Shimon Peres stands alongside David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Rabin in the upper echelons of statesmen that dominated Israeli politics both before and after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Peres, the son of a Polish émigré who moved to Tel Aviv in 1932, was intimately involved in conflicts as far back as the 1956 Suez crisis but shed his early hawkish beliefs for the pursuit of peace with the Palestinians and the wider Arab world.

Reference: http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/shimon-peres-israels-last-final-founding-father-who-sought-peace-arab-world-1581345