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.”