Resources for Teachers and Students on Shimon Peres

Prepare: Shimon Peres won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, sharing the award with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin. Peres' biography and the text of his Nobel lecture can be found on the Nobel website.

Read: Shimon Peres' Architects of Peace essay is excerpted from his memoir, Battling for Peace. In it he explores not only the challenges faced by the Jewish people to defend their cultural heritage, but also a vision for the peaceful development of the entire Middle East.

Explore: Shimon Peres founded the Peres Center for Peace in 1996 to pursue his vision of "a New Middle East" in which socio-economic cooperation would lead to regional cooperation rather than conflict. The center's website is viewable in English, Hebrew and Arabic. In addition to resources and information regarding the center's projects and activities, the website contains an extensive international listing of Peace Studies programs at the university level.

Write: In his Architects of Peace essay, Shimon Peres theorizes that the conflicts of the future will be over the content of civilization rather than over the territory nations occupy. Write a three-to-five page paper exploring what Peres means by "the content of civilization," investigating how such concerns could become more important than territorial concerns. Is Peres' assessment of the future of peace correct? Why or why not?

Extend: The Seeds of Peace program, geared toward empowering leaders of the next generation, has been endorsed by Shimon Peres, Kofi Annan, Mahmoud Abbas, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, George Mitchell, Colin Powell, and Queen Noor of Jordan. The organization runs international camps, leadership training programs, and a Center for Coexistence.

Additional Resource: The Harry S. Truman Center for the Advancement of World Peace, located on the Mt. Scopus campus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, supports major studies on history, politics and social development of the non-western world, with a particular focus on the Middle East. In addition to its large library and document center, the Center maintains an exhaustive website with resources and links particular to its work. The main page can be accessed in English at http://truman.huji.ac.il/.

Biography of Shimon Peres