By Jeffrey Heller
JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel Monday mourned the death of the fighter pilot son of an astronaut killed in the 2003 Columbia space shuttle disaster, and the prime minister postponed talks on Middle East peace to attend his funeral.
Asaf Ramon, 21, was killed Sunday in what the military described as a training accident when his F-16 ploughed into the hills of the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
His father, Ilan Ramon, had been Israel's first man in space and as a young F-16 pilot participated in the 1981 bombing of Iraq's nuclear reactor.
"Just Like Dad," said one newspaper headline, summing up the sense of national pride and double tragedy gripping Israel.
Israeli radio stations played sombre music, television news programs focussed on the young man's life and death and one leading newspaper composed a photo montage on its front page showing the uniformed pilot saluting his space-suited father.
"Few are the moments when private pain pierces the national heart with such force. Today the entire nation is wrapped in unending grief for the death of Asaf, who fell from the heavens like his father, Ilan," Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said.
Netanyahu planned to attend Ramon's funeral -- he was to be buried next to his father -- and put off for a day talks with U.S. President Barack Obama's Middle East peace envoy.
With diplomacy taking a back seat to Ramon's death, patriotism came to the fore in reports about what newspapers dubbed a national tragedy that united a troubled country.
"The public is divided over Israel's security policy," said the left-leaning daily Haaretz, which distinguishes itself from other Israeli newspapers by reporting regularly on Palestinian hardship under Israeli occupation.
"However, the existence of these essential controversies must not allow us to forget the devotion of those who have given their lives -- in the air, on land and at sea," Haaretz said in an editorial.
PRIDE
Many in Israel take special pride in the country's air force and have traditionally regarded pilots as the cream of the crop of Israeli society.
For Palestinians, the U.S.-built F-16 flown by the Ramons, father and son, is a hated symbol of Israeli might, used most recently in a bloody campaign in the Gaza Strip in January.
Israelis see the aircraft as the long arm of their defence, a likely weapon should they carry out veiled threats to attack nuclear facilities in Iran, as the elder Ramon did in Iraq.
The younger Ramon graduated at the top of his air force academy class in July, his wings pinned on by President Shimon Peres in an event that drew headlines in Israel, where the death of his astronaut father shocked the nation six years earlier.
Memorial candles flickered on the sidewalk in front of the Ramon family home as friends, family and air force officers gathered.
Six years ago, the family was living in the United States when the space shuttle Columbia broke apart about 12 miles (20 km) over Texas as it headed for landing. Six American crew members, along with Ramon, were killed.
"Don't tell me now that I have to be strong," Rona Ramon, the astronaut's widow, was quoted as saying by the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. "I've already been strong."
(Editing by Alastair Macdonald and Charles Dick)