Ezer Weizman, who announced from the Knesset podium Monday that he is retiring from politics, used his valedictory to warn that Israel is being led by the present government not toward peace but to impasse and possible war.
It was a statement that marked the political distance Weizman has traveled during some five decades of political involvement.
Weizman, a former fighter pilot who became air force commander and later defense minister, is credited with engineering Likud’s upset election victory in 1977. He went on to become a key architect of the 1978 Camp David accords.
Though he entered politics as a Likud activist and was thought by many poised to succeed Menachem Begin as prime minister, Weizman has been a relatively obscure Labor Knesset member for the past dozen years.
But at 68, clearly disillusioned with Likud, which he has often accused of missing opportunities for peace, Weizman also lacks confidence in Labor’s leadership.
"I’ve come to the conclusion that I’ve reached a point in my political life where I’ve contributed what I can," he told his parliamentary colleagues.
He added that he could not shake off "the troubling feeling that the road on which we are now embarked does not lead to peace, rather to a dead end, behind which looms the threat of war."
He said he was leaving the political arena with deep concern for the fate and image of Israel in the years ahead.
Weizman was badly shaken by a personal tragedy, the death of his son Shaul in an automobile accident last year. Shaul was seriously wounded on the Suez Canal front in 1970.
Weizman recalled that when he enlisted in the army, "I wrote him a letter and I asked: ‘Where did we, the parents, go wrong, that you, the children, go to war as well?’"
He said that when he and others had sent their sons to war, they had always dreamed about peace. But now the road is not leading to peace, he said.
RESPECTED BY FRIENDS AND FOES
Weizman expressed the same concerns years ago, when he believed that Begin, after signing the treaty with Egypt, was failing to build on it and expand the peace.
After resigning from Likud in 1980, Weizman came to be considered a political oddity because he opposed taboos, such as the ban on contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, and rejected the doomsday prophecies about the implications of a Palestinian state.
His own political movement, Yahad, failed to live up to expectations, winning only three seats in the 1984 Knesset elections. Weizman then threw his support to Labor, into which he soon merged his faction.
The result was a Labor-Likud unity government, in which Shimon Peres alternated with Yitzhak Shamir as prime minister. Weizman served as minister of science and energy and later as minister in charge of Arab affairs.
He left the government in early 1990 after a dispute with Shamir, who was then prime minister.
Weizman comes from one of the most illustrious Jewish families of the pre-state Palestinian yishuv. His uncle was the Zionist statesman Chaim Weizmann, who became Israel’s first president.
Ezer Weizman joined the Royal Air Force in 1942 and helped form the air wing of Haganah, the pre-state Jewish fighting force.
He commanded Israel’s air force from 1958 to 1966 and is credited with preparing it for the stunning victories of the 1967 Six-Day War.
In 1977, Weizman was Begin’s campaign manager and was credited with the electoral victory that ended 30 years of Labor governments.
Weizman is regarded with affection by Knesset friends and foes alike. At his leave-taking, they called him "Eizer," stressing the Yiddish inflection of his name, and lined up to embrace him and shake his hand.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
