Shimon Peres, president of Israel and, at 90, the world’s oldest serving statesman, has led his country through war and peace. He never managed to win a lasting settlement nor kindle the sense of enduring security that his people craved. He eased, but could not remove, the threat of violence from radical Palestinians. And he never quite managed to persuade his citizens and voters of the need to surrender entrenched positions.

Yet as Mr Peres approaches the end of his presidency, it is plain that this extraordinary career spanning 66 years does not represent a failed political life. Superficially it has been a progression from “hawk” to “dove”. In 1956, as a senior official in the defence ministry, he helped to plan the Suez war with Britain and France. In the 1970s he became an early supporter of settlements on the West Bank. In the 1980s he disguised himself with false whiskers to enter Jordan to negotiate with King Hussein. He is linked even more closely than Yitzhak Rabin to the Oslo accords and the acceptance of a Palestinian Authority.

Mr Peres is a wise man and Israel will be the poorer for his departure. The questions that remain unanswered are those that he astutely framed: above all, how, in a world of competing priorities, can Israel keep the US focused on long-term peacekeeping? How can the country keep alive the idea of a two-state solution?

The signs are not encouraging. Days before Mr Peres stepped down, new attempts to build confidence between Israelis and Palestinians were stymied by a reconciliation between Palestine’s chief factions, the secular Fatah and the Islamist Hamas. This move aligns Mahmoud Abbas, of the Palestinian Authority, with a group widely seen in the West as a terrorist organisation. Israel holds Hamas responsible for killing more than 1,000 Israelis, many of them civilian, and holds no truck with a unified Palestinian leadership.

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