President Ezer Weizman

Ezer Weizman, born in Tel Aviv in 1924 and a nephew of Chaim Weizmann, was a fighter pilot, commander of the Israeli Air Force from 1958 to 1966 and, as Defence Minister under Menachem Begin, one of the negotiators of the peace with Egypt. The Knesset elected him the seventh president in March 1993, and he was re-elected in 1998.

Outspoken and informal, he spoke his mind on the peace process, comforted the families of the victims of the bus bombings of the 1990s, and in January 1996 addressed the German Bundestag. In October 1996 he received Yasser Arafat at his home in Caesarea. In 2000 it emerged that years earlier, as a minister and member of the Knesset, he had received large sums from the businessman Edouard Saroussi. The Attorney General closed the case without charges, but Weizman resigned on 13 July 2000. He died in 2005.