Weizman: "Condemned to Fight "

A onetime Spitfire pilot's political second coming

Israeli Defense Chief Ezer Weizman, the Cabinet minister who greeted his returning boss Menachem Begin in Jerusalem with a widely publicized call for the formation of a "national peace government," has a well-deserved reputation for speaking his mind. So much so that when he was chief of operations for the Israeli forces in the late 1960s, he was told by Moshe Dayan, then Defense Minister, that he would never become chief of staff. "Too rash, naughty, and always shooting from the hip," said Dayan.

The tall, handsome onetime fighter pilot is still firing away, but he seems to be surviving. Not only does Weizman, 53, now have Dayan's old job at the Israeli defense ministry in Tel Aviv, he has also long been considered a leading contender for Begin's job--which, of course, he says he does not seek. "I'm very happy in what I'm doing," he told TIME last week, "and I can enjoy it for many years."

Quick reactions and boundless self-confidence are Weizman hallmarks. In the planning for the Israeli charge into Lebanon, it was Weizman's idea to create only a limited "security belt" close to Israel's border, and it was his idea later on in the operation to continue the plunge almost all the way to the Litani River, after it became clear that the Palestinians were putting up a hard fight and trouble was coming from the U.N. In the middle of the operation, Weizman explains with his characteristically dry understatement, "the rules had changed."

In the inbred world of Israel's leadership, Weizman occupies a special position. His uncle Chaim Weizmann was Israel's first President (young Ezer dropped the second n in his last name in an early assertion of his independence). His wife Re'uma is the sister of Foreign Minister Dayan's first wife. And in Israel's Likud coalition government, he stands as something of a kingmaker: it was Weizman, the second ranking member in Begin's Herut Party, who ran the campaign that gave Begin his upset victory in last May's elections.

Among Israelis, Weizman has long had a kind of Steve Canyonesque reputation. He flew reconnaissance missions for the British in Egypt and India during World War II, helped build Israel's fledgling air force after independence came in 1948 and was named commander ten years later. When he left the air force in 1966 to become chief of operations, he said goodbye by buzzing all the Israeli air-bases in his personal plane, a vintage Spitfire with a red propeller.

Politically, Weizman is in the midst of what amounts to a second coming. In the late 1960s he quit soldiering to take a post in Golda Meir's government as Minister of Transport, but soon left to go into the shipping and electronics business. After a few months of unwonted silence in his new job as Defense Minister, Weizman began falling into his old hip-shooting ways. When he was asked, during the first delicate days of talks with Egypt, about reports of new Israeli settlements in the Sinai, he answered: "What do you want? I am only responsible for Israel's security, not its sanity." Early in March, when he was in Washington negotiating yet another big Israeli request for U.S. arms ($13.5 billion worth over the next nine years), he got into a widely reported transoceanic squabble with his boss; he told Begin that he would resign if Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon was allowed to proceed with work on some new settlements on the West Bank against his own orders. Begin agreed to stop the work, but later grumbled to some aides that the many warriors in his Cabinet (Weizman, Sharon, Dayan and Deputy Premier Yigael Yadin are all decorated generals) "do not know how to take orders--only how to give them."

Weizman and Begin had clashed before. In 1972, only three years after joining the Herut Party, Weizman challenged Begin for the leadership. He lost, but Begin has never forgotten the attempt to unseat him. "I respect him," Weizman wrote of Begin in his 1975 memoirs, On Eagles' Wings. "But we are poles apart in our characters, our viewpoints and our personal traits. There was the friction you get between men who lack a 'chemical affinity.' " Today he puts his relationship with Begin a little differently. He is simply trying to help Begin "navigate the ship of state in rather stormy weather."

The Lebanon strike reflected a Weizman maxim. "Israel," he has remarked, "is condemned to fight from time to time. She has to plan her wars more carefully than any other country and achieve all her targets in a very short time." In closed meetings, he has added that "Israel under Begin's rule and myself at the defense desk will not absorb the first strike but will take the pre-emptive strike."

Weizman believes Israel's well-advertised readiness to strike first and hard when it felt threatened was "among many secret motives" for Anwar Sadat's November visit to Jerusalem. Weizman and Sadat have similar family tragedies: Sadat's brother Atef was killed in the 1973 October War; and Weizman's son Shaul, now 26, a former paratrooper, suffered head injuries from a sniper's bullet while stationed in one of the Bar-Lev fortresses in 1970.

Weizman believes that Israel cannot survive forever in a war situation with its neighbors. In the past he has expressed dismay at the stalling of the peace momentum, and he and other top Israelis may be beginning to have doubts on that score about the wisdom of the Lebanon invasion. A top Israeli official told TIME last week: "Like generals before him, Weizman has learned that you can know how to start a war, but you never know how it will end."

Before the latest explosions in the Middle East, Weizman told a friend that, following Begin's talks with Carter, "we will know if the peace negotiations are alive, or whether we go for another war. You know my hopes. You have to wish me luck." Even more luck will be needed now, given the storm clouds that the Lebanese operation has raised.

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