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that his long record of service should have earned him that right, and that it would be painful for him to accept that, by June, there would be a new Labor leader.

He was relaxed and gracious when I arrived. We went through the details of what we’d agreed, and worked out what each of us would say to reporters. What came next, as the party faithful filed in, was simple human nature, I suppose. Seeing some of his oldest supporters, he had second thoughts. His comments to reporters afterward were more hedged than what we’d discussed. Giora told me that after all of us had left, Peres turned to him and said: “Look what Barak is doing to me. What have you been doing?” Giora, who had been a conduit between us at the very beginning of our discussions, replied: “You asked me to bring Barak to you.” At which point, Shimon said: “OK. So probably I made a mistake.”

At a convention of 3,000 party activists in mid-May, a few weeks before the leadership election, he made a final attempt to mitigate that “mistake”. Nissim Zvili, the secretary-general of the party and a longtime Peres ally, introduced a motion to vote him into a new post of party president. A couple of Shimon’s friends urged me to back the idea, describing it essentially as a ceremonial role. But I feared it was a recipe for prolonging the agony. Whatever powers “President Peres” would have, the idea of two captains on a ship would almost certainly mean trouble. I was especially reluctant to go along with it because our particular ship had been in rough waters for so long. Labor needed to steer a calm, decisive course toward the next election if we were going to defeat Bibi.

What followed was one of the most painful spectacles I’ve ever witnessed. When Peres rose to make his case for becoming party president, he said: “I don’t want powers. I don’t want honors. But I also don’t want insults. I announced my decision to resign from the position of party chairman. Did someone push me into it? Am I trying to hold on to my job?”

“Yes!” many hundreds of the delegates shouted back at him.

Stung, he reminded the meeting that it was he who had led Labor back from the battering it took in the 1977 election against Begin. In 1981, he’d helped us recover a dozen of our lost seats. Even so, because he hadn’t succeeded in forming a Labor government, people had called him a loser! “Mah? Ani loser?” he asked, using the English word. “Am I a loser?”

“Yes! Yes!” came the shouts.

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