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Night Flight
They say that you can read a person’s feelings on his face. But if so, either
I’m a very good actor – the opposite of what anyone who has worked closely
with me would tell you – or the journalists clustered in front of me weren’t very
good face-readers. They said that I looked defeated. Distressed. Depressed.
Yet as I delivered my brief final statement outside an olive-green cabin at
Camp David, the American presidential retreat in the forested Catoctin hills
north of Washington, I felt none of those things.
Yes, I was disappointed. I realised that what had happened over the last 14
days, or more crucially what had not happened, was bound to have serious
consequences, both for me personally, as Prime Minister of Israel, and for my
country.
But I had been a politician, at that point, for all of five years. By far most of
my life, I had spent in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even
shaving yet, I was one of the founding core of a unit called Sayeret Matkal,
Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force, or Britain’s SAS. It may be that
the way I thought and acted, the way I dealt with danger or with crises, came
from someplace inside me. Even as a young kid, I was always quiet, serious,
contemplative. But my 13 years as a part of Israel’s main special-forces unit,
especially once I became its commander, etched those qualities more deeply.
And they added new ones: a sense that you could never plan a mission too
carefully or prepare too assiduously; an understanding that what you thought,
and certainly what you said, mattered a lot less than what you did. And above
all the realisation that, when one of our nighttime commando operations was
over, whether it had succeeded or failed, you had to take a step back. Evaluate
things accurately, coolly, without illusions. Then, in the light of how the
situation had changed, you had to decide how best to move forward.
That approach, to the occasional frustration of the politicians and diplomats
working alongside me during this critical stage of Israel’s history, had guided
me from the moment I became Prime Minister. In my very first discussions with
President Clinton a year earlier – a long weekend, beginning at the White House
and moving on to Camp David – I had mapped out at great length, in great
detail, every one of the steps I knew we would have to take to confront the
central issue facing Israel: the need for peace.
1
In choosing to return, now, to Camp David for two weeks of summit talks, I
knew the risks. Of all the moments of truth in my life – and in the life of my
country – few, if any, would carry higher stakes. Success would mean not just
one more stutter-step away from our century-long conflict with the Palestinians.
It would signal a real, final peace: in treaty-speak, end of conflict. Whatever the
complexities of putting an agreement into practice, given all the suffering and
bloodshed endured by both sides, we would have crossed a point of no return.
There would be two states, for two peoples.
And if we failed? I knew, if only from months of increasingly stark
intelligence reports, that an explosion of Palestinian violence – not just with
stones or bottles this time, but with guns and explosives – would be only a
matter of time.
I knew something else as well. This would be a moment of truth not just for
me. Or for Bill Clinton, a man who understood our conflict more deeply, and
was more determined to help us end it, than any other president before him. It
was a moment of truth for the leader of the Palestinians, Yasir Arafat.
The Oslo Accords of 1993, groundbreaking though they were, had created a
peace process, not peace. Over the past few years, that process had been
lurching from crisis to crisis. Political support for negotiations was fraying. And
yet the core issues of our conflict had not been resolved. In fact, they had hardly
been talked about. The reason for this was no secret. For both sides, these
questions lay at the heart of everything we’d been saying for years, to the world
and to ourselves, about the roots of the conflict and the minimum terms we
could accept in order to end it. At issue were rival claims on security, final
borders, Israeli settlements, Palestinian refugees, and the future of ancient city
of Jerusalem. None of these could be resolved without painful, and politically
perilous, compromises.
Entering the summit, despite the pressures ahead, I was confident that I, with
my team of aides and negotiators, would do our part to make such a final peace
agreement possible. Nor did I doubt that President Clinton, whom I had come to
view not just as a diplomatic partner but a friend, would rise to the occasion.
But as for Arafat? There was simply no way of knowing.
That was why I had pressed President Clinton so hard to convene the
summit. That was why, despite the misgivings of some of his closest advisers,
he had taken the plunge. We both knew that the so-called “final-status issues” –
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the substance of any real peace – could not simply be put off forever.
Untangling them was getting harder, not easier. And we realised that only in an
environment like Camp David – a “pressure cooker” was how I described it to
Clinton, and to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – would we ever
discover whether a peace deal could in fact be done.
Now, we knew.
* * *
Israel’s equivalent of Air Force One, perhaps in a nod to our country’s
pioneering early years, was an almost prehistoric Boeing 707. It was waiting on
the runway at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to ferry me and the
rest of our negotiating team back home.
It contained a low-rent equivalent of the American version’s presidential
cabin, and a few 1960s-vintage first-class seats, but consisted mostly of two
long lines of coach seats, three abreast, separated by an almost tightrope-narrow
aisle. I dare say I was alone in finding an odd sense of comfort in boarding the
plane. This museum piece of an aircraft was part of my past. It was the same
model of 707 for which I, with a couple of other young soldiers and engineers,
had come up with what we dubbed the “submarine door” system outside the
cockpit – to protect El Al pilots from future attacks after one of its planes had
been hijacked to Algiers in the summer of 1968. It was also the same kind of
plane – a Sabena flight, hijacked to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport – which I
stormed, before sunrise, four years later with a force of nearly two dozen
Matkal commandos. The shooting was over within 90 seconds. One of my men
– a junior officer named Bibi Netanyahu – was wounded. By one of our own
bullets. But we managed to kill two of the heavily armed hijackers, capture the
others, and free all 90 passengers unharmed.
Still, even I had to accept, it was no fun to fly on.
As we banked eastward after takeoff and headed out over the Atlantic, the
mood on board was sober. Huddling with the inner core of my negotiating team
– my policy co-ordinator Gilad Sher, security aide Danny Yatom and Foreign
Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami – I could see that the way the summit ended had hit
them hard. It was probably true, as all three often reminded me, that the greatest
pressure fell on me. I was the one who ultimately decided what we could, or
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should, offer in search of a true peace with the Palestinians. I was the one who
would be blamed by the inevitable critics, whether for going too far or not far
enough, or simply for the fact the deal had eluded us. I knew the drill: the same
thing had happened when I had come tantalizingly close to finalizing a peace
deal with Syria’s then-dying dictator, Hafez al-Assad, a few months earlier. Yet
these three dedicated men – Gili, who was by training a lawyer; Shlomo, an
academic; and Danny, a former Mossad chief – had just been through dozens of
hours of intricately detailed talks with each of Arafat’s top negotiators at Camp
David, not to mention the dozens of other meetings before we had even got
there. Now they had to accept that, even with the lid of the pressure cooker
bolted down tight, we had fallen short of getting the peace agreement which
each of us knew had been within touching distance.
I don’t think that even they could be described as depressed. On our side,
after all, we knew we had given ground on every issue we possibly could,
without facing full-scale political rebellion at home. We had proposed an Israeli
pullout from nearly all of the West Bank and Gaza. A support mechanism for
helping compensate tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees from the serial
Arab-Israeli conflicts of the past half-century. And most painfully and
controversially – my rivals and critics back home were already accusing me of
“treachery” – we had agreed to let President Clinton present a proposal for the
Palestinians to get sovereignty over the Arab neighbourhoods of Jerusalem as
well as “custodial sovereignty” over the Haram al-Sharif, the mosque complex
perched above the Western Wall, the holiest site in Judaism.
But precisely because we had been ready to offer so much, only for Arafat to
reject it all, even as a basis for talks on a final deal, I could sense how gutted my
key negotiators were feeling.
Still, I’m sure none of them was surprised when my own old operational
instincts kicked in. In my statement to journalists, I had been careful to say that
Arafat was not ready at this time to make the historic compromises needed for
peace. But before parting with President Clinton and Secretary Albright, I’d
been more forthright. It was clear, without my saying so, that the chances of our
getting a peace agreement on Clinton’s watch were now pretty much over. He
had barely five months left in office. Yet my deeper fear was that with Arafat
having brushed aside an offer that went far further than any other Israeli had
proposed – far further than the Americans, themselves, had expected from Israel
– the prospects for peace would be set back for years. Perhaps, I said, for two
decades.
4
The challenge now, I told my exhausted team, was to make sure we were
prepared for this new reality. Part of the spadework was already in place. Much
as I’d hoped that Arafat and I could turn a new page in Middle East history, I
had directed our army chief-of-staff, nine months before the summit, to draw up
contingency plans for the likelihood of an unprecedentedly deadly eruption of
Palestinian violence if we were to fail.
Now, I felt we had to go even further, and to prepare a proactive alternative
to the negotiated deal we’d been unable to secure. I proposed considering a
unilateral Israeli pullout from the West Bank and Gaza. The territorial terms
would, necessarily, be less far-reaching than the proposal Arafat had rejected.
But I felt we should still withdraw from the great majority of the land we had
captured in 1967, still leaving the Palestinians an area which the outside world
would recognize as wholly sufficient for them to establish a viable, successful
state.
And crucially, this would finally give Israel, our country, a delineated, final
border with the territory captured in the Six-Day War.
Gili, clearly uneasy about accepting the idea that the chances for a negotiated
peace were definitively gone, left to try to get some sleep on the long flight
ahead. Danny and Shlomo Ben-Ami as well. Within an hour or so, the plane
was full of irregularly slumped bodies, the silence broken only by the drone of
the 707’s engines and the occasional sound of snoring.
I sat, wide awake, in one of the seats at the front.
My sleeping habits were another inheritance from Sayeret Matkal. During
those years, nearly everything of significance which I did had happened after
sundown. The commando operations were, of course, set for darkness whenever
possible. The element of surprise could mean the difference between success
and failure, indeed life and death. But all of my planning, all my thinking,
tended to happen at night as well. The quiet, and the lack of distractions, helped
to discipline my mind. I found that it helped to free my mind as well, sometimes
only to discover that it went off in unexpected directions.
It did so now. Perhaps even I was still reluctant to accept that Camp David
meant that the opportunity for a transformative deal with Arafat was finished.
Yet whatever the reason, I began thinking back to the first time that my path and
his had crossed. It was in the spring of 1968, nearly a year after Israel had
defeated the armies of our three main Arab enemies – Egypt, Syria and Jordan.
Israeli forces were advancing on a Jordanian town called Karameh, across the
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Jordan River from the West Bank, from which a fledgling group called Fatah,
under the command of Arafat, had been staging a series of raids. In one of their
most recent attacks, they’d planted land mines, one of which destroyed an
Israeli schoolbus, killing the driver and one of the teachers and injuring nearly a
dozen children. The so-called Battle of Karameh was our single most significant
operation since the 1967 war. In pure military terms, it succeeded. But at a
price: more than two dozen Israeli soldiers dead. It also had a major political
impact. It caused shock among many Israelis, still wrapped in a sense of
invincibility from the Six-Day War, as well as a feeling in the Arab world,
actively encouraged by Arafat and his comrades, that compared to the great
armies Israel had defeated in 1967, Fatah had at least shown fight. Fatah had
drawn blood.
I had just turned 26 years old. I was finishing my studies in math, physics
and economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and had joined my
Sayeret Matkal comrades the night before the assault. It was a huge operation:
ten battalions, including crack infantry units. Our own role was relatively minor.
We were to seal the southern entrance to the town. But it proved a tough slog
just to get there. Our vehicles got bogged down in mud. By the time we arrived,
Fatah fighters, although many were in civilian clothes so we couldn’t be sure,
were racing past us in the other direction. One of them, we were later told, was
Yasir Arafat. On a motorcycle.
It would be nearly three decades before the two of us actually met – shortly
after the assassination of my longtime comrade and friend Yitzhak Rabin, when
I had become Foreign Minister under Shimon Peres. But in the intervening
years, Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters
had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in
Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world
political stage, and an increasingly uncomfortable thorn in Israel’s side. I was
head of Sayeret Matkal by then. Over a period of months, I drew up a carefully
constructed plan – a raid by helicopter into a Fatah-dominated area in
southeastern Lebanon, during one of Arafat’s intermittent, morale-boosting
visits from Beirut – to assassinate him. My immediate superior, the army’s head
of operations, was all for our doing it. But the chief of military intelligence said
no. Arafat, he insisted when we met to discuss the plan, was no longer the lean,
mean fighter we had encountered in Karameh. “He’s fat. He’s a politician. He is
not a target.”
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A decade later, the idea would suddenly resurface. In my first meeting, as a
newly promoted Major General, with our then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon,
Sharon turned to me and the army’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, and said: “Tell
me. Why the hell is Arafat still alive?” He looked first at Raful, then at me, and
added: “When I was 20 years younger than you are, I never waited for someone
like Ben-Gurion or Dayan to ask me to plan an operation. I would plan it! Then
I’d take it to them and say, you’re the politicians, you decide, but if you say yes,
we’ll do it.” I smiled, telling him that I’d done exactly that, a decade earlier,
only to have one of his mates in the top brass say no. Sharon now said yes. But
the plan was overtaken: by his ill-fated plan to launch a full-scale invasion of
Lebanon in 1982, targeting not just Arafat, but with the aim of crushing the
PLO militarily once and for all.
I finally met Arafat face-to-face at the end of 1995. Although the Oslo peace
process had dramatically changed things, it was clear that the real prize – real
peace – was still far away. We were in Barcelona, for a Euro-Mediterranean
meeting under the auspices of King Juan Carlos, aimed at trying to re-invigorate
negotiations. The ceremonial centrepiece of the event was a dinner at one of the
royal palaces, and it was arranged for me and Arafat to meet for a few minutes
beforehand. I arrived first. I found myself in a breathtakingly opulent, but
otherwise empty, room. Empty, that is, except for a dark-brown Steinway piano.
From childhood, I have loved music. And while I am never likely to threaten the
career of anyone in the New York Philharmonic, I have, over the years,
developed some ability, and drawn huge enjoyment, as a classical pianist. I
pulled back the red-velvet bench and began to play. With my back to the
doorway, I was unaware that Arafat had arrived, and that he was soon standing
only a few feet away, watching as I played one of my favourite pieces, a Chopin
waltz. My old commando antennae must have been blunted. I may not have
become “fat”. But, undeniably, I was now a politician.
When I finally realised Arafat was behind me, I turned, embarrassed, stood
up, and grasped his hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I must say I
have spent many years watching you – by other means.” He smiled. We stood
talking for about 10 minutes. My hope was to establish simple, human contact;
to signal respect; to begin to create the conditions not to try to kill Arafat, but to
make peace with him. “We carry a great responsibility,” I said. “Both of our
peoples have paid a heavy price, and the time has come to find a way to solve
this.”
7
I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that
Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I
now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever
truly understanding my mission at Camp David. My motivations. Or my mind.
Even in Israel, my reputation as a soldier has sometimes been as much a
burden as an advantage. A whole body of stories has followed me from my 36
years in uniform – a career which, after Sayeret Matkal, led me up the military
ladder until I was head of operations, intelligence, and eventually of the entire
army as Chief of Staff. By the time I left the military, I was the single most
decorated soldier in our country’s history. Some of the stories were actually
true: that when we burst onto the hijacked Sabena airliner, for instance, we were
dressed as a maintenance crew; or that, in leading an assassination raid in Beirut
against the PLO group that had murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich
Olympics, I was disguised as a woman. Not the most attractive young lady,
perhaps, though I did, painfully, pluck my eyelashes, and, with the help of four
pairs of standard-issue Israeli Army socks, develop quite a comely bosom. I
rejected the idea of wearing a long dress, in favour of stylishly flared trousers. I
was going on a commando operation, after all, not a prom date. But I did wear
heels. So yes, a woman, of sorts.
Yet some of the stories were just plain myth. I had given up counting the
times I’d heard about my alleged prowess in recording the fastest-ever time on
the most gruelling of the Israeli army’s obstacle courses. In fact, I was a lot
more like Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin.
The main misunderstanding, however, went deeper. The assumption
appeared to be that my military achievements, especially in Sayeret Matkal,
were down to a mix of brute force and raw courage. Courage, of course, was a
requirement: the willingness to take risks, if the rewards for success, or the costs
of inaction, were great enough. Few of the operations I fought in or commanded
were without the real danger of not coming back alive. But whatever success I’d
had as a soldier, particularly in Matkal, was not only, nor even mainly, about
biceps. It was about brains. The ability to make decisions. To withstand the
pressure of often having to make the most crucial decisions within a matter of
seconds. It was, above all, about thinking and analyzing – and always, always,
looking and planning ahead.
And as our plane droned onward towards Israel, I knew that I would now
need all of those qualities more than ever.
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* * *
This book is only in part the story of my life – a life that, from my
beginnings as a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined
with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle
age of the State of Israel.
Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are
inevitably a part of the story.
In setting out to write it, I was also determined to document, from the inside,
the critical setbacks as well. Mistakes. Misjudgements. Missed opportunities.
And the lessons that we can, and must, be prepared to learn from them.
No less so than I when I was planning a hijack rescue or a cross-border
commando operation in Sayeret Matkal, I remain convinced that Israel’s
security, Israel’s very identity, can be safeguarded only by evaluating
dispassionately the situation in our country and the world. And by looking
ahead.
Even when I was a soldier, I never stopped thinking this way, especially
when, first as military intelligence chief and especially as Chief of Staff, I knew,
in detail, every one of the security threats that faced Israel and was part of
discussions and decisions to try to confront them. I still vividly remember as
Chief of Staff, every Friday before the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, sitting
with Rabin, who was then Israel’s Defence Minister. Our offices were along the
same hallway of the kirya, the ministry’s headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across
from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an
apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics.
Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the wider world.
Many years before I became Prime Minister, I gave a lecture at a memorial
meeting for an Israeli academic. Not many people were there. I doubt even they
remember it. But I do, because what I said has, sadly, become more prophetic
than even I could have imagined. I talked about the imperative for peace as part
of Israel’s security. There was a “window,” I said. We were militarily strong. In
regional terms, we were a superpower. But politically, resolving the conflict
with our Arab enemies would almost certainly become more difficult with time.
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Iraq, perhaps Iran and other Middle Eastern states, might get nuclear weapons.
A violent form of fundamentalist Islam could, over time, erode existing Arab
and Muslim states, threatening Israel of course, but also the stability of our
neighbourhood and of the world. In those circumstances, even if an Israeli
government was strong enough, wise enough, forward-looking enough to
pursue avenues for negotiated peace with its immediate neighbours, getting the
popular support required would be all but impossible.
The window is still there. But it is only barely open.
I fear that I was right, as well, in predicting that our failure to secure a final
peace agreement with the Palestinians at Camp David might set back
peacemaking not just for a few months, but for many years. I have persisted in
trying, very hard, to make that particular prediction prove wrong. That was why,
despite intense pressure from my own political allies not to do so, I decided to
return to government in 2007 as Defence Minister. I remained in that role for
six years: mostly in the current, right-wing Likud government of my onetime
Sayeret Matkal charge, Bibi Netanyahu.
Much of what I say in this book about war and peace, security and Israel’s
future challenges, will make uncomfortable reading for Bibi. But very little of it
will surprise him, or his own Likud rivals further to the right, like Foreign
Minister Avigdor Lieberman and the Economy Minister, Naftali Bennett. I have
said almost all of it to them behind closed doors in the past few years, more than
once. When I finally decided to leave the political arena last year, it was largely
because I realized that they were guided by other imperatives. In the case of
Bibi, the most gifted politician with whom I’ve worked except for Clinton, the
priority was to stay in power. For Avigdor and Naftali, it was to supplant Bibi,
when the opportunity was ripe, as Likud leader and as Prime Minister. And
much too often – as with their hugely ill-advised recent proposal to amend
Israel’s basic law to define it explicitly as a Jewish state, and deny “national
rights” to non-Jews – the three of them have ended up competing for party
political points rather than weighing the serious future implications for the
country.
Peacemaking, as I discovered first-hand, requires taking risks. Statesmanship
requires risks. Politics, especially if defined simply as staying in power, is
almost always about the avoidance of risk.
10
The problem for Israel, no matter who or what party is in government, is that
there are risks everywhere one looks, and they show every sign of getting more,
not less, serious.
The “Arab Spring” has morphed into an Islamic winter. National frontiers
that were put in place by British and French diplomats after the fall of the
Ottoman Empire are vanishing. Centuries-old conflicts between tribes and rival
religious communities have reignited. The old Cold War system of nations has
given way to a world without a single geopolitical centre of gravity. Perhaps
most seriously, Iran seems determined to get nuclear weapons, and, in my view,
may succeed in doing so.
Where Israel is concerned, relations with our indisputably most important
ally, the United States, are more strained than at any time in decades.
Diplomatic ties with Europe, our single largest trading partner, have been
growing steadily worse. And the only real certainty is that anyone who tells you
that they know absolutely where things are heading next is lying. Just ask Hosni
Mubarak, who, despite having nearly half-a-million soldiers and security
operatives at his disposal, was utterly blindsided, and very soon toppled and
imprisoned, by an uprising that began with a sudden show of popular anger in
Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Internally as well, Israel faces dangers. Chief among them is the alarming
erosion of the standards of civil discourse, amid the increasingly shrill, often
hateful, divisions between left and right, secular and religious, rich and poor
and, most seriously of all, Jews and Arabs. While we remain economically
successful, the fruits of our wealth are being ever more unevenly shared, and the
prospects for continued growth constrained by the lack of any visible prospect
of long-term peace.
Bibi Netanyahu, of course, knows all of this. Indeed, he has repeatedly
spoken of the multiple threats Israel faces, not only in somber terms, but at
times almost apocalyptically.
That works, politically. Politicians, not just in Israel but everywhere, know
that it is a lot easier to win elections on fear than on hope.
Yet my own prescription – learned, as this book recounts, from years on the
battlefield, then reinforced by my years in government – is that Israel must
resist being guided by either of those alternatives. Not fear, certainly. But
neither by simple, untempered hope. Though the stakes have become much
higher since my night flight back from Camp David nearly 15 years ago, our
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need remains what I tried to impress on my negotiators then: realism. A
meticulously informed, utterly unvarnished, understanding of the threats we
face, of each altered situation after every success or a failure, and an ability to
set aside the background noise and political pressures and chart a way forward.
So what is that way? It begins with the mindset. On more than one occasion
in the past few years, after Prime Minister Netanyahu had warned our country
of a nuclear Iran or the spread of Al Qaeda-style hatred and violence, as if
prophesying the coming of Armageddon, I would say to him: “Stop talking like
that. You’re not delivering a sermon in a synagogue. You’re Prime Minister.”
Having been privileged to live my own life along with the entire modern history
of our country, I went further. Zionism, the founding architecture of Israel, was
rooted in finding a way to supplant not just the life, but the way of thinking,
which hard-pressed Jewish communities had internalised over centuries in the
diaspora: in Hebrew, the galut. We would instead take control of our own
destiny, building and developing and securing our own country.
Now, I told Bibi, he was back in the mindset of the galut. Yes, al-Qaeda, and
more recently Islamic State, were real dangers. The prospect of a nuclear Iran
was even more so. “But the implication of the way you speak, not just to Barack
Obama or David Cameron, but to Israelis, is that these are existential threats.
What do you imagine? That if, God forbid, we wake up and Iran is a nuclear
power, we’ll pack up and go back to the shtetls of Europe?”
Of course not. Israel, as my public life has taught me more than most,
remains strong militarily. We are, still, fully capable of turning back any of the
undeniable threats on our doorstep. Keeping that strength, developing it and
modernizng it, are obviously critically important. But as Israel’s founding Prime
Minister, David Ben-Gurion, used to say, the success of Zionism, and of the
Israeli state, required two things: strength and “righteousness.” He didn’t mean
the word in purely religious terms. He meant that Israel, if it were to retain
international backing and internal cohesion, must be guided by a core of moral
assumptions as well.
That, in itself, would be reason enough to pursue every possible opportunity
for “end of conflict” with our neighbours. And, at home, to protect and reinforce
our commitment to Israel as both a Jewish and a democratic state. But
Israel’s simple self-interest – its hope for prosperity, social cohesion, and
growth in future – makes this nothing short of imperative.
12
Bibi is right about one thing. The negotiating challenges have become more
difficult since Arafat’s refusal of our offer at Camp David. Arafat is no longer
alive. Palestinian politics have become ever more fragmented and messy, not
least as a result of the Hamas takeover of Gaza.
But Churchill once said that the difference between a pessimist and an
optimist was that the pessimist always saw difficulties in every opportunity. The
optimist saw opportunities in the difficulties.
I, of all people, do not look at such opportunities without hard-headed
analysis, even a dose of scepticism. But the opportunities are undeniably there,
and never has Israel risked paying a higher price for failing to see and at least to
try to act on them.
The first port of call should still be the Palestinians. I have repeatedly asked
Bibi, and the right-wing rivals that seem often to loom large in his political
calculations: “If you’re so sure you don’t have a negotiating partner in the
Palestinians, who not at least try? Seriously. What do you have to lose?”
But beyond this, there is a whole range of relatively moderate countries –
and, as Sunni states, strongly anti-Iranian countries – which share with Israel a
real, practical interest in putting in place a new political arrangement in the
Middle East. So does the United States, Russia, even China. Each, in their own
ways, is threatened by a terror threat that will require international action, and
many years, finally to defeat.
A Saudi “peace plan”, for instance, has been on the table for years. Formally
endorsed by the Arab League, it proposes a swap: Israeli withdrawal for full and
final peace and Arab recognition. Successive Israeli governments have
dismissed it out of hand, arguing that the withdrawal which the Saudi proposal
demanded – every inch of territory, back to the borders before the Six-Day War
– would be not only politically unacceptable, but practically impossible.
In the final days of the Camp David summit, as our failure was becoming
inescapably clear, a disheartened Bill Clinton said to me that he could
understand, just about, why Yasir Arafat had not accepted the unprecedentedly
far-reaching proposals I had presented. But what he couldn’t grasp was how the
Palestinian leader could say no even to accepting them as a basis for the hard,
further work which we all knew a final peace agreement would entail. Wasn’t
Arafat capable of looking beyond the political risks, of understanding the
greater risks of inaction. Of seeing the rewards? Of looking ahead?
13
My fear – not just on issues like the Saudi peace plan, but in charting our
place in a dramatically changed world, and safeguarding our twin Jewish and
democratic identities at home, pairing our physical strength with an equally
strong moral centre – is that we Israelis are now in danger of jettisoning the
example of David Ben-Gurion. For Yasir Arafat’s.
14
Chapter One
I am an Israeli, but also a Palestinian. I was born in February 1942 in Britishruled
Palestine on a fledgling kibbutz: a cluster of wood-and-tarpaper huts amid
a few orange groves and vegetable fields and chicken coops. It was just across
the road from an Arab village named Wadi Khawaret, which disappeared, with
the establishment of the State of Israel, when I was six years old.
As Prime Minister half-a-century later, during my stubborn yet ultimately
fruitless drive to secure a final peace treaty with Yasir Arafat, there were media
suggestions that my childhood years gave me a personal understanding of the
pasts of both our peoples, Jews and Arabs, in the land which each of us saw as
our own. But that is in some ways misleading. Yes, I did know first-hand that
we were not alone in our ancestral homeland. At no point in my childhood was I
ever taught to hate the Arabs. I never did, even when, in my years defending the
security of Israel, I had to fight, and defeat, them. But my conviction that they,
too, needed the opportunity to establish a state came only later, after my many
years in uniform, and especially when, as deputy chief-of-staff under Yitzhak
Rabin, we were faced with the explosion of violence in the West Bank and Gaza
that became known as the first intifada. And while my determination as Prime
Minister to find a negotiated resolution to our conflict was in part based on a
recognition of the Palestinian Arabs’ national aspirations, the main impulse was
my belief that such a compromise was profoundly in the interest of Israel: the
Jewish state whose birth I witnessed, whose existence I had spent decades
defending on the battlefield and which I was ultimately elected to lead.
Zionism, the political platform for the establishment of a Jewish state,
emerged in the late 1800s in response to a brutal reality. And that, too, was a
part of my own family’s story. Most of the world’s Jews, who lived in the
Russian empire and Poland, were trapped at the time in a vise of poverty,
powerlessness and anti-Semitic violence. Even in the democracies of Western
Europe, Jews were not necessarily secure. Theodor Herzl, a thoroughly
assimilated Jew in Vienna, published the foundation text of Zionism in 1896. It
was called Der Judenstaat. “Jews have sincerely tried everywhere to merge
with the national communities in which we live, seeking only to preserve the
faith of our fathers,” he wrote. “In vain are we loyal patriots, sometimes superloyal.
In vain do we make the same sacrifices of life and property as our fellow
citizens… In our native lands where we have lived for centuries, we are still
decried as aliens.” Zionism’s answer was the establishment of a state of our
15
own, in which we could achieve the self-determination and security denied to us
elsewhere.
During the 1890s and the early years of the new century, more than a million
Jews fled Eastern Europe, but mostly for America. It was only in the 1920s and
1930s that significant numbers arrived in Palestine. Then, within a few years,
Hitler rose to power in Germany. The Jews of Europe faced not just
discrimination or pogroms. They were systematically, industrially, murdered.
From 1939 until early 1942 when I was born, nearly two million Jews were
killed. Six million would die by the end of the war. Almost the whole world,
including the United States, rejected pleas to provide a haven for those who
might have been saved. Even after Hitler was defeated, the British shut the
doors of Palestine to those who had somehow survived.
* * *
I was three when the Holocaust ended, and it was three years later that Israel
was established in May 1948, and neighboring Arab states sent in their armies
to try to snuff the state out in its infancy. It would, again, be some years before I
fully realized that this first Arab-Israeli war was the start of an essential tension
in my country’s life, and my own: between the Jewish ethical ideals at the core
of Zionism and the reality of our having to fight, and sometimes even kill, in
order to secure, establish and safeguard our state. Yet even as a small child, I
was keenly aware of the historic events swirling around me.
Mishmar Hasharon, the hamlet north of Tel Aviv where I spent the first 17
years of my life, was one of the early kibbutzim. These collective farming
settlements had their roots in Herzl’s view that an avant-garde of “pioneers”
would need to settle a homeland that was still economically undeveloped, and
where even farming was difficult. Members of Jewish youth groups from
Eastern Europe, among them my mother, provided most of the pioneers,
drawing inspiration not just from Zionism but by the still untainted collectivist
ideals represented by the triumph of Communism over the czars in Russia.
It is hard for people who didn’t live through that time to understand the
mindset of the kibbutzniks. They had higher aspirations than simply planting the
seeds of a future state. They wanted to be part of transforming what it meant to
be a Jew. The act of first taming, and then farming, the soil of Palestine was not
16
just an economic imperative. It was seen as deeply symbolic, signifying Jews
finally taking control of their own destiny. It was a message that took on an
even greater power and poignancy after the mass murder of the Jews of Europe
during the Holocaust.
Even for many Israelis nowadays, the all-consuming collectivism of life on
an early kibbutz, and the physical challenges, are hard to imagine. Among the
few dozen families in Mishmar Hasharon when I was born, there was no private
property. Everything was communally owned and allocated. Every penny – or
Israeli pound – earned from what we produced went into a communal kitty,
from which each one of the 150-or-so families in Mishmar Hasharon when I
was a child got a small weekly allowance. By “small”, I mean tiny. For my
parents and others, even the idea of an ice cream cone for their children was a
matter of keen financial planning. More often, they would save each weekly
pittance with the aim of pooling them at birthday time, where they might stretch
to the price of a picture book, or a small toy.
Decisions on any issue of importance were taken at the aseifa, the weekly
meeting of kibbutz members held on Saturday nights in our dining hall. The
agenda would be tacked up on the wall the day before, and the session would
usually focus on one issue, ranging from major items like the kibbutz’s finances
to the question, for instance, of whether our small platoon of delivery drivers
should be given pocket money to buy a sandwich or a coffee on their days
outside the kibbutz or be limited to wrapping up bits of the modest fare on offer
at breakfast time. That debate ended in a classic compromise: a bit of money,
but very little, so as to avoid violating the egalitarian ethos of the kibbutz.
But perhaps the aspect of life on the kibbutz most difficult for outsiders to
understand, especially nowadays, is that we children were raised collectively.
We lived in dormitories, organized by age-group and overseen by a caregiver:
in Hebrew, a metapelet, usually a woman in her 20s or 30s. For a few hours
each afternoon and on the Jewish Sabbath, we were with our parents. But
otherwise, we lived and learned in a world consisting almost entirely of other
children.
Everything around us was geared towards making us feel like a band of
brothers and sisters, and as part of the guiding spirit of the kibbutz. Until our
teenage years, we weren’t even graded in school. And though we didn’t actually
study how to till the land, some of my fondest early memories are of our
“children’s farm” – the vegetables we grew, the cows we milked, the hens and
chickens that gave us our first experience of how life was created. And the
17
aroma always wafting from the stone ovens in the bakery at the heart of the
kibbutz, where we could see the bare-chested young men producing loaf after
loaf of bread, not just for Mishmar Hasharon but villages and towns for miles
around us.
Until our teenage years, we lived in narrow, oblong homes, four of us to a
room, unfurnished except for our beds, under which we placed our pair of shoes
or sandals. At one end of the corridor was a set of shelves where we collected a
clean set of underwear, pants and socks each week. At the other end were the
toilets – at that point, the only indoor toilets on the kibbutz, with real toiletseats,
rather than just holes in the ground. All of us showered together until the
age of twelve. I can’t think of a single one of us who went on to marry someone
from our own age-group in the kibbutz. It would have seemed almost
incestuous.
Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim have long since abandoned the
practice of collective child-rearing. Some in my generation look back on the
way we were raised not only with regret, but pain: a sense of parental absence,
abandonment or neglect. My own memories, and those of most of the children I
grew up with, are more positive. The irony is that we probably spent more
waking time with our parents than town or city children whose mothers and
fathers worked nine-to-five jobs. The difference came at bedtime, or during the
night. If you woke up unsettled, or ill, the only immediate prospect of comfort
was from the metapeled, or another of the kibbutz grown-ups who might be on
overnight duty. Still, my childhood memories are overwhelmingly of feeling
happy, safe, protected. I do remember waking up once, late on a stormy winter
night when I was nine, in the grips of a terrible fever. I’d begun to hallucinate. I
got to my feet and, without the thought of looking anywhere else for help, made
my wobbly way through the rain to my parents’ room and fell into their bed.
They hugged me. They dabbed my forehead with water. The next morning, my
father wrapped me in a blanket and took me back to the children’s home.
To the extent that I was aware my childhood was different, I was given to
understand it was special, that we were the beating heart of a Jewish state about
to be born. I once asked my mother why other children got to live in their own
apartments in places like Tel Aviv. “They are ironim,” she said. City-dwellers.
Her tone made it clear they were to be viewed as a slightly lesser species.
* * *
18
Though both my parents were part of the pioneer generation, my mother,
unlike my father, actually arrived as a pioneer, part of a Jewish youth group
from Poland that came directly to the kibbutz. In addition to being more
naturally outgoing than my father, she came to see Mishmar Hasharon has her
extended family and spent every one of her one hundred years there.
Esther Godin, as the then was, grew up in Warsaw. Born in 1913, she was
the oldest of the six children of Samuel and Rachel Godin. Poland at the time
was home to the largest Jewish community in the world, more than 3 million by
the time of the Holocaust. While the Jews of Poland had a long history, the
Godins did not. Before the First World War, my mother’s parents made their
way from Smolensk in Russia to Warsaw, which was also under czarist rule.
When the war was over, the Bolshevik Revolution had toppled the czars. Poland
became independent, under the nationalist general Josef Pilsuldski. The Godins
had a decision to make: either return to now-Communist Russia or stay in the
new Polish state, though without citizenship because they had not been born
there. No doubt finding comfort, community and a sense of safety amid the
hundreds of thousands of Jews in the Polish capital, they chose Pilsuldski over
Lenin. They lived in what would become the Warsaw Ghetto, on Nalewski
Street, where Samuel Godin eked out a living as a bookbinder.
My mother came to Zionism as a teenager, and it was easy to understand
why she, like so many of the other young Jews around her, was drawn to it. She
saw how hard her parents were struggling economically, on the refugee fringes
of a Jewish community itself precariously placed in a newly assertive Poland.
She saw no future for herself there. Though she attended a normal state-run high
school, she and her closest friends joined a Zionist youth group called Gordonia,
which had been founded in Poland barely a decade earlier. She started studying
Hebrew. Each summer, from the age of 13, she and her Gordonia friends would
spend deep in the Carpathian Mountains. They worked for local Polish
landowners, learning the rudiments of how to farm and the rigors of simple
physical labor. Late into the evening, they would learn not just about agriculture
but Jewish history, the land of Palestine, and how they hoped to put both their
new-found skills and the Zionist ideals into practice.
She had just turned 22 when she set off for Mishmar Hasharon with 60 other
Gordonia pioneers in the summer of 1935. It took them nearly a week to get
there. They travelled by train south through Poland, passing not far from the
little town of Oświęcim which would later become infamous as the site of the
Auschwitz concentration camp. Then, on through Hungary and across Romania
19
to the grand old Black Sea port of Constanța, and by ship through the
Bosphorus, past Istanbul, and on to Haifa on the Palestinian coast, from where
they were taken by truck to their bunk-bed rooms in one of a dozen prefab
structures on the recently established kibbutz. Though the water came from a
well, and it lacked even the basic creature comforts of the cramped Godin
apartment in Warsaw, that, to my mother, was just part of the challenge, and the
dream, she’d embraced and had come to define her. I know that she felt, on
arriving in the kibbutz, that only now was her life truly beginning.
