“Shimon Peres is feeling well.”
For several generations of Israelis, life is unimaginable without Shimon Peres. The equanimous, ubiquitous Peres, born Szymon Perski, in Poland in 1923, has been the face of Israel since before there was a state.
In 1944, four years before Israel’s Declaration of Independence, Peres was already leading illegal scouting expeditions into the Negev desert on behalf of the soon-to-be first prime minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion.
For Israelis, he has a Mount Rushmore-like presence, reassuring, occasionally mocked and all too often taken for granted.
The extent of the nation’s reliance on him became evident after the news on Thursday morning that Peres, 92, had been “rushed to the hospital.”
Before his top aide, Ayelet Frisch, managed even to answer her phone, Israeli media WhatsApp groups buzzed with dire reports of the ostensible breakdown of Peres’ famously healthy constitution.
Eventually, Frisch sent out a brief advisory announcing, in total, that “Peres was taken to Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer with chest pains. He underwent angioplasty in his heart after a narrowed coronary artery was found. The artery was expanded during the procedure. He is feeling well.”
From that moment on, in defiance of the fact that a 92-year-old gentleman suffering chest pains should not come as a shock to anyone, Israelis began and ended their news flashes with the line “Shimon Peres is feeling well.”
He has outlived everybody: Ben Gurion, who was known as Israel’s “old man,” his longtime comrade in arms Moshe Dayan, with whom he attended the 1946 Zionist Congress in Basel, his political nemesis Ariel Sharon, his ideological opponent Menachem Begin, even his lifelong Labor Party partner and ‘frenemy’, Yitzhak Rabin, whom he famously eulogized with the surprisingly tender “Goodbye, big brother.”
His wife, Sonia Peres, died in 2011.
Peres has even outlived the man tasked with chronicling his life, his biographer, the Anglo-British journalist David Landau, who died last year at the age of 67.
Peres is perhaps the last witness to the trials and tribulations of the State of Israel, and, in his 10th decade, possibly its greatest, most incorrigible champion.
The director of the Sheba Medical Center’s Heart Institute, Prof. Michael Eldar, was dragooned into participating in a normally lighthearted pre-weekend midday news show.
Anchor Sefi Ovadia: “He has a very youthful arterial system compared to his biological age, right? Looking good—like a man in his forties? ”
Prof. Eldar, in a reassuring baritone: “Yes. If it depends on his arterial system, he may have many years ahead of him.”
Peres, who woke this morning with what his son-in-law and personal physician, Prof. Rafi Walden, described as “some chest pain, not in a great degree of severity,” was found to have suffered a mild heart attack, and underwent angioplasty. He never lost consciousness.
Switching to the next segment of the midday news show, Yoaz Hendel, the second anchor, said only semi-jokingly, “and now to another historical monument, not Shimon Peres: the Temple Mount.”
Walden said Peres’ only complaint was that his staff at the Peres Center for Peace, his post-presidential foundation, had cancelled his plans for the rest of the day, which included a visit to the Sorek River, one of the most important water sources in the Judean Hills.
Peres left the presidency in July, 2014, after two successful tenures as Israel’s largely ceremonial head of state, a job he single-handedly turned into an international platform.
His son, Chemi, a well-known businessman, reported from the hospital that his father “is in excellent shape.”
“It was a mild attack, it was treated quickly, and his heart is strong,” the son said.
Peres’ daughter, Zvia Walden, was unamused by the nation-wide heart attack her father’s cardiac episode provoked in the Israeli media. “They listen to the calls for ambulances and the minute they hear an address they know they follow them. It’s an unnecessary invasion of privacy,” she complained on Israel Army Radio.
Speaking to The Media Line, Ayelet Frisch, Peres’ aide, said “he feels fine. He’s feeling good. He’s resting in bed on doctor’s orders, and he’s reading a wonderful book, Stalin’s Daughter”.
Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Peres’ successor, President Reuven Rivlin, spoke with Peres by phone. Rivlin relayed that Peres “first asked me how I was.”
Shimon Sheves, who served as Prime Minister Rabin’s Chief of Staff while Peres was defense minister during the crucial years of the Olso peace process, said “There’s a good reason the entire country jumped today.”
“He’s the last one left from the generation of Israel’s founders. He’s the last witness to the entire reason for the existence of the state. He’s been hugely dominant. He served in almost every leadership job, president, prime minister, defense minister, communications minister, transport minister, director general of the defense ministry,” Sheves intoned, speaking with The Media Line.
“He’s a man who worked hard at everything. It wasn’t obvious that’d he’d be loved as president. For most of his career he was one of the most contentious people in Israeli public life. For much of his career he was considered unelectable… But in the end, voted in as president well into his eighties, he became the man Israel needed to be its public face.”
“Having Shimon Peres as president was a privilege for the entire State of Israel,” Sheves added, “for his followers and for his detractors alike.”
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