Peres Joins Forces With Sharon

Shimon Peres Quits Israel Labor Party To Campaign For Ariel Sharon

(CBS/AP) 
Yossi Beilin, a former Peres ally who now leads the dovish Yahad Party, said Sharon has never given Peres much authority in past alliances and he doubted Sharon was interested in pursuing a real peace deal with the Palestinians.

"In my view, joining Sharon for the peace camp, for anybody from the peace camp, is a big, big, big mistake," he said.

Peres has been a major figure in Israel since the country's creation in 1948, when he was a young aide to founding Prime Minister David Ben Gurion. He helped create the framework for the Israeli army, developed Israel's nuclear capacity in the 1950s and was a key player in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in the 1990s.

"He's been in politics ever since Truman threw the bomb on Hiroshima," Ben-Ami told The Associated Press.

Peres is feted abroad as a statesman, and shared the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

But at home, he is renowned for his multiple electoral defeats. He served three brief stints as prime minister, twice replacing Rabin and once as part of a rotation agreement with a hard-line rival after a deadlocked election.

He also lost a parliamentary vote for the country's ceremonial presidency, an office that would have given him a dignified exit from politics.

In another shocking defeat, this month Peres lost the Labor Party primary to union leader Amir Peretz, who immediately began working to rejuvenate the party, recruiting academics, a prominent journalist and a reclusive millionaire to join its parliamentary slate. Peretz's moves appear to be working, according to a series of favorable polls.

Peres was insulted when Peretz refused to guarantee him the second slot on Labor's parliamentary list. After Sharon quit Likud last week and formed the Kadima, Peres began talks to leave Labor.

The defection could damage the party by persuading older Labor supporters of European origin, already wary of Peretz's Middle Eastern ethnicity and his union roots, to vote for Sharon, Ben-Ami said.

Peres has jumped ship before. In 2000, rebuffed by then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak in his attempt to recapture the Labor Party nomination, Peres approached the dovish Meretz Party and offered to run as its candidate. Meretz refused. And in 1965, Peres briefly followed Ben Gurion into a new party called Rafi, which was later folded into Labor.