JERUSALEM — Abie Nathan, a maverick Israeli peace pioneer, an entrepreneur and a one-man humanitarian-aid organization, who went from playboy to intrepid “peace pilot,” died Wednesday in Tel Aviv. He was 81.
The cause was various illnesses he had had for years, said a spokeswoman for Ichilov Hospital.
Mr. Nathan lived an unconventional life of adventure and diversity. He first became known in the 1960s after a hamburger restaurant he opened in Tel Aviv took off, enabling him to become a bon vivant who gave legendary parties and a darling of the city’s bohemian set.
He went on to organize emergency aid for the hungry from Biafra to Cambodia, sometimes turning to the Israeli and foreign governments for help.
But he is best remembered for his quirky quest for peace in a 30-year campaign waged through a series of audacious escapades by land, air and sea.
A Royal Air Force-trained pilot, he crashed into the national consciousness and the quagmire of the Middle East conflict with a dramatic solo flight from Israel to Egypt in an old rented biplane in 1966. A self-appointed ambassador, he wanted to talk to President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt about making peace.
After a forced landing in the enemy territory of Port Said, he was allowed to stay overnight in Egypt before being sent back to Israel. He never got to see Nasser.
Eleven years and two major wars later, the next president of Egypt, Anwar el-Sadat, flew to Israel in an overture that led to a treaty.
At first Mr. Nathan was seen as “a curiosity” in Israel, said Eitan Haber, a veteran Israeli journalist and former senior aide of the late prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin. “But then it turned out he was ahead of his time,” he said.
After a few more unsuccessful peace flights, Mr. Nathan turned to the sea, raising funds to turn an old ship into a floating pirate radio station, The Voice of Peace. Mostly anchored off the coast of Israel, the station started broadcasting in English “from somewhere in the Mediterranean” in 1973. It gained a devoted audience around the Middle East over the next 20 years with a potent mix of popular music and messages of love and peace.
Abraham Jacob Nathan was born in 1927 to a well-to-do Jewish family in the city of Abadan, Iran, and was educated at a prestigious Jesuit boarding school in Mumbai, then called Bombay, India.
After training as a pilot and working for Air India, he emigrated to the new state of Israel and volunteered as a combat pilot in the 1948 war.
An epicure, he was always ready to pay a personal price for his principles, embarking on numerous hunger strikes; he also served two terms in jail, in 1989 and 1991, for breaking a law against meeting with Yasir Arafat and other officials of the Palestine Liberation Organization, then banned in Israel as a terrorist group.
After receiving his six-month sentence in 1989, he issued a typical explanation of his person-to-person mission: “Violence will only increase and it will be impossible to heal the wounds, whether among the Arabs or the Jews, unless we decide to sit with each other. Our bullets alone cannot solve the problem.”
In 1993 Israel signed its first agreement with the Palestine Liberation Organization, known as the Oslo Accord, the fruit of months of secret talks in Norway. Soon after that, facing financial difficulties, Mr. Nathan sank the Voice of Peace ship.
“He was a kind of Don Quixote, more naïve and less political,” said Tzaly Reshef, a founder of the Israeli movement Peace Now, which was established during the Israeli-Egyptian peace talks in 1978.
Always working alone, Mr. Nathan never joined any political movement, though he made a failed bid to enter Parliament in 1965.
The image of naïveté gained Mr. Nathan widespread affection in Israel and largely spared him from the animosity of the Israeli right.
“He was seen as a type of national symbol,” Mr. Reshef said.
Mr. Nathan suffered strokes in 1996 and 1998 that left him partly paralyzed. He spent his last years in a Tel Aviv nursing home, out of the public eye. He had a daughter, Sharona.
His coffin will be placed Friday on the stage of a Tel Aviv theater to allow the public to pay respects, Israel Radio announced Thursday.
The prime minister of Israel, Ehud Olmert, said in a statement that “Abie Nathan loved life, loved mankind and loved peace. He painted Israeli society with a unique shade of humanism and compassion.”
On Thursday, the president of Israel, Shimon Peres, said, “His actions were like a beacon of light, of peace, in dark days of war and enmity.”