It was a feeling that never left her. Yet it was always clouded by the memory
of the family she left behind. When the Second World War began in September
1939, the Germans, and then the Soviets, invaded, overran and divided Poland.
Two of my mother’s three sisters fled to Moscow. Her teenage brother Avraham
went underground, joining the anti-Nazi partisans. All three would survive the
war. Yet in the autumn of 1940, the rest of her family found themselves inside
the Warsaw Ghetto with the city’s other 400,000 Jews. My mother’s parents
died there, along with her 13-year-old brother Itzik and her little sister Henya,
who was only 11.
When my mother arrived in the kibbutz, her Gordonia friends assumed she
would marry a young man named Ya’akov Margalit, the leader of their group
back in Warsaw. But the budding romance fell victim to the Zionist cause. As
she was embarking on her new life, he was frequently back in Poland training
and arranging papers for further groups of pioneers. He continued to write her
long, heartfelt letters. But the letters had to be brought from the central post
office in Tel Aviv, and the kibbutznik who fetched the mail was a quiet,
dimunitive 25-year-old named Yisrael Mendel Brog – my father. Known as
Srulik, his Yiddish nickname, he had come to Palestine five years earlier. He
was an ordinary kibbutz worker. He drove a tractor.
My father’s initial impulse in coming to Palestine was more personal than
political. He was born, in 1910, in the Jewish shtetl of Pushelat in Lithuania,
near the larger Jewish town of Ponovezh, a major seat of rabbinic learning and
teaching. His own father, though the only member of the Pushelat community
with rabbinical training, made his living as the village pharmacist. Many of the
roughly 10,000 Jews who lived there had left for America in the great exodus
from Russian and Polish lands at the end of the 19 th century. By the time my
father was born, the community had shrunk to only about 1,000. When he was
two years old, a fire broke out, destroying dozens of homes, as well as the
shtetl’s only synagogue. Donations soon arrived from the US, and my paternal
20
grandfather was put in charge of holding the money until rebuilding plans were
worked out. The problem was that word spread quickly about the rebuilding
fund. On the night of September 16, 1912, two burglars burst into my
grandfather’s home and stole the money. They beat him and my grandmother to
death with an axle wrenched loose from a nearby carriage. Their four-year-old
son Meir – my father’s older brother – suffered a deep wound from where the
attackers drove the metal shaft into his head. He carried a golf-ball-sized
indentation in his forehead for the rest of his life. My father had burrowed into a
corner, and the attackers didn’t see him.
The two orphaned boys were raised by their paternal grandmother, Itzila. Yet
any return to normalcy they may have experienced was cut short by the
outbreak of the First World War, forcing her to flee with them by train ahead of
the advancing German army. They ended up some 1,500 miles south, in the
Crimean city of Simferopol. Initially under czarist rule, then the Bolsheviks and
from late 1917 until the end of the war under the Germans, they had to deal with
cold, damp and a chronic shortage of food. My Uncle Meir quickly learned how
to survive. He later told me that he would run after German supply carriages
and collect the odd potato that fell off the back. Realizing that the German
soldiers had been wrenched from their own families by the war, he began taking
my father with him on weekends to the neighborhood near their barracks, where
the soldiers would sometimes give them cookies, or even a loaf of bread. Yet
they were deprived of the basic ingredients of a healthy childhood: nutritious
food and a warm, dry room in which to sleep. By the time Itzila brought them
back to settle in Ponovezh at the end of the war, my father was diagnosed with
the bone-development disease, rickets, caused by the lack of Vitamin D in their
diet.
In another way, however, my father was the more fortunate of the boys. The
lost schooling of those wartime years came at a less formative time for him than
for his brother. Meir never fully made up the lost ground in school. My father
simply began his Jewish primary education, cheder, a couple of years later than
usual. He thrived there. Still, when it was time for him to enter secondary
education, he decided against going on with his religious education. Meir was
preparing to leave for Palestine, so my father enrolled in the Hebrew-language,
Zionist high school. When he graduated, one of the many Brog relatives who
were by now living in the United States, his Uncle Jacob, tried to persuade him
to come to Pittsburgh for university studies. But with Meir signing on as his
sponsor with the British Mandate authorities, he left for Palestine shortly before
21
his twentieth birthday. Jacob did still insist on helping financially, which
allowed my father to enroll at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
He did well in his studies – literature, history and philosophy – but
abandoned them after two years. His explanation for not staying on, when I
asked him years later, was that with the accelerating activity of the Zionist
pioneers, it felt wrong to him to spend his days going to lectures, reading books
and writing essays. I am sure that he also felt isolated and alone, with Meir, the
only link to his life before Palestine, working in Haifa on the coast, four or five
hours by bus from Jerusalem. When he began looking for a way to become part
of the changes going on around him, Mishmar Hasharon didn’t yet exist. Its
founding core – a dozen Russian Jewish pioneers – was still working on
argicultural settlements near Herzliya, north of Tel Aviv, until they found a
place to start their kibbutz. But they had been joined by several young men and
women who, though a year or two older than my father, had been with him at
the Hebrew High School in Ponovezh. He decided to join them.
Late in 1932, the Jewish National Fund, supported financially by leading
Jewish figures in western Europe and the US, bought 2,000 acres from an Arab
landowner near Wadi Khawaret. The area was set aside for three Jewish
settlements: a moshav called Kfar Haim, where the land was divided into family
plots, and two kibbutzim. One was called Ma’abarot. Next to it was Mishmar
Hasharon. My father was among the seventy youngsters who set off in three
trucks with everything they figured they would need to turn the hard, scrubby
hill into a kibbutz. They built the core from pre-fab kits: wooden huts to sleep in
and a slightly larger one for the dining hall. They dug a well and ordered a
pump from Tel Aviv, at first for drinking and washing, but soon allowing them
to begin a vegetable garden, a dairy with a dozen cows, a chicken coop with a
few hundred hens, and to plant a first orange grove and a small vineyard.
Still, by the time my mother arrived three years later, there were not enough
citrus trees, vines, cattle and chickens to occupy a membership which now
numbered more than 200. Along with some of the others, my father worked
outside the kibbutz, earning a regular paycheck to help support the collective.
On his way back, he would stop at the post office in Tel Aviv to pick up letters
and packages for the rest of the kibbutz – including Ya’akov Margalit’s love
letters to my mother. That was how my parents’ friendship began, how a
friendly hello led to shared conversation at the end of my father’s working day,
and how, a few years later, my mother decided to spurn her Gordonia suitor in
favor of Srulik Brog, the postman. It was not until 1939 that they moved in
22
together. They didn’t bother getting married until the summer of 1941. Perhaps
because this was less than nine months before I was born, my mother always
remained vague when asked their exact wedding date.
My parents were an unlikely pair. My mother – bright, lively and energetic –
was a doer, who believed passionately in the grand social experiment of kibbutz
life. Having helped her mother raise her siblings in Warsaw, and with a natural
affinity from children, she became the main authority on issues related to
childbirth and early childcare. She actively partook in the kibbutz’s planning
and politics, and reveled in its social life. My father was more detached both
politically and socially. He was more contemplative, less assertive, less selfconfident.
Though he agreed broadly with the founding principles of the
kibbutz, and wanted to play his role in making it a success, I could see, as I
grew older, that he was often impatient at what he saw as its intellectual
insularity and its ideological rigidities.
Though it didn’t strike me at the time, he was not a large man. As a result of
his childhood illness, he never grew to more than five-foot-four. Still, he was a
powerful presence, stocky and strong from his work on the kibbutz. He had a
deep, resonant voice and wise-looking, blue-gray eyes. It was only through
Uncle Meir that by the time I was born, he had moved on from driving a tractor
to a more influential role on the kibbutz. Meir worked for the Palestine Electric
Company and when Mishmar Hasharon installed its own electricity system, the
PEC was in charge of the work. Meir trained my father and put him forward as
the kibbutz contact for maintaining and repairing the equipment. He was well
suited for the work. He was a natural tinkerer, a problem-solver. He was good
with his hands, and his natural caution was an additional asset as the kibbutz got
to grips with the potential, and the potential dangers, of electric power. Once the
system was installed, he became responsible for managing any aspect of the
settlement that involved electricity: water pumps, the irrigation system, the
communal laundry and our bakery.
My parents were courteous and polite with each other, but they never
showed any physical affection in our presence. None of the adults did. This was
part of an unspoken kibbutz code. Not only for kibbutzniks, but for all the early
Zionists, outward displays of emotion were seen as a kind of selfishness that
risked undermining communal cohesion, tenacity and strength. Because I’d
known no other way, this did not strike me as odd. Besides, I was a quiet,
contemplative, bookish and self-contained child. Only in later years did I come to
see the lasting effect on me. It was be a long time before I became comfortable
23
showing my feelings, beyond my immediate family and a few close friends.
When I was in the army, this wasn’t an issue. Self-control, especially in highpressure
situations, was a highly valued asset. But in politics, I think that it did for a
considerable time inhibit my ability to connect with the public, or at least with
the news media that played such a critical intermediary role. And it caused me
to be seen not just as reserved or aloof, but sometimes as cold, or arrogant.
I did get much that I value from my parents. From my mother, her
boundless energy, activism, her attention to detail, and her focus on causes
larger than herself – her belief that politics mattered. Also her love for art and
literature. When I would come home from the children’s dormitory to my
parents’ room – just nine feet by ten, with a wooden trundle bed to save space
during the day – there was always a novel or a book of verse sharing the small
table with my parents’ most single prized possession: their kibbutz-issue radio.
As a child, however, I spent much more time with my father. He was my
guide, my protector and role model. Like my mother, he never mentioned the
trials which they and their families endured before arriving in Palestine. Nor did
they ever speak to me in any detail about the Holocaust. No one on the kibbutz
did. It was as if the memories were scabs they dared not pick at. Also, it
seemed, because they were determined to avoid somehow passing on these
remembered sadnesses to their sons and daughters. Still, when I was ten or
eleven, my father did – once, inadvertently – open a window on his childhood.
Every Saturday morning, we would listen to a classical music concert on my
parents’ radio. One day, as the beautiful melodies of Tchaikovsky’s violin
concerto in D came through the radio, I was struck by the almost trancelike look
that came over my father’s face. He seemed to be in another, faraway, place.
When the music ended, he turned and told me about the first time he’d heard it.
It was on the train ride into Crimean exile with Itzila and Meir in the early days
of the First World War. The train took five days to reach the Crimea and
sometimes halted for hours at a time. Every evening, a man at the far end of
their carriage would take out his violin and play the second movement of the
Tchaikovsky concerto.
I have heard the piece in concert halls many times since. When the orchestra
begins the second movement – with the violin notes climbing higher, trembling
ever so subtly – it sends a shiver down my spine. I can’t help thinking of the
railway car in which my then four-year-old father and other Jews from
Ponovezh escaped the Great War of 1914. And of other trains, in another war 25
years later, carrying Jews not to safety but to death camps.
24
Listening to the concert program in my parents’ room was something I
always looked forward to. It was my father who encouraged me, when I was
eight, to begin learning to play the piano. I took lessons once a week all during
my childhood along with several other of the kibbutz children. When we got old
enough, we took turns playing a short piece – the secular, kibbutz equivalent of
an opening prayer – at the Friday-night meal in the dining hall. I have always
cherished being able to play. Sitting down at the piano and immersing myself in
Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Schubert or Mozart never ceases to bring me a sense
of calm, freedom and, especially nowadays, when I have finally worked to
master a particularly intricate piece, a feeling of pure joy.
* * *
As a young child, I spent most of my waking hours in the company of my
several dozen kibbutz “siblings” in the children’s home, the dining hall, or
running through the open spaces in the center of the kibbutz with our metapelet.
She would often take us through the orange groves in the afternoon, and
sometimes across the main road to the Arab village.
Wadi Khawaret consisted of a few dozen concrete homes built back from a
main street bordered by shops and storehouses. She would buy us sweets in the
little grocery store. The man behind the counter had a kindly, weathered face
and a dark moustache. Dressed in a gray galabiya and a keffiyeh, he smiled
when we came in. There was always a group of Palestinian women, in fulllength
robes, seated on stoops outside breastfeeding their babies. We saw cattle,
bulls, even the odd buffalo, being led to or from the fields. I sensed no hostility,
and certainly no hatred, toward us in the village. The people seemed warm, and
benignly indifferent to the dozen Jewish toddlers and their metapelet. My own
attitude to Wadi Khawaret was of benign curiosity. I did not imagine that within
a couple of years we would be on opposite sides of a war. I enjoyed these visits,
as I enjoyed every part of my early childhood. Each age-group on the kibbutz
was given a name. Ours was called dror. It was the Hebrew word for
“freedom”.
But dror was also the name of one of the Jewish youth movements in the
Warsaw Ghetto, heroes in their doomed uprising against the Nazis. Little by
little, from about the age of five, I became more aware of the suffering the Jews
had so recently endured in the lands my parents had left behind, the growing
25
tension around us and the sense that something momentous was about to happen
as the prospect of a state got closer.
The memories remain with me to this day, like a series of snapshots. It was
on a spring morning in 1947 that I got my first real sense that the Jewish state
was something which would have be fought for, and that youngsters not all that
much older than me would have a critical role to play. I got a close-up look at
the elite of the Zionist militias, the Palmach. It numbered something like 6,000,
from a pre-state force totaling around 40,000. The Palmachniks were highly
motivated, young political activists. They had no fixed base. Each platoon,
almost all of them teenagers, spent five or six months at a time on various
kibbutzim. For the first two weeks of each month, they would earn their keep by
working in the fields. They spent the other weeks training. I had just turned five
when I watched three dozen Palmach boys and girls, in their T-shirts and short
khaki pants, rappel confidently down the side of one of our few concrete
buildings. The building was only 25 or 30 feet high, but it looked like a
skyscraper from my perch on the grass in front, and the feat of the young
Palmachniks seemed to me nothing short of heroic.
A few months later, on a Saturday afternoon in November 1947, I crowded
into my parents’ room as the Haganah radio station crackled out its account of a
United Nations debate on the future of Palestine. The session was the outcome
of a long train of events starting with Britain’s acknowledgement that its
mandate to rule over Palestine was unsustainable. The British had proposed a
series of arrangements to accommodate both Arab and Jewish aspirations. Now,
the UN was meeting to consider the idea of splitting Palestine into two new
states, one Arab and the other Jewish.
Since the partition was based on existing areas of Arab and Jewish
settlement, the proposed Jewish state looked like a boomerang, with a long,
very narrow center strip along the Mediterranean, broadening slightly into the
Galilee in the north and the arid coastline in the south. Jerusalem, the site of the
ancient Jewish temple, was not part of it. It was to be placed under international
rule. By no means all Zionist leaders were happy with partition. Many, on both
the political right and the left, wanted a Jewish state in all of Palestine, with
Jerusalem as its centerpiece. But Ben-Gurion and the pragmatic mainstream
argued that UN endorsement of a Jewish state – no matter what its borders, even
with a new Palestinian Arab state alongside it – would represent a historic
achievement. The proceedings went on for hours. At sundown, we had to return
to the children’s home. But we were woken before dawn. The vote for partition
26
– for the Jewish state Herzl had first dreamed of 50 years before – had been
won. A huge bonfire blazed in front of the bakery. All around us the grown-ups
were singing and dancing in celebration.
On the Arab side, there was no rejoicing. Every one of the Arab delegations
at the UN voted against partition, rejecting a Jewish state even if it was created
along with a Palestinian Arab one. Violence erupted the next day. An attack on
a bus near Lydda, near the road up to Jerusalem, left six Jews dead. Similar
attacks occurred around the country. Shooting broke out in mixed Arab-and-
Jewish towns and cities: Jaffa on the southern edge of Tel Aviv. Safed, Tiberias
and Haifa in the north, and in Jerusalem.
I followed all this with curiosity and trepidation through my halting attempts
to read Davar le Yeladim, the weekly children’s edition of the Labour Zionist
newspaper Davar. We children felt an additional connection with what was
going on. One of our Dror housemates, a boy named Giora Ros, had left the
year before when his father took a job in Jerusalem. As the battle for the city
raged through the end of 1947 and into 1948, its besieged Jewish residents
fought for their lives. We sent our friend packages of clothing and food, which
we saved up by eating only half of an egg at breakfast and smaller portions at
dinner.
The mood darkened further at the end of January 1948, four months before the
British departed. A cluster of settlements known as Gush Etzion, south of
Jerusalem near the hills of Bethlehem, also came under siege. Around midnight
on January 15, a unit of Haganah youngsters set off on foot to try to break
through. They became known as “The 35”. Marching through the night from
Jerusalem, they had made it only within a couple of miles of Gush Etzion when
they were surrounded and attacked by local Arabs. By late afternoon, all of
them were dead. When the British authorities recovered their bodies, they found
that the enemy had not simply killed them. All of the bodies had been battered
and broken. Rumors spread that in some cases, the dead men’s genitals had
been cut off and shoved into their mouths. Since I was still a few weeks short of
my sixth birthday, I was spared that particular detail. But not the sense of horror
over what had happened, nor the central message: the lengths and depths to
which the Arabs of Palestine seemed ready to go in their fight against us.
“Hit’alelu bagufot!” was the only slightly sanitized account we children were
given. “They mutilated the corpses!”
Even after the partition vote, statehood was not a given. In the weeks before
the British left, two senior Americans –the ambassador to the UN and Secretary
27
of State George C. Marshall – recommended abandoning or at least delaying the
declaration of an Israeli state. Yet Ben-Gurion feared that any delay risked the
end of any early hope of statehood. After he managed to secure a one-vote
majority in his de facto cabinet, the state was declared on May 14, 1948.
And hours later, the armies of five Arab states crossed into Palestine.
28
Chapter Two
The 1948 war and the decade that followed remain vivid in my mind not just
for the obvious reason: they secured the survival of the infant state of Israel and
saw it into a more assured and independent young adulthood. It was also the
time when I grew from a young child –introspective and contemplative, aware
of how quickly my mind seemed to grasp numbers and geometric shapes and
musical notes, but also small for my age and awkward at the sports we’d play
on the dusty field at the far edge of the kibbutz – into a sense of my own place
in the family and community and the country around me. I did, along the way,
become arguably the most effective left defensive back on our kibbutz soccer
team. But that was not because I suddenly discovered a buried talent for the
game. Physically, I was like my father. I had natural hand coordination which
made delicate tasks come easily – one reason I would soon discover a pastime
that lent itself to acts of kibbutz mischief bordering on juvenile delinquency.
But when it came to larger muscles, I was hapless, if not hopeless. My prowess
as a soccer defenseman was because no opposing player in his right mind, once
I’d inadvertently cut his knees from under him when aiming for the ball, felt it
was worth coming anywhere close to me.
But when the war broke out in earnest in the spring of 1948, my focus, like
that of all Israelis, was on the fighting, which even the youngest of us knew
would determine whether the state would survive at all. Day after day, my
father helped me to chart each major advance and setback on a little map.
Dozens of kibbutzim around the country were in the line of fire. Some had soon
fallen, while others were barely managing to hang on. Just five miles inland
from us, an Israeli settlement came under attack by an Iraqi force in the nearby
Arab village of Qaqun.
But inside Mishmar Hasharon, I had the almost surreal feeling that this great
historical drama was something happening everywhere else but on our kibbutz.
If it hadn’t been for the radio, or the newsreels which we saw in weekly movie
nights in the dining hall, and the little map on which I traced its course with my
father, I would barely have known a war was going on. One Arab army did get
near to us: the Iraqis, in Qaqun. If they had advanced a few miles further, they
could have overrun Mishmar Hasharon, reached the coast and cut the new
Jewish state in half. I can still remember the rumble of what sounded like
thunder one morning in June 1948, as the Alexandronis, one of the twelve
brigades in the new Israeli army, launched their decisive attack on the Iraqis.
29
“No reason to be afraid,” our metapelet kept telling me. That only made me
more scared. Yet within a few hours, everything was quiet again, and never
again did the shellfire get near to us. A few weeks later, I heard the only gunfire
inside the kibbutz itself. It came from the top of our water tower. The man on
guard duty thought he saw movement on the road outside. But it turned out to
be nothing.
It wasn’t until well into 1949 that formal agreements were signed and
“armistice line” borders drawn with the Arab states. By the measure that
mattered most – survival – Israel had won and the Arab attackers had lost.
Jordan did end up in control of the West Bank, as well as the eastern half of a
divided city of Jerusalem, including the walled Old City and the site of the
ancient Jewish temple. The new Israel remained, at least geographically,
vulnerable. It was just 11 miles wide around Tel Aviv and even narrower,
barely half that, near Mishmar Hasharon. Egyptian-held Gaza was seven miles
from the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon and just 40 from the outskirts of Tel
Aviv.
Israel did secure control of the entire Galilee, up to the pre-war borders with
Lebanon and Syria, and of the Negev Desert in the south. The territory of our
new state was about a third larger than the area proposed under the UN partition
plan rejected by the Arabs. Yet the victory came at a heavy price: more than
6,000 dead, one per cent of the Jewish population of Palestine at the time. It was
as if America had lost two million in the Vietnam War. One-third of the Israeli
dead were Holocaust survivors.
The Arabs paid a heavy price too, and not just the roughly 7,000 people who
lost their lives. Nearly 700,000 Palestinian Arabs had fled – or, in some cases,
been forced to flee – towns and villages in what was now Israel. The full extent
and circumstances of the Arabs’ flight became known to us at Mishmar
Hasharon only later. But it did not take long to notice the change around us.
Wadi Khawaret was physically still there, but all of the villagers were gone. As
far as I could discover, none had been killed. They left with a first wave of
refugees in April 1948, and eventually ended up near Tulkarem on the West
Bank. After the war, the Israeli government divided up their farmland among
nearby kibbutzim including Mishmar Hasharon.
The absence of our former neighbors in Wadi Khawaret seemed to me at the
time simply a part of the war. From the moment the violence started, I
understood there would be suffering on both sides. When we sent our care
packages to Giora Ros in Jerusalem, I remember trying to imagine what “living
30
under siege” would feel like, and what would happen to Giora if it succeeded.
Especially after the murder and the mutilation of The 35, I assumed the war
would come down to a simple calculus. If there was going to be an Israel – if
there was going to be a Mishmar Hasharon – we had to win and the Arabs had
to lose. At first, even the fact our kibbutz had been given a share of the land of
Wadi Khawaret seemed just another product of the war. After all, Ben-Gurion
had accepted the plan for two states. The Arabs had said no, deciding to attack
us instead. Someone had to farm the land. Why not us?
* * *
Yet events after the war did lead me to begin to ask myself questions of
basic fairness, and whether we were being faithful to some of the high-sounding
ideals I heard spoken about with such pride on the kibbutz. The Palestinians
were not the only refugees. More than 600,000 Jews fled into Israel from Arab
countries where they had lived for generations. More than 100,000 arrived from
Iraq, and several hundred thousand from Morocco, Tunisia and Algeria in north
Africa. Immediately after the war, about 50,000 were airlifted out of Yemen,
where they had endured violent attacks ever since the UN partition vote.
The reality that greeted the Yemenis in Israel was more complex. Most were
initially settled in tented transit camps. I’m not sure how several dozen Yemeni
families made their way to Wadi Khawaret, but it made sense for them to move
into the village’s vacant homes. It was empty except for several deserted
buildings which we and other kibbutzim began using for storage and, later, for
our transport co-operative. Yet a few nights after the Yemenis moved in, a
posse of young men, including some from Mishmar Hasharon, descended on
them and, armed with clubs and wooden staves, drove them away.
I was shocked. I’d seen the photos in Davar le Yeladim celebrating the
airlift, with the Yemenis kissing the airport tarmac in relief, gratitude and joy at
finding refuge in the new Israeli state. Now, for the “crime” of moving into a
row of empty buildings in search of a decent place to live, they’d been beaten
up and chased away. By us. I realized Wadi Khawaret no longer belonged to the
Arabs. But, surely, our kibbutz had no more right to the buildings than Jews
who had fled from Yemen and needed them a lot more than we did. For days, I
tried to discover who had joined the vigilante attack. Though everyone seemed
to know what had happened, no one talked about it. In the dining hall, I ran my
31
eyes over all the boys in their late teens and early 20s. I was sure that after
something like this there had to be some sign of who had done it. But they
looked the same as before, eating and talking as if nothing had happened.
The Yemenis also needed jobs. This led to a challenge for Mishmar
Hasharon. The core of the kibbutz ethos was that we would live from our own
labor. Yet Ben-Gurion insisted we and other kibbutzim provide work for the
Yemenis and other new arrivals from the Arab states. We began hiring Yemeni
workers when I was about ten, the age when we kids started working for an
hour or so each day in the fields. We worked alongside several dozen Yemeni
women who lived a few miles north in a maabarah, a transit settlement which
later evolved into a village called Elyakhin. Each morning, the Yemenis arrived
in a bus, and they left at the end of their day’s work.
I don’t know whether I expected to feel a Gordonian sense of joy at the
redemptive value of physical labor when I began working in the fields. Our first
assignment was to plant long rows of flower bulbs – gladioli – spaced at
intervals of four inches or so. But as I joined the other children and the Yemeni
women, what I felt was more mundane. Heat. Fatigue. Boredom. To make the
time pass, I thought of it as a competition. Each of us began together, planting
the bulbs in furrows stretching to the end of the field. The point was obviously
to do it right. But I found it interesting to see who finished first, and how much
longer it took the rest of us.
The same worker always led the way. She was a Yemeni in her early thirties.
Her name was Baddura. Short and stocky, with dark curly hair, she was nearly
always smiling, whether we were planting bulbs, sowing seeds or picking
oranges and grapefruit and lemons, potatoes or peppers and tomatoes. When I
remarked to her how much better and faster she was than the rest of us, she
laughed. Still years away from growing into my adult body, I looked more like a
eight- or a nine-year-old. She took me under her wing. The next day, we were
picking tomatoes. “Do the row next to mine,” she said. Watching the almost
balletic grace with which she moved made it easier. I decided it was like
mastering a new piece on the piano. The secret was to achieve a kind of
unthinking fluidity, by focusing on the passage one or two ahead of the one you
were playing. Physically, Baddura was far stronger than me. Before long,
however, I was finishing my sowing or reaping a good ten yards ahead of the
other kids, and not too far behind her.
Though the Yemenis worked in our fields, they were not members of the
kibbutz. They were paid a day-rate. Though they were by far the most
32
productive workers, they got no share of what we produced or possessed. A few
years later, I raised this at one of the separate aseifa meetings held by young
people on the kibbutz, only to be told we’d never wanted to employ outsiders in
the first place. It was only because of Ben-Gurion that we felt unable to refuse.
I’m sure that was true, but it seemed to me an incomplete answer, and an
evasion. It struck me as an exercise in finding a verbal rationale for a situation
that was obviously unjust.
It was an accidental glance up from picking carrots which focused in my
mind the sense of unfairness I felt. We were working on a tract of about seven
acres of rich, dark soil where we grew carrots, tomatoes and potatoes and
eggplants. I think I was 11 or 12. We had assembled in the early afternoon near
the kibbutz garage. We piled on to a flatbed trailer, a dozen kids and a dozen
Yemeni women. We were towed by a tractor driven by a man named Yankele.
He was in his mid-40s. Like my father, he was one of the original group at
Mishmar Hasharon. Before the Yemenis came, he had worked planting and
harvesting. Now, he was responsible for “managing” the Yemenis, and us kids
as well, during our fieldwork. He paced among us every half-hour or so to make
sure the work was going smoothly. Though the area was ankle-deep in mud
during in the winter, it was hot and dusty in the summer. I’d been working for
an hour or so, crouching alongside Baddura, when I looked up. On the edge of
the field, under the shade of a clump of banana trees, I saw Yankele. He had a
set of keys on a metal chain. He was twirling them around his finger, first one
way, then the other, as his eyes tracked us and our Yemeni co-workers. Like a
kibbutznik-turned-plantation-owner.
* * *
As a February baby, I was the youngest in our age group. In the tiny world of
the kibbutz, there were not enough children to organize separate school classes
for each year. When I started school, I was five-and-a-half. Most of the others
were six. A few had already turned seven. Maybe it was this age pressure, or
maybe something inside me, but from the outset, I had a thirst for knowledge. I
was aware early on that some of the schoolwork came easily, almost
automatically to me: numbers and math and reasoning most of all. I also began
reading books, even if I could not fully understand them. By the time I was
eight or nine, I was burying myself in volumes of the children’s encyclopedia at
33
the kibbutz library, trying to untangle the mysteries of airplanes and
automobiles, or the creation of worldly wonders, from the Hanging Gardens of
Babylon to the Empire State Building and the Golden Gate Bridge.
At first, I got many of the answers from my father. On Saturdays, we would
walk around the kibbutz as I plied him with questions. In many ways, he always
lacked self-confidence. I remember decades later, after he had passed away,
asking my mother how come they had spent their entire lives on the kibbutz and
never moved away. She replied: “What would your father have done outside?”
But he had a quick mind and, despite having left Hebrew University early, had
secured enough credits to get his degree – one of a handful of men on the
kibbutz to have done so. He delighted in acquiring, and sharing, knowedge.
How come the moon wasn’t always round, I remember asking him in one of
our first educational strolls. How did anyone know that the sabertooth tigers I’d
seen in the encyclopedia actually existed? And where were they now? There
was not a single question he did not try to help me answer. When I was nine or
ten, he took me to see the first water pump on the kibbutz. I watched as he
disassembled the casing, then the power unit, which had a big screw-like
element in the middle. I wanted to know how it worked, how it was designed.
How it was made. A few months later, he took me to the factory near Tel Aviv
where the pumps were manufactured.
I was an introverted child, not so much shy as self-contained, contemplative,
at times dreamy. Our metapelet from when I was three until age eight was
named Bina. She was the mother of twins a year younger than me. She was
more handsome than beautiful, with wavy dark hair. But she was full of
warmth. She was especially kind to me, which was no doubt one reason I felt
the effects of my collective upbringing less dramatically than some other
kibbutz children. When we were both much older, she used tell a story about my
slightly ethereal approach to life when I was in her charge. One winter
afternoon when I was four, she took our group on to the gentle rise on the
northern edge of the kibbutz, which at that time of year was full of wildflowers.
When she got there, she realized I had gone missing. Retracing her steps, she
found me standing in front of a rock in the middle of the dirt path. “Ehud,” she
said, “why didn’t you come with us?” I apparently replied: “I’m thinking: which
side of the rock should I go around?”
Still, important though Bina was as a presence in my life, it was the
influence of another figure – another youngster – who mattered more and for
longer. His name was Yigal Garber. In first grade, every child got a mentor.
34
Yigal was mine. Solidly built and self-confident, with a knowing smile, he
would go on to become one of the most respected members of the kibbutz.
Though I was the only child he mentored, he was also in charge of our class’s
extracurricular educational program. It began when I was ten, and Yigal was
sixteen. It was a mix of ideological training – the kibbutz equivalent of what my
mother had done with her Gordonia friends in Poland – and a scouting course.
One evening a week, he would spend several hours with us. He began by
reading us a story or a poem. One which I remember with particular clarity
involved a slave who had a nail driven into his ear in hopes of remaining in his
master’s service forever. He had become enslaved not only in body, but in
mind. Another night, Yigal read us an account of a Palmach unit stranded on a
hill they had taken, with anti-personnel mines all around them. The readings
were gripping and they were always an entry-point for a discussion: how did we
understand the story? What would we do if faced with a similar choice?
When that part was over, he walked us into the fields outside the kibbutz.
The only sound we heard was the occasional screech of a jackal. Sometimes, he
would split us into twos and have each pair set off from a far edge of the field
and find our way back. Yigal stationed himself at the center. We would have to
sneak up and see which of us could get closest without his seeing or hearing us
approach. In his last year with us before leaving for his army service, he gave
each of us a narrow wooden stick and began drilling us in the teenage
introduction to martial arts. But I was less interested in that part of the training
than the scouting exercises. Not only was I the youngest in our group, and the
smallest, except for a couple of the girls. Notwithstanding my accidental
prowess on the soccer field, I lacked the strength and coordination to hold my
own in most physical contests at the time.
* * *
Yet then, shortly after I turned thirteen, I overheard a conversation between a
couple of older kids in the dining hall. They said there was this guy in Gan
Shmuel, a kibbutz to the north of us, who had an “amazing” ability. Using a
strip of steel shaped to work like a key, he could open locks – even chunky Yale
padlocks, the gold standard in those days – in less than a minute.
35
I was intrigued by the mechanical puzzle and managed to locate two slightly
rusted locks. One was a Yale, the other an Israeli-made lookalike called a
Nabob. One evening after dinner, I searched the ground around the kibbutz
garage for shards of metal that looked like they might fit into the key slot, and
spent the next half-hour or so propped against a tree, trying and failing to coax
either lock to open. I realized I would need to discover how the locks worked.
But how to get inside to see?
Saturday afternoons in Mishmar Hasharon were a quiet time, like the old
Jewish neighborhoods and shtetls back in Europe but minus the religious
trappings. The next day, I waited until mid-afternoon and walked past the
bakery towards the garage. Its roll-down, corrugated door was locked. So was
the structure next to it, where the blacksmith and metalwork shop were. But
attached to the blacksmith’s was a hut where our scrap metal was dumped. I
doubted it would be locked, and it wasn’t. Pausing to let my eyes get used to the
dark, I made my way into the metalwork area. I crossed to the cabinet where the
tools were kept. I took out a steel jigsaw used for cutting through metal and,
hiding it under my shirt, made my way out again.
Fortunately, the saw was up to the task of cutting into the softer alloy that
made up the body of the locks. Once I’d cut inside them, I saw they shared the
same basic construction. There was a series of springs and shafts which, in
response to the indentations of a key, aligned in such a way to allow the lock to
open. I sneaked back into the metalwork shop five or six times. By trial and
error, I managed to shape one of jigsaw blades into a pick tool that seemed like
it should do the job. For days, I manipulated it into each of the padlocks. I knew
I had the principle right, but I still couldn’t get it to work. Blisters formed on my
thumb and fingers. Then, finally, the Yale sprung open! With each successive
try I got better at knowing how to put the blade in, when and where to rotate it
and how much pressure to apply. After fashioning a half-dozen other tools, each
slightly different in width and shape, I reached a point where I could get the
mechanism to work on my first try. Other locks – doors, trunks, closets – were
even easier after I made picks for them as well.
I couldn’t resist sharing my newly acquired skill with a couple of the boys in
my class, and word gradually spread. There was a handful of slightly older boys
who we referred to as the “rogues”. They weren’t delinquents. They were free
spirits, bridling at the uniform expectations and rules of kibbutz life. Over the
next few years, as co-conspirators more than close friends, I found myself
drawn to two of them. Ido and Moshe were 18 months older than me. Though
36
Ido was just a few inches over five feet, he was strong and athletic, a star even
on the basketball court. Moshe was taller, if a bit overweight. He was nowhere
near as strong as Ido, but still stronger than me, and had a streetwise intelligence
and a sardonic sense of humor. Both had tested the patience of our teachers to
breaking point. Ido had been sent off to a vocational school in Netanya. Moshe
was moved to Mikveh Israel, a school which focused mostly on agriculture. On
Friday evenings and Saturdays in the kibbutz, however, they filled their time
with a variety of minor misdeeds. My role – the cement in our budding
partnership – was as designated lock-picker.
Our first caper targeted the concrete security building near the dining hall. It
contained the kibbutz’s store of weapons, with a metal door secured by a
padlock. Late one Friday night, with Ido and Moshe as lookouts, I crouched in
front of the lock and took out my tools. In less than a minute, I had it open. We
darted into the storeroom. There were about 80 rifles, along with a few machine
guns, on racks along the walls. Ido took a rifle from the furthest end of the rack
and wrapped it in a blanket. Moshe pocketed a box of ammunition. As the
others hurried back to our dormitory, I closed the lock, making sure it was in the
same position I’d found it, and joined them. The next afternoon, we stole away
through the moshav of Kfar Hayim into a field on the far side. We test-fired the
rifle until sunset, when we returned to the kibbutz and replaced it in the armory.
It felt like the perfect crime: foolproof, since no one was likely to notice
anything. Essentially harmless. And repeatable, as we confirmed by returning
on Friday nights every month or two.
This modest pre-adolescent rebellion never extended to doubting the national
mission of Israel. Growing up on a kibbutz in a country younger even than we
were, we all felt a part of its brief history, and its future. That was especially
true after my kibbutz mentor, Yigal, left for his military service and joined one
of the Israeli army’s elite units.
