Israel’s Voice of Peace Falls Silent After 21 Years : Radio: With signing of PLO accord, crusader says his pirate station has fulfilled its mission.

One last treacly rendition of “We Shall Overcome” went out over the airwaves, then came dead silence.

The Voice of Peace, a pirate station that broadcast music and idealism for 21 years from a ship floating “somewhere in the Mediterranean,” went off the air Friday, a unique Middle Eastern institution that fell victim in part to these hopeful new times.

Abie Nathan, the stop-at-nothing Israeli peace crusader who founded the Voice of Peace, told listeners that with the Sept. 13 signing of the Israel-PLO peace agreement, the station had fulfilled its mission.

“It’s time that the ship was laid to rest,” he said from his small converted cargo vessel off the Tel Aviv coast. “I think she has done what she came here to do.”

In its heyday, the Voice of Peace had transmitted its call for reconciliation in English, Arabic and Hebrew as far as Damascus, Syria, and Alexandria, Egypt. Nathan himself was imprisoned twice in Israel for meeting with Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat when such contacts were still banned.

More recently, the station had run into money troubles; Nathan said he was worried that the decrepit ship would not make it through another winter.

He had announced that he would sink the vessel but let himself be persuaded--at the last minute, just as his last broadcast was about to close at 2 p.m.--to turn it, instead, into a “peace museum” anchored off Tel Aviv’s strip of beach.

The near-sinking was only the latest episode in Nathan’s amazing career as a one-man, high-profile campaign for peace and single-handed provider of humanitarian aid. With the station closed, he said Friday that he was planning to fly off immediately to help Somali refugees and Indian earthquake victims.

For 12 years, Nathan had worn only black (including his underwear) to underscore his mourning over the refusal by Israel and the PLO to talk to each other. On Friday, with a whoop, the husky 66-year-old donned a white shirt to celebrate the new prospects for peace.

Lounging in the hot sun on his small yacht in Tel Aviv’s marina, retiree Yigal Geyra recalled that Nathan, his good friend and a former military pilot, first won renown nearly three decades ago when he flew his small private plane, the “Shalom (Peace) One,” to Egypt “to ask for peace.”

“It was an impossible thing to do,” Geyra said. “The Egyptians were very kind to keep him alive and return him in one piece.”

Nathan later flew to Egypt three more times and was sentenced to 40 days in an Israeli prison for one of the ventures. On Friday, Nathan told listeners that he sought peace so avidly in part because he wanted to wash his hands of the blood he spilled when his plane bombed Arab villages.

A former restaurant-owner, art collector and a natural businessman, Nathan accumulated friends and donors to his causes around the world. On Friday, conductor Zubin Mehta called in to demand, “What are you doing? The peace process is not over!”

“I know it’s just beginning,” Nathan responded, “but we’ve been in a lot of trouble. . . . I would have to sell my house to continue.”

What Nathan really wanted, and may still get, was a permit to operate his private radio station on shore. Israel’s airwaves are, so far, monopolized by government-run stations--one of the reasons Nathan’s formula of less talk and more good rock and jazz music won a wide following.

Even with the chance of coming back on the air someday, Nathan was deeply moved and full of reminiscences. When the station identification came on--”From somewhere in the Mediterranean, we’re the Voice of Peace”--Nathan groaned, “Oh God, this was the theme we played so many times. . . . “