Israeli President Uses Post as a Bully Pulpit for Peace

Israel’s first president used to complain to friends about the limitations of his largely ceremonial post, joking that the only place he was allowed to poke his nose was into his handkerchief.

Still, he and other Israeli presidents generally abided by the unwritten rules of the office: to serve as a national symbol and unifying force for the Israeli people and maintain a statesmanlike distance from the storms of Israeli politics.

Not anymore.

Ezer Weizman, a colorful, tart-tongued former fighter pilot, is carving out an activist, wholly unorthodox role as Israel’s seventh president. A political hawk turned committed dove, Weizman is changing his position into a platform from which he voices often blunt opinions about Israeli government failings, particularly on the peace process with the Palestinians.

Compared with previous Israeli presidents, “there’s no doubt Weizman is overstepping his bounds,” said Zeev Chafets, an Israeli author, columnist and former government spokesman. “But anyone who knew him knew exactly how it would end up.”

Since Weizman took office in May 1993, his outspoken comments have earned him criticism and praise from across the political spectrum. Ever the maverick, the 73-year-old president often stuns politicians who expect him to follow a predictable course in his potentially influential position.

But many Israelis are applauding.

“People love him,” said Shmuel Sandler, a political science professor at Tel Aviv’s Bar-Ilan University. “He says what people are thinking but are afraid to say. And he can get away with it.”

Weizman, who begins an official visit to Washington today, has acted at times as both a brake and a goad to Israeli governments.

Last fall, he all but pushed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into meeting for the first time with Yasser Arafat, announcing that he would meet the Palestinian Authority president himself if the prime minister continued to delay. Netanyahu met Arafat 10 days later.

Earlier, after a series of terrorist attacks during the Labor Party governments of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, Weizman read the shaken mood of the Israeli public and urged the government to slow the pace toward peace. Labor lost power last year to Netanyahu’s Likud Party in an election viewed as a rejection of Labor’s handling of the peace process.

Most recently, Weizman set off a furor by telling Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to be ready to pressure Netanyahu to make peace with the Palestinians. The president also suggested that Albright should “knock heads”--apparently those of Netanyahu and Arafat--to force a deal.

The comments, disclosed by a U.S. official, sparked furious accusations from Netanyahu’s aides and others that the president was trying to usurp the decision-making role of Netanyahu and his government.

Several right-wing politicians called for Weizman’s resignation, and a top Israeli official fumed privately that the president’s behavior was “demagogic,” according to an account in the Maariv daily.

The president’s aides said his remarks were taken out of context. But Weizman responded to the storm in typical fashion. He announced that he will seek a second term, reportedly dashing the hopes of those close to Netanyahu that the president might step down when his term expires in May.

Elected president by the Israeli parliament, Weizman promised at the outset to do his best not to, “heaven forbid, step on government toes.”

But in early 1995, he began speaking out, shrugging off concerns that he was damaging the presidency by abandoning its tradition of political neutrality and ignoring calls from one party, then the other, that he show restraint.

Previous presidents had commented occasionally on affairs of state but never so consistently or frequently as Weizman, analysts said.

In 1982, then-President Yitzhak Navon went on national television to call for a commission of inquiry into Israel’s role in the massacres of Palestinian civilians at two refugee camps in Lebanon.

“It was so dramatic precisely because he was a very reserved president and it was an exception to his normal behavior,” said Joseph Alpher, a veteran observer of Israeli politics as the Israel and Middle East representative of the American Jewish Committee in Jerusalem. “But Weizman’s personality is such that no one expected that he could play the role of reserved figurehead.”

Known for his loose tongue, Weizman has angered political allies and opponents over the years, as well as constituent groups such as women and homosexuals, with his sharp, occasionally crude language.

A scion of an influential Zionist family--he is a nephew of Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president--Weizman was trained as a fighter pilot by the British during World War II.

After Israel’s independence was declared in 1948, he helped build and then commanded the Israeli air force.

Known as one of the military’s most hawkish officers, Weizman joined Menachem Begin’s ultranationalist Herut Party and ran the 1977 campaign that ended in victory for Herut and its partners in a Likud coalition. He served as defense minister under Begin.

But an evolution in his political views had begun in the early 1970s, after his only son, Shaul, was disabled by a sniper’s bullet fired across the Suez Canal.

Close associates say the change of heart was completed when he became an enthusiastic supporter of Begin’s peacemaking with Egypt and struck up a close friendship with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.

In 1989, Weizman caused an uproar when he was reported to have talked with Palestine Liberation Organization officials at a time when such contacts were illegal for Israelis.

He never confirmed or denied it, but he was forced to leave a Cabinet post. In 1992, he left politics, many thought for good.

Weizman rarely gives formal interviews and he declined to be interviewed for this article. According to those close to him, however, he sees his current role as expressing what he considers the consensus opinions of the Israeli people and acting to promote the peace process, even if that means safeguarding its future by slowing it down.

“If there is a force he is driven by, it is the pursuit of peace,” said Eitan Ben-Tsur, a former top aide who now serves as director general of the Foreign Ministry. “I think he would do his utmost, under any circumstances and in whatever fashion--orthodox or unorthodox--to promote the peace process.

“He goes after his heart and his gut feelings,” Ben-Tsur said. “It’s not that he’s trying to make a new definition of the presidency. But that’s him, the way he is.”

If Weizman’s decision to seek another term disappointed Israeli officials eager for a more predictable president, it surely pleased the average Israeli.

More than any previous president, Weizman has formed a bond with the public. He travels across the country, visiting marketplaces, malls and farms, listening to people’s concerns as he dispenses one-liners and his own crusty brand of wisdom.

Last week, Weizman took visiting Czech President Vaclav Havel on a tour of Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda Street pedestrian mall, the scene of a suicide bombing on Sept. 4. But Weizman soon all but abandoned his distinguished guest and frustrated his security detail by making numerous forays into crowds that clustered around him.

In a matter of minutes, he urged a middle-aged man to have faith in the peace process; commiserated with merchants about the lack of business since the recent suicide bombings; admired an elderly woman’s haircut; chatted amiably with a group of soldiers; and calmed a woman shouting angrily about Arab merchants buying shops along the street.

“Relax,” he said quietly, standing a few feet from the woman. “Why are you blowing up like this? Things are not so simple, not so easy.”

He has also made it his custom to visit the bereaved families of all Israelis who fall victim to political violence, whether civilians killed in suicide bombings or soldiers slain in clashes with Muslim militants in Lebanon,

Those visits may have made him even more aware than most Israelis of the costs of conflict, according to several of those interviewed.

“He wants to be part of what Israelis are going through,” said Uri Dromi, who had to cope with Weizman’s criticisms of government policies as Israel’s top spokesman during the Rabin and Peres administrations. “And because he’s always there, I think he has acquired the right to be a voice for the average Israeli in a way that is new for presidents.

“He is a true and genuine advocate for peace and for the Israeli people.”

A recent poll for the Jerusalem edition of Yediot Aharonot, Israel’s largest daily, showed overwhelming support for Weizman; 70% of those surveyed said he was fulfilling his role in a “good” to “excellent” manner.

As the deadlock in the peace process continues, many Israelis are crediting Weizman with demonstrating leadership at a particularly tense, confusing time.

Of Israel’s top leaders, “Weizman alone seems willing to go the distance for peace, and, if this isn’t working, to go the distance for security,” columnist Larry Derfner wrote recently in the English-language Jerusalem Post. “He has the fearlessness to move in either direction . . . and the judgment to know which way to go and when.”

Ramit Plushnick of The Times’ Jerusalem Bureau also contributed to this report.