No Room for Small Dreams: Courage, Imagination and the Making of Modern Israel

by Shimon Peres

I’d come to believe that when you have two alternatives, the first thing you must do is look for a third—the one you didn’t think of, that doesn’t yet exist.

Experience has taught me three things about cynicism: First, it’s a powerful force with the ability to trample the aspirations of an entire people. Second, it is universal, fundamentally part of human nature, a disease that is ubiquitous and global. Third, it is the single greatest threat to the next generation of leadership. In a world of so many grave challenges, what could be more dangerous than discouraging ideas and ambition? Throughout my life, I have been accused by many people (in many languages) of being too optimistic—of having too rosy a view of the world and the people who inhabit it. I tell them that both optimists and pessimists die in the end, but the optimist leads a hopeful and happy existence while the pessimist spends his days cynical and downtrodden. It is too high a price to pay.

In the face of such an extraordinary situation, I knew there was little choice but to act. When I was told there was no way to make a rescue possible, I decided to heed the words of my late mentor, Ben-Gurion, who had passed away in 1973. “If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.”

investment. Of course, the tech sector has driven more than just high growth; it has propelled a scientific revolution, with breakthroughs that have reverberated around the world. Who would have imagined that the world would run on USB drives invented in Israel, or that doctors could see inside patients with an Israeli-developed camera no larger than a pill? Who would have thought that the world would depend on Israeli technology for GPS navigation or that Israeli hardware and software could save drivers from deadly collisions? Who would have believed that medicines to treat Parkinson’s disease and multiple sclerosis would have been developed right here, or that paralyzed people might be granted the ability to walk again through robotic legs invented in Israel? Ben-Gurion once said that in Israel, “in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” After such extraordinary achievement in science and technology and human creativity, how could we be anything but believers in miracles, faithful to the imaginations that are capable of conceiving them, and committed to the efforts to bring them to life? Ben-Gurion was right: realism in Israel is nothing less than the impossible made real.

“Whoever of you love life and desire to see many good days, keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies. Seek peace and pursue it.”

In the moment before Mrs. Mishcon could respond, I could already picture the scene, two former enemies, standing side by side as friends, the foreign minister of Israel in

“The future that we look for will not materialize unless we together overcome the fears of the past and learn from the past lessons for our future.”

but not before the deaths of millions. The splitting of the atom created the potential for new energy and new sciences—but