Former Israeli prime minister and Nobel Prize winner Shimon Peres will be the 1999 Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellow at Cornell University Wednesday, March 17.

Peres will present the Bartels Fellowship Lecture at 8 p.m., in the Alice Statler Auditorium, Statler Hall. Titled "What Would Peace In the Middle East Look Like?" the lecture is free and open to the public.

Peres, 75, served as prime minister from 1984 to 1986 and again following Yitzhak Rabin's assassination in November 1995, remaining as prime minister until the Labor Party was defeated in the elections of May 1996. He currently serves in the Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Peres' one-day visit to Cornell is hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies. He will meet with students and faculty from government classes and student groups.

In 1994, as foreign minister, Peres shared the Nobel Prize with Rabin and Yasser Arafat for their work on the Peace Accords. Under the agreement, Israel recognized the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and laid the foundation for gradual transition toward Palestinian control of the occupied West Bank.

He has harshly criticized Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's policies toward the PLO for being too confrontational. In late 1996 he told a Washington Post reporter, "If we shall lose the trust we developed in the Arab world, it will be very hard to regain it, and this is what is happening before our eyes." (Netanyahu's father, Benzion Netanyahu, is a Cornell professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies.)

Peres was born in Poland in 1923 and immigrated to Palestine with his family at the age of 10. He grew up in Tel Aviv and attended the agricultural high school in Shemen. He spent several years in Kibbutz Geva and Alumot, of which he was one of the founders, and in 1943 was elected secretary of the Labor-Zionist youth movement.

He has been closely associated with the development of defense capabilities. In the late 1940s he joined the Haganah and was assigned responsibility for manpower and arms. During and after the War of Independence, he served as head of the naval services and later headed the defense ministry's delegation to the United States. In 1952 he joined the Ministry of Defense and a year later -- at the age of 29 -- was appointed director-general, a position he held until 1959.

In 1959 Peres was elected a member of the Knesset and has been a member ever since. From 1959 to 1965 he served as deputy minister of defense. Among his achievements were the establishment of the military and aviation industries and the promotion of ties with France that culminated in strategic cooperation during the 1956 Sinai Campaign, which he masterminded. He also was responsible for Israel's nuclear program.

Peres is active in the Peace Research Institute, which was established in his honor.

The Henry E. and Nancy Horton Bartels World Affairs Fellowship was established at Cornell by the Bartels in 1984 to foster a broadened world perspective among students by bringing distinguished international public figures to campus. Henry and Nancy Horton Bartels are both members of the Cornell Class of 1948.