Shimon Peres

When you have two alternatives, the first thing you have to do is to look for the third that you didn’t think about, that doesn’t exist.

I was learning, as I did in the Ministry of Defense. I never knew, but I always learned.

I worked with a group of people who argued day and night – professors, officials, the Minister of Finance – but there were decisions that I had to make.

Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

There was one occasion when I was very young – eight years or seven years old – that Jewish businessmen went through the forest, and they were assassinated. And that was for the first time I saw in our paper where there were assassinations in our place.

He taught me literature, and he actually taught me how to read. He was my personal mentor.

I have a brother younger than me. My mother was a librarian, so from her, I got the taste to read.

They thought that I was a man with reasonable judgment, so I was never under pressure from my parents; I could do whatever I wanted. I never had a negative word from them, nothing whatsoever.

I think I was a good student, because I jumped over a school. My main interest was basically history and literature. Sports were basically basketball and swimming at a pool. I was so happy.

Early in the morning, I fell in love with the girl that later on became my wife. At that time, we were so naive. I wanted to charm her, so I read her Capital by Marx. I thought somehow she would be convinced by the strength of his criticism about capital.

Later on, there were some problems with our navy, so he made me the head of the navy – all things that I hardly knew anything about. I was basically an ignorant young man.

Now, I learned soon enough, that among the three, two don’t trust the third one – the third one is the government. Both industry and unions feel the government is a talking organization and a spending organization.

I joined the army as a private. I was offered a rank at that time, but I refused. I preferred to remain a private. First of all, I wasn’t taken by ranks, and before I knew it, they put me in the most sensitive positions anyway.

What should be the future of Israel? Is the land the most important choice, and for that reason to keep the whole of the land at any cost, or to have a partition and build the Jewish state on part of the land? And the other part?

He was the editor of our paper. He created the publishing house in Hebrew. He was – I wouldn’t say the “guru” – but really he was our teacher and a most respected man. I wrote for the paper of the youth movement.

If I tax them, in fact, I’m not taxing the capitalists, I am taxing the people who have saved, trusted. It was very controversial, those sorts of things. But finally, it worked out.

We asked the workers to give up 25 percent of their salaries. Imagine! We asked the industrialists to freeze all costs, no matter what the inflation is.

That was my first lesson from Ben-Gurion. Then I saw him making peace, and I saw him making war. He mobilized me before the war. The man was a very rare combination between a real intellectual and a born leader. There is a contradiction between the two.