Film 2 - Shimon Peres

"Today they're dancing and singing - tomorrow there'll be bloodshed" David Ben Gurion, declaring Israel’s independence in 1948

On Friday May 14th 1948 Shimon Peres was with the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, as he declared Israeli independence. Watching the celebrations afterwards he turned to the young Shimon Peres, future Prime Minister and current President of Israel and predicted the Middle East conflict that followed. Neither of them could have predicted the bloody conflict would still be appearing in the world news today.

Shimon Peres has quite literally spent a lifetime at the seat of power since that very day and with a seven-decade-long career in politics at the heart of the Middle East conflict. The second in the series of documentary films reveals through two days of interviews with the President of Israel the price he paid for being a leader, helping us answer the question “What is Leadership?”

As a nation builder it’s hard to overestimate the achievements of Shimon Peres, but in the words of the President, “What we call experience the younger generation call a chain of mistakes”. Despite winning the Nobel Peace Prize, with his own pursuit of peace so clearly demonstrated in the Oslo Peace negotiations with Yitzhak Rabin, the state of Israel he so passionately helped to build remains at war. Irrespective of any leader’s achievements, asking the question “what would you sacrifice for what you believe?” still begs the question of Shimon Peres of whether the sacrifice was worth it.