War & Peace Quote by Shimon Peres

Peres frames Ben-Gurion as a paradox you’re meant to feel before you’re meant to resolve it: the thinker who can also command. The line is doing reputational work on two levels. It elevates Ben-Gurion into the founding-myth category Israeli politics depends on, while quietly positioning Peres as the attentive apprentice who learned statecraft at the source.

The power sits in the montage-like compression: “making peace” and “making war” are treated as adjacent crafts, not moral opposites. That’s not casual phrasing; it’s a worldview from the early state years, when survival, diplomacy, and coercion were braided together. Peres isn’t confessing ambivalence so much as normalizing the idea that a leader’s legitimacy is measured by range: the capacity to reconcile and to mobilize, to argue in abstractions and then sign orders that spill into reality.

“I saw him” is also a claim of eyewitness authority. Peres narrates leadership as performance observed up close, turning history into a scene where character is the decisive variable. Then he lands the kicker: “There is a contradiction between the two.” It’s a deft piece of political psychology, suggesting intellectuals are typically trapped in nuance, leaders in decisiveness; Ben-Gurion, uniquely, escaped the trade-off.

Subtext: Peres is defending a model of leadership that modern politics often pulls apart - the policy wonk versus the wartime executive - and implying that Israel’s founding generation had to fuse them because circumstances demanded it. The “lesson” isn’t admiration alone; it’s an argument about what the job required.