The 1948 war had been won. But it had not brought peace. Palestinian
irregulars, fedayeen operating from Jordan and the Gaza Strip, mounted hit-andrun
raids. In armed ambushes or by planting mines, they killed dozens of Israeli
civilians and injured hundreds more. The country was in no mood for another
war. The newly created Israeli armed forces – known as Tzahal, a Hebrew
acronym for the Israeli Defense Force – also seemed to have lost the cutting
edge, or perhaps the desperate motivation, of the pre-state militias. At first, Ben-
Gurion relied on young recruits in the new army’s infantry brigades to counter
the fedayeen attacks. Nearly 90 reprisal operations were launched in 1952 and
37
early 1953. Nearly all ended with the soldiers failing to reach their target or
taking casualties. Sometimes both.
By mid-1953, the army decided to set up Israel’s first dedicated commando
force. It was called Unit 101. It was led by a 25-year-old named Ariel Sharon,
who had been a platoon commander in 1948. With Ben-Gurion and especially
his army chief-of-staff, Moshe Dayan, determined to hit back hard at the
fedayeen attacks, Sharon took a few dozen hand-picked soldiers and began
mounting a different kind of retaliatory attacks. The largest, in October 1953,
was in response to the murder of a woman and her two children in their home in
central Israel. It was against the West Bank village of Qibya. Sharon and his
commandos surrounded and attacked the village, destroying homes and other
buildings – and killing at least 40 villagers sheltering inside them. Israel
immediately came under international condemnation, accused of allowing its
troops to unleash a massacre. Unit 101 was disbanded. It lasted just half a year.
But that was not because of Qibya. While realizing the importance of avoiding
civilian casualties, Dayan remained convinced that only units like 101 offered
any realistic hope of taking the fight to the fedayeen. He made Unit 101 the core
of a larger commando force merged into Battalion 890 of the paratroopers’
brigade, and he put Sharon in overall command.
It was this force that Yigal Garber joined. He became part of its elite
commando team, Company A and took part in a series of attacks on the West
Bank and in Gaza. While avoiding a repeat of Qibya, they inflicted heavy
casualties on Jordanian and Egyptian army and police units, and also suffered
casualties of their own. Battalion 890 was based just a couple of miles from
Mishmar Hasharon and Yigal returned to the kibbutz every few weeks. He
never talked about the commando operations. But every time there was a report
of Israelis killed in a fedayeen attack, I knew there would be a retaliation raid,
with my Yigal almost certainly involved and, I hoped, returning unscathed.
He did. And in 1956, two years into his military service, he was part of
Israel’s second full-scale war. For a while, the reprisal attacks seemed to be
working. The fedayeen attacks decreased. But that didn’t last, especially in the
south along the border with Gaza. Egypt’s pro-Western monarchy had been
toppled in a coup organized by a group of army officers led by a stridently pan-
Arabist – and anti-Israeli – lieutenant colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Egypt began providing not just tacit support for the fedayeen in Gaza, but
arming and training them and helping organize cross-border attacks. Then, in
38
the summer of 1956, Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, which had been
owned by the British and French.
Ben-Gurion was emboldened to go war by the fact that both Britain and
France wanted to retake the canal. Under an agreement reached beforehand,
Israel was to begin the hostilities, after which the British and French would
enter under the guise of separating Israeli and Egyptian forces. Ben-Gurion’s
hope was to end the threat of fedayeen strikes, at least in the south, by taking
control both of Gaza and the enormous natural buffer afforded by the Sinai
Desert. Militarily, it went to plan. On October 29, 1956, Yigal and other
paratroopers from Battalion 890 were dropped deep into the Sinai. They landed
near the entrance to the Mitla Pass, a sinuous route between two lines of craggy
hills 25 miles from the canal. British and French air strikes began three days
later. Nasser pulled most of his forces back across the canal. By early
November, Israel was in control of Gaza and the whole of the Sinai.
Politically, however, Ben-Gurion and his European partners had
catastrophically miscalculated. Britain and France were fading imperial powers.
The balance of power after the Second World War rested with America and the
Soviet Union. Both were furious over the obviously pre-arranged seizure of
Sinai, Gaza and the canal. It took a while for the message to sink in. In a speech
to the Knesset after the conquest was complete, Ben-Gurion declared the post-
1948 armistice null and void, and said Israel would never again allow “foreign
forces” to control the territory it had captured.
A few days later, however, he had no choice but to deliver a different
message in a radio address to the country. He had at least managed to secure a
concession with the help of the Americans. The Sinai and Gaza would be placed
under supervision of a UN force. He also got a US assurance of Israel’s right of
passage through the Straits of Tiran to the Red Sea, and an agreement that if the
Egyptians blocked Israeli shipping we would have the right to respond. But he
announced that we would be leaving every inch of territory taken in the war. By
early 1957, we did so. The one lasting gain came in Gaza. On their way out,
Israeli troops destroyed the fedayeen’s military installations, and cross-border
attacks from the south ceased.
Unlike in 1948, the Sinai War touched me directly. I never felt Israel’s
existence was in danger. The fighting was brief and far away. But Mishmar
Hasharon had a small role in the war plan. Ben-Gurion and Dayan were
concerned that the co-ordinated attack might lead to a wider war, with the
possibility that Egyptian warplanes might get involved as they had in 1948.
39
Among the precautions they took was to base several hundred reservists from
the Alexandroni Brigade in a defensive position near the Mediterranean: the
eucalyptus grove at the top end of our kibbutz, where the cover was so dense
they were all but invisible from the air.
We kids seized on the chance to talk to the reservists. I can’t remember
whether it was Ido or Moshe who noticed an area at the back of their
encampment, on the other side of the kibbutz cemetery, where neatly stacked
boxes of munitions were being kept. But we spent the next several afternoons
on reconnaissance. A soldier was always on guard. But there were times the
area was unwatched, either when one guard handed over to the next, or on their
cigarette breaks.
We struck the following Friday. Nowadays, the cemetery consists of a halfdozen
rows of headstones. Walking through it, as I still do at least once each
year, is like revisiting my past. Almost all the grown-ups I remember from my
childhood now rest there, including my parents. My father died in 2002, at the
age of 92. My mother passed away only a few years ago, a few weeks after her
100 th birthday. But in 1956, the cemetery was tiny. The chances of anyone being
there at midnight on a Friday were close to zero. Crouching in the shadow of the
headstones, we could see the guard. We waited until he left for his break. Each
of us took a wooden box and one of the slightly larger metal boxes. Inside, we
found a treasure trove: thousands of bullets for all kinds of weapons. The metal
cases held heavier firepower: grenades and mortars. We returned those. We
were mischievous, but not crazy. Yet each of us now had a crate full of
ammunition, even including belts for machine guns.
* * *
My experience at school began to change in my early teenage years as well.
Shortly before my fourteen birthday, our age group was sent to a school outside
Mishmar Hasharon. The kibbutz had decided that since there were only a
dozen-or-so children in each class, it wasn’t economically viable to provide a
quality education. They sent us to the regional high school.
It was several hundred yards down the road in the direction of Tel Aviv. It
was far more rigorous. I was no longer the only kid in my class who liked to
read or could do math problems in his head. It was there I first got truly
40
interested in science. When I came across concepts I couldn’t understand, our
teachers always seemed able to answer my questions or help me find the
answers myself. I liked the school enormously. I might well have gone on to
finish my secondary education there. I probably should have. But the next year,
the kibbutz brought us back again.
One of the considerations was financial. Like many kibbutzim, Mishmar
Hasharon concluded that in order to make its school more economically
sustainable it would take in a number of “outside children” – yeldei chutz –
from towns and settlements around Israel. Yet this latest policy change was also
triggered a debate over the kind of education kibbutzim should provide. Should
a kibbutz school offer a curriculum tailored to passing the bagrut, the
matriculation exam, and going on to university? Or should it limit itself to a
fairly basic education geared to developing the talents needed for a productive
life on the kibbutz? In a series of heated debates in the dining hall, almost all of
Mishmar Hasharon supported the model of a basic, kibbutz-oriented education.
My father was the leading voice among the dissenters, and though it seemed
obvious he was fighting an uphill battle, I remember feeling a sense of pride at
watching him – and an echo in my own impulse to reach my own judgment
about issues and to act on it as I was growing older. Not only was he opposed to
the new policy. He was aghast. In the only time I can recall his speaking out at
one of the weekly kibbutz meetings, he asked how Mishmar Hasharon could
take upon itself the right to constrain an individual child’s life potential. “We
are Jews!” he said. “We are people who have left our impact on history through
our scholars, not our peasants. I can’t understand how we, who came here to
open a new chapter in the history of our people, can choose to keep our sons
and daughters from studying. We should encourage them to study!” He
accepted that the interests of the kibbutz mattered. But what kind of “model
society” would we be creating if we chose to “doom our own children to
ignorance, and cut them off from the great forward momentum of history in
Israel and the whole world?”
Especially in a kibbutz, however, the majority ruled. In this case, it was
nearly unanimous, my mother included. I could see she felt torn, whether
because she agreed with my father or because she realized how deeply he felt.
But she accepted the decision. For her, that was what was meant by being part
of the larger kibbutz family. Still, my father didn’t give up. He couldn’t change
the kibbutz’s ruling. But he tried to get me to stay at the regional high school. A
couple of years earlier, examiners had fanned out across Israel to administer its
41
first aptitude tests. I finished among the top two dozen results in the country.
“How can you throw your gifts away? For what,” he asked me. “If you leave
that school, and give up on going to university, it will be like betraying
yourself.” At one point, he walked me out to the patch of hard-packed soil
where we parked the tractors and farm machinery. “What do you want to do
with your life,” he asked. “Do you want to be a farmer?”
I thought about it before answering. “I don’t know what will happen in the
future,” I said. “But if you ask me now, I would say I want to drive one of the
kibbutz trucks.”
I could see the shock and disappointment in his eyes. But it was the truth. I
did imagine that at some point I might want to make a life outside the kibbutz.
But I’d never lived anywhere else. If I was going to remain a part of it, I could
think of no better way than to join our little corps of drivers. Though they lived
on the kibbutz, they spent most of their time delivering or picking up goods in
places like Tel Aviv, Holon or Ashkelon. As the US Marines might have put it,
I guess I figured I’d join the truck-drivers and see the world.
The deeper reason I said no to my father, as I am sure he suspected, was that
I felt a need to take control of my own life. That was simply a part of growing
up, a process which probably happened more quickly for 1950s kibbutz children
than for town or city kids. We loved and respected our parents. But we were
living with other teenagers. We weren’t just residents of the kibbutz. We were
part of the economic collective, working in the fields or orchards, the garage
and the metal shop. This bred a sense of independence. I listened to my father’s
arguments. But this was a decision about my future. I felt I had to make it for
myself. I cared about my education. But I’d reached a stage where my life
outside the classroom, and my circle of friends, mattered more. I am sure that
the same impulse drove me in my continuing freelance forays into lockpicking
and petty larceny with Ido and Moshe.
So I returned to the kibbutz school. The level of teaching was nowhere near
the regional school’s. But we did begin studying new subjects like economics
and politics. There were two other welcome surprises as well. The first was the
arrival of a new history teacher. Knowledgable, enthusiastic and eloquent, he
had a rare gift for igniting excitement in his students. We studied the French
Revolution. He brought it to life with insights into Montesquieu, Rousseau and
John Locke, Louis XVI and Mary Antoinette, Robespierre and Napoleon. He
traced the dynamics that led to the revolution, and the way its ideals descended
into the bloodshed and terror that followed. He presented history as a human
42
process that raised as many questions as it answered, as something we could
learn from.
The second high-point was a couple named David and Leah Zimmerman.
Though Mishmar Hasharon, like other kibbutzim, was secular, they introduced
us to the Talmud, the ancient compendium of rabbinic discussion and debate on
the meaning of passages from the Bible. We focused on two tractates, Baba
Kama and Baba Metziah, in which the rabbis drew on verses from Exodus to
argue out a system of rules for resolving civil disputes. It was the Talmud of
torts. The intricacy and the depth of the rabbinical debate fascinated me.
* * *
Yigal returned from the army a few months after the 1956 war, when, like
other teenagers, I was about to enter a pre-military program known as Gadna.
There were several options kids could choose. One was linked to the air force,
another to the navy. But most of us joined the reconnaissance and scouting
group, Gadna Sayerim. It involved studying topography and navigation, as well
as field exercises that were a lot like the ones Yigal had put us through a few
years earlier. At year’s end, we took part in a national exercise. It was called, a
bit grandiosely, Miyam el Yam: from sea to sea. We had to find our way from
the Mediterranean, near Haifa, across northern Israel to a lake which was a sea
only in name, the Sea of Galilee. It lasted three days. We were placed in teams
of four. We were each given a topographical map and a compass, with
landmarks marked along the way which we had to find and draw in a notebook
to prove we’d been there.
A couple of hours in, we faced our first challenge. We were making our way
along a shepherds’ trail, with brush and bramble on either side, when the path
split in two. We had to decide which fork to take. The map didn’t help. Each
inch covered the equivalent of a mile-and-a-half. The key was to be able to
match it with what we were seeing around us. To use points we could identify
from the map – Haifa and the sea in the receding distance, and a taller hill to our
northeast – and then figure out which path was more likely to take us in the
right direction. I knew this mix of calculation and imagination was something I
enjoyed. But it was more than that. Each of us had had the same preparation for
the exercise. As my trek-mates turned to me for this first decision, and then on
43
each successive stage as we crossed the Galilee, I realized that it was also
something that I was naturally good at.
Still, the closest thing to real military activity remained my excurions with
Ido and Moshe. Our ammunition trunks were stowed under our beds. But the
final piece of our arsenal fell into place in May 1958. For the tenth anniversary
of Israel, there was a national exhibition celebrating the achievements of the
state. I paid a first visit on my own. I was curious to see what was on show. But
as I walked through, I couldn’t help noticing the lack of security. Two days
later, I returned with Ido and Moshe. There was a stand devoted to the Israeli
military industry. We already had a supply of ammunition for an Uzi
submachine gun, courtesy of our raid on the Alexandroni Brigade. Now, when
the guy in charge of the stand was chatting with other visitors, we came away
with an Uzi.
It was then the trouble began. Along with Ido, Moshe and the other older
boys, I now lived in a larger dormitory under the cursory gaze of an older
metapelet. She was doing routine cleaning when she decided to dust around the
boxes under our beds. She’d never given them much thought. But when she
tried to move one of them, she was amazed by its weight. She got one her sonsin-law
to help. I think the box he pried open first was Moshe’s. But within a few
minutes he’d opened Ido’s and mine as well. Inside each were hundreds of
bullets and the machine-gun belts. Inside mine was our prized Uzi. It would not
exactly have taken the KGB to work out the rest. The kibbutz leaders ordered an
inquiry. Ido was summoned first, and attempted a brief show of defiance.
“What’s the big deal,” he asked. “It’s just stuff we collected. Why should you
care?” But separately questioning Moshe, then Ido again, the inquisitors worked
out every detail. The fact that the ammunition had come from the Alexandroni
Brigade, the reservists sent to defend us, was bad enough. But the Uzi had been
stolen from the National Exhibition. That was even worse. It was left to the core
of young men in their late 20s and 30s to figure out how to punish us. Everyone
agreed we could not be reported to the police. That would risk a scandal for the
kibbutz. They decided to beat some sense into the offenders, in front of all the
rest of the teenagers in the dormitory.
I wasn’t there. One afternoon each week, I now boarded a bus into Tel Aviv
for my piano lesson. But when I returned after sundown, I sensed immediately
something was wrong. Yigal was waiting at the bus stop outside the kibbutz. He
told me that what I had done was terrible. Not just because it involved weapons,
but because it was a breach of trust. Did you really steal ammunition from the
44
army, he asked, his voice rising. And from the National Exhibition? I didn’t
bother denying it. I suppose I felt lucky they hadn’t found out about our raids on
the kibbutz armory. He did not administer my beating. That came a few weeks
later from one of the kibbutz elders. He simply took me by the shoulders and
shouted: “You must never do this again.”
It was worse for my parents. At first, they believed I was an innocent party.
They were convinced I couldn’t have got involved in something like this
without being dragged in by the others. My father even asked me whether the
reason I’d been “drafted” by Ido and Moshe was because I was small, and able
to squeeze through tight spaces in windows and doors. As it happened, that did
sometimes come in handy. But I told them, no, I was not an unlucky bystander.
I was as much a part of it as the others. My father was angrier than I had ever
seen him. My mother, faced with what must have seemed like a betrayal of
every one of her Zionist principles, told me that if the kibbutz had decided to
report us to the police, she would not have objected.
Their mood lifted slightly when I began my final year of high school in
September 1958. After two years back in the kibbutz school, our age-group was
sent out again in another shift in policy. This one was in response to signs of
growing support in Mishmar Hasharon and other kibbutzim for the argument
my father had made against the quality of education we were offering. In order
to go at least some way toward meeting that objection, Mishmar Hasharon was
banding together with two dozen other kibbutzim and sending all 12 th -graders to
one of two outside high schools. The first, called Beit Berl, was a Labor Zionist
institution focusing on the humanities. In addition to a few of the less academic
boys, most of the girls were sent there. The rest of us went to a place called
Rupin. It was a few hundred yards past the regional high school. It specialized
in agriculturally related scientific research.
A few of the teachers were enormously gifted, and they were in the areas
that most interested me: math, physics and biology. Yet the rest of the
curriculum was almost numbingly uninspiring. I did not miss a single math or
science class. But otherwise, I began setting my own schedule. Some days, I
would sleep late, or not go at all. When I did go, I’d often show up without
having done the homework. Neither Ido nor Moshe was with me at Rupin. They
were starting their military service. But I assembled a new band of mischiefmakers,
and it was not hard to entice them to go AWOL.
I was warned several times by the school administrator. He said he could not
accommodate a student who seemed oblivious to, or dismissive of, the rules. He
45
was especially upset because my attitude seemed to be infecting others. A few
months into the school year, he told the leaders of Mishmar Hasharon, and then
my parents, that I would have to leave. My father was especially upset. A
couple of years earlier, he’d had visions of my staying on in the regional high
school and going to university. Now, I’d been unable to hold my own in Rupin.
Still, both he and my mother were relieved when Mishmar Hasharon and the
school worked out a compromise which did not end my studies altogether. The
expulsion stood, but I was allowed to continue attending math and science
classes.
For my mother, the blow was softened by the fact I began working almost
full-time on the kibbutz, alongside Yigal, driving a tractor. I woke up early and
accompanied him into the fields of wheat, barley or rye. We also made a series
of trips 130 miles south into the Negev to a moshav called Patish. It had been
set up by newly arrived Moroccan Jews. Since they didn’t have the equipment
or know-how to cultivate all their fields, they were renting out some of the land.
Mishmar Hasharon had contracted to farm a parcel of 450 acres.
For ten days at a time, Yigal and I would place a tractor on the back of a
pickup and head to Patish. We worked from four in the morning until sundown.
After work, we ate at a tiny family-run restaurant a few miles away in Ofakim, a
so-called “development town” populated by Moroccan Jews who had been
moved there as soon as they arrived in Israel. Far from regretting not being in
school, I drew satisfaction, and pride, from knowing that I was functioning as an
independent adult. But it also gave me time to think. My whole life had been
circumscribed by the struggle to create and secure the state. But I again found
myself pondering issues of basic fairness in our young country, and the
challenge of reconciling our words and principles with our deeds amid the
difficult realities of building the state.
Back on the kibbutz, it was the example of the kindly and hard-working
Baddura which had caused me to question how we were treating the Jews who
had arrived from Yemen. In the Negev, I met members of the even larger postwar
influx from Morocco. One image struck me above all. It was from the place
Yigal and I ate dinner. Ofakim was a development town that had yet to develop.
It had no visible means of support, and there was no sign the government was
doing much to remedy that or integrate the new immigrants economically and
socially. The “restaurant” was a side business a family had set up in the dining
room of their tiny home. The sixth or seventh time we went there, I was startled
by sudden movement a couple of feet away from where we were sitting.
46
Looking more closely, I saw a wooden box, the kind we used in Mishmar
Hasharon to crate oranges. It was filled with hay. At first, I thought the stirring
inside was a family pet. Then, I saw it was a baby. I said nothing until we had
left. “Was that really a child?” I asked Yigal. “A baby?” He replied, with a tinge
of sadness but also a look that seemed to convey surprise at my naivety: “Yes.
They don’t have room for him.”
* * *
My evolving feelings about the Arabs, the other people with dreams of what
they still saw as Palestine, would become more complex as my childhood drew
to an end. As mentioned, I barely registered the fate of the absent villagers of
Wadi Khawaret.
And yet as I got older – in my teens – I came to understand why the
Palestinians were fighting us. Before the 1956 war, Dayan gave a brief speech
that had a powerful impact on me. It was a eulogy, but it was for someone
Dayan didn’t know personally. His intended audience was the rest of the
country. He spoke in Nahal Oz, a kibbutz on the border with Gaza often
targeted by fedayeen. In April 1956, a group of Arabs crossed from Gaza and
began cutting down the wheat in Nahal Oz’s fields. The kibbutz security officer,
a 21-year-old named Roi Rotberg, rode out on horseback to chase them away.
The intruders opened fire as soon as he got close. They beat him, shot him dead
and took the body back over the armistice line. The corpse was returned,
mutilated, after an Israeli protest through the UN.
With Israeli newspapers full of agonized accounts of what had happened,
Dayan’s message was that we should not blame the Arabs for Roi Rotberg’s
death. We should look at ourselves, and the neighborhood in which we lived.
“Why should we talk about their burning hatred for us?” he asked. “For eight
years, they have been sitting in the refugee camps of Gaza, while before their
eyes we have been transforming the lands and the villages where they and their
fathers dwelt.” Of course, they hated us and the state we were building. Rotberg
had allowed his “yearning for peace to deafen his ears, and he did not hear the
voice of murder waiting in ambush.” Dayan said the danger was that other
Israelis had become similarly naive. “How did we shut our eyes, and refuse to
see, in all its brutality, the destiny of our generation?” A generation which was
47
settling the land but which, “without the steel helmet and the barrel of the gun,
will not succeed in planting a tree or building a home.”
Still, if I was part of a generation that understood the need for military
preparedness, strength and a readiness to fight if we were to survive in the
Middle East, the 1956 war also brought home to me the need to consider how
we fought. This meant grappling with a contradiction wired into Zionism from
the start: the need to take up arms to defend our state, while recognizing the
Jewish moral code that was its foundation. When the Israeli armed forces were
established in 1948, Tzahal’s doctrine included the principle of tohar haneshek
– “purity of arms” – and an explicit requirement for our soldiers to use the
minimum necessary force and do all they could to avoid civilian casualties.
Putting “purity of arms” into practice was always going to be hard. All arms
kill. In all wars, civilians die. But that did not make the principle, or the need to
be aware of it in combat, any less important.
Even if the soldier called on the make that judgment was someone who had
mentored me from the time I was six, and whose military prowess I had come to
respect. Even if it was Yigal Garber. His parachute jump on the first day of the
1956 war went smoothly. But the battle for control of the Mitla Pass turned out
to be the most deadly of the war. It was also unnecessary. Under Israel’s prewar
choreography with the British and French, the very fact of our landing near
the Mitla Pass was to be the trigger for an Anglo-French attack. In fact, Arik
Sharon, the commander of Battalion 890, received orders from Tel Aviv not to
take the pass. Only grudgingly, did they let him send in a reconnaissance force
to establish whether it was safe to cross.
The reconnaissance company walked into a trap. Machine-gun and mortar
fire rained down from Egyptian troops dug into the caves and other natural
defensive positions above the pass. It took hours to extricate the stranded men.
Yigal’s unit fought its way in from the eastern side of the pass. A small group
from the reconnaissance force managed to get a foothold on the western side.
Almost 250 Egyptians were killed. But 38 Israeli paratroopers also died, the
largest single toll in any battle since 1948. Battered and bitter, the surviving
men from the reconnaissance force parachuted into the southernmost part of the
Sinai, near Et-Tur on the Red Sea. Yigal and the others headed overground to
join up with them. By the time they got there, Egyptian resistance had all but
ended. Yigal’s company had a brief exchange of fire with several dozen holdouts
in the Egyptian force. The Egyptians surrendered. And then, apparently,
Yigal and his fellow paratroopers shot all of them dead.
48
At least those were the rumors after the war. I asked friends what they were
hearing. I asked some of the older men on the kibbutz, my father included. All
of them responded with a slightly different version of events. But I knew what I
wasn’t hearing. No one of them told me it was a lie. When I asked Yigal, he
averted my glance, and then changed the subject. I knew it was true, at least
broadly.
I realized that, before it happened, Yigal and the others had seen dozens of
friends gunned down in an Egyptian ambush in the Mitla Pass. But I didn’t need
a lesson tohar haneshek to know that the killing of captured Egyptian soldiers
should not have happened. Or that it was plainly, simply wrong.
When Yigal and I made our final trip to Patish in 1959, I knew it would be
pointless to ask him about it. Whatever he said wouldn’t change anything. I still
respected his courage and his fighting spirit, and the part he’d played in
defending Israel. I appreciated what he’d done for me as I grew up. But what
mattered now wasn’t what Yigal had done. It was what I would do, and how I
would live my life.
Especially since I, too, was about to begin my army service.
49
Chapter Three
I reported for induction on the second Sunday of November 1959, three
months short of my eighteenth birthday. Military service was a near-universal
rite of passage for Israeli teenagers. For children of the kibbutz, it held even
greater significance. Now that we had a country, the kibbutzniks’ role as the
avant-garde in taming and farming the land had ceased to be relevant. But the
sense of mission we’d been raised with – what we were led to believe set us
apart from the mere “city-dwellers” – drove us to aspire, maybe even assume,
we would leave an imprint in other spheres of the new state’s life. I doubt it’s an
accident that nearly every one of the boys with whom I grew up in Mishmar
Hasharon went on to become an officer during his time in the military.
Judging from my own first few weeks in uniform, however, there was every
reason to believe I would end up as an unfortunate, undistinguished exception.
This was not due to lack of ambition. In fact, I thought at first of joining the
air force. But a question on the application form asked whether I ever suffered
from any breathing discomfort. Like almost everyone on the kibbutz, I did get a
bit clogged up when the weather turned cold and damp. So I naively answered
yes, ending any chance of training as a pilot. My fallback choice was a tank
unit. But when I joined the hundreds of other draftees at the processing center
near Tel Aviv, about a hundred of us were shunted, by alphabetical lottery, into
training for armored personnel carriers instead. Known as battle taxis, the APCs
which Israel had at the time were lumbering, World War Two-vintage
halftracks.
Our training battalion was based, alongside the country’s main armored
brigade, in a huge, hillside army camp outside Beersheva in the Negev. I knew
that our tironut – basic training – would be tough. That was the whole point.
But we endured a seemingly endless array of inspections, under the watchful
eye of a corporal who meted out punishments for the tiniest scuff on a boot, a
belt, or a rifle. The rest of the time was spent in physical training, which I found
especially hard, at least at the beginning. I still weighed barely 130 pounds, and
by no means all, or even most, of it was muscle. My military career, such as it
was, looked very likely to involve spending my required couple of years baking
inside an APC in the Negev before moving on to something more useful, and
certainly more fulfilling, with the rest of my life.
50
But a series of accidents, in Israel’s life and in mine, would soon point me in
a dramatically different direction. The first became known as the Rotem Crisis,
and it delivered a jolting reminder of Israel’s vulnerability to a surprise attack
from neighboring Arab states. Militarily, we were far stronger than in 1948. But
we were still a young country, at an early stage in our economic development.
Our defense strategy rested on a recognition we could not afford to sustain a
large standing army, relying instead on a pool of trained reservists. The problem
was that a full call-up of the reserves would require something like 48 hours.
That meant some form of early warning was critical.
Rotem erupted in February 1960, about halfway through my tironut, and
began almost farcically. The Chief of Military Intelligence, Chaim Herzog, was
at a diplomatic receiption in Tel Aviv when he began chatting with a guest he
knew well: the head of the local CIA station. What, the American asked, did he
make of the fact that Egypt had moved its two main armored divisions into the
Sinai, toward the border with Israel? Herzog came up with a suitably woolly
reply, about how it was obviously a situation which bore watching. But the truth
was that neither he nor anyone else in Israel had any idea about the Egyptian
mobilization. He left the party as soon as he could, to tell Dayan and Ben-
Gurion. When a reconnaissance flight the next day confirmed that dozens of
battle-ready tanks had been rolled forward toward the Suez Canal, Ben-Gurion
and the generals scrambled for a response.
They did not want a war. Ben-Gurion was particularly worried that in
responding to Nasser’s buildup, he might inadvertently escalate things further.
He vetoed the idea of a full mobilization. But he did order a more limited callup,
of about 7,000 reservists. He placed the air force on alert. He directed the
four brigades responsible for the defense of southern Israel, including our
armored brigade near Beersheva, to move within a few miles of the border –
and gave us the additional role of sending several overnight munitions convoys
to equip the hastily assembled border force.
The first sign I saw that anything extraordinary was going on was the sudden
movement of tanks and APCs inside our camp. At first, no one told us raw
recruits anything. We were left to look on, and stay out of the way. But with our
operational units preparing to move forward, the problem was that there seemed
no one else with the expertise, experience and local knowledge to lead the
supply columns. So our training battalion was summoned before the platoon
commander. “Any volunteers,” he asked. When none of us raised a hand, he
said: “Come on. One of you must have grown up around here. That means the
51
first 25 miles will be familiar territory.” He left unspoken the obvious
postscript: the need to negotiate the final five to ten miles, through open desert,
and to find the right area, on our side of a border that wasn’t even marked.
“Can’t any of you,” he barked, “lead a convoy of a few dozen trucks?”
I’m not sure what possessed me. But I thought to myself: yes, I probably
can. I had been scouting and navigating in one way or another since those first
evenings with Yigal in the kibbutz orchards. I’d trained with Gadna Sayerim.
And while I’d never lived in the south, the farm settlement of Patish, where I’d
worked along with Yigal after getting kicked out of high school, was not far
from the route the conveys would have to take.
So I raised my hand.
“Can you lead a convoy?” he asked.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “Of course, I’ll need a map. And a compass.”
“Why do you think you’re qualified?” he prodded. I’d been in Gadna
Sayerim, I said. I was good with maps. “Okay,” he replied, and he sent me,
along with two of the company’s junior officers, to the battalion commander.
Someone must have phoned ahead, because he was clearly expecting us.
Still, I could see the surprise in his eyes when he looked at me: only just
eighteen, but looking closer to 15, my uniform sagging on my slender frame. He
gazedat the officers, then back at me, then at the officers again, as if trying to
figure out whether he was about to approve something utterly crazy. But he had
little choice. Three convoys had to be dispatched within the next couple of
hours. So far, with me, he had a sum total of one guy to lead them. “Fine,” he
said, and waved us out.
The column consisted of eight huge, American-made six-wheelers, each
packed with ten tons of munitions and other supplies. I was in the lead truck.
The driver was a reservist in his mid-30s. So were most of the men in the rest of
the transport trucks, one driver and one soldier in each. A staff sergeant, in the
second vehicle, was in theoretical command. But, surreal though it felt, I was
actually in charge, since I was the only person who might, conceivably, get us
to the right place.
The platoon commander was right. The first part, on paved roads, was fairly
easy. But just before sunset, we reached open desert, the beginning of more than
three hours of picking and weaving, calibrating and recalibrating, our way
across a wide expanse on sand and occasional scrub bushes that, every mile or
52
so, would suddenly give way to a windswept series of dunes and wadis. The
map and compass helped. But I soon realized that it was almost impossible to
get an accurate reading from inside the truck. Every few minutes, I waved the
convoy to stop, got out, and walked fifty or sixty yards into the sand and clumps
of acacia trees and calibrated our progress from there. My fallback was the
stars. From them, I could at least make sure we were headed in broadly the right
direction. But the need to navigate around the dunes meant we were never
moving in a perfectly straight line. The miles ticking by on the truck’s odometer
couldn’t tell me exactly how far we’d travelled. A couple of times, I realized we
were wandering off line – not by a much, but enough to risk leaving us either a
mile or two south of where we were supposed to go or, worse, on the Egyptian
side of an unmarked desert frontier that, especially at night, would look pretty
much the same on either side.
Finally, a few hours before dawn, I brought the convoy to a halt. I climbed
out, walked back to the staff sergeant and told him, with more confidence than I
felt: “We’re here.” I had no way of knowing for sure. But I felt we were
generally in the right place. Before we’d set off, I was briefed by the officer in
charge of one of the operational APC battalions. He had been to the area before,
on training exercises. Because of the emergency call-up, he was too senior to
lead a supply convoy. But he told me that once we got there, we should stop and
wait. He would follow our tracks the next morning and link up with us. An hour
after sunrise, we saw his jeep bobbing over the sand towards us. He pulled to a
stop, shook hands with the staff sergeant, and then he turned to me.
“Unbelievable,” he said. “We’re where we need to be.”
Our role in the grand scheme of things, and certainly mine, was hardly
decisive. But the rest of the border mobilization also went to plan. That, along
with some frantic diplomatic activity and a healthy common sense on all sides,
ensured that a new war with Egypt was averted – at least for a further halfdozen
years, until 1967. By then, the lesson of Rotem would be learned: our
need to find a realiable way to tap into the battle plans of the hostile Arab states
around us. And through another wholly unexpected turn of events starting just a
few weeks after the Rotem Crisis, I would turn out to play a personal role in
making that happen.
* * *
53
Under army regulations, training recruits got a five-day leave every few
months during tironut. My first one came a bit later than usual, due to Rotem.
But in April 1960, shortly before the Passover holiday, I headed back to
Mishmar Hasharon. Despite my minor triumph of desert navigation, I still had
every reason to believe I’d be spending the next couple of years in an APC unit
in the Negev, and can’t pretend I was looking forward to it. Still, the idea of
returning home in my army uniform, at least a bit stronger and bulkier than
before, did give me a sense of pride.
It was on my third day back, when I was in the dining hall with a half-dozen
schoolmates-turned-soldiers, that Avraham Ramon sat down and joined us. He
was a yeled chutz, one of the “boys from outside” who had joined our class
when we were taken out of the regional high school. He, too, was now in the
army. As we were finishing lunch, he asked me: “How’s tironut?”
“Tough,” I said. “Boring.”
Smiling, he said: “How would you feel about joining a sayeret?”
The question took me by surprise. In Hebrew, sayeret meant “reconnaissance
unit”. It was the name given to special units that carried out missions behind
enemy lines, or under particularly exacting conditions. In the early 1960s, there
were only two of note. One was Sayeret Golani, attached to the Golani Brigade
near the northern border. The truly elite one was Sayeret Tzanhanim, the
paratroopers’ sayeret. It had been built from Company A of Battalion 890,
where Yigal had served in the 1950s.
“Which sayeret?” I asked.
“It’s called Sayeret Matkal,” he replied.
I’d never heard of it. When I asked what it did, he said: “I’m not allowed to
say. But are you interested?” The air of mystery made it seem only more
enticing. And no matter what it did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead
of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied.
I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the
end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel
Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel department of military
intelligence. I was greeted by two men in their late 20s. One of them, shorter
even than me, introduced himself as Sami Nachmias. The other was tall and
slim and said in a surprisingly quiet voice: “I’m Shmil Ben-Zvi.” They were
two names which I, like most Israeli teenagers at the time, knew well. Ben-Zvi
54
had been an officer in Arik Sharon’s original Unit 101, and Nachmias was one
of the earliest recruits to Company A. They shook my hand and motioned me
into a Jeep. As we drove out of the base, they peppered me with questions about
almost anything except the army: the kibbutz, school, sports. Then, Ben-Zvi
pulled the Jeep to the side of the road, turned around to face me and asked: “Is it
true you can pick locks?”
Yes, I said. “Do you want me to show you?” He said that wouldn’t be
necessary.
“Is it true you can navigate? Read maps?” Nachmias asked. I said yes.
They drove me back to the base in silence. “OK,” Nachmias said. “You’ll
probably hear from us.”
I didn’t. But as basic training was winding down, I got a further order: to
report to an address in Tzahala, a neighborhood in north Tel Aviv where a lot of
military officers lived. It was a small house with a metal gate outside. I was met
at the door by a man about 30 in shorts and a T-shirt who introduced himself as
Avraham Arnan. He led me inside. He unfurled a map of Jerusalem and the
surrounding hills. He pointed to a spot on the southwest of the city. He drew a
wide, curving line through the hills to a second point. “You know how to read a
map?” he asked. When I nodded, he said: “I want you to describe to me – just as
if you were walking on this line – exactly what you see, as you make your way
to the place I marked.” I used the elevation lines on the map as a guide, and the
positioning of the hills and woodland and villages on the map, and began
describing how each stage would look. When I was finished, his only response
was the hint of a smile. When he spoke, it wasn’t about the map. It was, again,
about picking locks. “How did you learn?” he asked. I explained how I’d cut
into the locks, figured out how they worked and made a set of tools to open
them. “Thank you,” he said. “You can return to your unit.”
Though he hadn’t said so, I got a feeling this was the Sayeret Matkal
equivalent of a final job interview. When I got back to Beersheva, I dug around
as discreetly as possible for details about Avraham Arnan. I learned he had
served in 1948 in the hills around Jerusalem, so he would have known first-hand
the terrain he asked me to describe. That, I guessed, explained the half-smile.
