Shortly before 9 a.m. this Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres will leave his office in Jerusalem for the short drive to the presidential residence. There, assuming that everything goes according to plan, the Labor Party leader will hand in his resignation to President Chaim Herzog, thus setting in motion a transfer of power that many Israelis had once doubted would ever take place. Under the terms of a power-sharing arrangement that Labor and the right-wing Likud bloc had forged two years ago, when they formed the present national unity government, Peres will exchange jobs with Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir, head of the Likud. Shamir thus takes over as Prime Minister for the last two years of the current parliamentary term.
The rotation agreement was cobbled together after the 1984 elections ended in a stalemate. Neither Labor, with 44 seats in the newly elected 120-member Knesset, nor the Likud, with 41, was able to form a viable government. So the two traditional rivals formed an uneasy political alliance, with Peres taking the first turn at running the country.
From the beginning, Peres set himself four primary goals. To a country divided over the 1982 invasion and subsequent occupation of Lebanon, Peres promised an early troop withdrawal. He also pledged to restore Israel's ailing economy to health and to bring down its staggering triple-digit inflation rate. He committed himself to warming up what he called the "cold peace" with Egypt, the only Arab country that has signed a peace treaty with Israel. And he said he would seek ways of ending the nearly 40-year-old conflict between Israelis and Arabs.
All in all, Peres kept to his agenda, scoring some notable successes. He pulled Israeli troops out of Lebanon, except for the narrow "security zone" along Israel's northern border. He managed to lower inflation, from a high of 800% to around 25%. Scarcely a month before the end of his term, he reached an agreement with Egypt to submit the festering Taba dispute, concerning ownership of a 750-yard stretch of Red Sea beachfront, to international arbitration. This led to a restoration of full diplomatic relations with Egypt, which withdrew its ambassador from Tel Aviv in 1982, following Israel's invasion of Lebanon and the subsequent massacre of some 800 Palestinian civilians by Phalangist militiamen in an Israeli-controlled section of Beirut. In an effort to loosen the Middle East deadlock, Peres went to Morocco to confer with King Hassan II, then to Egypt to talk with President Hosni Mubarak. But his term ended before he could achieve any solid breakthrough toward peace.
In the process, the Prime Minister's political reputation underwent a remarkable transformation. In 1984 his own party regarded him as an obstacle to an electoral victory. Yet a recent poll in the daily Ma'ariv gave Peres a 76% popularity rating. Says a Western diplomat in Tel Aviv: "Two years ago, he was thought of as too clever by half -- devious and even untrustworthy. This was the price for too many shifts in party allegiance and changes in loyalty in his long political career. Today, he's Israel's leading statesman."