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

by Shimon Peres

My grandfather’s life ended in Vishneva. The Nazis marched through the forest and into the village square only a few years after I left, gathering up the Jews to meet a horrific fate. My grandfather was forced into our modest wooden synagogue along with most of his congregation, while the Nazis boarded the doors. What terror they must have experienced, I cannot comprehend—the first moment the smoke poured in through the cracks of the door; the crackling sound that would have made them realize the building had been set ablaze from outside. I am told that as the flames grew violent, as they engulfed our most cherished place of worship, my grandfather donned his prayer shawl, the same one I had hidden under during Yom Kippur, and chanted a final prayer—a last moment of stoic dignity before the fire stole his words and his breath and his life, along with all the others.

Ben-Gurion had shown me that listening is not just a key element of good leadership, it is the key, the means to unlock doors that have been slammed shut by bitter dispute and resignation.

At the time, I may have lacked the experience and rank to know much about the weapons on Ben-Gurion’s list, but decisions needed to be made about ammunition and alliances and weapons and war, and rather than run from the challenge, I fully embraced it.

But the bonds formed during times of crisis are unusually strong.

immigration. In three years we had doubled the population from six hundred thousand to 1.2 million, but we hadn’t yet built a state that could sustain it. The new arrivals were forced to subsist in immigrant camps that were little more than tent cities. Food was provided by the government in communal dining halls, but it was strictly rationed. In some new immigrant camps, there was only one toilet for as many as fifty people. The conditions were harsh and unsanitary by any measure, and yet by 1952 more than 220,000 people were forced to live this way. Those who had settled in Israel early also faced intense rationing, instructed by the government about how much food they could purchase—even how many pairs of shoes they could own. Poverty was the central condition of our young state, a national emergency worthy of our urgent attention. Given all this, what other response could I expect from my fellow Israelis except skepticism? I knew there would be those who dismissed the idea without a thought, considering it a preposterous notion from an idealistic young man. And yet I also knew that I was right, and that in being right, I should be willing to stand alone, that the doubts of those without imagination were no reason to abandon an important idea. And so I made the decision to pursue the building of an aviation industry in a country without enough food for its people.

In this, I came to understand the choice at the heart of leadership: to pursue big dreams and suffer the consequences, or narrow one’s ambitions in an effort to get along. For me, there was only one choice. I knew of no way to become someone else, and so I chose to be myself, and in doing so, to serve a cause greater than myself. I decided that accomplishment mattered more than credit, more than popularity, more than title. It was not that I didn’t want those things; it was that having them in the absence of action and risk and courage would have been empty. There were easier ways to pursue mediocrity. And so I chose not to wallow or to be distracted from my dreams, but instead to think inventively and creatively about a path our young state would follow. I wanted that state to be a flourishing one, a just and peaceful and moral one. And so I let myself dream, and I refused to give in to cynicism.

Success built my confidence. Failure steeled my spine.

I had come to understand that in addition to a clear vision and strategy, true leadership requires intricate knowledge—a facility with the granular details of every aspect of the mission.

“If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.” •••

History hinges on successes and failures. But reaching for the former to avoid the latter does not depend on our capacity to hope. It depends on our capacity to think clearly, to choose wisely, and ultimately, to make the moral choice—even in the face of danger. The “Fantasy Council” succeeded because it established an arena for tireless curiosity and radical suggestion. If leaders demand allegiance without encouraging creativity and outside inspiration, the odds of failure vastly increase. This is one of the great lessons of Entebbe, but it is enveloped in an even larger one: without emboldening people to envisage the unlikely, we increase risk rather than diminish it.

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.

The Jewish people have lived by the guiding principle of tikkun olam, the ambition to improve the whole world, not just ourselves. We lived in exile for two thousand years, without land, without independence, held together not by borders, but by this simple set of values that have echoed through history—in Hebrew, in Yiddish, in Ladino—in every language of every country into which the Jewish people dispersed. It is the basis of our identity. And it is from this moral code that we know, fundamentally, that Israel was not born to rule over other people, that to do so is in profound opposition to our heritage. And so I have pursued peace with all of my heart and soul, both realistically and optimistically, knowing its achievement remains our most essential task. Israel is small in territory, but it must be great in justice.

Every once in a while, someone will ask me to look back on my career and identify the achievement in my life of which I am proudest. I respond by telling them the story of a great painter, who was once approached by an admirer of his art. “Which of your paintings do you consider your most beautiful?” the man asked. The painter looked up at the man, then turned his gaze toward a large blank canvas, resting on an easel in the corner of the room. “The one I will paint tomorrow,” he replied.