But I was entering my last week of tironut. I still had no idea whether I’d be
spending the next couple of years inside an APC – or in a sayeret whose
function was a mystery, beyond the fact it seemed less interested in whether my
boots were shined than whether I could pick a lock.
55
The day before the end of basic training, I was told to return to Maka Esser.
A Jeep was waiting. A soldier was at the wheel. He mumbled hello and drove
me to a sprawling military base about 15 minutes away, not too far from the
international airport in Lod. It was built by the British in the Second World War
for the RAF. After 1948, the main part had been converted into Israel’s officertraining
school. But at the far end, set back from a criss-cross of runways, was a
pair of domed concrete shelters which had been used by the British for
munitions storage. Five tents. Two field toilets. And a single-story brick
structure with a tin roof. It contained offices for Avraham Arnan, a couple of
other officers and a secretary, a kitchenette and a room for storing weapons.
This was the home of Sayeret Matkal, although the first thing I was told was
that no one, outside a handful of senior officers in military headquarters, knew
we existed.
* * *
The heart and soul of Sayeret Matkal was Avraham Arnan. Even from my
brief first encounter with him in his living room in Tzahala, I was struck by his
physical presence, with almost movie-star looks and a face made even more
intriguing by the fact he had different-colored eyes, one brown and one a
piercing green. But what really set him apart, as I got to know him and come
under his spell in the sayeret, was his playful, almost bohemian disregard for the
normal strictures and structures, rules and regulations, of the armed forces.
What mattered to him was what actually needed to get done, and how best to
accomplish it despite all the bureaucratic obstacles, and he made me and his
other teenage recruits feel we were equal partners with him in getting there.
Years later, he confided that if his life had not led him into the military, he
would have probably chosen something in the arts or culture, maybe directing
films. But he had volunteered for the Haganah at age 17, a year before the 1948
war. As the losses mounted in Jerusalem, he found himself in the Palmach’s
crack Harel Brigade, under the command of a future Israeli chief-of-staff, Dado
Elazar.
His vision for Sayeret Matkal became Israel’s answer to the dangers
identified by Rotem. But it had its origins in his experiences in the years after
1948, when he joined a military intelligence group running a loose network of
Arab agents across Israel’s northern border. They provided occasional bits of
56
information. But in talking with his wartime friends, he realized this kind of
low-level intelligence could never address the real need for Israel: to ensure we
had early warning if Syria or Lebanon, Jordan or Egypt, were preparing to go to
war against us.
He began toying with the idea of training a small force of Israeli soldiers to
go on cross-border intelligence missions. The initial response from the kirya –
military headquarters in Tel Aviv – was so frustrating that anyone else would
have given up. None of the generals saw any reason to believe his scheme
would work. But the real obstacle was their continuing trauma over what had
happened the last time Israeli soldiers crossed the border on an intelligence
mission. It had happened in 1954, and it ended in a failure even more serious
than Rotem. The target was the Golan Heights, inside Syria. The special
technology unit attached to military intelligence had developed a bugging
device designed to be placed on a telephone pole on the Golan. The task of
installing it was given to the most decorated, and respected, commando unit in
the army: Company A in Sharon’s paratroop battalion, led by its commander,
Meir Har-Zion.
On a spring night in 1954, Har-Zion led his team onto the Golan. They
rigged the bugging unit to the telephone pole, buried the bulky transmitter and
made their way back. And it worked. Israeli intelligence could listen in to
military communications on the Heights. The hitch as that the batteries had to
be replaced every few weeks. Several more times, Meir and his men sneaked
back into Syria to keep the bug working. But as commander of Company A,
Meir was a key part of Israel’s anti-fedayeen operations. The last thing Moshe
Dayan wanted to risk was seeing him captured while trying to replace a few
batteries. So he shifted the task to a regular unit from the Golani Brigade.
In December 1954, a handover mission was organized. Three men from
Company A, including one of Meir’s sergeants, joined three from the Golani
Brigade. But they didn’t even hold a joint exercise before setting off. There was
also a lack of clarity about who was in charge. Though the Golani commander
was nominally the senior officer, only the Company A men had any first-hand
experience of this kind of mission. A half-mile onto the Heights, they were
intercepted by a Syrian soldiers. If this had been a Company A operation, the
response would have been automatic. They would have wheeled, opened fire
and attacked. But when the Syrians ordered the Golanis to drop their weapons,
one of them did, and the Company A men followed suit. They were all taken to
Damascus, held in solitary confinement, beaten and tortured.
57
One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the
son of a member of the Israeli Knesset whom Ben-Gurion and the whole of the
government knew well. The soldiers’ captivity dragged on until they were
finally returned to Israel in March 1956. By then, however, Uri Ilan had hanged
himself. He managed to hide a note into his uniform. It was found when the
body was being prepared for burial. It read: Lo bagadeti. Nekamah. “I did not
betray anything. Revenge.”
Ever since the Uri Ilan mission, there had been a de facto ban on crossborder
intelligence operations by Israeli soldiers. Ben-Gurion and his military
commanders knew, of course, the importance of getting early warning of an
enemy attack. But they decided the price of possible failure was simply too
high.
Sayeret Matkal was born three years later. Avraham was still part of the unit
running low-level agents in Syria and Lebanon, but his commander reluctantly
agreed to allow him to set up his new intelligence group. His initial
“headquarters” was a sparsely furnished Tel Aviv apartment. The first people he
brought in were veterans of the Palmach’s Arab Platoon, pre-state fighters who
trained themselves to pass as Arabs and gather intelligence, or stage raids,
behind enemy lines. Next, he invited friends who had served in Unit 101 and
Company A. Finally, he enlisted a core of them to help train recruits to his new
sayeret. He hoped the involvement of these commando veterans would also give
the unit credibility inside the kirya. One of them, Micha Kapusta, had been part
of 101, as had Itzhak Gibli, who had been a teenage Palmachnik in 1948. A
third was another Company A officer named Aharon Eshel, known as Errol, in
part for his undeniably Errol Flynn-like swagger, but also an acronym of his
Hebrew name. But the crowing addition to the group had the distinction of
having led the last successful Israeli bugging mission on the Golan, in addition
to being the most respected commando in Israel, a man who Dayan would later
call the country’s greatest soldier. It was Meir Har-Zion himself.
* * *
I was part of the second group of recruits to Sayeret Matkal, in the early
summer of 1960. The unit had been given its own base barely a year earlier. Bu
it had yet to carry out a single mission, and there was no sign of that happening.
Avraham couldn’t be sure when, or if, the generals in the kirya might give him
58
the go-ahead. Still, he was convinced that if we could demonstrate a toughness,
commitment and competence which offered an obvious addition to Israel’s
intelligence capability, even they would recognize the folly of not using it.
He made every one of us feel a part of making this possible. I was one of ten
new recruits, bringing the size of the sayeret to twenty. We were almost all
teenagers. In fact, the oldest of our officers was 21. Most of the men were
Sephardi Jews. For a unit like ours, with the aim of undertaking secret missions
in Arab countries, Avraham believed that a background in Arabic culture and
language was an important asset. I was the sayeret’s only lock-picker. But all of
us had been recruited in the much same way that I was. It was how the top
Palmach units had been formed, and the way Sharon assembled Unit 101:
friends recommending friends, in my case, my old yeled chutz schoolmate from
the kibbutz.
We trained in the whole range of commando skills. We used not only Uzis,
but Soviet-made Kalashnikovs and Gurionov machine guns. We worked with
detonators and explosives. We staged raids on Israeli airfields. We conducted
exercises using rubber dinghies to practice attacking from the sea. But mostly
we walked. For hundreds of miles, almost always at night the length and breadth
of the country. We would study a map of each area, committing every town or
village, hilltop or dry creek bed, to memory before we set off. I can still
remember what Meir Har-Zion told us: to be truly prepared, you needed to
spend “an hour for an hour” – an equal time mastering the lay of the land to the
amount you’d need to carry out an operation. It was a gruelling regime –
designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. On one series of exercises,
we were limited to a single canteen of water as we trekked deep into the Negev
Desert. It was gruelling, designed to push us to the very limits of endurance. I
remember the first time Errol set eyes on me after I joined the unit. He turned to
Avraham, laughed, and said: “Are we taking high school kids now?” But before
long, I was a “high school kid” no longer.
Meir Har-Zion rarely took a direct part in our exercises. On his final
Company A mission, a month before the 1956 war, he had been shot in his
throat and arm. A medic saved his life by performing a tracheotomy. But his
speech was affected, and he still had almost no use of his right arm. Errol,
Micha Kapusta and Yitzhak Gibli were more actively involved with us. They
were there not only to help train us, but to instill a commando attitude, a spirit
of confidence bordering on bravado.
59
Kapusta was our guide on our punishing five-day treks through the Negev.
Though Avraham would see us off at the start, he stayed back at the base. In a
couple of the exercises, we relied on carrier pigeons to keep in touch with the
base, until Kapusta began killing them for dinner. Once, on a searingly hot
desert afternoon, hours from the nearest hospital, he spotted a poisonous snake.
He used pieces of wood to pry its head up from the sand, grabbed its neck and
strangled it.
We also studied some Arabic, though most of the Sephardi recruits already
spoke the language. My tutor was a Cairo-born Jew named Amin. In part
because he enjoyed mathematics and played the violin, we hit it off
immediately. He was also deaf in one ear. Languages have never been my forte.
Even in Hebrew, I have a slight lisp. That made mastering Arabic even harder.
Still, Amin would frequently compliment me on my accent, at which point the
others in the class would point out that I was lucky he was hard of hearing.
A year in, we were given a classroom briefing on what to do if we fell into
enemy hands. The gist was to tell them only our name, rank and serial number.
But we had a special session with Gibli, who told us about what captivity was
really like. He had been shot and wounded during a retaliation operation in 1954
and was captured by the Jordanians. Until his release, he was kept in solitary
confinement and tortured. The details of his imprisonment, the beatings and the
cigarette burns, were lurid. Partly because we were developing a bit of
commando self-confidence – but mostly to hide the discomfort of wondering
how each of us would react to being in enemy hands – we heckled him over an
account that seemed to get more heroic with each retelling. He wisely ignored
us. He told us that survival would be down not just to physical strength. It
required strength of mind, the kind of subtlety required to give your captors
something to keep them at bay and to establish some form of human bond, to
but withhold anything of genuine value.
A few weeks later, the whole sayeret held a four-day exercise in the Galilee.
On the second night, at about four in the morning, we shook off our backpacks
and settled in for a few hours’ sleep. The first thing I heard was shouting in
Arabic. I saw a guy hovering over me, his face covered. He handcuffed me,
pulled a burlap sack over my head, yanked me to me feet and led me off. We
were piled into the back of a truck. From the whispered comments around me, I
assumed all twenty of us had been taken. We drove for nearly four hours.
Twice, I got an slap across the face, more painful because of the burlap. I kept
60
telling myself this had to be part of our training. If it was for real, we’d have
been more badly beaten, or killed. Still, I couldn’t be completely sure.
The truck lurched to a stop. We were led into a building, down a hallway and
into a large room. The walls were bare except for a series of iron rings. Our
captors tore the sacks from our heads for a few moments, and tied our wrists to
the manacles. For the first six or seven hours we were kept together, arms
shackled and raised. Then they took us away one by one. I was the last to be led
out. I was taken to a room so small there was not even space for a cot. It wasn’t
until the last shaft of light disappeared from the slit-like window near the top of
wall that the first interrogator showed up. He unlocked the door, entered and
unfolded a metal chair. He wanted answers: what unit was I from, what did our
unit do, who were our commanders, what were our orders, and what was our
designated role in the event of war.
I told him my name, rank and serial number. After each question, I repeated
them, or shook my head in silence. “You will answer, sooner or later,” he
shouted in heavily Arabic-accented Hebrew, hitting me across the face. “All of
you will.” For four days and nights, other interrogators shouted out the same
questions. I was slapped dozens of times. Punched in the stomach. One of the
captors uncuffed me and bent my arm behind my back, wrenching it upward.
Though I was determined not to cry out, I grunted in pain. Over and over, I told
myself: “This is not for real. They can hurt me. But they have limits. They can
twist my arm. They can hurt me. But there’s no way they can break my arm.”
I was not allowed to sleep. I was never left alone for more than a half-hour.
If I was crouching on the stone floor, I would be yanked to my feet and punched
or slapped. Twice a day, I was taken from my cell to a primitive toilet and given
a minute to relieve myself. There were only two changes to the routine. On a
few occasions, five or six of us were brought back into the large room and told
we wouldn’t be let go until we had given them more of what they wanted – the
implication being that some of us had already talked. And once or twice, the
interrogators sent in a good cop. “I can help you,” he told me. “But you have to
give me something.”
But when it was over, none of us had talked. We didn’t fool ourselves into
thinking that meant we could hold up in genuine captivity. There, they could
break your arm. They could burn your chest with cigarettes, rip out a fingernail
or a tooth. They could kill you. The main value had been to give us some sense
of what we might face. We might still be afraid, but at least it would no longer
be fear of the unknown.
61
Challenging though our training was, I found every bit of it enthralling and,
with each new test passed, somehow empowering and exhilirating. This was all
the more remarkable because we had still yet to carry out a single operation. If
anyone other than Avraham had been in charge, I think the unit might have
unraveled. The fact that it didn’t was mostly due to of the ethos he created, the
feeling that we were a special breed with a critically important common
purpose, and that sooner or later we would be called on to do special things.
When we were in uniform, it was camouflage dress. When we were on the base,
we mostly wore sandals and shorts. We called each other by our first names,
even the officers.
In its first few years, the sayeret sometimes felt less like an army unit than a
college fraternity. Every spring, we organized a feast in a cavernous hangar on
the edge of our compound. It was called Chag ha Pri, the Feast of the Fruit. For
days ahead of the event, we would mount night raids on kibbutzim, “liberating”
crates of every kind of fruit imaginable, and chicken and lamb if we got lucky.
The only rule was that none of us would steal from our own kibbutzim. Among
the guests at the Feast of the Fruit was an unsuspecting selection of senior
officers whom Avraham knew. A few of them got into the spirit, like Dado
Elazar, his Palmach commander from 1948. The Palmach had held similar
foodfests, with delicacies grabbed from nearby kibbutzim. Dado was by this
time commander of Israel’s armored corps. Since our sayeret was always short
of gasoline for our exercises, he would divert surplus supplies to us. But other
guests were less impressed with the pyramids of oranges and avocados and
mangoes and watermelons. I could almost hear a voice screaming inside them:
these are Israeli soldiers. They’re stealing this stuff.
* * *
It was not until the autumn of 1961, nearly eighteen months after I arrived,
that it seemed we might actually be given a real mission. This was largely due
to a change at the top of the military. For much of the 1950s, when Dayan was
chief-of-staff, his right-hand-man was a Haganah veteran named Meir Amit. In
1961, the term of Dayan’s successor as chief of staff, Haim Laskov, was coming
to an end and Amit was in the mix to get the top job. He was already Head of
Operations. In practical terms, that made him the number-two man in the armed
forces. But the job went to Tzvi Tzur, Laskov’s deputy. Amit decided to accept
62
the post of Head of Military Intelligence. He knew the importance of
intelligence, and the potential cost of Israel being taken by surprise in a future
war, having been part of the top military leadership during Rotem. He was
energetic, bright, and exuded an infectious sense of self-confidence and
authority. He also had clout at headquarters. If he decided the time had come to
revive cross-border intelligence operations, there was every chance it would
happen.
Still, it was an agonizingly slow process. By the time my period of military
service was drawing to an end, it hadn’t happened. I did not seriously think of
leaving. Though my two years in Sayeret Matkal had been the most physically
demanding of my life, they were also the most fulfilling. I did not want to
forfeit the chance of being part of its finally becoming an operational unit. So I
committed to at least a few more years in the military. I joined my closest friend
among the recruits, Uri Zakay, for six months in officers’ school as we waited,
or hoped, for approval to actually use the skills and qualities we had acquired in
the sayeret.
And in the summer of 1962, shortly after I returned to the unit from officers’
school as a second-lieutenant, the green light finally came.
63
Chapter Four
At first, it was only “approval in principle”. It’s impossible to overstate the
trepidation with which Israel’s military brass, and Ben-Gurion himself,
approached the decision finally to send Sayeret Matkal into action. It was not
just the fact that we were a unit uttterly untested in the field. The stakes in the
mission we were contemplating were enormous. For the first time since Uri
Ilan’s deseperate act of suicide in a Damascus jail cell, Israeli soldiers would be
crossing into Arab territory on an intelligence mission. Amid continuing
tensions with the increasingly militant rulers of Egypt and Syria, there seemed
little doubt that at some stage we would again have to fight to defend our
security, perhaps even our existence as a state. The Rotem debacle had
highlighted the danger of a surprise attack, potentially leaving us in a scramble
to call up reserve units as Syrian or Egyptian tanks advanced on our borders.
But the memory of Uri Ilan remained a haunting reminder of the risks of failure.
My role, again, came down partly to accident. The man initially chosen to
lead the operation was someone I’d liked from my first days in the sayeret.
Ya’akov Tal, known as Tubul, was a year older than me. He came from Tiberias
in the north of Israel. As a teenager, he’d worked for extra pocket money
alongside shepherds in the hills above the Sea of Galilee, picking up a nearfluent
command of Arabic. He was self-confident without a trace of arrogance,
with a natural talent for connecting with his soldiers. In my case, there was a
further bond: a shared fascination with math and sciences.
But Tubul had applied to the leading technology institute in Israel, the
Technion near Haifa. As he began training his four-man team to cross onto
Syria’s Golan Heights, he received word that he’d been accepted. The academic
year wouldn’t begin until September, and it had been assumed at first that the
operation would happen before then. But even though Meir Amit was pressing
the rest of the military brass for a final go-ahead, it still hadn’t arrived by early
August. Avraham decided he needed a fall-back plan. He called Tubul and me
into his office. He said he wanted me to join the team’s training as Tubul’s
deputy, and to be ready to step in as commander if that proved necessary. When
we next heard from Amit, a week later, it became clear the mission would not
happen in time for Tubul to lead it.
We would be setting out from the northeast corner of Israel, a patch of
parkland near a kibbutz called Dan, only a mile or so from where Uri Ilan’s
group had begun its mission. This time, however, the target was more
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ambitious. We intended to bug the communications line running east from
Banias, the Syrians’ base in the north of the Golan, toward Quneitra, their main
headquarters. That meant taking a longer route, beginning with a climb onto a
plateau about 200 feet high and crossing the Banias River toward the Syrian
base.
We had nearly three weeks for our final preparations. After two years of
sayeret training, I was confident that, physically, we would be up to the task.
But even without the obvious jitters emanating from the kirya, I could not help
but be aware of the possibility, and the cost, of failure. Every evening, I would
stake out time to go through everything that might conceivably go wrong. Years
later, when I went to do my graduate studies at Stanford, I was exposed to
words of wisdom from a non-kibbutznik – Benjamin Franklin – which probably
best summed up what drove my planning for the sayeret’s first operation, and
the others that would follow. “Failing to prepare,” he wrote, “is to preparing for
failure.”
Running into Syrian soldiers was, of course, top of the list of potential
pitfalls. But land mines were also a danger. I got a map of the area from military
intelligence which, in theory at least, showed the location of mines all along the
edge of the Golan. But it had been compiled over a period of nearly two decades
on the basis of information from shepherds, smugglers and the occasional Arab
agent. Whenever they reported seeing the telltale combination of fencing and
yellow danger triangles, the place was marked. Once it was marked, no one in
intelligence headquarters dared erase it. The result was that the map now
showed an almost unbroken stretch of mines. And within the amount of time
that we had to get ready, there was no way of knowing which of the minefields
was still there.
The timing was chosen by the cycle of the moon. We wanted to cross into
Syria in as near to total darkness as possible. That meant the final days of
September. Unlike Tubul, who had been commanding the team from the
moment they had joined the sayeret, I’d been working with them for only a
couple of months. My deputy for the operation, Avi Telem, was also a
newcomer. But he was smart, steady and he had served in the Golani Brigade,
so he knew the terrain along the border.
Avraham could not hide his own nervousness as the operation drew nearer.
A week before we were due to set off, he asked whether we were planning a
further, full-scale exercise. When I said the final run-through was set for the
following night, in the Negev, he told me he wanted Meir Har-Zion to attend.
65
During the exercise, Meir said nothing at all. I couldn’t help wondering
whether, despite our nearly daily exercises, and my nightly stock-taking, I’d
somehow missed an obvious detail in our planning. When we got back to the
sayeret base, Avraham was waiting for us. “Well?” he asked Meir. “They don’t
need me,” he said. “They know what they’re doing.” It was not just a source of
reassurance for me, but a huge relief for Avraham.
The team I’d inherited from Tubul included three gifted soldiers with
different backgrounds, and different skills. Motti Nagar was born in Cairo. He
was short but solidly built, smart, level-headed and almost always smiling. Kuti
Sharabi grew up in a Yemeni family in an impoverished neighborhood in Tel
Aviv. He had a self-deprecating sense of humor, a quick mind and sometimes
even quicker tongue, but an extraordinary ability to focus on the task at hand.
The third member was a kibbutznik. His name was Moshe Elimelech. We called
him Moshiko. Utterly self-contained, a man who spoke only when absolutely
necessary, he also brought two different qualities to the mission. One was going
to be indispensable: an almost squirrel-like ability to climb trees. Or telephone
poles. The other, of which I was a bit more leery, was a total, deeply irrational,
absence of fear.
Though none of us needed a further reminder of the weight being attached to
our mission, the night before we headed north, Avraham got a call from the
chief-of- staff’s office. Tzvi Tzur wanted to see me the next morning for a
personal briefing. I tried to get Avraham to say no. I pointed out that if we
didn’t get going by ten o’clock at the latest, we’d risk throwing everything off
schedule. But “no” was not an option. After some further back-and-forth, it was
agreed that I would meet the commander of Israel’s armed forces at nine the
next morning at a gas station north of Tel Aviv and join him for the 20-minute
drive along the coastal road to a speaking engagement he had in Netanya.
I saw Avraham again before I set off. “We are beginning an extremely
critical 24 hours for our unit, the intelligence corps, in fact for the armed forces
as a whole,” he told me. “I don’t know what might happen. No one does. Just
remember two things. First, out there, in the field, you are the ramatkal” – the
chief of staff. He told me that only I and my team could judge and respond to
what we encountered once the operation started. “And second, this mission has
to be accomplished.”
I left see the real ramatkal. Before we began the drive to Netanya, he asked
me to unfold the map I’d brought with me and talk him through, step by step,
how we planned to get onto the Golan, plant the bugging device, and get back
66
again. The more I talked, however, the more I sensed that the details weren’t
what General Tzur really wanted to know. I think what he actually wanted to
gauge was whether I felt confident. He wanted to reassure himself he wasn’t
taking any more than the obvious risks in sending us, in Uri Ilan’s footsteps,
back into Syria. Fortunately, he didn’t ask whether I was sure we’d succeed. If
he had, I would have said, yes, we were prepared. But there was no way we
could be certain. Still, he must have got what he wanted. When we reached the
edge of Netanya, he shook my hand, wished me luck and went on his way.
The rest of the team was waiting at the crossroads for me to join them. Two
teams, in fact: mine, with whom I’d be crossing into Syria in less than 10 hours’
time, and our hillutz, or back-up. A hillutz was always a part of sayeret
operations. The back-up group would stay on the Israeli side of the border. If we
got into trouble, they’d come in after us.
Even after my briefing for the chief of staff, we had one last stop to make on
the way north. It was at the headquarters of the army’s northern command. It
was in a Tegart fortress, one of dozens built by the British around the country,
with watchtowers on each corner of the outer walls. The northern commander
was an equally forbidding figure. Avraham Yoffe had served in the British
artillery in the Second World War and the Golani Brigade in 1948. He used to
joke with other officers that while they looked like a bunch of kids, he was the
only one with the true bearing of a general.
He must have been busy when we arrived, because we ended up hanging
around in the courtyard for nearly 20 minutes. Just as I was beginning to worry
that the timetable for what really mattered – our climb up onto the Golan – was
being put at risk, I noticed that off to the side was a beautifully polished jeep. I
assumed it belonged to General Yoffe, who was known to be an avid hunter and
would later become the head of Israel’s National Parks Authority. It had a
padlocked metal grill on the back which held two jerrycans of gasoline. Yori
Cohen, the commander of the back-up team, and I spotted the fuel containers at
the same time. We couldn’t help smiling. Yes, we were about to embark on an
operation which, assuming we didn’t fail, would finally give Israel real-time
intelligence from across our border for the first time since the 1950s. But we
were still Sayeret Matkal, still chronically short of gasoline for our field
exercises. And I still hadn’t forgotten how to pick a lock. As Yori stood guard, I
broke into the grill and removed the jerrycans, one for each of us, and closed it
again. Then, after briefing the general, we headed to our setting-off point. Yoffe
himself left to join Avraham Arnan and Meir Amit’s intelligence deputy,
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Ahraleh Yariv, in the command post for our mission, atop a hill on the Israeli
side of the northern border.
The sun set at around seven, but we waited for darkness. It was nearly eight
when we set out. Twenty minutes later, we crossed the border. I led the way,
with Motti Nagar, Moshiko, Kuti Sharabi and, finally, Avi Telem behind. We
carried the bugging equipment and our tools in our backpacks. Avi and I had a
pair of binoculars. Mine were bulkier, but offered a slightly better view in the
darkness. Each of us had an Uzi and a pair of grenades. All our planning had
been aimed at getting on to the Golan, installing the bug and getting out again. If
all went well, no one would even know we’d been there. But we had practiced
what to do if things went wrong. If challenged or ambushed by a Syrian patrol,
we would operate by old Company A rules. We would open fire.
The climb onto the plateau wasn’t too tough, not nearly as hard as our
sayeret training treks. When we reached the top, there was no obvious sign of
any Syrians. Still, we had to move slowly. Even with my binoculars, I could see
barely 30 yards into the moonless night, and I had to scan the route ahead, back
and forth, to make sure there were none of the fences or warning signs to keep
the Syrians’ own soldiers, or unsuspecting shepherds, from a minefield. Soon,
however, we found an obviously well-used footpath which I figured was very
likely to be safe.
When we had walked a few minutes, we found ourselves going through a
tangle of bushes and reeds, some of them up to two feet high, still dry and
crackly from the summer. Aside from the risk of tripping, I knew the noise we
were making might attract attention. I told the rest of the team to hang back 20
yards behind me. I moved forward to make sure the route was clear before
signaling them to follow. I had been slightly nervous on the climb up, not so
much because I expected trouble but because there was no way of knowing
what to expect. Much as I tried to put the concerns of the generals from my
mind, I also knew that this was no ordinary mission. But almost immediately,
the nerves had gone, and I was now focused only on getting us through the next
minute, the next 20 or 30 yards of the Golan.
But as soon as we’d made it across the plateau, we ran into trouble. We
needed to cross the Banias River. On our map, I’d picked out what looked to be
a shallow ford. But the water was much higher than we expected. After
spending 30 minutes scouting the bank for 150 yards in either direction, we
settled on what seemed to be the shallowest part. Yet we hadn’t anticipated the
need to cross a river in full flow. Worse, we’d never trained to do it. Not had we
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brought any special equipment. Unless we could figure out a way to cross – and
quickly – we would be putting the timetable for the whole operation at risk.
The only remotely useful tool I could find was two 25-foot lengths of
parachute wire. We spliced them together. I took the lead end and waded in. I
sunk up to above my chest, but managed to get across. With Avi Telem on the
other bank holding his end of the wire, the others used it to help them cross, so
they stayed a bit drier. They also kept the intercept equipment dry. Finally, Avi
followed. But both he and I were now soaking wet. We were also behind
schedule. We had covered less than half of the three-mile route to the telephone
pole. Even if we did manage to install the bugging device, the delay meant we
might be spotted on our way back to Israel. We were under strict orders to turn
back by 1:15 in the morning even if that meant not getting the intercept in place.
And it was already past midnight.
We began climbing into the heart of the Heights, planning to go around the
southern edge of the Syrian base at Banias. The vegetation was sparser but we
still ran the risk of making noise from the stones and larger shards of rock as we
weaved our way up. Within 10 minutes, I could see the vague outline of the
army camp: several large buildings for several hundred Syrian troops, ringed by
trenches with security outposts and a barbed-wire fence on the perimeter.
For a half-hour or so, we moved forward in a kind of rubber-band formation.
I would advance as quietly as I could, listen for signs of Syrian troops, scan the
area ahead with my binoculars and wave the others to follow. But as I prepared
to move forward again, I suddenly felt a tug on my shoulder. It was Moshiko,
and the very fact of his speaking was proof of his alarm. “Ehud,”we’ve got to
go faster,” he said. “We won’t get there in time.” I said I understood. But I told
him to wait for the others to catch up and stay behind with them as I scouted the
way ahead. Still, by the time the outer fence of the base came into view, the
others had picked up their pace. They were only 15 feet behind me.
It was then I heard the sound of movement. I motioned the others down. At
first, I thought it was a wild animal. But then I noticed, 20 feet in front of us and
a bit off to our right on a slight rise, a group of three Syrian soldiers. They were
lying on rocky scrubland 40 yards outside the fence. One was tossing and
turning. Another was snoring. I maneuvered my Uzi into firing position just in
case. We waited for a minute. Then two. But it seemed clear they really were
sleeping.
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Then, from directly behind me, came another sound: the hiss of Avi’s bulky
two-way radio. I was worried we’d end up waking the Syrians. But just as I was
figuring out how to make sure we got past them before that happened, Avi drew
up beside me.
“Ehud,” he whispered. “It’s 1:15. The command post ordered us to turn
back.”
“Turn off the radio,” I said, my hand on his elbow, reassuringly I hoped, as I
led him and the others back a full 100 feet from the Syrians. We took a wider
route around the camp. We moved much more quickly on the final mile to the
road that led toward Quneitra. We were now well clear of the camp, and I felt it
was unlikely we’d run into a patrol. I was also confident we’d have an easier
return trip. I knew what had held us up on the way in: finding a path on the
plateau clear of mines, figuring out how to cross the river, and the general
unfamiliarity of the terrain. None of those applied now. I felt we could get the
bugging job done and still be back before dawn. As we got nearer the road, Avi
asked me a couple of more times whether he should turn the radio back on.
“No,” I kept telling him. “It’s OK. I’ll tell you when.”
It was about two in the morning when we reached the road. We found a
telephone pole set back on the edge of a field. Moshiko hoisted himself onto
Kuti Sharabi’s shoulders, clambered up the pole and installed the bugging
device. The entire operation took him less than 10 minutes. We moved more
quickly on the way back. By around 3:30, we had crossed the river. “You can
turn on the radio now,” I told Avi, who was obviously relieved. He handed it to
me. Using our agreed code words, I reported our location, and added the phrase
for “mission accomplished.”
When we began our final descent, it was starting to get light. I assumed we
were near enough to the border to make it unlikely we’d be shot at. Still, there
was a danger we’d be spotted by a patrol, so I was relieved when we reached the
mound of boulders, more than ten feet high, that served as a tank barrier outside
Kibbutz Dan. When we stepped behind it, I saw that not only Avraham, but
Meir Amit as well, were waiting. The Head of Military Intelligence said
nothing. He didn’t have to. He just shook my hand, beaming. Avraham grabbed
each of us, one by one, in a bear hug.
Then, drawing me aside, Avraham said that I had only narrowly missed
landing in deep trouble. I assumed my transgression was shutting off the radio
and disobeying the order to return. That was just part of the problem, however.
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Despite General Yoffe’s angry protests in the command post, Avraham had told
him what he’d told me back at the base: that once an operation like this was
underway, only the commander on the spot could make life-or-death decisions.
I was “the ramatkal in the field.” But Yoffe had also discovered that his
jerrycans of gasoline were missing. He insisted that if and when I returned
safely from the Golan, I be handed over to the military police.
I don’t know what I would have told the general if he’d asked me directly
whether I broke into his jeep. But in the mix of celebration and relief that the
Syrian operation had succeeded, I got away with what amounted to a pleabargain.
I promised both Meir Amit and Avraham – at least one of whom
believed me – that it would not happen again.
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Chapter Five
Almost no one in Israel knew what we had done. But the next morning, a
package arrived at the Sayeret Matkal base from one of the few people who did.
We opened it in Avraham’s office. It was a nearly full carton of champagne:
real, French champagne, since it would be years before Israel’s embryonic wine
industry produced anything similar. Inside was a note from the chief of staff.
“For the success of the operation,” General Tzur had written. “Minus two
bottles… to teach Ehud Brog not to shut off his field radio.”
I assumed that his reprimand was tongue-in-cheek, for the same reason I’d
escaped being locked up on General Yoffe’s orders as a gasoline thief. Had we
been captured on the Golan, the very future of the sayeret as an operational
intelligence unit would have been put at risk. Tzur, and Ben-Gurion as well,
would have faced a reopening of all the old wounds from the Uri Ilan mission.
But not only had we managed to get in and out of Syria in one piece. We had
taken at least a first step toward erasing the blind spot in our intelligence
capabilities shown up so dramatically by Rotem. A few days later, I received a
letter from the chief of staff informing me that I was to receive my first tzalash,
or operational decoration, in recognition of “a mission which contributed to the
security of the state of Israel.”
My own feelings were more mixed. I was proud of what I, and my team, had
accomplished. On a personal level, too, I felt I’d reached an important landmark
on my unlikely journey from the winter morning when I’d arrived as physically
frail, awkward kibbutz teenager at APC boot camp in the Negev; through my
years of sayeret training under the strict, sometimes sardonic, but always
supportive gaze of Israel’s most storied commandos; to, now, having begun to
make a real contribution to Avraham’s vision of a new kind of Israeli military
unit. But while Avraham, General Tzur and our other military and intelligence
chiefs celebrated our mission, I felt not so much triumph as relief. I didn’t kid
myself: I knew that the operation could just as easily have gone wrong. In fact,
it very nearly did, through errors or omissions I had made. I made that point, in
general terms, when we joined Avraham and the rest of the sayeret in a formal
debriefing. But that very night, just as I had in the days before we set off, I
wrote down in detail some of the oversights I knew I’d have to correct if we
were to succeed in further missions.
Why hadn’t I chosen a route that took us further away from the Syrian base
at Banias? How had I let us arrive so unprepared, untrained and unequipped for
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crossing the swollen river? Why hadn’t I taken the time to check the current
several miles downriver inside Israel? And couldn’t we have moved more
quickly on the way in, even with the delay in crossing the river?
I was aware of, and grateful for, the confidence Avraham had shown in me.
He had taken a chance in choosing me to lead the sayeret’s first, critical
operation. He must surely have had doubts about whether I could handle the
task. Years later, I asked him about it. He told me that he’d been relying on
intuition. Yes, he realized I’d had no experience of a real cross-border mission.
But that was true of everyone else in the unit as well. He was convinced that the
tools needed for success were self-confidence, attention to detail and an ability to
think and act in response to what happened on the ground – all qualities which
he was confident that I possessed.
Now that we had provided Israel access to communications in the north of
the Golan, there was a demand for us to do the same in other parts of the
Heights. I was involved in nearly all of the missions we were asked to undertake
in the months that followed, either as commander of the main force or the
hillutz. I was also soon training a new team of recruits for future operations. But
perhaps the most important sign of Avraham’s confidence was to involve me in
early efforts to broaden Sayeret Matkal’s experience and reach beyond pure
intelligence missions – to create a true special forces unit that could fight as
well.
Early in 1963, we hosted a visit to the unit by Colonel Albert Merglen, a
veteran of France’s colonial wars in Indochina and Algeria, and commander of
the airborne commando force known as the 11 th Demi-brigade Parchutistes de
Choc. As the colonel looked on, I led a sayeret team on a live-fire raid in a
training area not far from Lod Airport. We attacked a position protected by
trenches and concrete barriers and stormed a two-story building. Eager to
impress Mergelen, Avraham even insisted on our wearing French-style berets in
place of helmets. I assume it was the attack more than the berets that did the
trick. But a couple of months later, Merglen proposed a series of exchanges. The
first would involve an officer from Sayeret Matkal officer spending eight weeks
on a counter-guerrilla commanders’ course in the parachutistes’ training
headquarters.
Avraham picked me to go. The French base was in a 17th-century fortress
near Mont Louis, in the Pyrenees along the Spanish border. I’d never been
outside Israel, at least legally. I had no passport. I didn’t own a suit or a tie. But
within days, I was kitted and fitted. I boarded an El Al flight to Paris and, on a
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storm-tossed Caravelle, flew to Perpignan in southeastern France. There were
eighteen “shock parachutists” on the course. I had just turned twenty-one. Not
only were most of them at least a decade older. They were the epitome of
toughness. The guy who taught us how to set booby-traps had parachuted
behind German lines in the Second World War. All of the men had fought in
Indochina and Algeria. One had operated behind Vietminh lines, surviving for a
year-and-a-half on nuts, berries, tree bark and snakes. With the benefit of my
sayeret training, I was at least their equal in fitness. I had also not spent years
consuming prodigious amounts of alcohol and smoking Gitanes. But I’d never
experienced anything nearly as demanding as some of the training we were put
through.
