Ezer Weizman: The former president of Israel, Ezer Weizman, who has died aged 80, was always enigmatic, a maverick born into the nearest thing the secular Zionist polity has to a royal family.
As chief of military operations in 1967, it was Weizman who, with military intelligence chief Aharon Yariv, persuaded a cautious Israeli cabinet to launch the Six-Day War; 10 years later, as a Likud politician, he ended three decades of Labour Party rule. In 1979 he helped to seal the key peace treaty with Egypt and in 1982 warned against his country's ill-fated invasion of Lebanon.
As Israel's president, from 1993 to 2000, he kept alive the ailing Oslo peace process, while in 1999 his attacks on the Likud prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, contributed to that party's electoral defeat.
Weizman's origins certainly gave him a head start in Israeli society. His uncle, Chaim Weizmann, instigated the Balfour Declaration in 1917, negotiated with Emir Faisal of Arabia in 1919, and became Israel's first president in 1948. Yet curiously Ezer always remained something of an outsider.
Born in Tel Aviv, he grew up in Haifa and aged 18 in 1942 joined the RAF. While in England he met members of the Irgun, a right-wing Jewish underground group, then led by Menachem Begin. They plotted to assassinate Gen Evelyn Hugh Barker, Britain's military commander in Palestine, but the scheme faltered due to abysmal planning.
At the time of Israel's independence in 1948, Weizman became one of the first pilots in the Israeli air force, flying requisitioned Spitfires. As air force commander from 1958 to 1966, he acquired the supersonic aircraft and electronic wizardry that gave Israel a qualitative advantage over its Arab enemies.
Buoyed by his heroic image following the Six-Day War, in 1969 Weizman joined Levi Eshkol's national unity government as transport minister, representing the right-wing Gahal bloc, a precursor of the Likud. Gahal left the coalition in 1970, but Weizman re-emerged to lead the Likud's 1977 election campaign, with military precision.
Harnessing the anger of Israel's oriental Jewish majority at the country's economic malaise, he also exploited the fury felt by many at Labour for nearly losing the 1973 Yom Kippur War. His reward, in Begin's new administration, was the coveted post of defence minister.
In March 1978 Weizman launched Operation Litani against south Lebanon to avenge PLO raids. But his hawkish views were changing and he was increasingly disturbed by the endless wars that drained Israel's youth; his own son, Saul, suffered brain injury from a sniper's bullet.
Weizman concluded that no genuine Middle East peace was possible until the question of Palestinian rights was addressed. He clashed repeatedly with cabinet colleagues who were encouraging Jewish settlement in the West Bank and finally left the government in May 1980. That November Weizman was expelled from the Likud.
After working as a businessman, in March 1984 he launched a dovish party, Yahad (Unity), which, although it won only three seats, ensured its leader a cabinet post. He joined Labour in 1986 and two years later became science minister.
But Weizman never felt comfortable in his new political home; intemperate remarks against Yitzhak Rabin in 1967 came back to haunt him. He eventually resigned his Knesset seat in early 1992, after Labour leaders had rebuffed his demand that they make way for younger politicians. The Rabin-led Labour Party won a crushing electoral victory only months later.
In March 1993 the Knesset overwhelmingly elected Weizman to succeed Chaim Herzog as head of state and re-elected him in May 1998. Controversial as ever, he stretched the normally ceremonial role of president to breaking point. His outrageous pronouncements offended such disparate groups as gays, women pilots, West Bank settlers, Palestinian politicians and wealthy diaspora donors. Israel no longer needed their "charity", he declared.
As president, Weizman often trespassed on political territory, most notably in 1996 entertaining Arafat at his Caesarea villa, after prime minister Netanyahu had refused to meet the PLO leader.
Down-to-earth, easy-going and charming, President Weizman regularly visited impoverished Arab villagers, victims of terror, and new Jewish immigrants from Russia and Ethiopia. Weizman also encouraged renewed diplomatic contacts with and visits to a whole range of countries and the Pope .
Although previously disparaged as bluff or insensitive, he showed tremendous dignity in soothing the country after premier Rabin's assassination in 1995.
Ultimately, however, Weizman fell victim to scandal. In December 1999 allegations emerged that he had accepted payments worth more than $450,000 from a French textile magnate of Sudanese Jewish origin, Edouard Saroussi. Weizman never denied receiving Saroussi's gifts during the years from 1988 to 1993. Yet in July 2000 the whiff of impropriety forced him to announce his premature retirement.
Weizman's autobiographical books, Battle for Peace (1981) and On Eagle's Wings (1975), reveal a statesman of vision, wit and passion.
His wife, Re'uma, and a daughter survive him. His son, Saul, died in a car accident in 1991.
Ezer Weizman: born June 15th, 1924; died April 24th, 2005