These are important, poignant and scarring events, for Peres as well as for the nation. To avoid them is a kind of cheating. Especially in The Biography.
The book's virtues are considerable for those interested in Peres and the early days of Israel. There are wonderful vignettes about his relationships with outsize, founding personalities: his awe of Ben-Gurion, his unrequited love for Moshe Dayan, his sour exchanges with Golda Meir (when told that Peres was a very gifted man, she responded, "So was Al Capone!"), and his nasty rivalry with Rabin, who saw him as a schemer and detested his insincerity and self-absorption.
But in general Bar-Zohar is coy with his criticism of Peres. For example, Peres played an important role, in the mid-1970s, in getting government support for Jewish settlement in the occupied territories. To some degree, Bar-Zohar suggests, Peres just wanted to be liked by those he considered "the new Zionists" of the Gush Emunim settler movement.
For a colder and more objective look at his involvement, see Gershom Gorenberg's Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, just out in paperback.
It's telling that the most incisive passages about Peres in this book come from the novelist Amos Oz. Oz, who is probably closer to Peres than Bar-Zohar, is nonetheless better able to achieve critical distance.
It is Oz who best articulates the combination of childishness, optimism, curiosity and lust for power that has defined Peres.
"I know two kinds of adults," Oz tells Bar-Zohar. "One carries inside himself the dead child that he once was. The other is a very rare kind of adult, who carries inside himself a living child — curious, thirsty for love, thirsty for knowledge. This is Shimon."
I once asked Peres why he didn't retire. "How can I retire?" he asked, then said with a kind of charming self-knowledge: "I'm a narcissist!"
Given his fluency, optimism, renown and experience, let alone his age, Peres would seem to be a perfect candidate for Israel's essentially powerless and symbolic presidency. That he may yet be denied it seems to say more about the country's petty politics than about Peres.
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