Chaim Herzog (; 17 September 1918 – 17 April 1997) was an Irish-Israeli politician, military officer, lawyer and author who served as President of Israel from 1983 to 1993. Born in Belfast and raised primarily in Dublin, the son of Ireland's Chief Rabbi Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, he immigrated to Mandatory Palestine in 1935. He served in the Haganah Jewish paramilitary group during the 1936–1939 Arab revolt and in the British Army during World War II. Following the end of the British Mandate and Israel's Declaration of Independence in 1948, he served in the Israel Defense Forces and fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War. He remained in the Israeli military as an officer following the war until retiring in 1962 with the rank of major-general.
After leaving the military, Herzog managed an industrial conglomerate and co-founded the Herzog, Fox & Ne'eman law firm, which would become one of Israel's largest law firms. Between 1975 and 1978 he served as Israel's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, in which capacity he denounced UN General Assembly Resolution 3379—the "Zionism is Racism" resolution—and symbolically tore it up before the assembly. Herzog entered politics in the 1981 elections, winning a Knesset seat as a member of the Alignment. Two years later, in March 1983, he was elected to the largely ceremonial role of President. He served for two five-year terms before retiring in 1993. He died four years later and was buried on Mount Herzl, Jerusalem.
His son Isaac Herzog, who between 2013 and 2017 led the Israeli Labor Party and was the parliamentary Opposition in the Knesset, is the incumbent President of Israel. The pair are the first father and son to have served as the nation's president. His father was born in Łomża in what was then Congress Poland, part of the Russian Empire, and his mother Sarah Herzog was born in Riga, in what was then the Governorate of Livonia, also part of the Russian Empire at that time; his maternal grandfather was the Orthodox Jewish Talmudic scholar Shmuel Yitzchak Hillman. When Herzog was nine months old the family relocated to Dublin after his father became Chief Rabbi of Ireland. Herzog was raised as an Orthodox Jew and attended a traditional Jewish primary school, or cheder, as a child. He received a secular education at the coeducational kindergarten of Alexandra College, which was otherwise a girls' school, and at Wesley College, Dublin.
In his youth, Herzog was also an athlete, becoming proficient in cricket, rugby, and boxing. He was a junior bantamweight boxing champion.
Worried about rising intermarriage and assimilation rates among Jewish youth in Ireland, Herzog's parents decided to send him to study at yeshiva abroad and gave him a choice of studying in Poland, Switzerland, or Mandatory Palestine. Herzog, who was a Zionist, chose Palestine and moved there in 1935. He studied at the Mercaz HaRav and Hebron Yeshivas in Jerusalem. In 1937 he was joined there by his parents upon his father being chosen as Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of Palestine. He also joined the Jewish paramilitary group Haganah and the Mandatory government's Jewish Supernumerary Police. During the 1936–39 Arab revolt in Palestine he served with the Haganah and Jewish Supernumerary Police in Jerusalem, mainly in the Old City and Arnona neighborhood. In 1938, he moved to the United Kingdom to study law at the University of Cambridge and University College London (UCL). He earned a Bachelor of Laws from UCL in 1941 and qualified as a barrister at Lincoln's Inn. He was called to the bar on 17 November 1942 and then devilled in the chambers of David Weitzman. Following his time at university, Herzog held the position of Chairman of the Union of Jewish Students (at that time named the Inter-University Jewish Federation).
Military career
thumb|left|200px|Herzog in the British Army
thumb|left|200px|Herzog in his British Army uniform with his mother, 1945.
thumb|left|200px|Herzog while serving as an Israeli military attaché in the United States, 1950.
With World War II underway, Herzog joined the Home Guard in 1940 and after starting studies at the University of Cambridge volunteered for the officer cadet training unit, joining the cavalry squadron where he trained with armored vehicles and horses. He enlisted in the British Army on 17 December 1942. After initial training with the Royal West Kent Regiment at Maidstone, Herzog was trained as an intelligence officer at the Intelligence Corps Training Depot at Wentworth Woodhouse and at Mons Officer Cadet School. He was commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1943. He underwent additional training at an intelligence officer's course at the University of Oxford and a prisoner of war interrogation course at the University of Cambridge. He was then posted to Northern Ireland as an intelligence officer on the staff of Lieutenant General Alan Cunningham, who would be the last British High Commissioner of Palestine, and was stationed at Thiepval Barracks, where his unit engaged in training with American units for the planned invasion of Normandy and handling security against potential IRA activity. Herzog was granted special permission to enter Belfast in civilian clothes. He was then transferred to serve as an intelligence officer with a division in southern England. Following the Normandy landings, he was given the task of interrogating German prisoners pending deployment as a brigade or divisional intelligence officer to northwest Europe, initially processing incoming prisoners before being assigned to conduct in-depth interrogations of prisoners deemed important. In July 1944 he was posted to Normandy as an intelligence officer in the Guards Armoured Division, taking part in operations across France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany. While temporarily detached from the Guards Armoured Division to the Third Division, he was part of the first Allied formation to enter Germany. Herzog suffered ear damage in an artillery attack on the brigade headquarters he was posted to near Bremen while the assault on the city was being prepared. His left eardrum was permanently damaged, resulting in lifelong hearing impairment. He participated in the liberation of a Nazi concentration camp near Bremen and visited Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation.
