Yitzhak Navon: Israel’s youngest president whose diplomatic skills proved crucial in the 1979 peace deal with Egypt

He grew up speaking Arabic, and later used his position to promote its study by Israelis

Navon, right, with the US President Jimmy Carter in 1979 (AP)

Yitzhak Navon, who has died at the age of 94, was Israel’s youngest president. He will be remembered mainly for his important role during the ceremonies of signing the Israeli-Egyptian Peace Agreement in 1979, for being the only Israeli president to raise a young family in the presidential residence in Jerusalem, for his insistence on investigating the Sabra and Shatila massacre during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, and for granting a pardon to Amos Baranes, who was wrongly convicted in one of Israel’s most shocking murder cases. Navon, the first president who came back to active political life after his presidency, also wrote the successful play, Sephardic Garden.

Navon was born in Jerusalem. His father’s family had lived in the city for more than 300 years and tracked its ancestry to the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492 who travelled to Jerusalem via Turkey. His mother, Miryam Benatar, was born in Morocco and emigrated to Jerusalem in the late 19th century. His father, Yosef, was a Torah Scribe (a calligrapher who writes down religious books and scriptures).

Navon, who learned Arabic at home, and would later be a gifted linguist, was the head of the intelligence service of the paramilitary organisation Haganah during the 1948 war, known in Israel as the War of Independence. After the war he embarked on a short-lived diplomatic career as second secretary in the Israeli delegations in Argentina and in Uruguay.

By 1951 he was back in Israel; after a short stint as head of chambers for Foreign Secretary Moshe Sharet, from 1952-63 he ran the offices of successive prime ministers, Moshe Sharet and David Ben Gurion. During those years he initiated the “Eliminating Illiteracy” campaigned.

Between 1965-78 he was a member of the Knesset (the Israeli parliament), first as a member of the Rafi party, which later merged with two other parliamentary factions, Mapai and Ahdut HaAvoda, to form the Labour Party. As an MK he filled various roles: temporary Speaker of the house, deputy Speaker, and head of the Parliamentary Committee for Security and Foreign Affairs.

In 1978 he was elected Israel’s President, a year after the right-wing Likud Party had come to power for the first time. As the first President of Mizrahi origin – Middle Eastern, rather than the European Ashkenazi – Navon found himself presiding over a country which was experiencing growing tensions between the two camps. Navon’s command of Arabic made his speeches in that language at the time of the Israel-Egypt peace agreement memorable. In 1980 he visited President Anwar Sadat of Egypt, helping improve the relationship between the two nations.

In 1982, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon and after the massacre in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila – which was carried out by the Lebanese Christian Phalanges, assisted by a tight ring of Israeli army forces around the camps – Navon joined the calls for a National Committee of Inquiry into the extent of Israel’s culpability. He threatened to resign if such a body was not appointed, and his threat, in conjunction with additional political pressure, led to the establishment of the Kahan Committee, which accorded responsibility or the massacres to high-ranking army officials and politicians, most memorably Ariel Sharon.

In 1983 Navon intervened in the case of Amos Baranes, who had been convicted in 1976 of murdering a 19-year-old soldier Rachel Heller, whose battered body was found by a roadside in Caesarea. Navon commuted his life sentence to 12 years and Baranes, who had confessed to the murder but later retracted his confession, was released shortly after thanks to time off for good behaviour. In 2002 the High Court of Justice exonerated him, and Navon’s involvement paved the way for a legal and public discussion of police interrogation methods and the efficacy of using confessions as sole evidence in murder cases.

At the end of his tenure as president Navon decided, unusually, not to try for a second term but to re-enter active politics. In 1984 he was re-elected to Knesset as for the Labour Party and appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Education. In this role he championed the study of Arabic, as well as adult education.

In 1963 he had married the glamorous Ofira Resnikov, with whom he had two children, one of them adopted. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 1978, she eventually died of it in 1993. She spoke frankly and openly of her disease, inspiring many woman to seek early diagnosis, at a time when “cancer” was still a dirty word. In 2008 Navon married Miri Shafir, who he had met two years after Ofira’s death.

Alongside his political work Navon was an author and playwright. His most successful play was A Sephardic Garden, about a veteran Sephardi family in Jerusalem. In 2014 it marked its 2,000th showing, at Habima Theatre.

Yitzhak Navon, politician: born Jerusalem 9 April 1921; married 1963 Ofira Resnikov (died 1993; two children), 2008 Miri Shafir; died Jerusalem 6 November 2015.