Chaim Herzog

Chaim Herzog was born in Belfast on September 17, 1918, into one of the most prominent rabbinic families of the era. His father, Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, served the Jewish community of Ireland and became the country's Chief Rabbi after the family settled in Dublin, where Chaim spent most of his childhood ^[1]. The household was scholarly and multilingual. Herzog grew up speaking English with an Irish accent he never fully lost, studied Hebrew texts at home, and attended Wesley College in Dublin. He also boxed as a youth, winning a bantamweight title in Ireland, a detail he recalled with pride throughout his life ^[2].

In 1935 the family left Ireland for Mandatory Palestine after his father was appointed Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi, first of Palestine and later of the State of Israel ^[1]. The teenage Herzog studied at yeshivot in Jerusalem and joined the Haganah, the underground Jewish defense organization, during the Arab revolt of 1936 to 1939. His parents then sent him to Britain for university. He read law at the University of London and at Cambridge, and was called to the bar at Lincoln's Inn, a training that shaped his precise, argumentative style for the rest of his career ^[3].

When the Second World War broke out, Herzog enlisted in the British Army. He was commissioned as an officer in the Royal Armoured Corps and later moved into military intelligence, a field for which his languages and legal training suited him well ^[2]. He landed in Normandy in the weeks after D-Day and served through the campaign in northwest Europe, ending the war with the rank of major.

Two episodes from this period followed him for life. As an intelligence officer he took part in the liberation of concentration camps in northern Germany, an experience he described as formative for his understanding of what Jewish statelessness had cost ^[4]. In May 1945 he was among the British officers involved in identifying Heinrich Himmler, the captured head of the SS, shortly before Himmler killed himself in Allied custody ^[2]. Herzog returned from the war convinced that the Jewish people needed sovereignty, and he carried his British military training directly into the service of the state that was about to be born.

Herzog reached Palestine again in 1947, in time for the war that accompanied Israel's independence. He fought in the 1948 battles for Latrun on the road to Jerusalem, and the new Israel Defense Forces quickly put his experience to use. He served as head of the IDF Military Intelligence Directorate twice, from 1948 to 1950 and again from 1959 to 1962, making him one of the principal architects of Israeli intelligence in its founding decades ^[5]. Between those terms he served as defense attaché at the Israeli embassy in Washington and commanded the Jerusalem district.

He left the army in 1962 with the rank of major general and turned to civilian life with the same energy. He led an investment company, and in 1972 he co-founded the law firm Herzog, Fox and Neeman, which grew into one of the largest legal practices in Israel ^[3]. He also became a familiar national voice. During the tense waiting period before the Six-Day War in June 1967, Herzog delivered calm, authoritative radio commentaries that steadied an anxious public, and after the fighting he served briefly as the first military governor of the West Bank ^[5]. His books on military history, including The War of Atonement about the 1973 conflict and the survey The Arab-Israeli Wars, reached wide audiences in Israel and abroad ^[6].

In 1975 Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin appointed Herzog as Israel's permanent representative to the United Nations. He arrived at a hostile moment. On November 10, 1975, the General Assembly adopted Resolution 3379, which declared Zionism to be a form of racism. Herzog answered from the podium with a speech that became the defining moment of his public life. He told the assembly that for the Jewish people the resolution was based on hatred and lies, and he ended by tearing the text of the resolution in half before the delegates ^[7]. He deliberately chose that date, the anniversary of Kristallnacht, to frame the vote as part of a longer history of anti-Jewish campaigns.

The gesture made him famous far beyond diplomatic circles and turned him into one of Israel's most recognizable advocates. He served at the UN until 1978, defending Israeli positions through the debates that followed the 1973 war and the early stages of Egyptian-Israeli peacemaking ^[7]. The resolution he tore up was eventually revoked by the General Assembly in 1991, while Herzog was serving as president, a reversal he welcomed as a correction of a historic wrong ^[4].

Herzog entered the Knesset in 1981 as a member of the Labor Alignment. Two years later, on March 22, 1983, the Knesset elected him the sixth President of Israel, and he took office that May. He was reelected in 1988 and served the maximum two five-year terms then permitted, leaving office in 1993 ^[1]. The Israeli presidency is largely ceremonial, but Herzog used it actively. He worked to ease tensions between religious and secular Israelis, between Jewish and Arab citizens, and between veteran Israelis and new immigrants, and he presided over the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Jews from the Soviet Union and Ethiopia in the early 1990s ^[5].

His decade in office included moments of controversy. Using the presidential pardon power, he granted clemency in 1986 to Shin Bet officials implicated in the killing of two captured bus hijackers in the 1984 affair known as the Bus 300 case, a decision that drew sharp public criticism and lasting debate about accountability ^[8]. He also broke diplomatic ground. In 1987 Herzog became the first sitting Israeli head of state to pay an official visit to West Germany, a journey heavy with symbolism for a man who had seen the camps in 1945, and he made state visits to a long list of countries as Israel's relations widened after the Cold War ^[4].

Herzog traveled back to Ireland as president in 1985, an emotional return for the Dublin schoolboy who had become a head of state. Those who study Chaim Herzog facts often note this double identity: he remains the only Israeli president born in Ireland, and Irish officials received him as a native son ^[2].

In 1947 Herzog married Aura Ambache, who had been born in Egypt and educated in South Africa and England. Aura Herzog became a public figure in her own right, founding the Council for a Beautiful Israel and organizing the country's International Bible Contest ^[1]. The couple raised four children. Their son Michael Herzog became an IDF general and later Israel's ambassador to the United States, and their son Isaac Herzog led the Labor Party and was elected the eleventh President of Israel in 2021, making the Herzogs the first father and son to hold the office ^[4].

Herzog was a prolific writer and speaker in retirement as in office. His memoir, Living History, appeared in 1996 and traced his path from Belfast and Dublin through the British Army to the presidency ^[6]. Colleagues described him as formal in manner, exact with facts, and quick with an anecdote, a blend of barrister, general, and diplomat.

Chaim Herzog died in Jerusalem on April 17, 1997, at the age of 78, and was buried on Mount Herzl, the national cemetery, after a state funeral attended by foreign leaders ^[4]. Any Chaim Herzog biography has to reckon with the range of his service: few figures in Israel's first half century worked at such a senior level in the military, the law, diplomacy, and the presidency. For readers asking who was Chaim Herzog, the shortest honest answer is that he was a founder-generation officer who became the ceremonial embodiment of the state he helped build.

Among Chaim Herzog achievements, three stand out. He shaped Israeli military intelligence in its earliest and most vulnerable years. He gave Israel its most memorable moment at the United Nations with his answer to Resolution 3379. And as president he modeled a unifying, outward-facing head of state during a decade of mass immigration and diplomatic change ^[5]. His name endures in institutions and in his family: the University of Haifa's Herzog Hospital connections aside, the clearest continuation came when Isaac Herzog took the presidential oath in 2021 in the chamber where his father had twice done the same ^[4]. Herzog's books remain standard popular accounts of Israel's wars, and his 1975 speech is still quoted whenever the legitimacy of Jewish statehood is debated ^[7].