Battling for Peace:: A Memoir

In this hopeful autobiographical memoir, Israel's current foreign minister discusses his behind-the-scenes negotiations that helped cement the 1993 Israeli-Palestinian accord, for which he won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994. Born in 1923 in Poland, Peres followed his family to Palestine in the 1930s after his father, a lumber merchant, was forced out of business by punitive tax assessments. He writes about his formative years on a kibbutz and his role as head of arms procurement for the new Israeli army, providing a firsthand account of the birth of Israel. Peres, defense minister in the 1970s and later Israel's prime minister, uses diary excerpts to recreate his orchestration of Israel's rescue of passengers on a French plane hijacked by PLO terrorists and flown to Entebbe, Uganda, in 1976. He also settles scores with political rivals Golda Meir and Yitzhak Rabin (in whose government he currently serves) and reveals that in 1987 he held secret talks with King Hussein of Jordan in London to launch a peace conference without the PLO--an aborted plan whose failure he blames on U.S. Secretary of State George Shultz. Photos not seen by PW. Author tour. (May)