JERUSALEM — The world awoke on Wednesday to an actuality it had never known before: a modern state of Israel without Shimon Peres. But in many respects Mr. Peres’s Israel began to disappear long ago.

During more than seven decades in public service, Mr. Peres, who died at 93 two weeks after suffering a stroke, accompanied Israel through startling transformations and constantly reinvented himself.

Rolling with the punches of reality, he went from state-builder to divisive political schemer to, in the early 1990s, an architect of the Oslo peace accords that were meant to lead to a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He never ceased to work behind the scenes for his tantalizing vision — some would say mirage — of a “New Middle East.”

Transcending internal divisions in his last official post, as Israel’s president, Mr. Peres was ultimately embraced by most of the country as its elder statesman, even as chaos engulfed much of the region and the promise of peace with the Palestinians faded into popular skepticism and fatigue.