With backpacks crammed with Alpine military gear and lead weights as
well, we hiked on to the peaks overlooking the fortress. They were covered with
snow and ice from about 6,500 feet upward. We trudged for hours, shifting to
snowshoes with cleats for the ice. We were taught how to dig caves in the snow
and to use ice axes to keep from tumbling down the steeper inclines. We scaled
cliff faces, without safety cables or nets. Our training inside the fortress always
included a break for lunch. Since the parachutistes de choc were, after all,
French, it was a Paris-restaurant-standard meal with copious quantities of wine.
I didn’t drink at the time, but could hardly abstain altogether. The first exercise
after lunch was pistol marksmanship. The instructors kept well clear when it
was my turn.
Yet however impressed, even at times awestruck, I was by the toughness of
the French commandos, and the obvious closeness they had built during
combat, I began to sense a darker side in them as well. They didn’t talk much.
Even if they had, my few words of French would not have been much help in
deciphering what made them tick. But every few nights, I would accompany
them when they walked into the small village down the road for a movie, or a
few drinks, and the locals would literally cross the street to avoid us. Later, I
discovered that every one of my French comrades had been involved in the
OAS, the far-right anti-De Gaulle opposition in the French army in the late
1950s. In Algeria, they had mounted free-lance attacks on the insurgents, and on
civilians as well. Though Algeria had been granted independence the year
before, these men were unreconciled to it. In fact, a few months after my time in
Mont Louis, the Demi-brigade was dismantled, when several of its top officers
were found to be involved in an assassination plot against President De Gaulle.
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After my return in June 1963, Avraham asked me to share my experiences
with the other sayeret officers. I began with the positives. I singled out the sense
of self-confidence, allied with individual strength and teamwork, that the French
commandos had developed from exposure to almost incredible extremes of
danger. I believed that their success depended not on eliminating risk. We all
knew that was impossible. It was about professionalism developed over a period
of years by men who had served together in the toughest of circumstances. But I
also mentioned their darker side, which seemed to me a reminder of the danger
of the misapplication of the very qualities which made them a formidable
military force. “The ethos of a unit like theirs, and like ours, is essential to
making us strong,” I said. “But what I saw in France was an entire ecosystem
that these guys had created, extremely patriotic in their own minds, reinforced
by one another. But dangerous for society as a whole.”
* * *
It would be nearly a decade before Sayeret Matkal became not just a military
intelligence unit, but a fighting force, and I would turn out to have a central role
in making that happen. But there was an almost equally daunting challenge we
were called on to tackle first – a critical one, if Israel was going to be truly
prepared in the case of a further war. For while our bugging missions on the
Golan had reduced our vulnerability to a surprise attack in the north, the real
challenge of Rotem had yet to be addressed. It was Egypt – with its hundreds of
battle tanks, and hundreds of thousands of men under arms – that was by far our
most powerful Arab enemy. President Nasser wasted no opportunity to flaunt
his determination to fight, defeat and ultimately erase the state of Israel. But we
still had no reliable, real-time intelligence on his forces.
Fixing that, if such an operation was even possible, would make our bugging
operations on the Golan look like mere boy-scout missions. We could not
simply walk into Egypt with our backpacks, find a telephone pole on one of the
few roads crossing the vast expanse of desert, and attach a bugging device. The
idea was to tap into the main military communications cable in the Sinai. That
meant using a vastly more powerful, and far bulkier, intercept apparatus,
weighing more than half a ton. Even getting it into Egypt would be a problem.
We certainly couldn’t carry it our backpacks, or tow it across the sand. Even if
we figured a way to get it there, we would still have to dig up the Egyptian
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cable, install the machinery, cover our tracks and get back into Israel again
undetected. Even if we managed to avoid getting captured, without completely
camouflaging what we’d done, the Egyptians would discover what we had
done, almost certainly tipping off Syria as well to our bugging operations on the
Golan Heights.
The difficulties with a Sinai operation weren’t just theoretical. Almost a year
before leading the first mission on the Golan, I’d actually been involved in
preliminary planning, and fairly detailed training, for such a mission in the
Sinai. We’d ended up abandoning the idea as obviously unworkable.
But Meir Amit, not just our unit’s overall commander in the kirya but Chief
of Operations during Rotem, recognized that getting intelligence access to
Egypt was central to Israeli security. He was intent on reviving the plan to tap
into Nasser’s communications in the Sinai. So was Avraham Arnan. He enlisted
the backing of an old friend, Uri Yarom, who was now commander of the Israeli
Air Force and was eager to put our fleet of recently acquired Sikorsky S-58
helicopters to operational use. When Avraham called me in to tell me what he
had in mind, he began by saying it would be “by far the greatest challenge
we’ve contemplated” – typically disarming candor, but also a challenge which
I’m pretty sure he knew would only increase my determination to at least try.
The flight in would be difficult enough. Israel had never before tried such a
heliborne mission. But he told me that wasn’t my problem. “That will be Uri’s
job.” The really testing part would be to carry out an mission, at night, deep
inside Egypt, cover our tracks and get out again in one piece. “Still, I’m sure
that we can succeed,” he said. “And I want you and your team to do it.”
Even now, more than half-a-century later, some of the details of how we
planned to tap into the Egyptians’ communications remain classified. But once
I’d chosen my team of sayeret soldiers for the mission, we trained for nearly
nine months. We drafted in geologists to identify areas of the Negev similar to
the terrain we’d find in the Sinai. We developed a series of methods to prevent
Egyptian soldiers or scouts from discovering that we’d been there – assuming,
of course, we managed to get in, attach the intercept, and return safely. It was a
relentless process of trial… and error.
One of the many reasons we’d abandoned the plan a couple of years earlier
was that, in a nighttime exercise to see whether we could avoid detection by
Israel’s own crack desert scouts, we’d failed utterly. Now, after many weeks of
training in the Negev, we did, finally, succeed – in a test running for four
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straight nights which replicated, as nearly as we could, what we intended to do
across the border in the Sinai. It was as if we’d never been there at all.
Yet there were the errors, setbacks and frustrations as well. Many months
into our planning, we conducted a series of run-throughs in which we simulated
attaching the intercept to Israel’s telephone network in the south, not far from
the camp where I’d done my tironut. Though it all seemed to go as planned, the
next morning in rained heavily. Within hours, the phone company was getting
reports from all around southern Israel of phones malfunctioning. Even
allowing for the fact it rained less in the Sinai, we had to address the risk. I went
to see the people in Meir Amit’s technology unit, and they began developing a
waterproofing system for the equipment.
The main problem with the equipment, however, was its sheer weight. The
helicopter could get us, and it, into Egypt. But we couldn’t fly directly to the
cable site in the Sinai. We might just as well tell the Egyptians we were on our
way. At around 1,100 pounds, it was much too heavy for us to carry. And if we
were going to go ahead with the mission, time was running short. A date for the
operation had been set by the kirya: February 1964. I was not alone in believing
that, unless we cracked the problem of getting the equipment to the cable site,
the operation was impossible.
The solution came from a staff officer in military intelligence. Meir Amit
visited our base once a month to hear how the preparations were going. With the
date getting closer, he brought along his entire staff. When I raised my concern
about the weight problem, a colonel from his personnel section said: “Why not
build a lightweight rickshaw, small enough to get in the door of the helicopter,
but which can carry all or most of the equipment once you’re on the ground?”
Within days, they had a prototype, made of airline-standard tubing and designed
to be pulled by two men. We held an exercise in the Negev. But it was almost
impossible for two men to pull through the sand. It also left deep zig-zag
imprints in the sand, which would surely raise the suspicions of the Egyptians.
But prototype number-two was a four-wheel, chrome alloy cart. The
technology experts had made the axles telescopic, so the vehicle would get
through the door of the chopper but could be expanded to the width of an
Egyptian army Jeep. They had borrowed nose wheels from a training jet. To
complete their oeuvre, they glued on real tire tread from one of the Egyptian
Jeeps we had captured in the 1956 war.
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We were as ready as we were ever going to be. We got the final go-ahead
from in mid-February. Our backpacks were crammed full with the whole array
of equipment we’d designed, commandeered or purchased for the mission –
including a metal detector we got from a hobby shop in Pennsylvania. All the
cargo except our personal gear, our weapons and our communications
equipment was loaded onto the cart. A command post was set up in a few
wooden huts on Mount Keren in the Negev, complete with special antennas to
receive the intercept transmissions if we succeeded. Not since the first Golan
operation had the attention of the kirya been so keen, or the stakes so high. In
addition to Meir Amit, and of course Avraham, also flying down to Mount
Keren would be General Tzur’s successor as armed forces chief of staff – a
gruff Palmach veteran whom I’d met very briefly at the end of my officer’s
course but who I would come to know well, and work closely with, in the years
ahead: Yitzhak Rabin.
* * *
The helicopter lifted off at about six-thirty at night. Compared to special
operations nowadays, the mission still had a somewhat improvised feel about it.
Certainly, that was true of the equipment we were ferrying in, and the tools
we’d devised to make sure we could get it installed and working. But the men in
my team were soldiers I’d trained from the day they arrived in the sayeret.
Achihud Madar was unfailingly surefooted, whether finding his way alone at
night on unfamiliar ground or in a firefight inside a building. He also had
natural dexterity. He and another of the soldiers who was also gifted with his
hands, Nissim Jou’ari, would be performing the most technically delicate part of
the operation on the cable. The third member was Oded Rabinovitch. Tall, thin
and quiet, he was absolutely reliable in whatever part of an operation he was
given to execute. And as my deputy commander, I’d chosen a sayeret officer
named Kobi Meron, who’d been with me on a number of Golan missions. Over
six feet tall, he was probably the strongest man in the unit, quick-thinking and
utterly unflappable.
When we landed, we telescoped out the axles on the cart. The roar of the
departing chopper was replaced by silence. Under the soft light of hundreds of
stars, I led the way deeper into the desert. It took nearly an hour to reach the
road leading to the cable site. Though traffic was light, I posted Oded and
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Nissim as lookouts. Kobi and I began digging a trench. The top layer of sand
was easy to remove. But then, just a few inches down, our shovels struck
something hard. Maybe it was a sheet of rock. Maybe sand packed tight over the
millennia. But it resisted all our attempts to break through.
We had to find a way to get far enough beneath the surface to install the
equipment. I called back Oded and Nissim from lookout duty. All four of us
attacked the subsoil with every tool in our backpacks that could conceivably
help. It took nearly three hours in all. But we finally managed to carve out a
trench that seemed as if it might just do the job. It wasn’t as deep or as wide as
we’d planned. But we were approaching a point where we would have to give
up. We couldn’t risk any more time digging, and still leave time to attach the
intercept unit, cover our tracks and make the rendezvous with the helicopter to
take us back into Israel.
Achihud and Nissim cramped themselves into the hole and got to work, like
surgeons in an operating theater, silent except for the faint hum of the intercept
equipment. Within a little less than an hour, they’d finished the main part of the
work. During our training exercises, we’d factored in a fall-back plan, a way of
ensuring we got the unit installed but without additional equipment to extend its
battery life. Since we were still behind schedule, I was tempted to stop while we
were ahead. But having come this far, and knowing the potential risks of a
further mission to refresh the power unit and replace the batteries, I told them to
keep going, and also to take the extra few minutes needed to make sure the
equipment was functioning.
We had to be out of Egypt by first light, and we were now left with more
than an hour’s less time than we had reckoned on to make it back to the
rendezvous point. There was another problem, too, which I at first sensed more
than saw. A bank of fog was closing in. It had come in patches at first, but was
getting denser. We had the same radio we had taken on to the Golan. We’d
worked out codewords for each part of the operation but otherwise agreed to
break silence only if absolutely necessary. Now, I had no choice. If the fog
continued to thicken, it would block any chance of the helicopter getting in. I
radioed the command post and said as calmly as I could: “The milk is coming.”
It wasn’t elegant. But “milk” was our codeword for fog. The chopper would
now try to bring us out within 30 minutes.
Moving more quickly now that the cart was nearly empty, we made our way
eastward. As conditions worsened, I radioed again with a short series of
numbers: directions for a new pickup point. Even that seemed like it might not
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work. The fog now enveloped us completely. I brought the team to a stop. I
stayed with the cart while the other four outlined a landing area with kerosene
flares in the hope that the pilot would see us. It was another five minutes when
we heard the thump of chopper blades. Though we couldn’t see more than a few
feet, I suddenly saw the outline of the landing gear and then the underbelly. But
the helicopter did not seem in control. It was drifting towards where I was
standing with the cart. It was just seconds away from hitting me when its nose
wrenched upward. It landed with a judder a dozen yards away. Later, I learned
the navigator had realized the craft was drifting and, just before impact, shouted
a warning to the pilot.
We piled in, secured the cart and took off. Within a minute, the murky
blanket of fog was below us. As we swooped back into Israel, I could see the
first pink of sunrise. By the time we touched down at Tel Nof air force base,
southeast of Tel Aviv, the command post in the Negev was receiving the first
intercepts.
A few days later, one of the sayeret soldiers gave me a first-hand insight into
the mood in the command post in the final stages of the operation. Avsha
Horan’s role had been to act as security guard for the top brass in Mount Keren.
He occasionally took a peek inside. He described to me the atmosphere when I
radioed my “milk is coming” message: solemn faces, hushed conversations
between Avraham and Meir Amit. And off to the side, the recently elevated
chief-of-staff, Rabin, chain-smoking and biting his nails. Finally, the audible
sighs of relief when the pilot radioed in with his final message from the
chopper: “Out of the fog. Heading home.”
* * *
With the rest of the team, I was invited to see Yitzhak Rabin ten days later.
We were being given a further tzalash. This was the first time I’d met him since
leaving officers’ school two years earlier, when, with a few terse words, the
then-deputy chief of staff congratulated me and several other cadets who
graduated with top honors. I had felt a bit overwhelmed in his presence. Now, I
was struck by how shy he seemed. He greeted each of us with a tentative
handshake, and seemed uncomfortable in making eye contact. Yet once he
began asking me about the Sinai operation itself, it was as if he was
transformed. He was hungry for every detail, anxious to know the way we’d had
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to adapt on the ground. And obviously pleased that we’d found a way to make
the operation work.
The Sinai mission marked a transition not just for me, but for others in
Sayeret Matkal as well. Avraham Aranan finally left the unit he’d imagined,
created and built. He became the head of the technology unit in military
intelligence. His deputy, Dovik Tamari, succeeded him, serving the first in what
would become two-year stints for each of his successors as the sayeret’s
commander. I, too, was given a wider role. Though I was still just a young
lieutenant, and too junior for the job, Dovik made me his de facto deputy, with
responsibility for operational oversight of our missions. I returned to the Sinai a
year later, not in that capacity but because of my on-the-ground experience, to
accompany a sayeret team which installed an intercept on a second Egyptian
communications cable.
Though the tzalash was gratifying, what gave me more satisfaction, and
pride, was the importance of the Sinai operations themselves. I was confident
that if we did have to go to war again, the equipment we installed, along with
the bugs on the Golan, would give us an essential edge. But in truth, I didn’t
actually believe there would be another war. Sure, the threat was still there.
Egypt, in particular, still seemed determined to find a way to hobble, and if
possible eliminate, Israel. But especially since the 1956 war, the fedayeen
attacks, and cross-border skirmishes, had been subsiding. Not long after the
second Sinai intercept mission, I was chatting with other officers on the sayeret
base and remember turning to one of them and saying I was sure that by the
time I was married and had a teenage child, we’d be able to take a skiing
holiday in Lebanon. We didn’t have peace yet. That might take time. But I felt
that things were getting more normal.
I began thinking what that would mean not just for Sayeret Matkal or Israel,
but for my own future. By the autumn of 1964, I’d reached a decision: to end
my active service in the unit that had been central to my life since leaving the
kibbutz. Dovik did persuade me to delay, for nearly a year. But at the end of the
summer of 1965, I left Sayeret Matkal. In fact, I left the army altogether. I went
to study mathematics and physics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. I would
remain involved in the sayeret as a reservist. But I couldn’t see devoting my
adult life to military service in a country which, fortunately, seemed on a
trajectory toward peace. I had spent five years in an extraordinary unit. It had
been more fascinating and fulfilling than I could have dreamed of when I’d
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finished my tironut. Now I looked forward to pursuing a different path with
equal eagerness and energy.
There was also something else which colored my thinking. For the first time
in my life, I had fallen in love.
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Chapter Six
The French have an expression for love at first sight: coup de foudre. A
thunderbolt. That was how it felt when I’d set eyes on nineteen-year-old Nili
Sonkin in mid-February 1963.
It was my first visit to the kirya in Tel Aviv. I’d been told to report to the
administrative section, to register my formal change of status from a mere
draftee to a staff officer, something I’d managed to overlook amid the demands
of our first sayeret operations on the Golan. Since I didn’t know which office to
go to, I asked a girl sitting at a desk near the entrance. She looked up with a
wide smile. When she directed me to the second floor, it wasn’t just her voice
that struck me: multi-timbered, almost like a musical composition. It was her
eyes. Bright, radiant, green. Full of playful, unapologetic self-confidence.
In the weeks that followed, I invented a series of excuses to return to the
kirya. I introduced myself to her, with as much composure as I could muster,
and on each further visit chatted to her a bit more. I told her about growing up in
Mishmar Hasharon, about math and music, about Israel, and how, as a soldier in
the past few years, I’d walked almost every inch of the land – in short, about
everything except our still-secret sayeret and our nighttime forays across the
border. She, too, opened up about her home and her family and her friends.
Though there was another girl I’d been going out with – the younger sister of
my old kibbutz co-conspirator, Moshe – she was more a friend than a girlfriend.
I’d never before felt anything like the connection I sensed with Nili, nor
anything like the race in my heartbeat as I set out to see her.
I also found myself gripped by an unexpected, and unfamiliar, lack of selfassurance.
I was now 22, three years older than Nili. I had the inbred confidence
of a kibbutznik, the quiet sense of specialness which, at least for another decade
or so, would give the children of the kibbutzim a disproportionate place in
Israel’s government and army, media and the arts. The same confidence which
had convinced me as a raw recruit back in boot camp that I could lead a supply
convoy to the edge of the Sinai. Since then, I’d begun to make a mark in Sayeret
Matkal as well, leading its first clandestine operation and receiving a citation
from the chief-of-staff. Yet with Nili, I couldn’t help feeling unmoored, totally
out of my depth. She was part of a different Israel. She was a Tel Avivit, born
and raised in the largest and brashest city in our young state, a place which was
everything the kibbutz was not. She had graduated from Alliance, a high school
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in north Tel Aviv set up with French backing and an accent on French language
and culture. Unlike the girls on the kibbutz – proud of their plain, utilitarian
clothes and sensible shoes – she wore make-up and perfume and, when she was
out of uniform, bright print dresses. She never tried to make me feel out of place. Still,
it was sometimes hard not to wonder whether she saw me as a country bumpkin – a
nice, interesting, bright county bumpkin, perhaps, but still an interloper or a curiosity in
her world.
It wasn’t until April, the day before I was due to leave for the French commando
fortress in Mont Louis, that I plucked up the courage to ask her out. I needn’t have
worried. She smiled. In fact, she proposed that since I was about to leave the country,
she should be the one doing the asking. She invited me to dinner that evening at
the apartment she shared with her parents and younger sister, about a half-mile
from the kirya, a few blocks back from the Mediterranean. Dinner was less
awkward than I feared, but I still felt nervous, until the dishes were cleared and
Nili and I went out to chat on the apartment balcony and, just before I left, to
share a first kiss.
We wrote each other almost every day while I was away in France. Once I
got back, we met whenever I wasn’t preparing for a sayeret operation. This was
the first girl I’d known whom I could talk to, and listen to, on almost any
subject with a feeling that it was natural and somehow meant to be. But in the
second half of 1963, I was working almost non-stop on preparing for a sayeret
operation. I still saw Nili when I could, sometimes at her apartment, but also
occasionally going out to a movie, a meal or a concert in Tel Aviv. Yet what I
most wanted was an acknowledgment that we were not just dating: a
commitment that we intended the relationship to last. I didn’t say this to Nili.
Years later, she would say this was down to pride. In fact, I was afraid she
would say no. And in the periods when we were apart, I couldn’t help asking
myself why she hadn’t raised the question of a deeper commitment.
Even more frustrating, by the time I entered Hebrew University in
September 1965, our relationship was again being conducted by mail. After her
military service, she took a two-year posting at our embassy in Paris. I could
understand the attraction, not just because of her taste for all things French. She
was working with the Mossad to help Moroccan Jews skirt an official
emigration ban and get to Israel. Still, it meant that charting our future together,
if we had one, was going to have to wait.
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* * *
The intellectual experience at university everything I hoped. The challenge
was finding a way to juggle my studies with my military reserve duty. In other
units, most reservists could schedule their one month per year when classes
weren’t in session. To be of use to Sayeret Matkal, I’d have to report when I
was most needed, and four weeks was unlikely to be enough. Near the end of
my first term, from late 1965 into the new year, I was called to participate in our
latest mission into the Sinai. The next winter, and through early 1967, I was
called up for another mission and was away for nearly two months.
That operation was prompted by the fact the Egyptians had begun laying a
new communications cable, parallel to the one where we’d put our intercepts.
With the diggers getting closer to where I’d led the first Sinai mission, the
kirya was worried that they might unearth the apparatus we’d installed. In
theory, at least, we’d planned for that. The bugging unit which we buried
included a booby-trap explosive device. Still, nearly four years on, we couldn’t
be absolutely sure it would work. So the decision was taken to send the sayeret
back on a further night crossing into the Sinai, defuse the explosives, and bring
the whole thing back to Israel. Since I was the one who’d installed it, I was
given the job of removing it.
The officer in overall command of the mission was Nechemia Cohen. He
was a good friend, and one of the finest officers in the unit. Before I left for
university, I’d mentored him so that he could take over my role as the effective
number-two officer in the sayeret, in charge of all our core operational
activities. He, too, was now about to leave, though not to for university. He was
becoming deputy commander of a paratroop company, under another former
Sayeret Matkal, named Yechiel Amsalem.
I was meant to defuse the booby-trap remotely: with a 12-foot-long metal
tool designed by the technology unit. I was fairly confident I’d manage. But
when Chief-of-Staff Rabin heard about the operation, he summoned me, along
with Eliezer Gonn, the scientist working with us on the plan to defuse the
booby-trap. Rabin was with a half-dozen other officers when we arrived. Gonn
had brought along a mock-up of the explosive device, which he proceeded to
place on Rabin’s office table. But as I took out the extension tool and started to
explain how I was going to defuse the device, Rabin turned to Gonn and asked:
“Could it blow up spontaneously?”
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“Yes, it could,” he said.
“What?” Rabin barked.
Gonn replied matter-of-factly: “It is a physical device. It obeys the laws of
physics. When, for instance, there’s a thunderstorm in Turkey, a flash of
lightning could discharge at precisely the frequency needed, or one of its lower
harmonies, with enough energy to activate the fuse in the detonator.”
I was far junior to everyone else in the room. But as a physics student, I was
probably the only one who could fully follow the argument he was making.
Looking at Rabin’s expression, it was clear that he was about to cancel the
operation on the spot. “Excuse me, sir,” I said. “Could I ask Doctor Gonn
another question?”
I pointed at an unopened bottle of orange soda on Rabin’s desk. “Tell me,” I
asked the physicist, “is it possible that the fluid in that bottle is spontaneously
leaking through the glass even as I’m speaking?”
“Sure,” Gonn said. “It might take years before even a fraction of a centimeter
of the soda goes missing. But glass is like a ‘frozen’ liquid, and liquid water, or
the molecules, are seeping into, and through, the more viscous ‘liquid’ of the
glass. It’s just physics.”
Rabin looked at me, then at Gonn. But he had clearly got the message. “The
operation is confirmed,” he said, in the deep, gravelly voice I would become
much more familiar with in the years ahead. “Good luck.”
The device didn’t explode, but I couldn’t defuse it either. I did manage to get
the remote metal tool locked on the bolt on the booby trap. But it wouldn’t
budge – even when I waved back Nechamia and the others and took out an
ordinary wrench. Though this was the first of my sayeret missions that ended in
failure, that wasn’t what worried me as we boarded our helicopter back into
Israel a couple of hours before dawn. It was the real possibility that the
Egyptians would inadvertently discover that we’d been intercepting their
communications. Dovik Tamari, as sayeret commander, was especially upset.
This was one of the last operations during his period in command of the unit. He
was about to hand over to a veteran paratroop officer, Uzi Yairi.
Yet our aborted Sinai mission turned out not to matter. What saved our
eavesdropping network was the very thing which I was confident would not
happen when I left for university: another Arab-Israeli war.
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* * *
Tension began building in the north in the spring of 1967, initially set off by
Syrian efforts to divert water from the upper reaches of the Jordan River, an
important water source for Israel was well. In a series of exchanges, Syrian
troops on the Golan fired on Israeli tractors in the demilitarized zone below, and
began shelling our argicultural settlements in the Galilee, while we responded
with tank fire and then air power, scrambling our jets and shooting down six
Syrian MiG-21s.
The first indication that we might be headed toward war came as I returned
to university for the spring term, and trouble began brewing in the south. Ben-
Gurion had by now retired as prime minister. His successor was the undeniably
thoughtful, if far less charismatic, Levi Eshkol. During Israel’s Independence
Day parade on May 15, he received word that Egypt had moved thousands of
troops into the Sinai, nearer to the border with Israel. Then, with the Soviets
warned Nasser of what they said were Israeli plans for a preemptive strike
against Syria, he went further expelling the United Nations force put in place
after the 1956 war. On May 23, he closed the Straits of Tiran, Israel’s trading
gateway to the Red Sea and the source of virtually all our oil imports.
I was told to report to Sayeret Matkal the following day, as part of the first
group of reservists called up. When I reached the base, Uzi Yairi, who was now
in charge of the unit, organized us into four teams. He put me in command of
one of them. We were told to prepare ourselves to helicopter into the Sinai,
attack a series of Egyptian air bases and put the runways out of commission. My
team’s target was the base at Gebel Libni, not far from where I’d placed, and
recently failed to defuse, our first intelligence intercept.
With each passing day, war looked more likely, and there was no confidence
we would win without a costly struggle. In 1948, Arab attacks had killed about
170 people in Tel Aviv. Now, word got out that a park in the center of the city
had been set aside to allow for the burial of as many as 5,000. With Israel’s
military commanders pressing Eshkol to take the initiative and launch a
preemptive strike, he delivered a radio address at the end of May, intended to
reassure the country the situation was under control. But due to last-minute,
handwritten changes to his typescript, he faltered while reading it. He sounded
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anything but under control. Within days, he bowed to political pressure and
brought back Moshe Dayan, now a member of the Knesset, as Defense Minister.
I still vividly remember a visitor to the sayeret the day after Eshkol’s
address. Colonel Eli Zeira was head of the “collection department” of the
intelligence corps, the rough equivalent of America’s National Security Agency.
Formally, Sayeret Matkal was part of his department. He called together all the
officers. He said that there had so far been three periods in the Zionist project.
The first was from the early settlements in Palestine at the end of the 19th
century until the establishment of Israel in 1948. The second, from 1948 until
the 1956 War. The third from 1956 until now. Then he said: “There will soon be
a war. Three Arab countries will take part. Within a week, we will defeat all of
them. And a new chapter in the history of Zionism will begin.”
The Six-Day War began on June 5, 1967. As Eli Zeira so confidently
predicted, not just Egypt and Syria, but Jordan, too, joined forces against us.
And it was indeed all over within a week. The final outcome – Israel’s victory –
was sealed by noon on the first day, with wave after wave of pre-emptive
bombing sorties destroying the entire air force of all three Arab countries. But
the fighting which followed was brutal in places: especially around Jerusalem,
but also in the south at the outset of the war, and later on the Golan Heights.
The first effect back in Israel of our air force attacks was to make our sayeret
helicopter missions into the Sinai suddenly superfluous. In fact, it left the entire
unit at loose ends – especially veterans or reservists like me who had been part
of our nearly decade-long development into Israel’s sole, dedicated cross-border
infiltration force. At this point, we were still just an intelligence unit, not an
elite commando force like Britain’s SAS, Avraham Aranan’s ultimate vision for
the sayeret. The aim of our bugging missions into Syria and Egypt was not to
fight. It was to get in and get out, unseen and undetected. But we were not only
equipped to fight if necessary. From the unit’s earliest days under the sway of
Meir Har-Zion, Kapusta and Gibli and Errol and the other grizzled vets from
Unit 101 and Company A, we had been steeped in the spirit of commandos. Our
training was the most rigorous in the Israeli armed forces, involving not just a
punishing endurance régime but learning to assemble and disassemble, fire and
detonate, everything from handguns to machine guns, makeshift explosives to
grenades and landmines.
The frustration we felt on the first morning of the war was not because we
were itching to fight, for the hell of it. One hallmark of the sayeret’s ethos,
especially once the unit did start to evolve into a full-fledged commando unit,
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was always the principle of targeted force, the idea that we would take out
targets, or defeat enemies, out of military necessity. But even on the first day of
the war, it was clear that it would be by far the most consequential conflict in
our country’s history. There was no mission for Sayeret Matkal, nor, it seemed,
any prospect of our playing any significant part.
The fact that my own role was slightly less peripheral was due to Avraham
Arnan. He phoned me almost as soon as we’d got news of the Israeli air victory,
and told me he had been told to take a few men from the sayeret across the
southern border. Our assignment was to complete our failed attempt to defuse
the booby-trap on the intercept in the Sinai. I quickly drafted in two others from
the unit. One was Danny Michaelson, a friend from Hebrew University, where
we had been lab partners. The other was Rafi Friedman, our paramedic, who
had been with me on several of our missions on the Golan.
Avraham arrived at the base around noon. I got a Jeep and we set off. We
crossed into Egypt around four o’clock in the afternoon and headed for the field
headquarters of Israel Tal. Known as Talik, he was the commander of Israel’s
armored corps, and Avraham knew him well. His wartime division consisted of
the country’s premier tank unit, the Seventh Armored Brigade, and a reserve
brigade. We accompanied them the next day to an abandoned Egyptian camp
not far from El Arish, in the northern Sinai. At least, we’d assumed it was
abandoned. As Talik and Avraham were talking in his command post, we heard a
sudden burst of gunfire, which seemed to come from just a few dozen yards
outside. As everyone inside the command post looked around, Avraham turned
to me and said: “Ehud, don’t you think we ought to deal with it?” Then, to
Talik: “Make sure none of your guys shoots him.”
I got Danny and Rafi. We made our way toward an underground bunker,
which seemed the most likely source of the gunfire. Hugging the wall as I led
the way down a series of concrete steps, I clicked off the safety on my Uzi just
in case. But with the main Egyptian forces in obvious retreat, I figured that
whoever was doing the shooting would have to be shellshocked, or insanely
brave, to put up a fight. There were eight men crouched inside, soldiers and
several staff officers cradling Kalashnikovs, and an Egyptian army general. In
what was obviously at least serviceable Arabic, I told them all to raise their
hands. I made a brief attempt to interrogate the general, but quickly reached the
limits of my linguistic proficiency. So we marched them away and handed them
over to Talik’s intelligence officers.
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This interlude instantly conferred on us the desert equivalent of street cred.
The next morning, Talik agreed we could accompany the Seventh Brigade as it
moved deeper into the Sinai, and peel off when we got closer to Gebel Libni to
complete our “sayeret mission.” Given the early course of the fighting, and our
forces’ rapid advances in the Sinai, I couldn’t help wondering whether there
was any real need to defuse, much less remove, the bugging machinery. But the
very fact that the kirya, in the early hours of the war, had still wanted us to try
was a reflection of the deep sense of apprehension in Israel in the weeks before
the war. Even now, it appeared, there was a concern that the Egyptians might
reclaim the parts of the Sinai which we had captured.
When the armored column got close to Gebel Libni, I pulled our Jeep aside
and headed for the stretch of communications cable where we’d planted the
intercept. For several hours, I tried to accomplish in broad daylight what I’d
failed to do in the desert darkness four months earlier. But it was no use. I
finally told Avraham we’d be better off just blowing it up. I attached an
explosive charge and set a two-minute delay. We watched from a couple of
hundred yards away as the whole assembly disintegrated. Then we rejoined the
Seventh Brigade.
Before sunset on the third day of the war, we reached the Egyptian air base
at Bir Gafgafa in the heart of the Sinai. Even had the war ended then, we would
have been in control of a large chunk of the desert buffer zone which Ben-
Gurion had hoped to retain after the 1956 war. But now, more quickly than even
the most optimistic planners in the kirya could have anticipated, Talik was
poised to move on – toward the Suez Canal, and the main towns and cities of
Egypt. As the Seventh Brigade billeted down in Bir Gafgafa, Talik sent his
reserve brigade westward, in the direction of the canal.
We went with them. The battalion was more mobile than a pure tank force,
but also more vulnerable: lightly armored French AMX-13s and a collection of
the halftracks which I dimly, unfondly, remembered from my tironut. A few of
the AMXs led the way, then a line of halftracks, and more tanks at the rear. I
nosed our Jeep into the middle, behind the battalion commander, a lieutenantcolonel
named Ze’ev Eitan. There were scattered groups of Egyptian soldiers on
either side of us, and they aimed an occasional burst of fire in our direction. But
there seemed little point in shooting back. We didn’t need to fight, and it was
clear that the Egyptians didn’t really want to.
Shortly before dark, Lieutenant-Colonel Eitan brought our column to halt.
The road we were on cut through tall sandunes on either side. We knew there
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were still Egyptian soldiers around us, though I doubt any of us expected
trouble. Still, there were well-established rules for setting up a defensible
position when an armored force halts for the night. As Eitan briefed his officers,
I stood a few feet off to the side and listened. Suddenly, the commander of his
AMX company interrupted. “Sir,” he said, “why are we staying here – right on
the main road? There are Egyptians still out there. Behind us, for sure. And any
force ahead of us will run straight into us. Why not a few hundred yards off to
the side, in a place that gives us a view of any enemy movement, or allows us to
ambush an approaching force?” I could see that he was right. I expected Eitan to
agree and alter the arrangements. But he didn’t. I think that, having ordered his
men to encamp on the road 20 minutes earlier, he was reluctant to get his tanks
and halftracks moving again. No doubt, some of the exhausted crews were
already asleep.
I parked our Jeep a few yards off the road. We organized a series of watches:
Avraham, then Rafi and Danny, with me taking the pre-dawn stretch. A few
hours later, Rafi nudged me awake. “I heard something,” he said, pointing west
toward the Suez Canal. “It was faint. But I think so.” I told him to keep
listening. For a while, everything seemed fine. Then, Danny woke me up. He
said he was sure he heard a faint tremor, as if from tanks or APCs. I put my ear
to the ground. I heard it too. I told him to go to Eitan’s command halftrack,
insist he be woken up, and tell him. When he got back, Danny said: “I told
him.”
“And?”
“Don’t know,” he replied. “He said I could go.” I tried to grab a bit more
sleep before my watch. But barely 15 minutes later, Danny jostled me awake
again. “I’m sure now,” he said. “Whatever it is, it’s closer.” I went off to find
Eitan. But before I got there, a column of Egyptian T-55 tanks suddenly
appeared on the road, 50 yards from the front of our column. I’m sure they were
every bit as surprised as we were to be face-to-face with enemy armor. But they
knew what to do. They opened fire.
Had we been deployed a few hundred yards off the road, we’d have seen
them coming. If the battalion commander had acted on Danny’s warning, we’d
have had an extra 20 minutes to prepare. But the shells jolted our crews awake.
Within 30 seconds, they were returning fire. But our tanks barely dented the
heavily armored T- 55s. Nearly every one of theirs seemed to score a direct hit.
Within minutes, a number of our halftracks, and one of our tanks, were in
flames.
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Now that we were in a fight –the single fiercest battle in Israel’s advance
across the Sinai – Lieutenant-Colonel Eitan reacted swiftly. Standing tall amid the
shellfire and the flames, he radioed for supporting fire, only to be told that none of
our artillery batteries was within range. Realizing we couldn’t penetrate the
front armor of the Egyptian tanks, he ordered a platoon from the rear to leave
the road and fire on the Egyptians’ from their flank. When one T-55 was hit and
started to burn, he ordered the rest of us to collect the dead and wounded and
retreat toward Bir Gafgafa.
As we pulled back, we encountered a company of Centurion tanks from the
Seventh Brigade, sent in to relieve us. We pulled off the road to let them pass.
The battle ended up raging for another hour. By the time it was over, the
Egyptian tank unit was nearly destroyed. But almost two dozen of Eitan’s
reservists had been killed. A few days later, I learned that the commander of the
Centurions had also been killed. His name was Shamai Kaplan. Though I didn’t
know him personally, he was married to one of my kibbutz “sisters” from
Mishmar Hasharon.
