Several days before he signed the Oslo Accord in September 1993, I asked Shimon Peres, then foreign minister in the government of Yitzhak Rabin, how he would like to be remembered in the history books. “As one who contributed to an Israel strong enough to make peace,” he answered. Peres, who died Sept. 28 at age 93, leaves behind a state with the most powerful military in the region and one of the world’s strongest high-tech industries. Thanks to Peres and his generation, Israel is an island of stability in the heart of a stormy Middle East. He started pulling Israeli troops out of Lebanon and extricated the economy from runaway triple-digit inflation in the mid-1980s. Peres paved the way to the Oslo Accord with the Palestinians, which led to the peace agreement with Jordan in 1994 and strengthened Israel’s international standing.

Peres did not live to translate this power into peace. The State of Israel did not enjoy the fruit of his labor. The 1979 peace agreement with Egypt was signed by Prime Minister Menachem Begin of the Likud Party shortly after the 1977 elections that ended Labor Party rule. The negotiations Peres conducted with Syrian President Hafez al-Assad in 1996, after Rabin’s assassination, led to a dead end. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was the one who led Israeli troops and settlers out of the Gaza Strip in 2005. Prime Ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert were much closer than Peres ever was to a permanent status agreement with the Palestinian side.

Peres’ attempts to bridge the divide between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas ended in bitter disappointment. Peres spent his final years in politics as an international envoy trying to explain the policies of Israel’s right-wing governments. In his early days as president he went as far as Washington to advocate for Netanyahu, who had lost President Barack Obama’s trust.

Leaders like Peres are usually described as “men of vision and action.” But often, as in his case, the action and the vision are not synchronized. Not only that, the action undermines the vision and makes it virtually impossible to realize it. In his role as “a man of action,” Peres, as defense minister in charge of the occupied territories from 1974 to 1976, was credited with the establishment of a long list of settlements. In the settlement of Ofra, the one whose houses are mostly located on private Palestinian land, residents sit in the cool shade of its first tree, planted by Peres in the 1970s. The founder and first mayor of the settlement town of Ariel, the late Ron Nachman, once showed me a 1977 document signed by Peres, approving the establishment of the new settlement in the heart of the West Bank’s Samaria region.