My Dinner with Shimon Peres
With the death of President Shimon Peres, I want to relay a remarkable story he once shared with me. Six years ago almost to this day, with the UN General Assembly convening in New York City as it did again this past week, I got an unexpected call from a close Israeli friend and his wife, a very prominent couple both in Israel and here in the US, asking if I would meet them for a small dinner with President Peres at Amaranth restaurant on the Upper East Side, and to bring a date. My wife Rachel had plans and couldn’t attend so I asked if I could bring two friends and the three of us headed out that evening, finding the restaurant surrounded by security personnel and police.
As we made our way inside, we were greeted by my friend who led us to a cordoned off section where Peres and one of his aids awaited us for a dinner gathering of about six of us. With Peres’ many bodyguards occasionally letting a fellow restaurant patron through to shake his hand, Peres between glasses of wine turned to each of us at the table asking us to tell him a bit about ourselves and what we thought of Israel. While many truly memorable stories came out of this evening which lasted until 2 am when Peres opted to dismiss his driver and walk the several blocks back to his hotel, the most memorable to me happened just after it was my turn to speak.
No sooner had I let Peres know that I was a convert to Judaism, having been born and raised as a Catholic in Fairbanks, Alaska, than Peres became very animated and let us all know that he wanted to tell us all a story about how he had spent over a month in the early 1960s in Alaska along its border with Canada, on a then secret operation that he wanted to now share with his dinner companions. He recounted how, at the urging of Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion, he had trekked around the world to find and acquire weapons that would ensure Israel’s security in the face of an international arms embargo that even the US backed at this point, although the Kennedy Administration’s opposition to arming Israel was beginning to subside he noted. Peres explained that one trip had led him to Los Angeles where, apparently, a wealthy Jewish businessman had in his personal arms collection two vintage British built De Havilland Mosquito fighter long range bombers.
The Mosquito fighter bombers were of particular interest to Peres and Israel because, in an era prior to the composite ceramics, plastics and other materials used today to make long range planes lighter for maximizing striking distance, the Mosquito fighter bombers, called “Wooden Wonders”, were made with strips of Ecuadorian balsawood sandwiched between sheets of Canadian birch plywood. Peres explained that these planes, active in the 40s and 50s but by the early 60s hard to find, were so light that a single fueling could enable Israel to strike deep into the heartlands of its neighboring enemies if threatened by them. After negotiating to buy both planes from the collector, Peres then needed to find a way to get them back to Israel without flying over the airspace of a country that was actively enforcing the embargo. To do so, he enlisted two young Israeli pilots to initially fly the planes up through Canada, hoping that an over the North Pole journey might make the most sense.
En route, Peres explained, one of the planes crashed somewhere along the border of Alaska and Canada. As the leader of the operation, Peres decided he needed to personally take charge of the search and rescue mission, and so he spent what he described as one of the roughest months of his life in the austere boreal forested and tundra filled terrain of that region looking for the missing pilot and his downed plane. Peres explained neither was ever found but as the search was underway and he spent day after day trudging through this no-man’s land looking, he couldn’t help but reflect for long hours on the price the young pilot had paid and the growing resentment he and other Israelis were feeling that his young nation needed to secretly sneak around the world, begging and borrowing from others, like second-class citizens of the world, merely to find ways to defend their lives and their home.
Peres described how, one particularly grey and rainy day, in a remote stretch of nearly impenetrable terrain of Alaska he had what amounted to a Jewish epiphany that he must work to make sure no more young Israeli men or women lost their lives in this way. As the mission wound down, and he prepared to go home he said he determined to go back to Israel and focus all his energies on making sure his country could build its own weapon systems and technologies to protect itself, and never again be reliant on others for its security.
And so began his and Israel’s focus, support for and investment in the type of hard scientific research and development that enabled the country to create the most powerful military in the Middle East and, as the famous 2009 book “Start-up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer discusses, inspired generations of Israelis to start technology businesses that have over time had a major impact throughout the world.
So as we navigate our way home through traffic on the Long Island Expressway using Waze, an Israeli start up acquired by Google in 2013, or snap a photo on one of the new iPhone 7s which employ innovative sensing technology developed by LinX Imaging, an Israeli startup snapped up by Apple last year, let’s each take a moment to think of both Shimon Peres and that young pilot who Peres told me at the end of our conversation he would think about each and every day for the rest of his life.