* * *
The pace of the war, its intensity, and the transformative capture of territory
across our 1948 borders had accelerated dramatically since we’d joined the
reserve battalion’s ill-fated advance toward the canal. Back at Bir Gafgafa, we
learned that Israeli troops had broken through in fierce fighting with the
Jordanians and taken the whole of east Jerusalem, including the Old City and
the site of the remains of the ancient temple. The news sent a shiver down my
spine. I was still only 25, a kibbutznik raised on the assertively secular creed of
Gordinian Zionism. But I was old enough to remember the war of 1948, the
bitter struggle for the ancient city in which Judaism had been born, the packages
of food we had sent to try to help break the siege there, and the division of
Jerusalem at the end of the war, leaving us with only its newer, western half.
And while I may not have read the Torah in the same way as a religiously
observant Jew, the meaning of Jerusalem was no less powerful for me. It was
part of our people’s history, of who we were, where we’d come from and how
we had ended up in the place where I’d been born, where I’d grown up, and
which I’d spent the early part of my adult life defending. This was no less true
of the biblical sites of Judaea and Samaria – the West Bank of the Jordan river.
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Places like Bet El, Shiloh, or Hebron. They represented the historic wellspring
not just of the state we’d created, but of Jewish civilization, our heritage, our
moral and ethical foundation. As I drove back to Tel Aviv with Avraham and
the others on the morning of fourth day of the war, we heard Israeli ground
forces were consolidating their hold there as well.
After dropping Avraham at the kirya, we drove back to the sayeret base, but
it was nearly empty. The main fighting was now with Syrian armored units on
the Golan Heights, and most of the men in the unit had gone north in the hope
of joining what seemed likely to be the final stage of the war. Although the
precise outcome was not yet clear, there was a dawning certainty, almost
surreal, that
Israel was gaining control of all the areas across our 1948 borders from
which the Arab states around us had shelled Israeli farming settlements, or
facilitated fedayeen attacks and ambushes against our citizens – the very border
areas where I’d led intelligence operations in Sayeret Matkal.
I, too, drove north. Not far from Kibbutz Dan, the staging point for our first
Golan operation, I linked up with a group of other sayeret reservists. Israeli
tanks had already broken the main resistance of the Syrians, but fighting was
continuing in a few parts of the Golan. In the western corner of the Heights
which bordered Lebanon, several villages still lay beyond the Israeli advance.
We got an order to see if we could take them. It took barely an hour, against no
more resistance than I’d met in “capturing” the Egyptians in the Sinai bunker.
By the time we had made our way back across the Golan to the now-abandoned
Syrian headquarters in Quneitra, it was sunset. The war was drawing to a close.
I gave my Jeep to a couple of paratroopers and hot-wired a more comfortable
mode of transport back home: a big, black Mercedes which had obviously
belonged to a senior Syrian officer. If only because of the license plates, I
avoided the main road back into Israel. I found a dirt track running between
Syrian positions on the southern edge of the Golan and descended toward the
fruit groves of Kibbutz Ha’on, near the Sea of Galilee. I then headed for
Givataim in north Tel Aviv, to a place I knew well. It was the home of
Menachem Digli. He had been Avraham Arnan’s deputy in the sayeret when I
left for my stint in officers’ school. Before I returned to the unit, he had a
motorcycle accident, badly damaging his leg. He’d been temporarily reassigned
to a post in intelligence. I figured a Syrian Mercedes would make a nice gift.
Not wanting to wake him, I left it in front of his house. Sadly, he never got to
use it. The next day a couple of military policemen knocked on his door and
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asked what he knew about the car outside. “Nothing,” he said. “It’s not mine.”
They took it away.
As insistently as I, and others in Sayeret Matkal, had wanted to play our part
on the battlefields of the Six-Day War – in the Sinai, on the Golan, in the bitter
battle to capture Jerusalem, or amid the olive-green hills and valleys of the West
Bank – we had to accept that, at most, we’d been freelance support troops. Or
mere spectators. But while it would be many years before this was openly
acknowedlged, we did play an important part in the outcome. Because Dayan
had been called back as Defense Minister only days before the war, he had
wisely decided not to alter the plan for the preemptive air strikes. But he did
adjust our ground advance. Just as with Eshkol’s knowledge of the initial
Egyptian advance in the Sinai before the war, Dayan’s judgements were
informed by detailed, real-time intelligence on where enemy tanks and troops
were located, what they were doing, and what how and when they were
planning to advance.
As speculation mounted after the war about how Israel seemed to know so
much the Arab forces, Meir Amit’s successor as Head of Military Intelligence,
Ahrahle Yariv, even engaged in some misdirection. He was anxious to avoid
jeopardizing future sayeret bugging operations. In a speech on how the war had
been won, he included a reference to a “high-ranking spy” in the Egyptian army
who, he implied, had leaked critical information. The “spy” was the series of
intercepts we’d attached to the Egyptians’ main military communications
network in the Sinai, and to the telephone poles on the Golan Heights.
On a deeply personal level, too, the war left its mark on Sayeret Matkal.
Though the fighting had been brief, people did die. Thousands of Egyptians,
Syrians and Jordanians. And about 650 Israelis. Some of were not just people
we knew. They included close friends. Nechemia Cohen, the officer I’d joined in
our failed attempt to defuse the booby-trap in the Sinai before the war, entered
Gaza on the first day in his new role as deputy commander of Amsalem’s
paratroop unit. Amsalem was killed early on, so Nechemia took command. He
was shot and killed fifteen minutes later. To this day, he and I share the
distinction of being the most decorated soldiers in Israel’s history. Had he lived,
I have no doubt that it is an honor he would have held alone.
This was the first close friend from the unit we’d lost. We did not mourn him
openly. For young soldiers of my generation, especially but not only those raised
with the additional kibbutz ethos of stolid self-control, there was an embedded
sense that such individual displays of emotion were an indulgence, and luxury
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even, which the country we were building could not afford. In the early years of
the state, the model Israel mother or father were those who stood silent and strong
as a soldier’s coffin was lowered into the ground.
Nechemia’s death hurt, of course. I was friends not just with him, but his older
brother, Eliezer. Known by his army nickname, Cheetah, he was in charge of the
air force’s main helicopter squadron. He had flown both me and Nechemia on
sayeret missions into the Sinai. Several days after the war was over, before
returning to university, I drove up to Jerusalem to see his family. Cheetah was at
the door when I arrived. Neither of us spoke. But as we embraced, I could feel
my eyes dampen, and there were tears in his eyes as well.
“Our squadron was the one that got the call to bring out the casualties,” he
said. “They ordered the pilot who brought out Nechemia not to tell me he was
dead… until the war was over.”
“He was a wonderful man,” I said. “There was no one better.”
* * *
When I returned to Hebrew University, the country felt completely different.
It was not just the sudden realization that, in military terms, Israel had
eliminated any realistic threat to its existence, important though that was. The
more profound change was physical. The country in which I’d grown up was a
place which felt not just small, but pinched, especially in its “narrow waist” near
Mishmar Hasharon. Pre-1967 Israel was about three-quarters the size of the
state of New Hampshire. Now, within the space of less than a week, the
territory Israel controlled had more than tripled. It included the whole Sinai
Desert, up to the edge of the Suez Canal. The entire Golan. The ancient lands of
Judaea and Samaria: the West Bank. And the reunited capital city of Jerusalem.
Suddenly, we had a sense that we could breathe. Wander, explore. Few of
my classmates were religiously observant. But none of us could help feel the
sense of connection as we walked through the Old City of Jerusalem, or parts of
the West Bank whose place-names resonated from the Bible. I felt especially
moved when I first visited the Old City with my friends, stopping and chatting
and buying things at the colorful market stalls. And, religious or not, when I
stood in front of the surviving Western Wall of the ancient Jewish temple.
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The personal interactions we had with Palestinians in the weeks after the war
were without obvious tension, much less hostility. They were often friendly.
Looking back, I’m sure that was one reason – along with simple human nature,
a desire to enjoy Israel’s new sense of both security and size – that none of us
was inclined to look too deeply, or too far ahead, and contemplate the
implications for our country’s future. I was aware, of course, that the politeness
we exchanged with the Palestinians of Jerusalem or the West Bank were
superficial: a few words across a market stall or a restaurant counter. I did not
pretend to myself that our Arab neighbors were now suddenly inclined to be our
friends.
But I did feel that, having come face-to-face with our overwhelming military
supremacy, the Arab states would, over time, grant Israel simple acceptance.
From there, I believed that we could begin the process of building genuine,
lasting, human relationships and, eventually, peace.
There was a brief period after the war when Eshkol cautioned his ministers
about the implications of holding on to the vast new area we had conquered.
The government formally agreed to treat most of it, with the exception of
Jerusalem, as a “deposit” to be traded for the opening of peace talks. Yet within
weeks, the emphasis in the Israeli political debate shifted to which parts we
would keep: the Sinai and the Golan almost certainly, as well as the Jordan
Valley and a number of areas of past Jewish settlement on the West Bank. The
drift away from any serious talk of trading land for peace was accelerated by the
Arab states’ response to the war. Perhaps that, too, was simply a matter of
human nature, a reluctance on their part to accept defeat. But they appeared no
more ready than before to contemplate peace. Throughout the summer, there
were clashes along our new “border” with Egypt: the Suez Canal. In September,
all the Arab states adopted a platform which became known as the “three no’s”.
They rejected not just the idea of peace, but peace talks, or recognition of the
State of Israel. And in October, Egyptian missile boats attacked and sunk Israel’s
largest warship, the destroyer Eilat, killing nearly 50 people on board.
Without this renewed violence, perhaps, we in Israel might have been able to
consider more deeply the future implications of our victory in the Six-Day War.
The gains on the battlefield, of course, were clear to everyone. We were no
longer a small, constricted country beset by a sense of vulnerability. We were
not only much bigger, but also stronger than the combined armies of the Arab
states. Still, very few people asked themselves at the time what kind of Israel
this implied. We failed to grasp the potential complications in holding on to all
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the land, and of controlling the daily lives, however benignly, of the hundreds of
thousands of Arabs who lived there. Nor, crucially, did we ponder the
limitations of military strength, alone, in addressing these questions. We – and I,
too, at the time – were too caught up in a sense of post-war relief, celebration
and, as the months of ostensible normalcy in this new Israel, complacency as
well.
But within only a few years, we would face a dramatically different series of
challenges. First, a campaign of Palestinian terror. Then, another full-scale war,
which began with a surprise attack by Arab armies which we had assumed
would not dare to fight us again.
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Chapter Seven
If you’d visited Tel Aviv in July 1967, you would have sensed a new spirit
of confidence, not cockiness exactly, but a sort of spring in the collective step.
This was not just due to the Six-Day War. It was because the city, if not yet the
rest of the country, had shed the economic austerity of Israel’s first two decades
and was beginning to experience at least some of the consumer comforts which
Western Europe, or America, took for granted. But we were still a decade away
from the first shopping malls, or the upscale cafés and restaurants which
nowadays give places like Dizengoff Street, a few blocks back from the
seafront, the feel of London or Paris on a summer’s day. Television had been
introduced only a year before the war. Color TV was still nearly a decade away.
I can’t say I was surprised to learn, when the archives were opened a few years
ago, that a committee of moral arbiters in our Ministry of Education vetoed
plans for the Beatles to perform in the city. “No intrinsic artistic value,” they
pronounced. “And their concerts provoke mass hysteria.”
Even in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rest of Israel, a kind of cultural austerity
still prevailed, an emphasis on modesty and self-restraint. It was a legacy of
1948, a reflection of the years of shared sacrifice, physical labor, and the lifeand-death
struggles which I, like most Israelis at the time, had experienced
within our own lifetimes. That may help explain why I can remember no one
remarking on an aspect of my character which, once I rose to public
prominence, would attract attention, frequent comment, and sometimes
criticism as well: the fact that I seemed so self-contained, reluctant to engage
emotionally with people beyond a circle of close friends or confidants. My lack
of smalltalk, and the kind of gladhanding and schmoozing that are the currency
of political life. At the time of the 1967 war, I was not yet a public figure. Yet to
the extent those around me would have taken note – family, university
classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the kirya – my slight emotional
aloofness, my focus on simply getting things done, and the way I internalized
setbacks, even tragedies like the death of Nechemia Cohen, was not exceptional.
It was, in many ways, simply Israeli.
Yet as Israel, Israeli society and my place in them changed, it would be
suggested to me more than once – not always kindly, when it was from critics or
rivals – that I had a “touch of Aspbergers” in me, a reference to those on the
more benign reaches of the autism spectrum with a special facility for math,
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abstract ideas, the theoretical sciences and, often, music as well. I would always
smile in response, suggesting that such diagnoses were probably best left to the
professionals. I couldn’t pretend, however, that emotional engagement with new
acquaintances, even with people I knew and liked but were not close friends,
was something that came naturally. And it is also true that from my first
experience of the world of numbers as a child on the kibbutz, and as I tackled
ever more elaborate pieces on the piano, I did become aware of what might be
called the upside of “a touch of Aspergers” – if that, indeed, is what it is. I was
conscious of the ease with which my brain translated the complexities into
pictures in my mind. And the joy, at times, with which it allowed me to play
around with, and develop, what I saw.
By the summer of 1967, I had experienced that feeling again, in my first real
encounter with theoretical physics at Hebrew University. After the Six-Day
War, I began seriously contemplating a future as a research scientist, or perhaps
eventually a professor of physics. Two months after the war, I enrolled in a
summer program at the Weizmann Institute, Israel’s preeminent postgraduate
research facility. Surrounded by some of the country’s, even the world’s,
leading scientists, and by post-doctoral students determined to follow in their
footsteps, was intellectually enthralling. But it turned out to have another effect
on me as well. As I thought more and more about the prospect of joining their
fraternity once I’d completed my undergraduate degree, I also heard them
describe the way in which pure science sometimes got submerged in simple
routine, or, more discouragingly, in the politics and positioning and backbiting
of the academic world.
I think what finally changed my mind, however, was a feeling, nurtured on
the kibbutz but solidified by that many nights I’d spent leading sayeret
operations across our borders, that I would find my true purpose in life trying to
make some special contribution to the future course of Israel. I did not for a
moment contemplate politics at that point. Instead, I thought of going back into
the military. I realized that in order to make a significant mark, if indeed I
could, would require me to serve in the regular army, not just an extraordinary
unit like Sayeret Matkal. But I did hope that, at some stage, I’d be given the
opportunity to finish my time in the sayeret as its commander, carrying on
Avraham’s vision and, ideally, building and expanding on it as well. At least if
that part proved possible, I felt that, by comparison, a career in academia would
be somehow blinkered, and surely less fulfilling personally. My sayeret
experience had also taught me something else as well: that protecting Israel’s
security was not just a matter of muscle, or firepower, indispensible though they
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sometime were. It called for mental application, an ability to assess risks, to find
answers under enormous pressure when, inevitably, things went wrong. It
required not just brawn, but brains.
A week before I began my final year at Hebrew University, I went to see Eli
Zeira, the senior intelligence officer who’d so brashly predicted the course of
the Six-Day War, in hopes of sounding out my prospects of picking up my
military career where I’d left off. Despite a yawning gap in rank and age – Eli
was nearly fifteen years older – I felt I could be open with him. Not only did I
know him from Sayeret Matkal, which came under his purview in the kirya. He
was a scientist manqué and was eager, as soon as I arrived in his office, to hear
about my physics studies. When I did manage to turn the conversation to the
army, I told him I was thinking of returning after I graduated. Yet before finally
deciding, I wanted his honest opinion about my chances, at some point, of being
given command of the sayeret. He began with a series of caveats. The choice of
future leaders of the sayeret was not be his to make. When the current
commander, Uzi Yairi, ended his term in roughly 18 months’ time, I’d still be
too young to have a realistic chance. “Maybe even next time around,” he said.
And in any case, I would first need to get some experience in the regular army.
“But then,” he concluded, “my opinion is that you have a very good chance of
becoming commander of the unit.” That was more than enough. I figured that
whether it actually happened would now ultimately be down to me.
My last year at university was the closest thing I would have to a normal
student existence. I was called away only once. But it was for a battle which
would turn out to have a lasting impact on the course of our conflict with the
Arabs, and on the prospects of eventually finding a way to make peace. It was
Israel’s largest military action since the war, across our new de facto border with
Jordan. And it was directed at a new enemy: a fledgling army of Palestinian
fedayeen, called Fatah. It was led by a man that I, like almost all Israelis, had
never heard of at the time: Yasir Arafat. Born in Egypt, as a 19-year-old he had
fought against the establishment of Israel in the 1948 war. Although Fatah had
nominally existed for nearly a decade, it was only now emerging as a political
force, in large part because of the Arab armies’ humiliating defeat in the Six-
Day War. A Palestinian political leadership already existed, in the shape of the
Palestine Liberation Ogranization. But it was based in Cairo. Its chairman was,
for all practical purposes, an adjunct of President Nasser’s leadership role in the
Arab world. Though Arafat had not yet explicitly challenged this state of affairs,
his, and Fatah’s, rise after the war carried a powerful, message for the existing
Arab presidents and prime ministers: their brash promises of victory before the
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1967 war had turned out to be hollow words. It was time for a new generation,
and a new, more direct, form of confrontation with the “Zionist enemy.”
Arafat had set up camp with nearly a thousand men just across the Jordan
River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hitand-run
raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev. Eshkol’s cabinet
was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, in both an act of
retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if his army didn’t rein in Arafat’s
men, Israel would take whatever action necessary. But the decisive moment
came on the eighteenth of March. A school bus near Eilat, in the far south of
Israel, hit a Fatah landmine, killing the driver and a teacher, and injuring 10 of
the children.
I was called up the night before the Israeli attack, as part of a small Sayeret
Matkal contingent which was supposed to play a support role. An enormous
pincer operation was mounted around the Fatah camp and Karameh itself:
including a full infantry brigade, the Seventh Armored Brigade and the
paratroopers’ sayeret. But the resistance they met, both from Fatah and
Jordanian troops, was much fiercer than expected. One of the paratroop
commandos, Mookie Betzer, who would go on to join Sayeret Matkal, told me
how they landed by helicopter and immediately came under a hail of AK-47
fire. Within minutes, several of his men had been killed. Mookie was wounded.
The tanks of the Seventh Brigade advanced from the south. Battling the
Jordanian army, they took losses as well. Amnon Lipkin, who would also later
become a friend and colleague, in both the army and Israeli politics, was in
command of a unit of lightly armored French tanks called AMLs. They, too,
were hopelessly outgunned.
Our sayeret assignment was to block the southern entrance to Karameh as
the Israeli armored force advanced. But we got bogged down in mud as we
made our way from the Jordan River. By the time we arrived, hundreds of
Arafat’s men had already fled the area. Arafat, too, had escaped, on the back of a
motorcycle.
By the time the fighting was over, some two hundred Fatah fighters had been
killed. But nearly 30 Israeli soldiers lost their lives as well, and more than twice
that number were wounded. Politically, the outcome was even murkier. Most of
Israel was still basking in our victory in the Six-Day War. Now, we had
deployed many of the same units, only to fight to what looked like a costly
draw. Arafat and Fatah could claim – and soon did – that they had stood and
fought, and inflicted losses on the victors of 1967.
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* * *
In retrospect, given all the interruptions, I’m a little surprised that I managed
to get through my university studies. My classmates helped. They were
incredibly generous in going through with me what I’d missed, and sharing their
notes, whenever I returned for an extended stint of reserve duty. I’ve seen
interviews with university friends saying I was one of the top students in our
class. But that is more generous than true. It would be fairer to say I was a good
student.Working hard in the final year, I did finish in the upper quarter of the
class, and several of my math and science professors strongly urged me to go on
to graduate school.
But my mind was made up on returning to the army. And as I balanced my
studies with plans for the future during my final months, I still hadn’t given up
hope that Nili would be there with me. When she returned from Paris, we had
started seeing each other again. Whenever I could, I would take the bus down to
Tel Aviv and spend the weekend with her. Everything I’d loved about her since
that first meeting in the kirya, everything I valued in our relationship, was still
there. Yet so, too, were the doubts: whether she was ready to commit herself to
sharing our lives together; and whether a kibbutznik like me could ever truly fit
in to her Tel Avivi world. Shortly before Karameh, she’d invited me to a Fridaynight
party with a group of her friends. It was the first time she was including
me, as part of a couple, in her social circle. But almost from the moment we got
there, I felt out of place. For her, it was just another party, one of dozens she
must have been to since she was a teenager. But I immediately felt out of place.
I didn’t drink. I couldn’t dance. I couldn’t help feeling like a wallflower, or an
alien presence.
Now, I decided there was no point in waiting and wondering. I borrowed a
Jeep from an army friend, with the idea that Nili and I could spend three or four
days together, driving south from Jerusalem into the Negev and the Judean
desert: to be alone, to talk, to see whether we actually had a future. I wrote her a
note, took the bus to Tel Aviv while she was at work, and dropped it through the
letterbox. “I am going on this trip, into the desert,” it said. “I’d love it if you
could come with me. I think it’s important for us.”
I never heard back. I felt crushed, though I tried hard to tell myself it was
better to know where we stood. Years later, she told me the envelope had ended
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up under a pile of mail. She hadn’t seen it until a week afterwards. She said that
of course she would have come with me. She felt angry with herself, and with
me too, for not simply having phoned. But since I didn’t contact her in the
weeks that followed, she figured this was just another one of our times apart. Or
“stupid pride”. A few months later, I heard she was engaged to be married, to a
young man she’d known since their high school days at the Alliance.
I had first met Nava Cohen, the woman I would go on to marry, the previous
year. It was through another Cohen, though they were not related: Nechemia,
my sayeret friend who was killed in the 1967 war. He invited me to Tel Aviv
for a party in the spring, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and introduced us.
Nava was just nineteen, five years younger than me. I was struck not just by the
fact she was attractive, but by her poise, warm-heartedness, and her obvious
intelligence. But she had her boyfriend with her, and I still saw myself and Nili
as life partners. Now, she was beginning her studies at Hebrew University as
well, and, in a way, it was again Nechemia
Cohen who brought us together. Since his death, those of us who knew him
from the sayeret had been looking for a fitting way to remember and to honor
him. We finally decided to set up a living memorial in his name: a Moadon
Sayarim, a center to train young people from all over Jerusalem in scouting and
navigation. We spent six months getting it up and running, and Nava pitched in
with the work.
It wasn’t until a few months after I heard of Nili’s engagement that I finally
asked her on a date. We were in the university library, which had a space where
you could listen to tapes through headphones. I would go to hear classical
music. Nava was studying English literature, and I’d sometimes see her there,
engrossed in recordings of Shakespeare with the text of Hamlet or Macbeth in
front of her. Since I wasn’t shackled by the need to follow the alacks and
alasses, I read the newspaper as the music washed over me. I turned to the
movie section. I circled three films, drew a question mark in the margin and
passed it to her. She looked puzzled for a second. Then she smiled and put a
checkmark next to one of them.
While we came from different backgrounds, the gap was narrower than it
had been with Nili. Her parental home was in Tiberias. Her parents were from
old Sephardi families, with a centuries-long history in Palestine, and were also
solid Ben-Gurion Labor supporters. Her father had fought in the British army in
the Second World War. He now ran the branch of Bank Leumi in Tiberias. Her
mother ran a shop in what was then the city’s best hotel, the Ginton.
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We were married there, in the spring of 1969. My parents and brothers came
with two busloads of friends from the kibbutz. Avraham Arnan was there, of
course. But Ahraleh Yariv and Eli Zeira, two of the military intelligence heroes
of the Six-Day War, also drove up for the wedding, which touched both Nava
and me, not to mention her family and our guests. Years later, as I rose higher in
the ranks of the military, I would sometimes be invited to weddings by officers
under my command. Remembering how much we appreciated Ahraleh’s and Eli
Zeira’s gesture. I always said yes.
* * *
It was only weeks after our wedding that I formally returned to Sayeret
Matkal. Both Nava and I were aware of the additional pressures my military
commitments might place on our family life. But she understood why I’d
chosen to go back, and was supportive. As for me, I was, if anything, more
certain that I’d made the right decision. Israel was clearly facing a whole new
set of challenges to its security. Given the decisiveness, and speed, of our
victory in 1967, there seemed no immediate danger of Egypt’s risking another
full-scale war. In Israel, where Golda Meir had become Prime Minister after
Eshkol’s death from a heart attack, there was also little appetite for returning to
the battlefield. Yet the post-war skirmishes with the Egyptians along the Suez
Canal had escalated into far more than that: what would become known as the
War of Attrition. Nor could there be any doubt, after Karameh, that Fatah’s
influence, militancy and determination would only grow, not least because even
more radical factions within the PLO were ready to step into the breach if
Arafat faltered. Israel needed to find an answer for all these threats.
Uzi Yairi’s term as Sayeret Matkal commander had by now ended, but his
successor was someone I knew well. Menachem Digli was the officer on whom
I’d bestowed my stolen Syrian Mercedes at the end of the war. His leg was now
recovered from the motorcycle accident, and I returned to the sayeret at his
deputy. He delegated full responsibility to me for operational issues. I believed
that the new kind of challenges we were confronting, particularly the prospect
of intensified attacks from the new generation of Palestinian fedayeen, meant
that the sayeret would sooner or later have to broaden its reach, moving beyond
the kind of intelligence operations we’d done before the 1967 war to become
the SAS-like special forces unit Avraham ultimately envisaged. But that was not
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going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required
were going to be a lot tougher. Israel now had control of the entire Sinai and the
Golan. To tap into enemy communications, we would have to push deeper
inside Egypt and Syria.
Soon after my return, we began planning the sayeret’s most ambitious
mission so far: targeting the main communications system between Suez City,
at the southern end of the canal, and Egyptian military headquarters in Cairo.
We were obviously going to have to go in by helicopter. But we faced not just
the risk of being spotted on the way in. The buildup of Egyptian forces along
the canal now included Soviet-made anti-aircraft missile batteries. We might
easily get shot down.
The mission struck the generals in the kirya as so risky as to border on the
insane. But I was confident that we could make it work. I began talking to the
few senior air force officers who seemed more receptive, as well as to officers
in the helicopter units. Not only had I flown into the Sinai on earlier missions. I
now also had a physics degree. Together, we developed a plan – using the desert
terrain, and drawing on the helicopters’ maneuverability – to calculate a flight
route that could avoid detection by Egyptian radar. As an extra fail-sale, I
proposed using three helicopters, and three sayeret teams. Two would fly
slightly higher, with the express aim of getting spotted, but still evading missile
fire. They would land far away from the real target of the operation. The main
team, with me in command, would also stage a pair of diversionary attacks:
planting explosives on a high-voltage electricity cable, and on the main oil
pipeline from Suez City to Cairo.
Still, for many weeks, the answer from the kirya was no. The man who had
succeeded Rabin as chief-of-staff after the war, Chaim Bar-Lev, dismissed it as
“a plan built on chicken legs.” In the end, what got us the green light was a
further escalation, on both sides, in the War of Attrition. In January 1970, Israeli
warplanes began a series of deep-penetration bombing raids, for the first time
striking targets dozens of miles, in some case hundreds of miles, back from the
canal. The Israeli bombing campaign reduced the chance we’d get shot down and
provided cover for our operation.
Our helicopters took off after sunset, nearly skimming the water and peeling
off in separate directions on the far shore. The other two aircraft headed 120
miles to the south. I led the main team of ten men. We set down a few miles
south of the road from Suez City to Cairo. We unloaded a pair of Jeeps, drove
off, and within an hour had placed our time-delay explosives on the electricity
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tower and the pipeline. But when we reached the site of the underground
communications cable, the mission literally ran into the ground. We dug for
more than two hours, but still hadn’t found the cable, and our mail-order metal
detector stubbornly refused to chirp out any sign of it.
Just when I’d decided to call the helicopter back in to get us, it finally
peeped a faint signal. I still wasn’t convinced, but as we manipulated it back and
forth, it got louder. Still, my instinct was to abort. We’d placed the explosives
on the electricity tower and the pipeline. That would at least divert attention
from our real mission, which meant we could return in a few months and have
another attempt. After all, the part of the operation that had been causing the
most concern in the kirya – our ability to get deep inside Egypt undetected –
had succeeded. We were nearly three hours behind schedule. Unless we worked
a lot more quickly than planned, by the time we installed the communications
intercept and covered our tracks, it would be daybreak.
Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from
their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military
engineers had built after the war into a 2,400-feet-high mountain called Gebel
Um-Hashiba, 20 miles back from the Suez Canal. When I radioed in to tell him
I’d decided to abandon the operation, I could hear the surprise in his voice, and
what seemed reluctance as well. “If that’s your judgement…” he said. But
before I could reply that, yes, I felt withdrawal was the wisest course, I heard
him speaking to someone whose voice I also recognized: Avsha Horan. He was
the soldier on guard duty in the command post for our first intercept operation
in the Sinai, the one who’d told me of how Rabin was chain-smoking and biting
his nails when it appeared we might be in trouble. Now, he was a sayeret
officer. Digli came back on the radio. “We can see more from here,” he said.
Then, pausing, he added: “Avsha says he thinks you can still do it.”
I had grown to respect Avsha’s judgement. And while Digli hadn’t explained
what “more” they saw from the command post, I assumed that, since they were
also following the other helicopter teams further south, they were concerned
that the Egyptians had figured out at least that Israeli units were involved. Both
he and I knew that it ultimately had to be my call. Whatever happened, I’d be
responsible. Yet I realized that discussing it further would change nothing, and
time was now what mattered most. “We’ll do it,” I told him, and signed off.
We’d planned for the cable work to take something like five hours, which I
knew we couldn’t afford. With all of us pitching in, sweat drenching our
“Egyptian” uniforms, we managed to finish in slightly less than four. But we
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were still behind schedule. Dawn was 25 minutes away. I radioed the helicopter
pilot with a new pickup point, closer to where we’d installed the equipment
though still far enough, I hoped, to avoid giving away what we’d done. Still, we
barely made it. The sun was rising as the chopper began weaving among the
dunes and wadis on the flight back to Israel. Looking back, we could see flames
leaping up from the oil pipeline in the dim, dawn light.
There could be no doubt the prize was worth it. By the time we returned, the
receiving equipment at Um-Hashiba was, for the first time, picking up real-time
communications at the highest level of the Egyptian military. With the War of
Attrition showing every sign of getting even fiercer, it was a criticial
intelligence advantage. When we landed, not only Digli, but Ahrale Yariv were
there to meet us. Digli, smiling broadly, handed me a small cloth insignia.
“You’ve earned it,” he said, adding that Bar-Lev himself had endorsed my
promotion from captain to major.
* * *
With the Cairo-Suez mission, and a series of other operations I helped run
nearer to the canal, there now seemed every possibility that I would be chosen
to succeed Digli as commander when his term expired. But that was still more
than a year away, in the spring of 1971. With his agreement, I decided to use the
time to do what Eli Zeira had advised me before I made my decision to return:
to get experience in the regular army. The War of Attrition had created a
demand for qualified officers who could command tank units, since they were
playing a key role against the Egyptians along the canal. Along with about a
dozen other middle-ranking officers who had volunteered to move into the
armored corps, I embarked on a course covering every facet of tank warfare:
how each system on an individual tank worked, how to pilot one, load in the
shells, and then calibrate its main gun, aim and fire. We studied
communications protocols, even tank maintenance. We were taught how to
command an armored platoon – a group of three tanks – and then an armored
company of eleven tanks and APCs. Finally, in July 1970, we were given
command of actual companies, with the aim of deploying us against the
Egyptians.
My company was part of Brigade 401, in the Sinai. It was one of the several
armored forces that were rotated, every three months, into action on the front
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line. In a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari,
Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we waited
our forward deployment, due in September, he included me in his discussions
with his senior officers on tactics and planning. This inevitably included the
core of our existing strategy: a line of fixed fortifications which we had built on
our side of the canal after the war. They were known as the Bar-Lev Line,
because the chief of staff ultimately had to sign off on them. But the main
impetus had come from Avraham Adan. A former Palmachnik, known as Bren,
he was the overall head of the armored corps.
There were strong critics of the Bar-Lev line, but few more vocal than Arik
Sharon. The very qualities that had made him the perfect choice to lead Unit
101 and its successor commando units – a natural instinct to favor bold,
preemptive attacks, allied with an absolute confidence in his own judgment and
little time for those who challenged it – had stalled his rise up the military
ladder for a few years. But now he was head of Israel’s southern command. He
was convinced that in the event of another full-scale war with Egypt, the Bar-
Lev line would be worse than useless. We’d find ourselves forced to defend a
string of fortifications that could serve no real purpose in repelling a concerted
Egyptian attempt to retake the Sinai. Arik’s preferred strategy was to let the
Egyptian troops cross the canal and then confront them on terms where Israeli
forces had a proven advantage: a mobile battle in the open desert.
When the debate came up in our brigade strategy discussions, I said I
believed Arik was right. From our recent sayeret missions, I said there was no
way the Bar-Lev fortifications could protect us. I knew how easy it had been for
us to operate unseen between Egyptian positions across the canal, and they were
only a few hundred yards apart. On some parts of the Bar-Lev line, there were
six or seven miles between outposts. A whole Egyptian brigade could pass
through.
Very few in the kirya, however, seemed ready to recalibrate our strategy
against the Egyptians. Only later, when the damage had already been done,
would it become clear that the navy was alone in acting on lessons learned from
the fighting since the 1967 war. Having lost its largest warship to a more mobile
Egyptian missile boat at the outset of the War of Attrition, it began focusing on
deploying mobile missile boats of its own. But the air force was showing no
sign of dealing with the implications of the Egyptians’ increased anti-aircraft
capability – even though we’d begun losing planes and pilots to the new
surface-to-air missile batteries Nasser had received from the Soviets. And I
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could see that a similar myopia, or denial, was affecting the armored corps. On
patrol along the canal, I would sometimes see the hulk of an Israeli tank which
had been destroyed by Soviet-made AT-3s. Known as Saggers, they were
portable, allowing a single soldier to fire wire-guided missiles. Their range was
nearly a mile-and-a-half, which was more than the main guns on our tanks. Yet
no one appeared to have addressed the question of what would happen if the
Egyptians used Saggers on an even greater scale in a future war.
I remained in the Sinai through early 1971, but never led my tank company
on combat operations. By the time we were due for our deployment, the War of
Attrition was suddenly over. Neither we nor the Egyptians wanted a return to
full-scale war. With Washington taking the lead, a cease-fire was agreed. Both
sides claimed victory. But both were exhausted. Certainly, most Israelis had
ceased to see a compelling reason for the 1,000 days of fighting. We had lost
about 900 dead: more than in the Six-Day War.
But in one respect, the Egyptians won. Under the terms of the truce, their
anti-aircraft batteries were barred from a roughly 30-mile strip along the canal.
Within days of the truce, however, Nasser began moving his SAM batteries
forward. Before long, there were nearly 100 missile sites in the “prohibited”
zone, giving the Egyptians control of 20 miles or more of the airspace on our
side of the canal. Golda was incensed. So was Bar-Lev. But there was no way,
and no will, to reopen the fighting and force Nasser to move the missiles back.
The cease-fire took effect at midnight on August 7, 1970. I’ve never had
trouble recalling the date, because of a phone call almost exactly 24 hours later.
It was from my mother-in-law, to tell me Nava had gone into labor with our first
child. Since I was due for deployment on the front line, we had agreed weeks
earlier that the best thing would be for her to have the baby in Tiberias, so her
parents could be with her. Now, I got a Jeep and raced north. I reached Tiberias
the next morning. I opened the door to the hospital room and saw Nava,
obviously tired but beaming, cradling our daughter Michal in her arms.
I managed to stay with them for several days before returning to the Sinai.
With Nava and Michal soon settled back into our apartment in the north Tel
Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv, I made weekend visits home whenever I
could. Still, I saw nowhere near as much of our daughter’s first few months as
most fathers. As Nava and I would discover even more jarringly over the next
few years, that was an inescapable part of being an army officer.
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But at least my next posting was closer to home. It was only 20 minutes from
our apartment, on a former RAF base not far from Lod airport. On the First of
April 1971, I was promoted from major to lieutenant-colonel, and given the
assignment which, more than any other, I’d hoped for when I returned to the
army.
I became the commander of Sayeret Matkal.
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Chapter Eight
It was the same jumble of buildings in the same corner of the base where I’d
reported a decade earlier, as a 19-year-old fresh from tironut, when the sayeret
was still a gleam in Avraham Arnan’s eye. Now, I was about to become the first
of his successors to have been chosen from within the unit itself. As I called
together the officers that first morning, I couldn’t be sure whether I would make
a success of my two years in command. But I did know what I hoped that I, and
we, would accomplish: to complete Avraham’s vision. To forge a true specialforces
unit, at a time when the threats facing Israel seemed increasingly to
demand one.
Avraham’s initial hopes and expectations for the unit had been more than
met. Sayeret Matkal had played the key role in erasing the traumas of Uri Ilan
and Rotem, and restoring the morale and effectiveness of Israeli military
intelligence. Time and again, operations which we said we could do – dismissed
as too dangerous, or impossible, by others – proved achievable. Yet as I now
told the team leaders and our other officers, this was no longer enough.
