Ezer Weizman

Ezer Weizman was born on June 15, 1924, in Tel Aviv, into one of the most prominent families of the Zionist movement. His father, Yechiel Weizman, was an agronomist, and his uncle Chaim Weizmann became the first president of the State of Israel in 1949, a post Ezer himself would hold four and a half decades later ^[1]. The family moved to Haifa when Ezer was an infant, and he grew up on the slopes of Mount Carmel in comfortable circumstances, attending the Hebrew Reali School ^[2].

Aviation captured him early. He learned to fly at eighteen, and in 1942, during the Second World War, he joined the British Royal Air Force. Trained as a fighter pilot, he served in Egypt and later in India with the RAF, an experience that gave him professional flying credentials rare among Jews in Mandatory Palestine ^[1][3]. After demobilization he spent time in London, where he was active in the Irgun underground while ostensibly studying, before returning home as the struggle over Palestine's future intensified ^[3].

When Israel declared independence in May 1948, Weizman was among the small band of trained airmen available to the new state. He flew in the improvised air service that became the Israel Air Force, piloting Czech-built Avia S-199 fighters in some of the force's first combat missions during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War ^[2][3]. Those early sorties, flown with cast-off aircraft against numerically superior enemies, marked the beginning of a military career that would define Israeli air power.

Weizman rose quickly through the young air arm. He trained on jets in Britain in the early 1950s, commanded fighter squadrons and air bases, and in 1958 was appointed commander of the Israel Air Force, a post he held for eight years ^[1][2]. Under his leadership the IAF was rebuilt around French Mirage and Mystere jets and around a demanding culture of pilot selection, relentless training, and rapid aircraft turnaround between sorties ^[3].

His signature conviction was that Israel's survival in any war depended on winning command of the air in the opening hours. The planning that matured during and after his tenure produced Operation Focus, the pre-emptive strike of June 5, 1967, which destroyed most of the Egyptian air force on the ground within hours and set the course of the Six-Day War ^[2][4]. By then Weizman had moved up to serve as head of the General Staff Branch, the number two position in the Israel Defense Forces, and he watched the doctrine he had championed vindicated in spectacular fashion ^[1].

Weizman never hid his disappointment at being passed over for chief of staff. He left the army in 1969 with the rank of major general, taking with him a reputation as the father of the modern Israeli air force and a personal trophy: a black-painted Spitfire he had flown since the 1948 war and kept airworthy for decades ^[3][4]. Among the most repeated Ezer Weizman facts is that this aircraft became a flying symbol of the IAF's founding generation.

On leaving uniform, Weizman joined the right-wing Herut movement led by Menachem Begin and entered the national unity government of Golda Meir as minister of transport in 1969, resigning the following year when Herut left the coalition over acceptance of a ceasefire initiative ^[1][5]. Through the 1970s he moved between business ventures and party work, and he managed the Likud election campaign that brought Begin to power in May 1977, ending nearly three decades of Labor rule ^[2][5].

Begin rewarded him with the defense ministry, and it was there that the hawkish former general surprised almost everyone. When Egyptian president Anwar Sadat flew to Jerusalem in November 1977, Weizman built an unusually warm personal rapport with him, and over the following year he became one of the most committed Israeli advocates of an agreement ^[4][5]. He played a central part in the negotiations that produced the Camp David Accords of September 1978 and the Egypt-Israel peace treaty signed in March 1979, the first between Israel and an Arab state ^[1][2].

The partnership with Begin did not last. Frustrated by the slow pace of talks on Palestinian autonomy and by settlement expansion in the occupied territories, Weizman resigned from the government in May 1980 ^[5]. He recorded his account of the period in his memoir The Battle for Peace, published in 1981, a sequel of sorts to his earlier autobiography On Eagles' Wings ^[6]. In 1984 he returned to politics at the head of a small centrist list, Yahad, which won three Knesset seats and joined the national unity government; he later merged the party into the Labor Alignment and served in cabinet posts including minister of science until 1992 ^[1][5].

In March 1993 the Knesset elected Weizman the seventh president of Israel, and he took office that May ^[1][2]. The presidency is largely ceremonial, but Weizman was temperamentally incapable of staying quiet. He spoke his mind on the peace process, on religious and secular tensions, and on almost anything else, regularly irritating governments of both left and right and just as regularly delighting much of the public ^[4][5].

His term coincided with the Oslo years and their aftershocks. He comforted the country after suicide bombings, spoke at the funeral of assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1995, and pressed successive governments, including Benjamin Netanyahu's, to keep negotiating with the Palestinians ^[4]. In 1996 he hosted King Hussein of Jordan at his private home in Caesarea, a gesture typical of his personal, informal style of diplomacy ^[5]. The Knesset re-elected him to a second term in 1998.

The end was clouded. Late in 1999 an Israeli journalist revealed that Weizman had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the French businessman Edouard Saroussi during the 1980s and early 1990s, before his presidency, without reporting the money ^[2][4]. The attorney general found the affair too old to prosecute but sharply criticized his conduct, and under mounting public pressure Weizman resigned the presidency in July 2000, three years before his term was due to end ^[1][4].

In 1950 Weizman married Reuma Schwartz, whose sister Ruth was married to Moshe Dayan, tying two of Israel's most famous military families together ^[3][5]. The couple had two children, Shaul and Michal, and made their later home in Caesarea on the Mediterranean coast.

Family tragedy shadowed his public life. His son Shaul was shot in the head by an Egyptian sniper while serving along the Suez Canal during the War of Attrition in 1970 and survived with a severe brain injury; friends traced part of Weizman's turn toward peacemaking to that wound ^[4][5]. In 1991 Shaul was killed in a road accident, a loss Weizman rarely discussed in public.

Even admirers conceded that his tongue was a liability. He scattered jokes, insults, and unguarded opinions across four decades of public life, and his machismo and occasional dismissive remarks about women drew justified criticism in his later years ^[4]. Yet the same directness made him unusually approachable for a head of state; he took public phone calls at the presidential residence and visited bereaved families without cameras ^[5].

Weizman died at his home in Caesarea on April 24, 2005, at the age of eighty, after a long period of declining health, and was buried beside his son Shaul in the local cemetery rather than in the national plot reserved for presidents on Mount Herzl, in accordance with his wishes ^[2][4]. Tributes came from across the political spectrum and from Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states whose peace with Israel he had done much to advance.

Any fair reading of Ezer Weizman achievements has to hold two careers in one frame. The first is military: he shaped the Israel Air Force into the instrument that decided the 1967 war, and generations of Israeli pilots trained inside a system bearing his imprint ^[2][3]. The second is political: the fighter pilot who once opposed territorial concessions became a principal architect of the first Israeli-Arab peace treaty and, as president, a persistent voice for negotiation ^[1][4].

Students consulting an Ezer Weizman biography today encounter a figure who resists tidy categories, a hawk who became a dove without ever becoming cautious. His flaws, from the gifts affair to his unfiltered speech, were as public as his triumphs. That combination of audacity in war and impatience for peace is the inheritance he left Israeli public life ^[4][5].