Ezer Weizman

Biography

Ezer Weizman was born in Tel Aviv in 1924, a nephew of Israel's first president Chaim Weizmann, and grew up in Haifa. He served in the British Army and then the Royal Air Force during the Second World War, trained as a pilot in Rhodesia, and in 1944-46 belonged to the Irgun underground.

In the 1948 war he flew some of Israel's first fighter missions. He rose through the new air force, commanded it from 1958 to 1966, and built it into the force whose surprise strikes destroyed the Egyptian air force at the start of the 1967 war, by which time he was deputy chief of the general staff. He left the army in 1969.

Entering politics with Gahal, he was minister of transport in 1969-70 and, after rejoining what had become Likud, defence minister under Menachem Begin from 1977. His friendship with Anwar Sadat made him a key figure in the talks that produced the Camp David Accords and the 1979 peace treaty with Egypt. He resigned in 1980, founded the Yahad party in 1984, and served as a minister in the national unity governments, later sitting for the Alignment and Labor.

The Knesset elected Weizman president in 1993 and re-elected him in 1998. In office he pressed for peace with the Palestinians and Syria. He resigned in July 2000 after reports that he had received undeclared payments from businessmen, and died in Caesarea in 2005.