Our intelligence operations still mattered. In fact, we would have to “push
further” across Arab borders, deeper into enemy communications systems. Our
intercepts had given Israel an important edge in the Six-Day War. I assumed –
though naively, it would turn out – that they would be put to use in any future
war. But if the sayeret was to retain its unique role, we had to become a fighting
force as well. One reason, I didn’t even have to mention: we all remembered our
frustration in 1967, when we’d been little more than bit players in the most
important conflict since the establishment of the state. But for me, the main
argument for change was what had happened since the 1967 war: the fact that
Israel was facing a new range of security challenges which other army units,
trained to engage and defeat enemy troops on the battlefield, were not equipped
to meet.
In the War of Attrition, we might not have lost a single inch of territory. But
we had lost tanks and planes. Israeli soldiers and pilots were being held prisoner
in Egypt and Syria. Arafat’s Fatah and the other armed Palestinian groups might
not present a conventional threat. Yet while I’d been with my tank company in
the Sinai, they were fighting a full-scale civil war against King Hussein’s army
in Jordan. The catalyst: a multiple hijacking in September 1970, a sign that they
were turning to non-conventional warfare, and to acts of terror.
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“We’re not starting from scratch,” I assured the sayeret officers, and I could
see some of them nodding in agreement. We had a proven record of success,
under Avraham and the four other commanders before me. We would be able to
rely on the qualities that had proved our doubters wrong in our first intelligence
missions. “We have to stay true to the spirit of Sayeret Matkal,” I said. Every
one of the officers knew what I meant: teamwork, the way we valued brains and
creativity, more than formal lines of authority. The rigor we applied to training
for, preparing for, and executing each mission. And, no less importantly, to
criticizing, and trying to fix, everything that had gone wrong on an operation, or
we’d failed to anticipate.
Though I expected to be leading many of the operations myself, I knew that
we’d succeed or fail on the strengths of the officers around me. I was incredibly
fortunate on that score. Some, I already knew well from my time as Digli’s
deputy. Smart, self-confident, self-starting officers like Amiram Levin, the
stocky kibbutznik from the north with whom I’d worked most closely and most
often as deputy. Avshalom Horan – Avsha – who’d convinced me to risk
completing the mission on the road from Suez to Cairo. Giora Zorea, who, like
me, had come up through the unit and was one of our most experienced team
leaders. And Danny Yatom. Born not far from Mishmar Hasharon, but a city
boy, from Netanya, he was smart, level-headed and a sure-handed organizer,
and with whom I’d somehow clicked from time he arrived in the sayeret. I made
him my deputy for my first year in command.
There were two others as well, both related to Moshe Dayan, but with a selfassurance
all their own: Uzi Dayan, the son of Moshe’s brother, who had been
killed in the 1948 war when Uzi was only months old; and Mookie Betzer, who
was married to Uzi’s cousin. I’m not sure which of the two joined the sayeret
first. Mookie, I believe. But their family ties, far from extraordinary, were part
of how Sayeret Matkal had developed from the start. It had been friends
bringing friends. But also, not infrequently, a cousin bringing a cousin, or a
brother bringing a brother.
This was the case with two other officers, whom I knew less well at first but
who would become key members of my team. In their case, it was the younger
one who joined first. Binyamin Netanyahu – Bibi, as everyone called him – had
been a member of Amiram Levin’s team when I was Digli’s deputy. He’d also
been a part of one of our several – thankfully harmless – failures along the canal
at the beginning of the War of Attrition. The plan was to cross in rubber boats
held together by nylon cord, with the assistance of Shayetet 13, Israel’s
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equivalent of the American navy SEALs. But Bibi’s dinghy got tangled up, and
he found himself in the canal, being tugged down by the current. Only the
SEALs, and Bibi’s mix of calm and endurance, averted disaster.
When I returned as commander, Bibi had gone through officers’ school and
was given a team of his own, making him one of half-a-dozen core, operational
officers with whom I worked from the planning stages of every mission,
through the training and the operation itself. Especially with Bibi, since he was
newest to the role. He was smart, tough and, even by sayeret standards,
supremely self-confident. It also was clear that he understood my determination
to build the unit into a military strike force – which was one reason why he
urged me to bring in his older brother. Bibi was 22 at the time. His brother –
Yonatan, or Yoni – was 25. He had led a company of paratroopers in the 1967
war, before going off to university. He’d taken a bullet in the elbow while
helping to rescue one of his soldiers behind Syrian lines on the Golan. “He
wants to return to the army, and he’s exactly the kind of officer you want,” Bibi
said.
I brought Yoni in for a chat. Over the next several years, I would get to know
him much better, becoming not just friends but neighbors, when he bought a flat
a few floors up from ours. But even in this first meeting, I found him a contrast
to his younger brother. Bibi was practical, detail-oriented. Yoni was a more
complex character. He was interested in history, and philosophy. He wrote
poetry. He would sometimes feel the need to get off by himself, and just think.
He was a man of action, too. Taller and trimmer than Bibi, with a thick thatch of
dark hair swept back from a craggy face, he was the Central Casting image of a
soldier. He also had real, battlefield experience. Not only did I invite him to join
Sayeret Matkal. I put him in charge of our training teams. When Danny Yatom
left the following year to train as an armored officer, I made Yoni my deputy.
However different in some ways, the Netanyahu brothers were close. They
seemed almost driven, to excel and to succeed. As I got to know them both, I
sensed that the drive did not come merely from within. It came from their
upbringing, their family background, and in particular their father. Ben-Zion
Miliekowsky, as he then was, studied at Hebrew University at the same time as
my father, in the early 1930s, and was an impassioned supporter of Ben-
Gurion’s main right-wing Zionist rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. My father
remembered him gathering bemused groups of students during breaks from
classes, standing on an upturned wooden box, and proclaiming that the Arabs
would never willingly accept a Jewish state. Long before the 1948 war, and
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nearly four decades before our capture of the West Bank in 1967, he insisted
that we needed to create a Jewish state in all of biblical Israel: from the
Mediterranean to the Jordan River.
It was through Bibi and Yoni that I got to know their father. After 1948, he
had led a frustrating existence. A specialist in medieval Jewish history, he could
not find a place on the faculty at Hebrew University. He was convinced,
perhaps with some reason, that his outspoken advocacy for Jabotinsky’s
Zionism in a country defined by Ben-Gurion’s had frozen him out. He left to
pursue his academic career in America, where both Yoni and Bibi spent much
of their youth. He always remained bitter about what he felt were unfair,
politically inspired, roadblocks to his academic advancement in Jerusalem.
Though he would eventually return to Israel, he was teaching at Cornell
when his sons became officers under my command in Sayeret Matkal. So there
was a physical distance between father and sons. But what struck me was how
large the father loomed in both of their lives. There was an almost adolescent
admiration, bordering on worship. I remember once remarking to Nava that it
was as if, despite all their physical self-confidence, Bibi and Yoni were tethered
to their father by some mental umbilical cord. They seemed weighted down by a
struggle to live up to his expectations, to right the “wrongs” done to him, and
achieve the advancement and success which the young State of Israel had
denied him. In a poignant postscript, decades later when Bibi first was elected
Prime Minister, Ben-Zion was asked by a journalist for his reaction. “He would
make a very good Minister of Hasbarah,” he replied, a Hebrew word which
translates as something between public relations and propaganda. “Or Foreign
Minister.” But how about Prime Minister, the reporter pressed. Ben-Zion
replied: “Time will tell.”
* * *
Even as we mounted intercept operations deeper into Egypt and Syria, I
made sure that we trained as if we were already the broader strike force I hoped
Sayeret Matkal would become. We mapped out plans for commando operations
against the new kind of security challenges the country faced. We worked in
detail on how we’d carry them out. We prepared rigorously to make sure we’d
be ready. Yet no matter how proficient we got, there was no guarantee it would
actually happen. A bit like Avraham in the unit’s infancy, I had to deal with the
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frustration of trying to convince the generals in the kirya to give us the goahead.
Some of them agreed Israel needed a specially trained commando force.
But not everyone felt Sayeret Matkal could, or should, take on that role. Rafael
“Raful” Eitan was perhaps the most strident. He had fought with the Palmach in
1948. He was an officer in Unit 101 and a commander of the parachutists’
Battalion 890. He was now katzhar, in overall charge of all infantry and
paratroop forces. He insisted that such work required a real sayeret, by which
he meant the paratroopers.
Yet the need for a special-forces unit was becoming increasingly hard to
ignore. By the summer of 1971, a couple of months after I became sayeret
commander, King Hussein’s army had defeated the insurgency of Fatah and a
pair of even more militant partners, the Democratic Front and the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine. That meant a quieter eastern frontier. But the
Palestinian groups rebased across our northern border in Lebanon. When
Jordanian Prime Minister Wafsi al-Tal was assassinated, it proved to be the start
of a series of killings and terror attacks by a new group within Fatah, called
Black September. There was at least some potentially encouraging news from
Egypt. When Nasser died in September 1970, he was succeeded by a less
flamboyantly militant vice-president, Anwar Sadat. Yet in both Egypt and
Syria, a number of our air force pilots were still being held prisoner.
I felt an especially strong motivation to help bring the pilots home. They had
risked their lives for us. It seemed to me we owed them the same. One of the
men being held in Syria, Pini Nachmani, had a personal connection to many of
us in the unit. He had worked with us on sayeret missions. I came up with a plan
that, while undeniably risky, seemed to me to have every chance of success. It
was to abduct a number of Syrians from an officers’ club on the western edge of
Damascus. We would land in transport helicopters a few miles away and unload
a pair of armored cars captured in 1967. But Raful’s view prevailed. I could not
get the approval of the kirya. I did take heart from Avraham Arnan’s support.
He was now Golda Meir’s counter-terrorism adviser. Also from the fact that
Chaim Bar-Lev’s successor as chief of staff was an old friend of the sayeret:
Dado Elazar, Avraham’s Palmach comrade from 1948. Yet winning over the
remaining doubters in the kirya was obviously going to take time.
As so often during my years in uniform, however, Sayeret Matkal’s birth as
a special-forces unit came by force of circumstance: not in an officers’ club near
Damascus, but a few miles away from our base, on a runway at Lod Airport.
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* * *
I was sitting down to dinner with Nava a little before seven on May 8, 1972
when the phone rang. We’d just fed Michael, who was almost two, full of
energy, and showed no sign of wanting to go to bed. “It’s Manno,” said the
voice on the line. Brigadier General Emanuel “Manno” Shaked was Dado’s
chief of operations. “A plane has been hijacked,” he said. “It’s heading for Lod.
It will land in about 30 minutes. They’ve got hostages. Get to the airport. Dado
and Dayan are on their way.”
I called Danny Yatom and told him to get whoever was at the sayeret base to
Lod as soon as possible. But most of the men were on training exercises,
including one team with Yoni deep in the Negev Desert. He immediately began
calling them back. When I got to the airport, I found Dayan and Dado huddling
in a room below the control tower, unfurnished except for a small table in the
corner. Talik was there with them. He was now head of all military operations
in the kirya. Rechavam Ze’evi as well, the head of the central command area,
which included Tel Aviv. So was Ahrahle Yariv, who had succeeded Meir Amit
as head of military intelligence, and nodded glumly as I joined them.
The plane had landed. A Sabena Boeing 707 bound from Brussels to Tel
Aviv, it had been hijacked after a stopover in Vienna. All we knew at this point
was that the hijackers were Palestinians and that there were about a hundred
passengers on board. Dado said that, while we figured out how to respond, we
had to make sure, at all costs, the plane didn’t take off again. It would
presumably go to an Arab country, where we’d be powerless to act. Though
only a handful of my men had arrived, I took the only officer who had, Shai
Agmon, and an El Al engineer to see whether we could disable the hijacked jet.
It was parked well off from the main terminal area. With the El Al man leading
the way, we approached from the rear, crouching low, hoping the hijackers
wouldn’t spot us. The engines were still running, but at least the deafening noise
kept anyone from hearing us as we ducked under the fuselage and the engineer
removed a stabilizing pin from the front wheel. It was an eerie feeling,
envisaging the captive crew and passengers, and the terrorists, a few feet above
our heads but knowing we were powerless to do anything more to help.
Manno had called me not because I’d won my argument to expand the role
of the sayeret. It was the luck of the draw. With the growing threat of terrorism,
the kirya had drawn up a list of installations which might be targeted. Next to
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each, they’d put the name of the military unit to be called up in an emergency.
We’d been allocated Lod Airport, because our base was just 15 minutes away.
Still, as I accompanied the engineer back to the control tower, I tried to work
out in my mind whether we could plan, prepare and train quickly enough to
mount an operation to free the plane later that night.
More than a dozen members of the unit had now arrived, and more were
joining us every half-hour or so. I arranged for El Al to give us a hangar and a
707 identical to the Sabena plane. Shai, Danny Yatom and I took two airline
technicians with us for a closer look at the Boeing. We studied up on it as
quickly as we could, beginning with the cockpit and the front door, which we
saw was too high to reach without a large ladder. But making our way back, we
realized the wings were low enough to climb on to. When, with the help of
Danny, I clambered onto one of them, I managed to get one of the emergency
doors to open by banging hard on the top end with my open fist. I asked the
technicians whether we could expect the Sabena doors to give way as well. Yes,
he said, but he cautioned me that on some airlines, there were passenger seats
next to at least one of the two doors above each wing.
Walking up into the cabin, I tried to work out how we might attack the
hijackers before they were able to harm the passengers, or us. The risks were
obvious. But I felt we had to be ready to act. With the rest of the sayeret still
making its way to Lod, I put Danny in charge of briefing the new arrivals,
familiarizing them with the 707 and preparing for the possibility of an assault
operation. I also told him to get hold of a couple of dozen small, 22-caliber,
Beretta pistols. I couldn’t see how we’d manage to make our way onto the plane
with Uzis. We knew we’d have to get up to speed quickly on using the Berettas.
None of us had trained on them. But many of the air marshals on board El Al
flights were Sayeret Matkal reservists, and they did use Berettas. I told Danny
to check for any sayeret marshals arriving on El Al flights and get them to join
us.
As I headed back to see Dado, we were nowhere close to a detailed plan on
how to confront the hijackers. Nor did we have any orders. The people who
would give them – Dado, Dayan and ultimately Prime Minister Meir – were still
deciding how to respond. But when I reached the control tower, at about
9:30pm, the order came, if not to mount an operation, at least to make sure the
sayeret was ready. “Talk to Talik,” Dado told me. “See what the options are to
take over the plane if that’s the decision.” I sat down with Talik and ran through
what I’d learned from my brief look at the hijacked plane and the work we’d
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been doing on the Israeli 707. I told him I’d need another two hours to make
sure my men had practiced climbing up on the wings and forcing open the
doors, and another hour for preparations and briefings for the teams who would
be participating in the operation. “By about half an hour after midnight, we’ll be
ready to deploy,” I said, though from his stoic, nearly silent response I couldn’t
be sure whether he was in favor of an assault. “By 0100, we’ll be ready to act.”
Both of us went back to see Dado. He seemed encouraged, especially when I
said we’d be ready to move by one in the morning. He told me the pilot of the
plane had been in contact with the control tower. He was an RAF veteran and,
though the terrorists seemed unaware of this, he was also Jewish. The hijackers
were demanding more than 300 Arab prisoners be released and flown to Cairo.
“And they seem quite nervous.”
Returning to the hangar, I sent Shai Agmon with four soldiers to set up a
lookout and sniper post about 70 yards to the side of the Sabena jet. I told him
not to open fire unless they were sure there had been shooting inside the plane
and could positively identify an armed hijacker. By now, we had three dozen
soldiers and officers, including Uzi Dayan and his full team. I took all those
who were already briefed and divided them into four groups, each with an
officer and five soldiers and assigned to deal with one of the wing doors. I left
the others to continue training.
When midnight came, I was far from certain we could meet the 12:30 am
deployment target I’d given Talik. Incoming flights had stopped for the night,
and we still hadn’t managed to bring in any air marshals. I believed they would
give us a crucial advantage. They knew Berettas. They also knew the inside of a
707. But I was worried about losing Dado’s trust in a sayeret operation if we
failed to meet the timeline. From Shai’s lookout post to the side of the plane, I
learned that the front cabin door of the plane was open. He said he’d seen a
couple of hijackers walking by it, silhouetted by the dim cabin light. But
otherwise, there was no sign of activity inside. I called Talik and told him I was
taking my assault teams to the area behind the plane. About a half-hour later, I
confirmed we were ready to begin the operation. Although the plane’s engines
were off now, our approach had been masked by the drone of the generator
brought in to supply power to the cabin. We were lying face-down on the
tarmac, directly behind the tail of the plane but well back. Two rows of 12 men,
plus me and a soldier in charge of the communications. We’d brought along
four small ladders to help us onto the wings. “We want to exploit the darkness,
and the sound of the generator, to cover us,” I said in my final briefing before
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we’d left the hangar. “If they realize we’re there, we get into the cabin as
quickly as possible, any way we can. The first five seconds will ne critical. Act
decisively,” I told the men. “Assume that everyone else will be doing the same.
Trust your instincts. You are trained for this.”
But more than an hour passed as we waited for the green light to storm the
plane. My main concern wasn’t that the hijackers would see us. There seemed
little reason to believe one of them would suddenly decide to take a walk in the
middle of the night. But sunrise was around five in the morning, and there was
no way I could see mounting our assault in broad daylight. If we didn’t get the
go-ahead soon, the chance would be lost. I called Talik several times, making
the point that if we were going to do it, we needed to use darkness as an ally.
The sayeret was a breed of night animals. Other people, even terrorists, would
be less alert and effective at night. But he kept saying he needed more time.
Finally, an hour before sunrise, he called back. “The big boss is on his way,”
he said. I left the others and crept back to meet the Defense Minister, a good
eighty yards from the plane. Dayan greeted me with a whispered hello. In a
way, his arrival reminded me of my first operation in the sayeret when, before
heading north to the Golan, I’d been summoned to brief Tzvi Tzur, the chief of
staff. Tzur had seemed less interested in the details than in confirming that I was
confident the mission would work. Dayan, of course, had as much operational
knowledge and experience as anyone in Israel. Yet it seemed to me that he, too,
wanted to satisfy himself that I honestly felt we were in a position to succeed.
Especially, though he never so much as hinted at this, because two of the
officers I would be taking in with me, Uzi and Mookie Betzer, were members of
his family.
“How do you plan to do it?” he asked. I explained how we would get into the
plane simultaneously, in four teams, and confront the hijackers. I said I was
confident we’d succeed, especially since darkness gave us an element of
surprise, and the terrorists were bound to be tiring. “We can do it,” I said.
“Better now than in daytime.” Dayan merely nodded. He stood there, silent, for
another few moments. “I’ll let you know,” he said, then shook my hand and
returned to the control tower. But fifteen minutes later he sent his reply, via
Talik. It was brief and explicit: “Not tonight.”
For the first but not the last time in uniform, I felt the frustration of finding
my preparation and judgement trumped, without explanation, by a decision
from above. When I got back to the control tower, I made no attempt to hide my
view we should have moved against the hijackers while we had the chance. But
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Dado sat me down and filled me in on what was obviously a changing situation.
He said the terrorists had allowed the pilot, Reginald Levy, to come see Dayan
and press their demands. He had brought with him a slab of light-yellow
material to demonstrate the seriousness of the risk of saying no. When tested, it
turned out to be exactly what the hijackers said it was: plastic explosive.
The pilot said there were four terrorists: two men with pistols and two
women with explosives and grenades. There were 95 passengers and seven
crew. He’d also confirmed that none of the exits above the wings was blocked
by a passenger seat. He’d returned to the plane without any clear answer from
Dayan on the prisoner release. But before leaving, he revealed that his own wife
was among the passengers. He asked Dayan to promise that Israel would help
care for their daughter if the hijack ended tragically.
By the next morning, that was looking more and more likely. Though the
hijackers were still in contact with the tower, the only visible movement was the
arrival of a representative of the Red Cross. The lead hijacker, who called
himself Captain Rifa’at, was making increasingly forceful demands for the
prisoner release. Our negotiating team did its best to buy time by giving the
appearance we were considering the demand. It was Dayan who came up with
the idea of going further. He told Rechavam Ze’evi, as the head of the central
command area, to begin rounding up hundreds of young Israeli reserve soldiers.
He wanted them dressed them in prison uniforms, and then bused to the airport,
within sight of the hijacked jet. Dayan also arranged for another Boeing 707,
ostensibly to take the “freed prisoners” on to Cairo.
“What then?” Ze’evi asked Dayan. “We’re not really going to put them on a
plane and take off!”
It was after he’d had no real reply that he in effect answered his own
question, inadvertently leading us to the idea of attempting a daytime attack
after all. Talking to Dado and me, he said: “Since we’re going to such lengths to
deceive them, why not just add another layer? Why can’t Ehud’s people take the
role of the airport mechanics?” Looking at each other, Dado and I realized it
was a stroke of brilliance. Dado went to share the plan with Dayan, confident
that he would be no less enthusiastic, which he was. I remained with Ze’evi and
his deputy to work out the details. We agreed they would take care of the
pantomime with the prisoners, as well arranging for El Al to get us the ladder
trucks that airline maintenance crews used, which would allow us access to the
Sabena jet’s front and rear doors as well. That left me free to concentrate on
preparation and training.
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We had just a few hours to adapt the original plan. Although we’d trained in
close-quarters fighting for my plan to attack the officers’ club near Damascus,
we’d never had to use that skill in a live mission. Nor had we ever used the
Berettas. While we’d disguised ourselves as enemy soldiers or military police
on our intelligence operations, this would be the first time we were taking on
the persona of civilian engineers, with the need to fool armed terrorists on the
lookout for any sign of danger or betrayal. And for the first time in any of our
major operations, we would be operating in daytime.
Now that nearly all our soldiers and officers had arrived, I began arranging
the final line-up of attack teams. We would need six rather than four, since the
new plan would give us access to the front and rear doors. Danny now also told
me that a couple of the El Al technicians had shown him a way of climbing up
from inside the nose wheel into the cockpit. One of the toughest and strongest
of our soldiers, Uri Koren, had tried it successfully on the El Al 707. I told
Danny, Uri and another officer that they would be assigned to attack through the
front door and the nose wheel. I put Uzi Dayan in charge of the tail door. The
emergency doors above the wings, however, still gave us the quickest way in. I
planned to command the operation from the left of the aircraft, because both the
front and tail doors also faced that way. I entrusted Bibi Netanyahu and his team
with breaking in through the main wing door on the far side of the plane.
By noon, we got a further boost. With the resumption of incoming flights,
we began collecting air marshals. One in particular raised my confidence. I
knew Mordechai Rachamim well from the sayeret. He was a Yemeni Jew from
Elyakhin, the moshav near Mishmar Hasharon where Baddura and the other
Yemeni workers lived. He was tall, strong and athletic, naturally agile and quick
to respond in situations of danger. He was also no ordinary air marshal. In 1969,
he’d been posted on an El Al flight from Amsterdam to Tel Aviv. On a stopover
in Zurich, four gunmen from Fatah’s main radical rival in the PLO, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine, leapt out of a car, opened fire with AK-47s
and began throwing grenades. The PFLP assault injured four of the crew and
killed the co-pilot. Armed with his Beretta, Mordechai rushed to the cockpit
window and returned fire. Seeing the attackers were too far away, he slid down
the emergency chute. Once on the tarmac, he shot one of the terrorists in the
head and kept the rest of them at bay.
As additional air marshals arrived, I slotted each of them into an assault team
in place of one of our sayeret soldiers. The next to arrive was Marco Ashkenazi,
a Cairo-born veteran with whom I’d worked on a mission inside Egypt. I put
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Mordechai on the main left-side wing door, critical for the opening moments of
the assault, and added Marco to Bibi’s team on the other side of the aircraft.
It was then that Yoni arrived back from Negev. He insisted on being added
to one of the assault teams. In one respect, that made sense. He had more
battlefield experience than almost everyone in the unit. But there was an
unwritten sayeret rule never to place two brothers together in the line of fire.
“It’s too late,” I told him, with an arm on his shoulder. “Bibi has already been
training his team.” He went off to find Bibi. I thought there was little chance of
Bibi standing down, but didn’t feel I could stop Yoni from trying. Five minutes
later, they came to talk to me. Bibi said: “Yoni wants to replace me. We want
you to decide.” I assumed both of them knew what I’d say. “Today, it’s Bibi,” I
replied. “But Yoni, this is not our last operation. I will make sure you are there
the next time.”
The last marshal to join us was a tall, thin redhead we always called Zur.
He’d had only 15 minutes to begin training when I got word that Dado – along
with Ze’evi and Ahrahle Yariv – were on their way to see a run-through. As
they filed into the hangar, I quickly explained the operational plan. I showed
them how we would push in the wing doors in, and then ushered them inside the
707. Two minutes later, the emergency-door teams climbed on to the wings.
When I gave the agreed two-finger whistle, they stormed the plane. “OK,
gentlemen,” Dado told the team leaders when it was over. “We’ve seen what we
needed.” Before returning to the control tower, however, he took me aside.
“You know they have explosives, right?” he said. When I said yes, his tone
softened. “You don’t have much time, Ehud” he said. “Don’t waste it.
BeHatzlakha.” Good luck.
We still had to outfit ourselves in mechanics’ overalls, and swap the
sayeret’s paratroop-style red boots for black ones. I directed all the men to
conceal the Berettas on a waist-belt inside their overalls. We got acquainted
with our mechanics’ toolboxes. Finally we organized our maintenance
motorcade: four electronic buggies in front, towing four ladders, two short ones
for the wings and taller ones for the front and rear doors. Waiting for the order
to move, I said a final few words. Seeing the determination and nervous
anticipation on the faces of the men around me, I began by reiterating that the
first five seconds would be critical. “We all know that nothing ever happens
exactly according to plan. Each and every one of us has to focus on speed,
momentum and precision. No one can wait for anyone else to act. From the
moment I give the signal, or if we come under fire, each team has to act as if
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they have to accomplish this all on their own. All of us must assume that. Keep
cool. Stay focused. Rely on your instincts. We’re ready for this mission. And
we are going to achieve it.”
One minute after four in the afternoon, we got the word to go. I was in the
lead buggy, consciously trying to look like a civilian, not a soldier. It was about
a mile-and-a-half to the aircraft. I glanced back at the others. Like me, many of
them had been awake for 30 hours or more, in some cases nearly 48 hours. The
air marshals had been plucked off long-haul flights on which relaxation, much
less sleep, was not an option. As before any mission, I knew everyone would be
thinking about what was about to happen. They also realized that if we failed,
the passengers trapped inside the plane would be at the mercy of terrorists
armed with AK-47s and explosives. But I was confident that any apprehension
would be overtaken by adrenalin when as the assault began.
As we got closer, Shai Agmon radioed me. He said two or three people, not
the terrorists, had come out of the plane. One seemed to be the Red Cross man.
They were about 120 yards away from the aircraft. As soon as he’d signed off, I
got word from the command post in the control tower that it was indeed the Red
Cross representative, along with two of the flight crew. They’d been chosen by
the terrorists to do security checks on the “maintenance” men.
I brought the convoy to a halt. The Red Cross man gave each of us a fairly
cursory body search before waving us on. Then, he got to Bibi. Though I had
somehow failed to notice, he had left on his red sayeret boots. In Israel, that was
the equivalent of a neon sign saying: “I am a paratrooper.” Although the Red
Cross man noticed the boots, he at first made no comment. Then, rolling up the
pants leg of Bibi’s overalls, he saw his Beretta – not inside his waistbelt, but
inside the boot. The next thing I heard was an angry spurt of French as the man
called the control tower. For a moment, I feared the mission was over, with
potentially fatal repercussions for the hostages. But whatever explanation the
Red Cross man was given – presumably by Dayan himself, who would not have
held back in conveying what was at stake – it dissuaded him from taking further
action.
As we were returning to the buggies, the Red Cross man told me that
“Captain Rifa’at” had ordered us to pull up to the generator on the side of the
plane. Each of us would then have to walk forward and open the front of our
overalls so he could make sure we weren’t armed. I passed back four orders to
the rest of the men. First, with no exceptions, move your pistol to the back of
your belt. Second: I’ll be the first to go through the inspection. Third: watch
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what I do and do the same. Finally, if our cover is broken, or if you hear
gunfire, we all storm the plane.
I felt as I always did as an operation was about to begin. Along with the
tension, I had a keen awareness of everything happening around me, almost as
if I was watching things in slow motion, in high resolution. When our
motorcade approached the generator, Rifa’at leaned out from the co-pilot’s
window. He was pointing a pistol at us. He seemed to be in his late 20s or early
30s. He had dark hair and a moustache and the hint of a stubbly beard. We
stopped beside the generator. I got out and walked toward the cockpit, halting
about 10 feet away. Looking up the hijacker, I made a conscious effort to appear
curious rather than worried. His eyes seemed a mix of intense focus and tension.
I opened the front of my overalls. Because of the heat, I was wearing nothing
else on top. He nodded his head to signal he was satisfied. I refastened the
overalls and moved off. One by one, the other men passed inspection. Then we
went back and brought the two smaller ladders to the side of each wing, and the
“mechanics” set down to work. I delayed bringing in the large ladders so as to
minimize any risk of arousing the terrorists’ suspicions.
The fact that at least so far they seemed to suspect nothing was in large part
down to Dayan’s misdirection plan. As we began working on the plane, the
“Palestinian” prisoners were disembarking from buses about 300 yards away.
As Rifa’at watched, several hundred men formed long rows. A few of them
waved in his direction. The Boeing which was theoretically going to take them
on to Cairo, to be followed by the Sabena jet minus the hostages, was being
towed into position.
One by one, our assault teams were moving into place. All that remained
was for me to give a short, sharp whistle and the attack would begin. Yet just as
I was raising my fingers to my mouth, I saw Bibi coming toward me from under
the fuselage. He motioned to me to wait. Zur, the last of our air marshals, had a
problem. Having spent 10 hours in the air on the way back to Israel, before
being immediately plugged into an assault team, he had something to attend to.
“He has to take a shit,” Bibi said. Can’t it wait, I asked. No, was the answer. So
I said OK, leading to the most surreal “operational” moment I would witness
during all my years in the military.
The “prisoner release” was now in full flow. Dozens of military vehicles,
and a small army of fire engines and ambulances, had also pulled to the far end
of the runway, out of sight of the hijackers, in case our attack on the Sabena jet
went wrong. Tel Aviv hospitals were on alert. And Zur was crouching and
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relieving himself. He nodded in gratitude when he’d finished, and returned to
Bibi’s team on the far wing. I gave him a full minute to be certain he was in
place.
Then I whistled. From my initial position beside the plane, I saw Danny
Yatom and his team begin to move one of the tall ladders toward the front door.
Shifting my eyes toward the wing doors as the “crucial first five seconds” ticked
by, I saw both the ones on my side of the plane were still shut. I climbed up on
the wing. When I got to the smaller, rear door I saw the main one cave inward
and Mordechai Rachamim rush in. But the soldier on the other door was
trembling and frozen in place. I slapped him, hard, on the back. “Move!” I
shouted. Instantly, he pushed the door in and rushed inside. I then noticed Uzi
and his team had still not entered from the rear. I jumped from the wing and ran
toward the ladder at the back, but by the time I got there, they had made it
inside, and I followed them in.
Everything was over within 90 seconds. As I’d expected, the planning and
training turned out to matter less than instinct and initiative. Within seconds, Uri
Koren managed to get into the nose-wheel assembly. Though he couldn’t
dislodge a metal-mesh panel separating it from the cockpit, he spotted the
outline of a man’s foot above him, fired, and wounded Captain Rifa’at. The
other members of Danny’s team in front were less lucky. With the ladder, they
had no trouble getting to the passenger door, but they struggled to force it open.
When they did nudge it open a crack, one of the hijackers opened fire, slightly
wounding one of the men and forcing them to abandon the attempt.
Mordechai went in shooting, but immediately drew fire and had to retreat.
But Omer Wachman, another air marshal I’d posted on the far wing, was in a
couple of seconds later. Coming face-to-face with one of the hijackers, he shot
him in the head. That allowed Mordechai to get back inside. He quickly
exchanged fire with the hobbled Captain Rifa’at, hitting the hijacker in the side.
As Mordechai ducked down to reload his pistol, Rifa’at managed to lock
himself inside one of the toilets near the cockpit. Mordechai ran after him. He
fired through the bathroom door, then kicked it open and confirmed that he was
dead. Rushing back toward the center of plane, he spotted the main woman
hijacker, wearing a bulky explosive vest. Grabbing her hands, he reached inside
the vest and yanked out the battery pack. With two of the hijackers already
dead, Mordechai had now subdued the third. But knowing that there was still
another woman unaccounted for, he handed her over to Bibi and Marco
Ashkenazi. Bibi grabbed her by the back of her hair, but it turned out to be a
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wig, which came off in his hand. As she began screaming, Marco instinctively
struck her across the face, but he used the hand in which he had his Beretta. The
gun went off, and the bullet grazed Bibi in his upper arm.
When Uzi Dayan had finally got in through the rear door, he’d run up
against a stocky, suntanned man blocking in his way, and fired – thankfully,
only into his midsection. He turned out to be one of the passengers, a filmmaker
from Austria. Still, there was the other woman hijacker to deal with.
Several of the passengers pointed to the floor just ahead of Uzi, where she lay
curled up, holding a grenade with the pin out. Ordering her loudly, sternly, not
to move, Uzi wrapped his hand over hers, extracted the grenade from her grasp
finger by finger, replaced the pin, and had one of his men lead her out of the
plane and down the stairs.
All the hijackers had been either killed or captured.
Tragically, in the initial crossfire, a 22-year-old passenger named Miriam
Holtzberg, had been hit. Although the man whom Uzi had mistakenly shot
recovered, she did not. Yet all of the remaining passengers and crew were now
free and safe, alive and unharmed.
I felt a mix of emotions when it was over: pride, a sense of achievement
against all the odds. And huge relief at having succeeded in ending the ordeal of
the captives. Without my saying so, everyone in the unit understood that my
inaugural comments as commander, about our need to become a full specialforces
unit, were no longer a distant wish. Still, I knew this was only one step,
and I wanted to make sure we kept our feet on the ground. The day after the
Sabena rescue, Israeli newspapers devoted acres of newsprint to how the
operation had succeeded. Since Sayeret Matkal’s existence was still an official
secret, the headline writers called us, variously, a “special” unit, a “select” unit
and even in one case, because of our El Al coveralls, “angels in white.” We did,
briefly, celebrate back at the sayeret base. But as with every other operation, we
went through a self-critical assessment of what we could have done better. How,
if we had to do another hostage-rescue operation, could we make sure none of
the passengers was harmed? How could we improve co-ordination among the
assault teams? And minimize the risk of shooting each other. Why had I, as
commander of the operation, had to wait for someone else to suggest the idea of
disguising ourselves as aircraft technicians? And why had we failed to train
with Berettas and other pistols as well as Uzis?
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They were not just academic issues. Even if we were never again called upon
to free a hijacked airplane, I assumed we would face other operations which
were equally urgent, without the weeks or even months of preparation we’d
always insisted on in the past.
* * *
After the Sabena operation, I emphasized the need for us to be proactive. It
wouldn’t be up to us to decide which operations to do. But it was up to us to
take the initiative in identifying and understanding specific threats and framing
ways in which we could provide a response. Even before Sabena, barely two
weeks had gone by when I didn’t go to Eli Zeira, who was in charge of the
operations department of military intelligence, with a mission which I felt
confident we were ready to carry out. Several of the most complex centered on
the new threat posed by Palestinian groups in Lebanon. Before the civil war in
Jordan, King Hussein had accused Fatah, the PFLP and the equally militant
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine of trying to create “a state
within a state” and deliberately weakening his government. Now, they were
doing much the same in Lebanon. Their headquarters buildings in southern
Beirut were spawning hijackings or terror attacks. From bases in southern
Lebanon, the Palestinians were also firing Katyusha rockets into Israel.
One of the operations I planned targeted Arafat. From our intelligence
intercepts, we knew that a day or two after a particularly intense clash with
Israeli artillery units on the Lebanese border, he would tour the area and meet
with his commanders. If we were going to go after him, however, we needed to
know exactly when he was coming. Fortunately, the Lebanese authorities
tracked Arafat’s motorcade on these “review the troops” excursions, reporting
how many cars were involved, which one he was in, and their progress. Thanks
to previous sayeret missions, we could listen in. In order to ensure the operation
would be on our terms, I proposed that a couple of days before we planned to
move, Israeli artillery target a Fatah rocket site in an isolated area about ten
miles from the border, where there was just a single road in from Beirut. I
proposed landing several teams by helicopter the night before. We would lie in
wait until the Lebanese army checkpoints reported that the Fatah convoy was on
its way. Israeli helicopters and F-4 jets would then cut off the road on both
sides, and we would ambush Arafat’s vehicle.
