JERUSALEM - Former Israeli president and air force chief Ezer Weizman who died Sunday, was a brilliant pilot turned politician who embodied national ideals of courage and advocated peace with Arab states.
After a career that spanned six decades, it was a lung infection that finally got the better of the 81-year-old war hero who imbued Israel's largely ceremonial presidency with more political flavour than any of his predecessors.
Born in Haifa in 1924, Weizman descended from the "sabra" aristocracy of Jews born in the holy land, representing the epitome of the Ashkenazi, or European-descended, elite that has dominated Israel for the past 50 years.
A nephew of Chaim Weizman, Israel's first president, the young Ezer joined Britain's Royal Air Force aged just 18 in 1942 at the height of World War II.
Following the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, Weizman went on to have a glittering military career, becoming chief of Israel's air force (1958-66) and deputy chief of staff during the 1967 Arab-Israeli war (1966-69).
Like a number of former Israeli generals, he entered politics and opted for the nationalist right. As defence minister in the late 1970s, he played a central role in negotiating the peace accords Israel signed with Egypt in 1979.
Weizman broke with the right-wing Likud party in 1980 and later joined the leftist Labour Party, becoming a firm supporter of peace efforts with the Arabs and serving in successive Labour cabinets.
As minister of science in a national unity government, he defied the law forbidding any contact with the Palestine Liberation Organisation, and had a secret meeting with a Palestinian official in Geneva in 1989.
The affair cost him his place in the security cabinet.
After a short period in the political wilderness, he was elected Israel's seventh state president in May 1993 and consistently used his larger than life personality to promote peace and battle extremism.
Widely popular despite his forthright comments on everyone from gays to women to religious Jews, he was re-elected for a second five-year term in 1998.
Two years later, scandal forced him to resign after it was revealed that he had received some 450,000 dollars as "gifts" from French millionaire Edouard Saroussi in the 1980s, when he was an MP and minister.
The first Israeli head of state ever to face a police interrogation as a suspect, Weizman barely escaped criminal proceedings, but after an enquiry the affair was dropped amid "insufficient proof" to press charges.
The Yediot Aharonot newspaper described Weizman as the quintessential Israeli -- "coarse, irascible, impatient and intolerant, warm-hearted and sensitive to human pain, bitter and uncompromising when it came to his political positions."
Living out his retirement in his sumptuous villa in the Mediterranean resort of Caesarea, north of Tel Aviv, he was still scathing about politicians he disapproved of and never missed an opportunity to upbraid them in the media.
To the end, he sought to fulfil what he saw as his duty to bridge the ethnic, political and religious divides in Israel.
On February 19, 2004, already weakened by old age and illness, he made one of his last public appearances, at the inauguration ceremony for the delivery of Israel's first two US-built F-16I jets.
For the teenager who flew Britain's legendary Spitfires, it must have been a momentous occasion, more than half a century after his beloved state was created, to witness the latest generation warplane in the skies.
04/24/2005 19:02 GMT