The death of Israel’s former president, Shimon Peres, is a sad occasion, even for those who stood at the opposite end of the spectrum from him politically. The respect and affection he enjoyed owed not only to the length of his service in the Zionist struggle and the range of important positions he held but to the combination of dignity, integrity, and humor with which he conducted himself.

It would be vainglorious to suggest that we knew him well. The first of the several times we met him was in the late 1980s, when he was serving as the finance minister. He received us in the Labor Party’s offices at Tel Aviv. He inquired whether we were related to the American Zionist Louis Lipsky (alas, no). What about the French financial schemer Claude Lipsky, he inquired. (alas, no, either).

At the time, Peres was in an awkward spot, being a Laborite sharing rotations as prime minister with, in Yitzhak Shamir, one of Israel’s most right-wing politicians. Israel had already begun to liberalize its economy. Peres told us he had his own strategy for dealing with this, for him, unaccustomed ideological trend. “We’re going to make money like capitalists,” he said, “and spend it like socialists.”

Though in the 1970s he was a fierce backer of extending Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, Peres won his Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the Oslo Accord, a test of the intentions of the PLO that found it wanting. He was more invested in the peace process than any other Israeli leader, though when he was briefly prime minister in the mid-1990s, he launched such a fierce attack on Hezbollah in Lebanon that the Forward newspaper called it the “war process.”

It wasn’t the only seeming contradiction that invites reflection in respect of his capacious personality. David Twersky, late foreign editor of the Sun, liked to point out that Peres was considered the father of Israel’s atomic bomb. That might seem to make him a hawk, Twersky would say, but it also enabled Israel to keep its enemies at bay without having to maintain a large, active-duty standing army.

One famous Peres moment came in 2009, when he was President of the Jewish state and was seated at the Davos Economic Forum on a panel between Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey, General Secretary Ban of the United Nations, and Amr Moussa of the Arab League. The Gaza war known as Operation Cast Lead had just ended, and passions were on a boil.

After patiently listening to his adversaries, Peres delivered — starting at 39 minutes and 21 seconds into the above video — a peroration that reminded some of the speech in which Shakespeare’s Shylock cries out, “Hath not a Jew eyes?” It, or the prospect that Peres would have the last word, prompted the Turkish premier to storm out. What did Peres do? According to a report in the Times, he phoned his Turkish adversary to say he hadn’t meant it personally and to apologize.

No doubt there are those who would suggest that was inappropriate for a president, an embarrassment even. We tend to a more charitable view. Israel can learn from everyone, even those whose counsel it rejected. “Democracy is not matter of elections,” Peres had said during his exchange with Mr. Erdogan, “it is a civilization” — an institution of which Peres will be remembered as one of Israel’s many exemplars.