Obituary: Chaim Herzog

Chaim Herzog crammed at least half a dozen careers into his life. He spent more than 20 years in the military, but he also practised law, spent a decade as a businessman, represented Israel's Labour party in parliament and wrote many books on Israel's history before in 1983 becoming Israel's sixth president.

Like most of the major figures in modern Israeli politics - with the exception of Moshe Dayan - Herzog was born outside the Middle East, in his case in Belfast, in 1918. He came from a family that was not merely Jewish, but rabbinical: his father Isaac Herzog was Chief Rabbi in Ireland and, later, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi when Israel gained independence in 1948.

His brother Yaacov, also a Rabbi, had one of the most brilliant minds of our century. Yaacov did not live long enough to complete the great work on Zionism that be had planned. But, in a collection of essays - A People That Dwells Alone - published by his widow, he illuminated the whole history of the Jewish people. Chaim Herzog was always ruefully to confess a friendly envy of his brother. "He was the smart one," he once said to me, "I was the plodder".

This plodder, however, wrote nine excellent books, countless essays, both on matters military and political and, during the famous Six Day War of 1967 - when Israel was fighting for her survival - provided a running commentary on radio on the progress of the conflict; it was balanced and soothing enough to reassure the deeply nervous nation. But, then, he had the right background to deliver those elegant commentaries.

He was, as Shimon Peres, a former Prime Minister of Israel, put it, "Safra Ve'Saifa" - "a man of the sword, and of the book". He was less intellectually and religiously rigorous than either his father or his brother, but his faith came from deep within his character. Trained as a lawyer, he was called to the Bar at Lincoln's Inn in 1942, and went on to edit a volume, Judaism, Law and Ethics (1974), which stands comparison well with anything written by his father, or his brother. And, all the while, he was a consummate soldier.

Chaim Herzog's childhood was spent in Ireland during the Troubles (the family moved to Dublin when he was a year old); as a youth he was Ireland's bantam-weight boxing champion. Having moved to Palestine at the age of 17 in 1935, he felt that it was his duty to return to Britain on the outbreak of war in 1939. He enlisted in the British Army and was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the Guards - the only Yiddisher Irishman in the Black Watch. He was, eventually, to play an important role in Allied military intelligence after the Normandy landings in 1944 (he was also one of the last British officers to question the Nazi general Heinrich Himmler and became Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery's personal representative to a high-level conference on displaced Europeans immediately after the war).

What he learned then served him well when he met up the formidable Israeli Military Intelligence Service after the Second World War. In 1947 Herzog returned to Palestine, and the following year, on the strengh of his fairly limited expertise and at the age of 29, was put in charge of organising the intelligence of the inexperienced Israeli army. For the next two years he acted as the first head of Israeli military intelligence.

But Herzog was more than a scholar and an intelligence officer. He was a soldier as well: he commanded, at various times, the Israeli Defence Forces in East Jerusalem and in the Negev Desert, which borders on the Sinai desert and which was, in his time of military office, the Israeli border with Egypt, then Israel's most implacable enemy. He rose to the rank of major-general. From Southern Command, in 1959, he was recalled to Jerusalem to reform the intelligence service he had created.

After retiring from regular service in 1962 he went into business, and for ten years was managing director of GUS Industries. Then, as a reward for his brilliantly reassuring broadcasts during "Israel's finest hour", the Six Day War, when Israel triumphed on every front, Herzog was appointed Military Governor of the West bank, and in June 1967 rode into Jerusalem. He stayed for less than a year: enough time to put in place a structure of enlightened and benign occupation, but short enough to preserve his reputation before it got tarnished - at that stage the occupied territories were seen as bargaining counters against a future peace agreement, and there were no Jewish settlements.

