“An exemplary symbol of the Israeli Sabra,” Ariel Sharon called Ezer Weizmann after Weizmann’s death on Sunday at the age of 81 – a judgment that was like a eulogy for a eulogy, for who in Israel still speaks about Sabras? Once, to be born a Jewish child in the land of Israel, as Weizmann was in the new city of Tel Aviv in 1924, conferred an almost mythical status. Today, it is merely to be the bearer of another Israeli birth certificate.

And yet Weizmann, more even than his contemporary Yitzhak Rabin, was the archetypical Sabra. The closest thing possible to a blueblood in those days of Zionist egalitarianism (his uncle, Chaim Weizmann, was for years leader of the Zionist movement and the first president of the state of Israel), he was all a native-born Palestinian Jew was supposed to be: blunt, cocky, rough-mannered, mischievous, fun-loving, corner cutting, impatient with etiquette and forms

This was the Weizmann who, in 1977, visiting Egypt for the first time, flung the cane he was hobbling on because of a broken leg across the president’s lawn. “Ezra!” Sadat had shouted upon catching sight of him after having been introduced to him the previous month in Israel. “Are you still walking on that stick of yours?” Piqued both by his incapacity and the mispronunciation of his name, Weizmann twirled the cane above his head, shouted in Arabic “To hell with it!” and sent it flying. Everyone was shocked except Sadat, who burst into loud laughter. It was the start of a genuine friendship between the two.

Weizmann, a former air force commander who had trained the pilots responsible for destroying the Egyptian air force in the 1967 war, was a key figure in the difficult negotiations that led to the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty. More than any other leading politician in Israel at the time, his views were changed by the experience. From a hard-line hawk in Menachem Begin’s Likud government, in which he was minister of defense, he was transformed into a staunch proponent of territorial compromise.

This transformation eventually scuttled his political career, leading in 1980 to his leaving the Likud, in which he had stood a good chance of becoming Begin’s successor, and in 1986 to his joining the Labor Party. Yet the route to the top there was closed to him and his election to Israel’s figurehead presidency in 1993 was more a booby prize than a promotion.

Today, when Ariel Sharon is in the stormy process of trying to lead the Likud down the same path that Weizmann frustratedly felt unable to take it on, it is possible to praise Weizmann’s far-sightedness for already realizing 25 years ago that the Likud’s territorial maximalism was unrealistic. One can only speculate on what impact he might have had then if, instead of walking out of the party in a pique, he had stayed to fight for his beliefs. The unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians that Mr. Sharon is seeking to execute now, in the wake of the second intifada of 2000-2004, would have made just as much sense after the first and less bloody intifada of 1987-92.

And yet the impact would probably not have been very great, because Weizmann was always too impetuous and short-tempered to be a successful politician. Gifted at personal contacts, and winning in his outspokenness and cutting through of cant, he had no patience for the give-and-take of political wheeling-and-dealing. To his Sabra mentality, such things were ugly hypocrisy.

All this was compounded further by his military background. Like many of the Israeli generals who went into politics after leaving the army (one thinks of Yigal Yadin, Moshe Dayan, Ehud Barak, even – especially in his first term as prime minister – Yitzhak Rabin), he was used to orders and military chains of command. The chaotic world of politics, in which the lowliest Knesset member or local ward heeler had to be cajoled for support, instinctively repelled him. He hated to flatter or glad-hand in return for a favor or vote. Such high principle is all very fine and well in politics until you need the votes and don’t have them.

I met him, if it can be called that, twice. The first time was at an open house for the public that he gave in the mid-1990s in the presidential sukkah during the Feast of Tabernacles. He was having a fine time chatting with the ordinary citizens who had dropped in from the street to say hello, express their appreciation of him, or impart to him their secret plan for running the world better. Suddenly, noticing that I, present as a journalist, was following him around with a notebook, he turned on me and snapped: “Stop stepping on my goddamn toes!”

The second time was at the movies, several years later, when he still was president. It was a rainy winter night in Or Akiva, a largely lower-class town near his home in Caesaria that had a movie theater, and when my wife and I rose to leave at the end of the show there he was – rising, like us, from the back row with his wife and a single bodyguard. There weren’t many other people there and as we walked out I said to him, “In how many countries in the world do you go to the movies and find the president behind you?”

He grinned and gave me a thumbs-up sign, and you could see that he didn’t remember that I was the person who had stepped on his goddamn toes. He was, indeed, as excellent a president as he was a lousy politician. It was a post in which, for the most part, he could say and do what he wanted with no other consequence than being liked for it.

Mr. Halkin is a contributing editor of The New York Sun.