military service in the IDF Artillery wing between 1970 and 1972, and was selected as an officer in the Israel Defense Forces as the brigade ordnance officer of the 202nd paratroopers brigade and reached the rank of captain. On 22 April 1974, Peretz was badly wounded as a result of an accident at the Mitla Pass. He spent a year in the hospital recuperating. After leaving the hospital, he bought a farm in the village of Nir Akiva. Still in a wheelchair, he began growing vegetables and flowers for export. During this period he met his wife Ahlama and they married. They have four children. Political career Mayor of Sderot In 1983 Peretz ran for the office of mayor of Sderot, as candidate of the Israel Labor Party. He won, ending a long period of dominance of the town's politics by the right-wing Likud party and the National Religious Party. It was the first in a series of local councils that passed back to Labor control in the late 1980s. As mayor, he emphasised education and worked to improve previously fractious relations with the kibbutzim in the area. Histadrut and 'One Nation' In 1988 he was elected a member of the Knesset. In 1994, after failing in a previous bid for Histadrut leadership, Peretz joined forces with Haim Ramon to contest control of the then powerful trade union federation. They ran on an independent list against the favoured candidate of then Labor leader Yitzhak Rabin. They won, and Peretz became Ramon's deputy at the Histadrut, isolating him within the Labor Party. He became chairman of the Histadrut in December 1995, when Ramon reentered the cabinet following Rabin's assassination. During his early years at the helm of the Histadrut, Peretz was regarded as a militant firebrand, with an easy hand on the trigger of general strikes. Sometimes the pretext for declaring a general strike would be an inopportune statement by the finance minister, as had been the case with Ya'akov Ne'eman in 1996. However, in his later years as head of Histadrut, Peretz was seen as becoming much more moderate, as he moved toward a potential run for national office. During the tenure of Benjamin Netanyahu as finance minister (February 2003 – August 2005), Peretz was fairly cooperative with the government in a series of structural and financial reforms that moved Israel towards a more market-oriented economy. He has remarked that