Then in 1975 he was appointed Ambassador to the United Nations. During this three-year stint he made a celebrated but unsuccessful defence of his country against the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. He took to the podium and while speaking proceeded to rip up a copy of the resolution. The motion was approved nonetheless (when later the United Nations rescinded the resolution, he was among the first to praise the decision). That year he also wrote The War of Atonement, an account of the 1973 Yom Kippur war and its political effects. In 1978 he returned to Israel and opened a law practice in Tel Aviv.

And, after all this, he went into politics. Having a simple, but truthful, belief in the idealistic views of the old founding fathers of the state of Israel, notably Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion, he joined the Labour Party. He rose through its ranks - serving as a member of the Knesset from 1980 to 1983 - to become president of his country, a position he held for two terms, making him so far the longest-serving president of Israel. For his election he had to overcome intense opposition from the the right-wing Likud party, headed by the then premier Menachem Begin.

When Herzog became president in May 1983, the nation was divided by the war in Lebanon and facing international isolation. During his 10 years in office Herzog made constant visits abroad and spoke to 13 foreign parliaments - a fact which symbolised Israel's new international acceptance, especially in Europe. (Indeed, like his brother-in-law, the former foreign minister Abba Eban, Herzog - with his mellifluous, still slightly Irish tones and Anglo-Saxon manners - was regarded with some suspicion by the Israeli electorate; he did better with diaspora Jews.) Upholding his long-time reputation for fairness, Herzog scupulously adhered to the bi-partisan posture of the presidency and refused to be compromised by his former political affiliation with the Labour party, though on occasion he ran into controversy - in 1986 he was accused of political expediency when he granted presidential pardons to the head of the Shin Bet security service and three aides who had allegedly been involved in the killing of two Arab captives and a subsequent cover-up. Four years later he again lost popularity among the liberal community when he commuted the sentences of Jewish underground members convicted of killing Arabs in the occupied West Bank after he had resisted right-wing pressure for months to grant them an amnesty.

Yet the man's origins had been both humble and confined. The Irish Jewish community of his birth was tiny. Even his visionary father doubted whether the Jews could ever return to Palestine. Nonetheless, this same father, talking with President Roosevelt when it seemed that the Middle East would fall to Rommel's Afrika Korps, heard the President's advice not to return to Palestine, for fear of what the Nazis would do to him. "Mr President," said Herzog, "God forecast two destructions of the Temple, but not a third. Therefore, I am going home." Rabbi Herzog went home to safety and independence.

The presidency of Israel is supposed to be merely an honorific post. It was created by David Ben-Gurion to placate Chaim Weizmann who, as the creator of Zionism, felt that, in 1948, he should be the first Prime Minister of the infant state. Herzog, however, turned his office into an engine of diplomacy. His brother had, in secret, negotiated between Israel and Jordan: he, much more publicly, negotiated between the most powerful Arab power, Egypt, and Israel. With great astuteness, he used himself as a channel between hostile forces. And, while we may think today that the peace process in the Middle East is in danger of breaking down, the fact that it exists at all is due, in no small measure, to the efforts of the Herzog brothers.

Chaim Herzog, soldier, lawyer, diplomat, politician and writer: born Belfast 17 September 1918; Called to the Bar, Lincoln's Inn 1942; Director of Military Intelligence, Israeli Defence Forces 1948-50 and 1959-62; Defence Attache, Israeli Embassy, Washington DC 1950-54; Commander, Jerusalem Brigade 1954-57; Chief of Staff, Foreign Command 1957-59; 1st Military Governor, West Bank and Jerusalem 1967; Honorary KBE 1970; Senior Partner, Herzog, Fox and Neeman 1972-83; Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the United Nations 1975-78; Member, Tenth Knesset (Labour) 1981-83; President of Israel 1983-93; author of: Israel's Finest Hour 1967, Days of Awe 1973, The War of Atonement 1975, Who Stands Accused? 1978, (with Mordechai Gichon) Battles of the Bible 1978, The Arab-Israeli Wars 1982, Heroes of Israel 1990, Living History 1997; married 1947 Aura Ambache (three sons, one daughter); died Tel Aviv 17 April 1997.