Dr. Itzhak Fried, Arens’ son-in-law, said Arens had died at home in his sleep.
A former member of the Irgun militia and a young leader of the revisionist Betar Youth Movement, Arens remained until his last days a beacon of Israel’s ideological right. After helping found the Herut (Freedom) party, he reached the top echelons of its outgrowth, the Likud, and was seen by many as the natural heir of the conservative Prime Ministers Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir.
Widely considered an outstanding civilian defense minister, Arens was respected by the military and helped shape Israel’s defense doctrine as an army outsider involved in the core debate. A champion of Israeli self-reliance, he fostered Israel’s aerospace program and became the godfather of one of the country’s most ambitious projects — to build an indigenous state-of-the-art fighter plane, the Lavi.
“There was no greater patriot than him,” said Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in the same revisionist movement and whose political career was first nurtured and then diligently promoted by Arens. “Moshe Arens’ great contribution to our people and our country will forever be remembered.”
Though Arens was one of the longest-surviving members of Israel’s founding generation, his grandest political and national goals remained unfulfilled. An aeronautical engineer by training who lacked charisma and the common touch, he never made it to the premiership, while the Lavi was grounded under intense pressure from the Pentagon.
Arens, also known by his nickname, Misha, served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and left for Israel in 1948 to join the fight for independence. He then pursued a career in engineering before winning a seat in the Knesset, or Parliament, on the Likud ticket in 1973.
A somewhat dour academic and a paragon of politeness and correctitude, Arens seemed increasingly out of place in the hurly-burly of the Likud. But his ideological credentials and acumen continued to propel him up the ranks of the party, which swept into power on a popular tide in 1977 and has dominated Israeli politics for many years since.
Arens veered right of Begin, his mentor, voting against the Camp David Accords with Egypt in 1978 because he believed that a total withdrawal from Sinai was too heavy a price. His hawkishness helped earn him an appointment as ambassador to the United States in 1982, a time when Israel was drawing headlines and international criticism for invading Lebanon to flush out the Palestine Liberation Organization.
Yet Arens proved adept at making Israel’s case to audiences in the United States and came to be valued by Reagan administration officials as an Israeli government insider, according to journalist Wolf Blitzer in his 1985 book “Between Washington and Jerusalem.”
Arens returned home in 1983 to take up the position of defense minister, replacing Ariel Sharon, a decorated general who was forced to resign after a tribunal found him indirectly but personally responsible for the massacre by Israeli-allied Lebanese Phalange militiamen at the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camps near Beirut.
The Israeli army was spread thin in Lebanon. Arens set about consolidating the forces there.
“He basically undid what Sharon did,” said Ehud Yaari, co-author of the 1984 book “Israel’s Lebanon War.”
Arens won support for his work in Lebanon, but was ultimately unable to parlay that into what he had hoped would be his legacy: the Lavi. He lobbied for the project intensively from its inception in 1980. The U.S. government initially gave a green light for the transfer of necessary technology, and Congress approved an allocation of $250 million a year through U.S. military aid.
But the Americans later withdrew their support, largely because of the ballooning cost, and the project was canceled in 1987, its proponents in Israel defeated in the Cabinet by a single vote.
The demise of the project released hundreds of engineers with cutting-edge knowledge and experience into the market and has been credited with providing a crucial boost to Israel’s then-burgeoning high-tech industry.
After the defeat of his beloved project, Arens remained in government serving as a minister without portfolio, as foreign minister and then again as defense minister until 1992, when Likud was voted out of power. He returned briefly in 1999 to challenge his own protégé, Netanyahu, for the party leadership, but lost and served briefly in Netanyahu’s Cabinet before leaving politics for good.
“Misha was one of the most important ministers of defense the State of Israel ever had,” said President Reuven Rivlin, another scion of the revisionist Herut movement. “He was not a commander or a general, but a devoted man of learning who toiled day and night for the security of Israel and its citizens.”
Moshe Arens was born in Kovno, now Kaunas, Lithuania, on Dec. 27, 1925, and moved with his family to the United States at 13. He graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in World War II before leaving to fight in Israel’s 1948 war of independence with Begin’s right-wing underground militia, the Irgun.
After going back to the United States for graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology and a stint in the U.S. aviation industry, Arens returned to Israel in 1957 for good. He worked as an associate professor of aeronautical engineering at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, and as vice president for engineering at the state-owned Israel Aircraft Industries. He married and had four children. He is survived by his wife, the former Muriel Eisenberg; his four children, Yigal, Ranan, Aliza and Rut; 10 grandchildren and one great-granddaughter.
Arens once told Blitzer that “Israel exists in the Middle East, not in the Middle West of the United States” and that he was of the view that it was up to the Arabs to prove they wanted peace with Israel, not the other way around. Nevertheless, he supported the need for practical arrangements with the Palestinians and approached the issue with a sense of decency and regard for basic human rights. Arens backed the Shamir Plan, first proposed in 1989, to hold Palestinian elections in the occupied territories to be followed by talks and limited autonomy. The initiative failed to get off the ground.
Arens went on to denounce the interim Oslo Accords reached with the Palestine Liberation Organization in the mid-1990s and strongly opposed Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Eschewing the current Palestinian leadership as a true partner for peace, Arens advised patience, cautioning in a 2016 interview, “I say proceed slowly. Everyone wants to know what’s the end game. I don’t know what it will be.”
Still, he continued to raise a sharp voice of moral clarity, writing regular columns in the liberal Haaretz newspaper into his 90s, and did not shy away from criticizing the Netanyahu government.
He decried Netanyahu’s appointment of an ultranationalist rival, Avigdor Lieberman, as defense minister in 2016, describing it as the result of a “murky” political deal. (Lieberman resigned late last year.)
More recently, he rejected the passage of a contentious nation-state law enshrining national self-determination as “unique to the Jewish people,” prioritizing Jewish building and downgrading Arabic from an official language alongside Hebrew to one with a special status. Arens denounced the legislation, which was heavily promoted by Netanyahu, as “needless,” “damaging to Israel” and gratuitously insulting to the country’s Arab citizens when, he said, Israel’s Jewishness was not in question.
Arens devoted his later years to writing. In his 2011 book, “Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto,” he brought to light the previously unrecognized role of the Betar fighters in the 1943 ghetto uprising.
His political memoir, “In Defense of Israel,” published last February, conveys a sense of satisfaction with his life’s work.
“I look back in wonder at Israel’s sixty-nine-year history,” he wrote in the epilogue. “In a few decades it has developed into a country well able to defend itself with a dynamic economy growing at a rapid rate, while simultaneously fulfilling its declared mission and absorbing millions of Jews in need of a haven.”
Recounting Israel’s victories in wars of survival and defense against waves of terror, he concluded, “It is Israel’s military prowess and economic vitality that has paved the way to progress toward peace with its Arab neighbors. Arab nations have come to realize that, like it or not, Israel is here to stay.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.