His landslide election as president by the Knesset was the first vote for a top post that he has won.
"Shimon Peres is one of the most important figures in Israel over the past 60 years," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, leader of Peres's centrist Kadima party, said at the weekly cabinet meeting ahead of the ceremony.
Many Arabs still hold Peres responsible for the massacre of 105 civilians in the Israeli shelling of a UN camp in south Lebanon in 1996, when he was then Foreign Minister.
Peres's landslide win in parliament on June 13 marked a triumph that laid to rest the ghosts of seven years past, when he famously lost the same ballot to the rightwing Katsav despite being the overwhelming favorite.
His election was the crowning triumph in a record-breaking career of a man who has held just about every major office in the past five decades and who has a political pedigree that is second to none.
Supporters say the international prestige of Peres, who up to now has been admired abroad far more than at home, could lift the presidency from a disgrace heaped upon the office after his two predecessors were ousted by scandal.
Katsav agreed to a controversial plea bargain in which rape charges were dropped in return for him pleading guilty to charges including sexual harassment, indecent acts and witness subornation.
Katsav's predecessor, the late Ezer Weizman, resigned in 2000 after revelations he received around 450,000 dollars from a French millionaire while a minister and an MP.
Israeli commentators say Peres will aim to expand the presidency's influence.
Peres, the two-time prime minister who has never won a national election, has said the presidency could be his last service to Israel.
In the July 2000 presidential election Peres was widely expected to win, only to watch in shock as the obscure Katsav from Likud emerged victorious after the surprise defection of ultra-Orthodox MPs.
That humiliating defeat -- and his loss in 2005 of the Labour leadership -- sealed Peres's image as a perennial loser after he failed to lead his party to victory in parliamentary elections in 1977, 1981, 1984, 1988 and 1996.
Peres commands great respect abroad, including for his role in the 1993 Oslo accords with the Palestinians that saw him win the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize along with former premier Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
He has held a string of top posts, including the foreign and defense portfolios, and is considered the father of Israel's biggest deterrent -- its suspected but undeclared nuclear weapons program.
Peres dedicates much of his time to promoting peace between Israel, the Palestinians and the Arab world through his Peres Center for Peace, which aims to build an infrastructure for peace by promoting socio-economic development.
Born in 1923 in what was then Poland but is now Belarus, Peres emigrated to Palestine when he was 11. He speaks English and French as well as Hebrew. He and his wife Sonya have three children, eight grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. |
