News Analysis: Israel’s Seventh President Likely to Have Diminished Political Role

It seemed only fitting that the inauguration of Ezer Weizman as Israel’s seventh president should take place this week in the midst and in spite of the dramatic coalition crisis that engulfed Israeli politics.

For Weizman will have a much less political role than his predecessors when a new reform goes into effect with the next Knesset elections.

Until now, one of the president’s key functions in a largely ceremonial post was to choose, after general elections, the Knesset member whom he judged to be best-suited to forge a stable political coalition and form a government. The president also now performs that function should the government collapse after losing a Knesset no-confidence vote.

In the next Israeli election, however, citizens will vote twice: once for the party of their choice and once for the politician they want to be prime minister.

This direct ballot for prime minister means that in no political circumstance will it fall to the president to choose between vying leaders –a role that can assume much importance if the competing parties and blocs are closely balanced.

It was a realization of the post’s diminished political influence that the Knesset’s election last month of Weizman, a politically controversial dove, caused no political ripples, even among the right.

To the contrary, Weizman’s winning smile and engaging personality have prompted a wall-to-wall warmth in the Knesset that ensures a happy inauguration.

Weizman and his many well-wishers hope and believe that these same qualities will ensure a sustained noncontroversial atmosphere around his presidency.

If so, Weizman will have broken with a penchant in his long career, as an air force officer and then politician, for being at the center of every passing storm.

Irrepressible, with a vocabulary often spiced with bad language picked up during his days with Britain’s Royal Air Force, Weizman has managed to offend most leading Israelis at one time or another over the years.

But most of those offended have ultimately been reconciled by his great charm and infectious bonhomie.

STRONG BELIEF IN PEACE PROCESS

Weizman started out in politics on the right. He orchestrated Likud’s election victory of 1977 and was appointed minister of defense by a grateful Menachem Begin.

Weizman nudged and prodded Begin toward signing the Camp David accords and the peace treaty with Egypt, but resigned in disgust at what he felt was the late premier’s reneging on peace commitments, including those involving Palestinian autonomy.

Weizman went on to lead a small but influential Yachad party he founded, which sided with Labor in the unity governments of the 1980s and moved steadily toward the more dovish wing of Labor, advocating talks with the Palestine Liberation Organization.

He managed to emerge from all of this a popular and well-loved national figure.

Weizman’s hardest task as president, as he acknowledges, will be to keep his more controversial thoughts and feelings bottled up inside.

The president in Israel is expected to express the nation’s “consensus” — an elusive commodity even for such mild-mannered of his predecessors as Ephraim Katzir and Chaim Herzog.

Weizman follows in the footsteps of his late uncle, Chaim Weizmann, who served as Israel’s first president (and spelled his last name differently).

The elder Weizmann died in office embittered because he felt that Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had constructed the presidency specifically to keep Weizman at arm’s length from the real seat of power.

The younger Weizman, though having lost his only son in a fatal accident last year and suffering from a military injury, seems to harbor no bitterness in his makeup.

Approaching 70, he appears reconciled to his detachment from power. But sources close to Weizman believe that despite the limitations of the role, he intends to play his part — perhaps a vital part again, as he did at Camp David — in bringing Israel and its other Arab neighbors into an era of peace.