After the surrender of Germany, Herzog headed intelligence operations in several provinces of the British occupation zone in Germany from 1945 to 1947. He was tasked with identifying and interrogating Nazi officials, and briefly encountered Heinrich Himmler following his capture. During this period he also helped facilitate the illegal clandestine transport of Jews from the Soviet occupation zone to help them try to reach Palestine. He was discharged from the British Army in March 1947 as a war substantive captain and was granted the honorary rank of Major.
While in the British Army, Herzog was given his lifelong parallel name of "Vivian" because his first commander could not pronounce "Chaim"; but another Jewish soldier explained to the commander that "Vivian" was the English equivalent of "Chaim".
After being demobilized from the British Army, he returned to Palestine and practiced law before rejoining the Haganah. He headed spying operations on the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine.
He subsequently served as commander of the IDF's Jerusalem District from 1954 to 1957 and as the head of Southern Command from 1957 to 1959. He again served as director of the Military Intelligence Branch from 1959 to 1962, during which time he introduced new technologies including computerization, enhanced intelligence cooperation with France, and established covert cooperation with the Iranian secret service SAVAK.
Post-military career and activities
thumb|right|200px|Herzog in 1969
After retiring from the army, Herzog was managing director of GUS-Rassco industrial conglomerate from 1962 to 1972. In 1965 he was among the founders of the Rafi political party which became one of the parties that merged to form the Israeli Labor Party. He ran for the Knesset in the 1969 Israeli legislative election but was not elected.
During the 1960s, Herzog appeared as a commentator in Israeli radio broadcasts and on the BBC, earning a reputation as Israel's leading political and military analyst. He was chief military commentator for Israel Radio during the Six-Day War and Yom Kippur War, making both radio and television commentary during the latter. His analysis immediately prior to and during the Six-Day War and the during the Yom Kippur War was credited with raising public morale. Furthermore, Herzog raised the voice against the indifference of some Jewish leaders who seemed "to act with indifference" to the light of the said condemnation against Zionism, he asked then: "Where is the Jewish people?" in The New York Times article titled: "Herzog Asserts Jews Didn't Aid Israelis in U.N. Zionism Debate". After the publication of the editorial, "several letters of support arrived to the Israel delegation at the United Nations", he had become a hero for the common Jewish American citizen.
Herzog also provided the Israeli justification for the Entebbe raid to the UN and conducted the first contacts between an Israeli and Egyptian diplomat with Egyptian ambassador Ahmed Asmat Abdel-Meguid. He also visited far-east countries such as China, Australia, Singapore, and New Zealand. During a 1992 visit to Spain, he and King Juan Carlos I signed a symbolic order cancelling the Alhambra Decree which had ordered the expulsion of Jews from Spain 500 years before.
President Herzog reduced the sentences of Menachem Livni, Uzi Sharbaf and Shaul Nir, members of the Jewish Underground, who were sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1984 murder of four Palestinians in the West Bank town of Hebron. Herzog reduced the sentences, first to 24 years, then to 15 years, and in 1989, to 10 years, which enabled the men to be released two years later on good behaviour.
Herzog was an opponent of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq, to which he referred to as a nest "of world terror". He said the world largely dismissed Israel's warnings that Baghdad was becoming a capital of world terrorism, adding that some Western countries helped Hussein develop into a military power.
Commemoration
In 1998, the Ulster History Circle unveiled a commemorative blue plaque to Herzog at his birthplace on Cliftonpark Avenue, Belfast. The plaque was removed in August 2014 because it had been repeatedly vandalised with anti-Israel slogans. DUP councillor Brian Kingston said, "This is a shocking indication of the level of tension and anti-Semitism which currently exists in parts of Belfast."
A park is also named for him, Herzog Park, in Rathgar in south Dublin.
A major thoroughfare in Jerusalem, Shderot Hanassi Hashishi (Sixth President Boulevard), is named for him.
Personal life
thumb|right|Herzog's grave on Mount Herzl
Family
Herzog's father was Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, chief rabbi of Ireland and later Israel. His brother Yaakov Herzog served as Israel's ambassador to Canada and later as Director General of the Prime Minister's Office. He married Aura Ambache in 1947 and the couple had four children. One of their sons is Isaac Herzog, a politician who was the chairman of the Israeli Labor Party and chairman of the Jewish Agency and is now President of Israel, the first son of a president to serve as such. Another son, Michael Herzog, served as a general in the IDF and as Israeli ambassador to the United States. Their other children are Yoel, an attorney and former IDF Brigadier General, and Ronit, a clinical psychologist. His brother-in-law was diplomat Abba Eban, their wives being sisters.
Death
Herzog died on 17 April 1997 in Tel Aviv, from heart failure caused by pneumonia, at the age of 78.