate, statesmanlike approach toward Israel's relations with both enemies and allies. He favors a step-by-step approach to peace in the Middle East. If elected Premier, he is expected to go along with President Carter's proposal to reconvene the Geneva talks this year. He would certainly be more ingenious and inventive than the stolid Rabin. Like Rabin, however, he will be intransigent on questions dealing with the Palestine Liberation Organization. To a suggestion that the P.L.O. be granted recognition by Israel, Peres replied: "Stroking a tiger will not make it a pussycat."

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