Ezer Weizman, Former President of Israel and Hero of 1967 War, Dies at 80

Correction Appended

Ezer Weizman, the swashbuckling and acerbic former president of Israel, who built the country's air force and guided it in the startlingly swift victory over the Arab forces in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, died last night, the government said. He was 80 and suffered recently from pneumonia.

Mr. Weizman made his name as one of Israel's most celebrated fighting men, yet he worked to transform himself into a dovish politician. He was involved in the 1978 peace negotiations with Egypt that led to Israel's withdrawal from the territory he helped capture a decade earlier.

His eventful life paralleled that of the country he served for more than half a century. A fighter pilot with Britain's Royal Air Force during World War II, Mr. Weizman created Israel's fledgling air force in the war at Israel's founding in 1948. He became an acclaimed military strategist, a forceful cabinet minister and a leading figure in each of the country's two major political parties.

"He represented everything mythic and heroic about Israeli society; he also represented everything chauvinistic and impolitic about Israeli society," said Michael B. Oren, author of the best-selling book, "Six Days of War," about the 1967 war.

He was elected twice to the country's presidency, a largely ceremonial post. However, he left public life under a cloud, resigning the presidency in July 2000 after revelations that he had accepted more than $300,000 from two businessmen, one French, the other Israeli, during the 1980's and early 1990's, when he was a cabinet minister and a member of Parliament.

Prosecutors investigated and scolded Mr. Weizman, but did not file charges. Still, as political pressure mounted, Mr. Weizman quit, though he never expressed regrets.

"I will saddle up my horse, hold on tight and disappear," he said just before resigning. "Don't ask me what I am going to do."

Mr. Weizman was a hybrid, an Ashkenazic Middle Easterner who spoke fluent Hebrew and English, with a smattering of Arabic and enough Yiddish to swear. He could be caustic in any language. Though he was the second president produced by his family -- his uncle Chaim Weizmann was Israel's first president -- he took pride in his common touch as a plain-spoken, native-born Israeli.

Mr. Weizman was never far from the center of events, and played major roles in two of the most dramatic episodes in Israel's history: the 1967 war, when he led the air force he had built to a stunning pre-emptive victory, and the Camp David peace talks of 1978, when his unexpected rapport with President Anwar el-Sadat proved critical to forging peace with Egypt.

As commander of the air force from 1958 to 1966, Mr. Weizman assembled a potent fleet of fighter jets and personally led the training of its highly proficient pilots.

He was the military's chief of operations in 1967, when the Arab forces, led by Egypt, began gearing up for a coordinated offensive against Israel.

On the morning of June 5, Israel launched a pre-emptive attack, putting Mr. Weizman's air-based strategy into action with devastating results. In two hours, with just 300 combat planes, half as many as the combined Arab force, the Israeli Air Force destroyed 200 Egyptian aircraft, most of which never left the ground. By noon, another 200 Arab planes were downed in aerial combat. It was often said that the war, which lasted six days, was won by the air force in the first six hours.

Eleven years later, Mr. Weizman, then Israel's defense minister, made his reputation as a peacemaker by helping convince a skeptical Prime Minister Menachem Begin that a negotiated withdrawal from Egypt's Sinai Peninsula would make Israel more, rather than less secure.

In the peace talks at the American presidential retreat in Camp David, Md., Mr. Weizman quickly befriended the Egyptian delegation, in stark contrast to Mr. Begin's aloof, adversarial demeanor.

"I like that Ezra," Mr. Sadat, said after one of his early meetings with Mr. Weizman. Soon the two men were on a true first-name basis. Mr. Begin complained when the Mr. Sadat began dealing with Mr. Weizman directly outside of formal negotiating sessions.

Mr. Weizman was not the only Israeli military leader to evolve from a fierce, distrustful hawk to an ardent peace advocate. But few made that transition so rapidly and dramatically, and with such public consequence.

His two books documented the shift. In "On Eagles' Wings," a memoir published in 1975, he called for the unilateral annexation of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Israel's pre-1967 borders contained "the land of Israel without the land of the Bible," he wrote.

But in 1981, in "The Battle for Peace," Mr. Weizman vigorously defended the compromises Israel made at Camp David, and sympathetically reported Mr. Sadat's assertion there that the West Bank and Gaza belonged not to Jordan or Israel but to their Palestinian inhabitants.

Mr. Weizman rarely, if ever, censored his sharp tongue, irreverently skewering opponents and allies alike. With almost every major figure in his public life, he had an openly contentious, even combative, relationship that he seemed to relish.

He disparaged Yitzhak Rabin's strategic preparations for the 1967 war. In the 1980's, after crossing over to Labor from Likud, he publicly scorned his former party colleagues Yitzhak Shamir and Benjamin Netanyahu as "borderline fascists."

In 1993, while Mr. Weizman was president, a young Israeli woman asked for his help to be admitted to a pilots' training course. He replied: "I don't agree with you. Have you ever seen a man knitting socks? Have you ever seen a woman surgeon or a woman conducting a symphony? Women are not capable of withstanding the pressures needed to be a combat pilot."

Ezer Weizman was born in Tel Aviv on June 15, 1924, into one of the founding families of Zionist Palestine.

The Weizmann clan (Mr. Weizman dropped the second n) has been an omnipresent element of the local elite since the 19th century. The clan's patriarch, Ozer Weizmann, a timber merchant and Zionist activist from Russia, had 15 children, of whom 12 survived to lead long and accomplished lives.

The most celebrated was Ezer Weizman's uncle Chaim Weizmann, a research chemist and leader of the World Zionist Organization before becoming Israel's first president. Many other uncles, aunts, cousins and in-laws were formative figures in academic and charitable institutions across Israel.

Ezer Weizman grew up in Haifa, a northern port city, attending the prestigious British-run Hareali Ha'ivri secondary school, the self-styled Eton of Palestine. His father, Yehiel Weizmann, an agronomist, taught nearby at the Technion, which became Israel's pre-eminent science and engineering school.

Mr. Weizman took up flying as a young man at the Haifa Aviation Club. During World War II he enlisted in the Royal Air Force, following the example of his cousin Michael Weizmann, Chaim's son, who was killed in action over the British Channel in 1942. "I will continue in Michael's place," he telegraphed his uncle.

His wartime military service, which included duty in Egypt, Libya and India, marked him for the rest of his life as a brash and aggressive risk taker. His wry humor, his clipped accent when he spoke English and his penchant for stunt flying were all reminders of the R.A.F. officer he once was. Years after his active military career, he flew his own Spitfire as a hobby.

Back home after his discharge in 1946, he joined the Haganah insurgents and helped organize the first embryonic version of the Israeli Air Force: a fleet of nine Piper Cubs used for supply and reconnaissance missions in the Negev Desert.

With one of a few rehabilitated German-designed Messerschmitt fighters acquired later, he flew the first sorties in the 1948 war of independence against Egyptian forces near Ashdod, on the southern front.

After independence he helped organize the air force into a formidable force. As air force commander, he persuaded his often reluctant, tank-minded colleagues to invest more in aircraft and flight training. His vindication came in the 1967 war, which made him a national hero.

After the war, he was given much of the credit for forging the close alliance with the United States military that has endured to this day. "We won the last war with French equipment," he liked to say on visits to Washington, "and I would like to win the next one with American equipment."

The 1967 war brought him fame, but his path to becoming military chief of staff appeared blocked, and he left the military in 1969. He entered politics that year as the youngest member -- and some said the most hard-line member -- of Prime Minister Golda Meir's coalition cabinet.

In 1977, as campaign manager for the right-wing Likud, he engineered one of the most pivotal electoral triumphs in Israeli history: Mr. Begin's election as prime minister. The Likud victory ended 29 years of uninterrupted rule by Labor and its predecessors and began an era of hotly contested parliamentary democracy.

As the first defense minister for the new Likud government, Mr. Weizman reiterated his opposition to territorial concessions. He argued before and after the 1977 election that Israel needed to retain its hard-won territories of Gaza, the West Bank, the Golan Heights and the vast Sinai Peninsula.

In an emotionally scarring incident for the family, his son, Shaul, was badly wounded by an Egyptian sniper's bullet in 1970 while serving as a soldier in the Sinai.

"Ever since that day, my family has lived in the shadow of his injury and the physical and emotional infirmities it brought upon him," he wrote.

Shaul Weizman and his wife were killed in an automobile accident in 1991.

After his role in the 1978 Camp David negotiations, Mr. Weizman's advocacy of peace talks periodically made him the center of controversy.

In 1990, he was summarily dismissed from the cabinet by the prime minister, Mr. Shamir, for meeting secretly with an emissary from the Palestine Liberation Organization, a violation of Israeli law at the time.

Labor members of the coalition government successfully demanded Mr. Weizman's reinstatement. But in 1992, he quit the Parliament in protest over the government's refusal to begin direct peace talks with the Palestinians.

In 1993, the Parliament elected him president.

A man of action, Mr. Weizman seemed ill-suited for the largely ceremonial post, which seemed to require a diplomat who could rise above the clamorous public debate that is a permanent feature of Israeli life.

Speaking immediately after his election, Mr. Weizman joked: "It's clear to me what I'm not supposed to do as president. I'm not yet sure about what I am supposed to do."

Once in office, he found himself repeatedly embroiled in the debates of the day. Re-elected president in 1998, he became increasingly vocal about his dissatisfaction with the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

After Mr. Netanyahu's defeat in May 1999, Mr. Weizman worked publicly to pull secular leftist parties into the coalition led by the new prime minister, Ehud Barak.

Mr. Weizman shrugged off criticism of his political activity, saying, "I have often told the best legal minds in the country, 'Show me where I have overstepped my authority and I'm prepared to stand trial for it."'

Mr. Weizman was hospitalized two months ago and suffered from pneumonia. He was discharged this month and returned to his home in the coastal town of Caesarea, where he died last night with his family at his side, the president's office said.

He is survived by his wife, the former Reuma Shamir Shwartz, whom he married in 1950; and their daughter, Michal.

A state funeral was expected to take place on Tuesday in Or Akiva, near Haifa, Reuters reported.

Correction: May 6, 2005, Friday An obituary on April 25 about the former Israeli president Ezer Weizman mischaracterized the affiliation of the secondary school he attended in Haifa. The Hareali Ha'ivri school was founded by Zionists in pre-World War I Palestine; it was not run by the British.