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When I took the plan to Eli Zeira, he was reading an issue of the French
newsmagazine l’Express and snacking on salted almonds from a dish on his
desk. As I ran through the reason we’d come up with the plan – the bourgeoning
power of Arafat and Fatah in Lebanon – he peered at me over his reading
glasses and nodded. As I set out the details of the attack plan, he listened, with
no obvious sign of approval or rejection. But after I’d finished, he dismissed it
out of hand. He said that Arafat was no longer the battlefield commander whose
forces had fought Israel in Karameh. “He’s fat. He’s political,” he said. “He is
not a target for this kind of operation.”
After the Sabena hostage-rescue, Dado and the other senior officers in the
kirya did seem more receptive to our trying to initiate operations, especially the
plan to seize Syrian officers and trade them for the Israeli pilots. But such a
mission required not just military or intelligence approval. Dayan, and possibly
Golda as well, would have to sign off, and there was little immediate sign of
that. But, once again, events on the ground would force the issue. Early on the
morning of June 9, our intelligence intercepts gave us notice that the next day, a
group of senior Syrian officers was going to make an inspection visit to the
eastern part of the Lebanese border area with Israel. We would have to move
quickly. Within the space of 12 hours, we’d need to plan the attack, organize,
equip and brief the assault teams, make the three-and-a-half-hour drive north,
and cross into Lebanon.
Still, I was determined to try, which marked the start of two of my most
frustrating weeks as Sayeret Matkal commander. The place where we planned
to abduct the Syrians was an area I knew personally: the sparsely settled strip of
land where Lebanon, Syria and Israel met, not far from where I’d helped
“capture” several Syrian villages on the final day of the 1967 war. With the
convoy expected to pass through the next morning, we crossed the border a little
before midnight on June 9. We lay in ambush in dense vegetation a few meters
off a curve in the road, further reducing the time the Syrians would have to react
once they saw us. I stationed two other sayeret teams a few hundred yards away
in either direction, so they could cut off the road once we attacked.
But as the convoy was approaching, I was suddenly contacted by the sayeret
officer we’d stationed in the command post back in Israel. He relayed a message
from Motta Gur, the head of the northern command. Its intelligence unit said
there was a Lebanese Army checkpoint a quarter-mile from the ambush site.
Motta himself was in the south, with Dado, watching a tank exercise. So I
had no way of talking to him. I replied through the officer in the command post.
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“Tell Motta we know about it,” I said. “We’ve planned for it. It’s not a
problem.” I figured there were at most four or five Lebanese soldiers manning
the checkpoint. The last thing they’d want to do is get involved in a firefight
between us and the Syrians. But Motta’s reply was unequivocal. The mission
was off.
When we’d climbed through a bramble-filled ravine back into Israel, I left a
message for Motta. I found it hard to disguise my frustration, and my anger, at
being ordered to abort the attack, especially after my assurances that the
Lebanese roadblock was not a problem. Yet when we got back to the sayeret
base, I realized there was more to his veto than I’d thought. He and Dado had
received intelligence saying the Syrians were likely to make a series of further
inspection tours of the border area, so this would not be our last chance. The
next day, we received word they’d be touring the western part of the border on
June 13. On the Lebanese side, it was known as Ras Naqoura, on ours as Rosh
Hanirkra, where the Mediterranean coastline rose dramatically to a ridge and,
once into Israel, sloped steeply down again toward Haifa.
I took in two main assault teams, one led by Mookie, the other by Uzi
Dayan. We hid in a tangle of bushes about halfway along the road which
climbed up toward the border ridge. I stationed Bibi and his team at the bottom
of the road, equipped with Uzis and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. We
waited, knowing that we’d be able to see the convoy as it twisted its way up
toward us. Again, I had no direct link to Motta. Yet both he and Dado were
following the mission from a command post in northern Israel. We were in
nearly real-time contact through a sayeret officer, named Amit Ben-Horn, right
across the border.
A first vehicle appeared at around 10:30 in the morning. Bibi radioed us. It
was a Lebanese army armored car with a single machine-gun. It drove past and
halted 150 feet on, at the point where the road began to climb. The two guys
inside took out a small table and a couple of chairs and began brewing up coffee
on the side of the road. “All OK,” I said when I radioed Amit to tell him. “Predeployment.”
The convoy arrived two hours later and began to climb. “We’re
taking it,” I radioed Amit.
“Wait,” he replied. And as I kept pressing him for the final go-ahead, another
30 seconds passed.
“Not approved,” he finally barked back at me, clearly wanting to make sure I
got the message.
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“What the hell is going on?” I replied, in a mix of a shout and a whisper,
since I knew the convoy was getting closer. But within a minute, we spotted the
lead Land Rover, which was soon past us on the way up to the ridge. It was
followed by two large American cars, with the Syrian officers, and then a
trailing security vehicle. It was too late. I was fuming. The convoy had passed
within a couple of yards of us, moving slowly because of the incline. But,
regaining my composure, I realized we’d get another opportunity, when the
officers returned from their inspection visit. We now knew exactly how the
convoy was deployed, and with any luck, the security men would be less alert
by the end of the day. Even better, it would be beginning to get dark, perfect
conditions for the ambush.
But as we were waiting, Amit radioed me with a question from from Dado
and Motta. “Where’s the armored car?” It’s still there, at the bottom of the road,
I told them. “But there’s nothing it can do.” Bibi and his team had it in their
sights. I considered not telling Amit what happened a few minutes later: a
Lebanese shepherd, with a half-dozen sheep, stumbled on us. One of Uzi’s men,
fluent in Arabic, tied the startled man’s arms behind his back, scattered the
sheep, and told him: “It’s fine. Another hour or so, we’ll be gone, and we’ll let
you go.” It turned out to be less than an hour. Forty-five minutes. During which,
not once but twice, Amit told us that Dado and Motta were worried: about the
armored car and now about the shepherd. I assured him everything was fine.
We’d do the operation. The guys in the armored car would be helpless. If all
went well, they might not even know we’d intercepted the convoy. The
shepherd, like us, was just waiting for it to be over so we could all go home.
Minutes later, Amit called again. He told us the convoy was on its way down.
But barely 60 seconds later, he said: “It’s off. Don’t do it. Dado told me to
repeat it twice so you’d understand: do not do the operation.”
When we got back to the command post, not only were Dado and Motta
there. Since Motta was within days of leaving to become Israel’s military
attaché in Washington, they’d been joined by his successor as head of the
northern command, Yitzhak Hofi. Three times, I suggested to Dado that we
speak without my officers present. I did not feel it was right to have Uzi,
Mookie and Bibi hear me the generals how I felt. But Dado insisted there was
no reason for them to leave.
“This is a serious issue,” I said, trying to keep my emotions in check. “What
happened out there is unacceptable. An effective special-forces unit cannot
operate this way. For the second time in a week, you’ve made us stop an
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operation. Both times, it was an operation that we, the ones who have to do it,
knew could succeed. An operation on which the fate of three Israeli pilots
depends. One of whom we know personally, and have worked with. Now, again,
with no real reason, you’ve stopped us. I see this as a breach of trust.” When
neither Dado nor Motta replied, I went on: “I have to tell you openly. You can’t
possibly judge the situation on the ground. Only we can. And you’re behaving
as if you know. You can’t know from here. There was no reason for us not to
grab those officers. I don’t want to reach a point when I have to start thinking
about what to report back, or not report, just to make sure we’re free to
complete a mission that you ordered, after agreeing it was necessary for Israel.”
No one said anything for a few moments. I could see that Uzi, Mookie and
Bibi were shocked at having heard me speak in this way to three of the top
commanders of the armed forces. But I meant every word. If Sayeret Matkal
was to function as a special-forces unit, it needed to have the trust of those
who’d authorized an operation in the first place. It was Dado who finally
replied. Sort of. Trying to defuse the tension, he told us a joke from his Palmach
days. “There are two bulls who come into a field full of cows. A young one and
old one. The young one says to the old guy: let’s run over there to the far end of
the field, where the prettiest cow is, and we can fuck her. The old bull replies:
“No need to rush. Let’s go slowly, and fuck them all.”
I guess we were meant to be the young bulls.
I doubt Dado knew whether we’d get a third chance at the Syrian officers,
though I’m sure he hoped so. A week later, we got word there would be a final
inspection visit, to the central sector of the border area. Ordinarily, I would have
led the operation. Now, I made an exception. To Dado’s obvious surprise, I
decided to remain behind, in the command post. “A commander has to be in the
best place to ensure a mission is successfully completed,” I told him. “I’ve
come to the conclusion the only way I can do that is to be here with you.
Because the real bottleneck isn’t out there in the field. It’s here.”
I placed Yoni, who had just become my deputy, in overall command of the
two main teams: Uzi Dayan’s and another led by one of our most impressive
young officers, a kibbutznik named Danny Brunner. He reminded me a lot of
Nechemia Cohen: he spoke little, and softly, but once an operation began was
calm, clear minded and able to anticipate and avoid trouble before it
materialized. Two other teams, one led by Mookie Betzer and the other by Shai
Agmon, would act as blocking units, concealed half-a-mile on either side, once
the main force intercepted the convoy. We chose a spot across from the Israeli
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moshav of Za’arit. We equipped Yoni’s force with a pair of Land Rovers in
Lebanese army colors and had them hide overnight in the moshav’s orchards, a
hundred yards from the road on the Lebanese side of the frontier. The next
morning, when we got confirmation the convoy was on its way, they crossed
and stationed themselves on the road, lifted the hood of one of the vehicles and
made as if they were trying to repair engine trouble. Both the blocking forces
were in half-tracks with heavy machine-guns in case the convoy chose to stand
and fight.
What we didn’t count on was a Lebanese driver, in a VW Beetle as I recall,
puttering along the road shortly after Yoni’s team crossed. The man waved at
them. Quite rightly, Yoni let him drive on. Along with the other obvious reasons
not to fire on a civilian VW, he didn’t want to alert the Syrians and their hosts
there was danger ahead. But the Lebanese motorist, as well as a group of nearby
farmers, were suspicious enough to deliver a warning that there were a couple
of stalled Land Rovers on the side of the road. The convoy halted shortly after
passing Mookie’s force, hidden in a field a few dozen yards away.
Had I not been in the command post, I’m pretty sure what would have
happened next. The mission would have been called off. This time, I was the
one in direct contact with all three teams. Even before I gave the order, Yoni
had anticipated it. He and Uzi turned west to confront the convoy. In a brief
initial exchange of gunfire, one of Uzi’s men was wounded, not seriously, in the
leg. But with Mookie’s team firing from behind and Yoni’s and Uzi’s men in
front, the convoy was trapped, and the Syrians captured.
The safest way back into Israel would have been the way the force had
entered. But Yoni and Uzi realized the main imperative was to get the Syrians
out as quickly as possible. At a not-inconsiderable cost to a pair of American
limousines, Uzi drove each of them, with a total of five Syrian officers, through
a boulder-strewn field across the border.
The Syrians included three senior members of the Operations Department of
the General Staff, and two from Air Force intelligence. Israel made an
immediate offer to swap them for our pilots, though how enthusiastically I’m
not sure. With this kind of leverage on our side, it seemed unlikely the Syrians
would do further harm to our pilots. Our intelligence officers were keen to get
every bit of information they could before sending the Syrians home. It would
be a year later before the exchange was done. Yoni received a well-deserved
tzalash for his role in the mission.
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* * *
Barely two months after the ambush operation in south Lebanon, Black
September seized and murdered members of the Israeli team at the 1972
Olympics in Munich.
As soon as the news broke on the morning of September 5, I phoned Ahrahle
Yariv as head of military intelligence. “You need to send us,” I said. I tried to
persuade him that if it came down to an operation to free our hostages, Sayeret
Matkal offered the best hope that it would not end in a bloodbath. We had the
mind-set, the background, the training and now the experience. I also knew the
German military had no special-forces unit. I’d have been even more worried if
I had known that German law barred the army from operating in peacetime.
That meant any use of force would be left to the police. Ahrahle told me it was
too early to say what involvement, if any, Israel might have. He’d get back in
touch with a decision when it came.
I called my officers together to begin planning. I decided to use the men who
had been with me for the Sabena mission, including Mordechai Rachamim. We
collated information from the stream of media reports from Munich and
assembled a rough idea of the layout of the building the terrorists had attacked.
As for the attackers, I said we had to assume there were at least half-a-dozen,
that they had not just AK-47s but grenades or other explosives. And that like the
Sabena hijackers, they would be prepared to die but hoping to live. All of that
turned out to be true. None of it, however, could alter the reply I got from
Ahrahle a couple of hours later. “We decided to send Zvika,” he said. Zvika
Zamir was the head of Mossad, and he would be going only as an observer. Any
operation against the terrorists would still be in the hands of German units.
The German police’s bungled attempt to end the ordeal was especially
painful because it was so predictable. I believe that if we had been there, at least
some of the eleven Israelis killed might not have lost their lives. The Germans
launched an ambush at a NATO airfield outside Munich, when the terrorists and
hostages were ostensibly on their way to board a flight for Cairo. We know now
that there was no properly co-ordinated plan. Too few police were deployed for
the operation. They were insufficiently armed, and they lacked relevant training
or experience. The result: a bloodbath. As a final insult to the memory of the
murdered Israelis, although the three surviving terrorists were jailed, the
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German government released them to meet the demands of the hijackers of a
Lufthansa airliner the following month.
Added to Israeli public’s shock over the massacre, there was anger at having
to watch the murderers go free. In the weeks afterwards, I got occasional hints
that a sustained Israeli response was underway, though I didn’t know the details.
I was not aware that it was Ahrahle, at the direction of Golda herself, who was
co-ordinating it. Nor that a special Mossad team was at the center of the
operation. Yet from news reports of a series of attacks on suspected leaders of
Black September, I, and most Israelis, assumed we were determined to convey a
message which the Germans had not: that terror killings of the sort perpetrated
in Munich would not go unanswered.
It was not until late 1972 that I knew the full scale of the operation. We had
no formal ties with the Mossad, but our intelligence work occasionally
overlapped. In mid-December, the sayeret’s intelligence liaison was approached
with a “theoretical question” by a couple of guys from the Mossad. Did we have
the capability to attack three separate flats in a pair of apartment buildings in
Beirut. I sent back my preliminary answer a few days later. I said it was
possible. But there was no way I could say for sure without more information.
Would the people in the apartments be armed? Were there guards outside? Was
there a caretaker or concierge? Was there only one way in to the buildings, or
also rear entrances? Would we be able to get a plan of the interior of the
apartments?
In another month, they came up with most of the answers. The buildings
were fairly new, with glassed-in lobby areas and concierges. The Mossad men
also gave us a fairly detailed layout of two of the three apartments. They did not
know whether there were back entrances. They thought it was likely there were
bodyguards, or at least some security detail posted outside. As for the people
living in the apartments, all of them were likely to have at least small arms.
Over the next week or so, we raised a series of other questions. Mainly, I
wanted to know whether they were sure the people we’d be looking for would
be at home. The Mossad officers said they were working on that, but were
confident of being able to confirm this before any operation happened. Though
they didn’t identify the people they were targeting, I had now learned, through
Ahrahle and others, what had been pretty obvious since the Mossad’s initial
approach. They were Palestinian leaders with ties to Black September. “I think
it’s possible,” I finally told them. “We’ll put a plan in place. We can finalize the
arrangements if you come back and say you want us to do it.”
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Nothing happened for several months. By the early spring of 1973, with my
two-year term as sayeret commander winding down, I assumed the operation
had been vetoed. I could understand why. As we worked on our plan, it had
become clear that getting into the heart of the Lebanese capital, hitting the
apartments and getting out again without starting a minor war would be by far
the most difficult mission we had attempted. I did not doubt that Sayeret Matkal
offered the best chance of success. But it wouldn’t be easy. I figured that
whoever was making the decision had come to the same conclusion.
I was on a weekend away with Nava and Michal in the Red Sea resort of
Eilat when things suddenly began to move. At around noon on Saturday, I got a
call from Talik’s deputy in the kirya. “Ehud,” he said, “we need you back here
as soon as possible.” When I asked why, he said: “You remember how you were
approached by someone with some questions, and you went back to them with a
list of other questions for them to answer?”
I told Nava I’d been summoned to a meeting at the chief-of-staff’s office –
the kind of call of duty that both of us were now used to – and grabbed the first
commercial flight north. It got the the kirya early in the evening, and joined a
meeting that was already well underway. Dado was in his usual seat on the
right-hand side of the table he used for staff discussions, flanked by Talik.
Across from them was Manno Shaked, the officer who had phoned me to tell
me about the Sabena hijacking and who had now succeeded Raful Eitan as
katzhar, overall chief of the infantry and paratroopers. Beside him were the two
Mossad officers with whom I’d had most of my dealings about Beirut. They
were all staring at an aerial photo of the Lebanese capital, with an area marked
in blue pen around a street called Rue Verdun.
I entered and took one of the remaining chairs. Gesturing toward the image
of Beirut, Dado turned to me. “Do you know this place?” he asked. Yes, I said.
I’d seen the photo. Nodding toward the Mossad men, I said: “These two officers
showed it to me.”
“Do you have an idea how to do this operation?” I told him that we didn’t
have a fully detailed operational plan. But I said we’d looked into the problems
we’d face. “We believe we can do it.” When he asked how, I outlined the
approach we’d settled on: a small force, thirteen men, plus two from Mossad to
act as drivers. We would need the Mossad men to go to Beirut ahead of us, and
rent a pair of nice American cars, the kind typical tourists would use. We’d land
on the waterfront, well south of the most built-up parts of the city coastline, and
meet up with the rental cars. When we reached the apartment blocks, three
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groups of three men each would take care of the apartments. Four more would
remain outside to deal with the concierges or security guards or any other
interference, and to command and co-ordinate. We’d leave the same way we
came in, by sea.
Dado nodded. I found out later that he’d asked the same question of Manno,
who had proposed a classic regular-army raid. They would block the road with
ten armed paratroopers on each end with the aim of holding off resistance, while
another two dozen went in to the apartments and attacked. I could only assume
Dado concluded that this almost certainly wouldn’t work, at least not without
major trouble. It would certainly forfeit any chance of surprise.
“The mission is yours,” he said. “Manno will be in overall command,
offshore. Because we’re also planning to hit several other targets.”
The reason for the urgent summons was that the Mossad had confirmed all
three Palestinians would be in their apartments in 10 days’ time. Everyone
involved realized that – given its complexity, the obvious risks, and the
inevitable unknowns – the operation could well go wrong. In fact, one reason
for Dado’s “other targets” was to ensure that if it did, there would be successes
elsewhere to provide a credible justification for having sent Israeli forces into
Beirut. As we received further intelligence, new obstacles had to be factored in.
The main one was the presence of a gendarmerie, a Lebanese police post, at the
bottom end of the street, only 500 feet or so from the apartments. And we would
be operating in a crowded, up-market residential area. We could only hope that
at the hour we struck, most people would be in bed. Or out partying. This was,
after all, pre-civil war Beirut, the “Paris of the Middle East”.
In the years since, an extraordinary array of stories has grown up around the
sayeret’s final and best-known mission during my term as commander,
culminating in the dramatic version in Stephen Spielberg’s movie Munich. I
remember reading in one earlier book, otherwise surprisingly accurate, about
our five weeks of intensive training. Even the full 10 days which I thought we’d
been given would have been a bonus. In fact, we had half that as a full team,
since our Mossad drivers, European-born Israelis, had to make their way
through Paris to Beirut as tourists, rent the cars and scout out our route from the
seashore to Rue Verdun.
There were four other operations planned alongside ours: three by paratroop
units and one by the Shayetet 13 SEALs, against a series of Fatah and
Democratic Front installations. Though all of them, like ours, would need help
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from the SEALs in getting ashore, only one required direct co-ordination with
us. This was an attack on a DFLP building a mile or so away in southern Beirut,
led by Amnon Lipkin, the friend whose unit had faced one of the toughest
battles at Karameh. Amnon’s paratroop force would land with us and also pile
into Mossad rental cars. Our attacks would begin at the same time, with the
maximum prospect of retaining the advantage of surprise. When and if we both
completed the operations and got away safely, we would meet up again on the
seafront.
From our first meeting, the morning after Dado gave me the go-ahead, I
realized I would have to make at least one change to the plan to rely on the core
Sabena team. There was no way, after his exclusion from the hijack rescue
mission, that I could refuse Yoni when he pressed to be included. I added him to
Mookie Betzer’s force. I put the other two attack teams under a pair of young
officers named Amitai Nachmani and Zvika Gilad. Both were self-confident,
natural leaders. Both had other qualities I also knew we’d need: focus, and
calm. I would take charge on the street outside the targeted apartments, along
with Amiram Levin. With us would be Dov Bar, a Shayetet 13 officer, and our
medic, Shmuel Katz.
In the hangar at the sayeret base, we made mock-ups of the layout of the
apartments, using bedsheets for the walls and adjusting the dimensions as
further bits of intelligence came in from Mossad. But the real work involved
simulating the whole operation, from the moment of our landing on jet-black
rubber dinghies piloted by the SEALs. We found a new building development
in north Tel Aviv with a pair of apartment blocks under construction. For two
nights, we ran through the whole thing: setting off in the dinghies from a missile
boat off the Israeli coast before midnight, meeting up with our Mossad drivers
on shore, making our way through the center of Tel Aviv to the apartment
complexes and simulating the attack. I wanted to ensure we could pull off the
whole thing without anyone raising an alarm. The one problem came during the
second run-through. A policeman drove by as we were “attacking” the
apartments. Dado managed to convince him that reporting us to his superiors
would not be an especially good idea.
In our debriefing discussions after that exercise, Dado identified a major
problem I’d overlooked. We would be entering Beirut dressed as civilians. Once
we got to the top end of Rue Verdun, we planned to approach the apartments as
if we were party-goers returning from a night on the town. “It doesn’t look
right,” Dado said. “More than a dozen party people walking, all men?” Mookie
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came up with the solution, one that would have the unintended effect of
elevating our mission further in Israeli lore. The three least burly-looking of us
would go in as women: a boyish looking guy named Lonny Rafael, Amiram
Levin, and me.
Still, there was another, potentially deeper concern that had yet to be
addressed. In all sayeret missions, since the beginning, we knew we might end
up having to fight, shoot and, if necessary, kill. Yet now we would be going in
with the expectation of killing three specific men. We had black-and-white
photos: Mohammed Youssef al-Najar, or Abu Youssef, an operations officer in
Black September; Kamal Adwan, one of Arafat’s top military planners; and
Kamal Nasser, a member of his leadership circle and his spokesman.
Nominally, it was understood we would seize them and bring them back to
Israel if possible. I had us exercise how we’d do that. But none of us really
believed that once our teams made it into the apartments, the Palestinians would
surrender. We assumed we would have no option but to kill them.
The killing was not the main issue. After all, I had drawn up a plan a year
earlier to target Arafat himself. Though no one in the sayeret took any pleasure
in having to take a life, at the end of the day we were a part of the army. Black
September, and Arafat’s Fatah more broadly, were not only at war with the
existence of Israel. They were behind a campaign of terror. Certainly there was
no significant public opposition, after the horror of Munich, to going after those
who were deemed to be part of the operational or political direction of Black
September. Our uneasiness inside the unit, however, revolved around what I’d
extolled as its “spirit” when I became commander. Beyond all the specific
qualities we needed to succeed in our operations, our image of ourselves was as
thinking soldiers. We might sometimes find it necessary to kill, but we were not
killers.
As I explained to each of the men I’d be leading on the operation, the
Mossad, Dado, and ultimately Golda had concluded that these three men were
appropriate targets in the wake of Munich. As a battalion-level commander, I
did not feel I was in a position to challenge their judgement, unless we had been
ordered to carry out an attack that was clearly improper or immoral. In that case,
I would have no hesitation in refusing. I said I viewed what we were being
asked to do in Beirut not as an act of revenge, but a deterrent. It was a way of
leaving no doubt in the minds of potential future terrorists that massacres like
Munich carried a heavy price.
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The more difficult question for some in the unit was how we were delivering
that message: breaking into apartments in the middle of the night. Yes, each of
the men was almost sure to be armed. But these flats were their homes. Very
likely, members of their families would be there. If the operation went as
planned, it was hard to imagine how any of the men would have a chance of
surviving. My answer was that ideally we would face them on a battlefield. Yet
given the nature of Black September, that was not going to happen. Mossad was
right to conclude this was the only way to isolate and attack them.
For Amitai Nachmani, who would be leading the attack on one of the
apartments, my words were not enough. Twice, he came to see me. It was not
that he didn’t trust or respect me as his commander, he said. But before leading
his team into Beirut, he needed to satisfy himself that the people we were
attacking, and the way we were attacking them, had been properly thought
through by the people giving the orders. I told him I understood. I did not tell
him that I was actually proud of him for asking – which, although I’m sure he
sensed it, was an omission I regretted when he lost his life in the Sinai Desert a
few months later. But I did go see Dado. I told him what Amitai had said. He
needed no convincing when I urged him to address the entire Beirut team and
answer their questions at our final planning meeting. He did so, explaining how
and why the decision to target these three Palestinians had been reached, to the
satisfaction of Amitai and the others.
We set off by missile boat from Haifa on the afternoon of April ninth. To my
relief, since I suffer from seasickness, the Mediterranean was calm as we
headed west towards Cyprus, before circling back in the direction of the
Lebanese coast after nightfall. I ran through the plan a final time with each
member of the team and then joined Amiram and Lonny in transforming
ourselves as best we could into credible dates for the evening. I’d vetoed dresses
or high heels, in favor of flared slacks and flats. We used standard-issue army
socks to pad out our bras. The Mossad had recruited a volunteer from a Tel
Aviv beauty parlor to help us with our lipstick, blue eyeliner and eye shadow.
The final touch was our wigs. Amiram and Lonny were blondes. I went as a
stylish brunette.
I’m reluctant to take issue with the Spielberg version of events, if only
because he had my part played by someone undeniably better looking than I
was, even as a 31-year-old. But in Munich, we are shown zooming into a
crowded harbor area on a line of motor boats, changing into drag only once
we’ve sprinted ashore, opening fire on a dockside kiosk and shooting our way
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into town like something out of the wild west. Had any of that happened, we
would have started a small-scale war, not to mention run the very real risk of
not getting out alive.
In fact, we left the missile boat, Manno’s offshore command post, in motor
dinghies out of earshot of Beirut and cut the engines as we got closer to the
shore. All of us, including the “women”, were wrapped in ponchos to avoid
showing up on Rue Verdun soaking wet. After getting out of the dinghies, we
were carried ashore by the SEALs to make sure we stayed dry. All of us had
loose-fitting jackets. The attack teams used them to conceal Uzis, explosive
charges to blow the locks on the apartment doors if they couldn’t be forced
open, a hand grenade or two and flashlights for the dash up the stairs. One
member of each team had a large plastic bag, with orders to take away any
easily accessible documents for Mossad analysts back home. As the mother of
the brood, I also had a large purse, in which I carried our radio to communicate
with the team leaders and with Manno on the missile boat if necessary.
Our SEAL pilots steered us well away from the more built-up part of the
seafront towards the Coral Beach, one of the private clubs on the southern end
of the shoreline. Four rented station wagons were waiting, two of them for us
and two for Amnon’s squad. Amnon set off toward the DFLP target. We headed
north towards the center of town. In the Spielberg film, my speaking role
consisted of two words, my name, as I introduced myself to my driver. In fact,
we had already met: during the run-through exercises in Tel Aviv. After we got
into the cars, I asked him how his scouting of the route had gone. He said
basically OK, but that he’d noticed a couple of cops patrolling near the top of
Verdun on one of his drive-bys. I assured him it would be fine. There would be
no reason for a policeman to suspect what we were up to, or who we were. Still,
I could tell he was nervous. “What’s wrong?” I asked. He hesitated before
replying. “I’ve never been in a place where there’s live fire,” he said. I told him
not to worry. He still wouldn’t be. “You’re going to be parked around the
corner, until it’s over. Then, it’s just about getting home.”
When we reached the top of Verdun, it was about ten minutes after one in
the morning. Our cars pulled over. I took Mookie’s arm as we began walking
the 150 feet or so to the first of the apartment buildings. The others followed in
knots of two or three. Both Mookie and I saw a policeman approaching on the
sidewalk. “Ignore him,” I whispered. We weaved a few inches to the side to let
him pass. The buildings were as we’d expected, with their lobbies set back from
a covered terrace in front. As the other teams made their way to the second
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building, I stayed with Mookie. His job, along with Yoni in his expanded team,
was to deal with Abu Youssef, the Black September operations officer. The
concierge must have been on a coffee break. The lobby was empty. The door
was unlocked, so they sprinted toward the interior staircase and made their way
up.
Adwan, the Fatah military man, and Kamal Nasser lived next door. Adwan,
Amitai’s target, was on the second floor. Nasser was on the third. As the teams
raced into the other building, Amiram and I posted ourselves near one of the
terrace pillars, occasionally exchanging a few words of what we hoped would
pass as girl talk. The SEAL officer and Dr Katz were near the top end of the
street as lookouts. We seemed seconds away from what had all the makings of
the operation we’d rehearsed back in Tel Aviv. The one major problem I’d
expected – security guards posted outside – hadn’t materialized. We’d been told
by the Mossad to look out for a grey Mercedes, but it wasn’t there.
The next stage was for each team leader to press the transmit button three
times on his radio. When I’d heard from all of them, I would send a signal back.
Then, at the count of five, each of them was supposed to start the attack.
Mookie’s signal came first. Yet before either of the other two teams checked in,
the trouble began. Suddenly, the door of a red Renault flew open almost directly
across the street from where Amiram and I were standing. A tall, sturdy, darkhaired
man climbed out. He looked across at us. He opened his leather jacket.
He pulled out a pistol and started to approach us. “Ein breirah,” I whispered to
Amiram. “No choice.” To this day, I remember the shock on the man’s face as
he watched us – a pair of 30something women – open our jackets and pull out
Uzis. Fortunately for him, we’d had to make allowances for concealment in
choosing our weapons. We’d left the Uzis’ stabilizing shoulder braces behind.
As our first shots hit, he had half-turned to run. Though wounded, he somehow
got back in the car. We kept shooting but he managed to drag himself out of the
far door and roll behind a waist-high wall on the other side of the street. One of
our shots obviously hit the electrical innards of the Renault, because the car
horn began blaring full-blast, as if someone had set off a modern-day car alarm.
So much for the element of surprise.
I saw three sets of lights suddenly come on in the otherwise dark apartment
buildings. They were in the flats that Mossad had identified. At least that part of
the plan was intact. These were the Palestinians we were after, and it seemed
they were at home. Seconds later, I heard an explosion. It was from Abu
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Youssef’s apartment, the one Mookie and Yoni had been assigned. Then, bursts
of gunfire from the other building.
A Land Rover was approaching from the gendarmerie at the bottom of the
road. We waited until it was about 50 feet away. Amiram and I opened fire, then
Dov and Shmuel Katz as well. The driver lost control and crashed into the side
of the Renault. There were at least four policemen inside. They, too, rolled
behind the wall on the far side of the street. Using the terrace columns for cover,
we kept shooting. Within a minute or so, only a couple of the cops fired back.
Though the three Palestinians could not know the reason for the gunfire and
the wailing of the car horn, they were now on their guard. When Mookie had
blown open the door to Abu Youssef’s flat – and he, Yoni and the other two
members of his team ran into the apartment – he saw the Black September man
peering out from the bedroom. Mookie raised his Uzi but the Palestinian ducked
inside and shut the door. All four of them fired through through the door. When
they went in, they found not only Abu Youssef but his wife, both dead. When
Zvika’s team burst in on Kamal Nasser, he, too, was ready. Crouching behind a
desk, he raised an automatic pistol and fired, grazing one of the team on the leg.
But in a burst of Uzi bullets, he, too, was killed.
I suspect that Amitai’s face-to-face meeting with Dado may have saved his
life. When he and his team cornered Kamal Adwan, he had an AK-47 raised and
ready to fire. Without even a split second’s unconscious hesitation, Amitai fired
first. His only regret afterwards was that Adwan’s wife and children saw it
happen, and that when they’d blasted open the apartment door, the force blew
open the door of a nearby flat, killing an elderly Italian woman. She had been
one of the Mossad’s sources of information on the Beirut apartments.
Mookie’s team came down first. They joined us, crouching behind the
columns, as sporadic shots continued from one of the policemen behind the wall
across the street. When a second police Land Rover approached, I at first
signaled the others to let it pass. But when it suddenly accelerated toward us, we
opened fire. It swerved, crashing into the rear bumper of the other one.
The other teams were back down now. I shouted for Dov to have the drivers
bring the station wagons from around the corner. When we began to pull away,
a third police Land Rover appeared. It sped up behind us. Mookie tossed back a
grenade. The last thing I saw as we made it to the end of the block and headed
toward the seafront was the front end of the vehicle exploding. We dropped
hollow, needle-sharp spikes out the window of the car as we left, so I knew that
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any other pursuing vehicle would be in no shape to follow for very long. But we
still had to avoid trouble on our way back out. I knew it would be a risk to go
back to the Coral Beach, so we took the shortest route to the sea, straight out to
the Corniche, the city’s main avenue along the Mediterranean. As we got closer,
we could hear gunfire. Obviously, the police, and the Palestinian militias,
realized something was not right. The advantage we had was that they would
have no idea what had happened on Rue Verdun, who we were, or where we
were going.
No sooner had we joined the Corniche than I saw another police Land Rover
about 200 yards ahead of us. This one had a spotlight on the roof, panning both
sides of the road. I told the driver to slow down. About 100 yards or so later,
reaching the place where we’d arranged for the SEALs to meet us, he and the
other station wagon pulled over to the side of the road. The Land Rover kept
driving. We slid down a steep embankment nearly 30 feet to the sea. Two of the
three assault teams had bags full of documents as well. We swam out to the
dinghies. When we had hoisted ourselves in, we headed out at first by paddle,
then under engine power, to the missile boat. The whole operation had taken
about a half an hour, only 10 minutes on Rue Verdun.
I radioed Manno on the way to the missile boat. A half-dozen words: the
agreed code phrase for “mission accomplished, targets achieved.” I could hear
relief in his voice when he replied. At first, I assumed that was because they
hadn’t heard from us during the operation. Our radio link to the missile boat had
gone down when we entered the built-up area around the apartment blocks.
Genuinely, despite Manno’s suspicion that I’d cut the connection. Yet he had
other reasons to exhale when he heard we had got out safely. Amnon’s team had
had a much tougher time. They met resistance from the moment they arrived at
the DFLP building. Two of his men were killed, another wounded. They set off
their explosive charges, but had to fight their way out. They only barely
managed to escape, carrying their fallen comrades with them and linking up
with another team of SEALs near the Coral Beach.
It was a little before six in the morning when I got home. I was careful not to
wake Nava. I’d changed out of my slacks and flats and surrendered my wig on
the missile boat. But I didn’t have the energy to deal with my makeup. The next
thing I remember was my wife standing by our bed as I stirred awake around
noon the next day. She looked at my eye makeup and lipstick, shook her head,
and smiled. She didn’t need to ask where I’d been. Israel radio had been full of
news about a major operation in Beirut.
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* * *
A few weeks later, my term as commander ended. The handover to my
successor, Giora Zorea, turned out to be more elaborate than my arrival, though
not at my instigation. With both Talik and Avraham in attendance, Dado
presented me with my fifth tzalash. It was not for Beirut. Not for the operation
against the Syrian officers, or the unprecedented access our intelligence
missions were providing into Egypt’s military communications. Dado said it
was for all of the above. And not just for leading the unit of which I’d been a
part almost from the start. It was for my part in bringing it to maturity. When I
replied, I am sure everyone knew I was speaking from the heart in saying that
my every moment with Sayeret Matkal had been a privilege. And that this latest
commendation was an award for the achievements the whole sayeret.
Dado did me another good turn. As my stint as commander drew to an end, I
knew what I hoped to do next in the army: to use my tank training to work my
way up the command chain in the armored corps. But like past sayeret
commanders, it was assumed I would first spend time at the US Marine Corps
staff college in Quantico, Virginia. I had other ideas. I wanted to exercise other
parts of my mind, by doing postgraduate work at a normal American university.
Dado agreed.
I still had to get accepted. The first step was to take the post-graduate entry
exam, the GRE. There were two parts to it. The first involved mathematics and
abstract thinking, the second English language. If my fate had rested on my
English grade, I’d have ended up at Quantico. I finished in the 28 th percentile.
But in the other part, I was in the 99.6 th percentile. I applied to four universities:
Harvard, Yale, MIT and Stanford. Amazingly, I got accepted by all of them. I
chose Stanford, mainly because it allowed a far greater latitude in choosing my
program of study. Also, the weather.
In early August 1973, Nava and I joined my parents and hers on a sunny
afternoon in Mishmar Hasharon to celebrate Michal’s third birthday and say
goodbye. We were heading to Palo Alto, California, with every expectation of
two years of intellectual stimulation, new friends, new experiences and
something approximating a more normal family life. My “other” family, the
Israeli army, also had reason to believe a period of new possibilities lay ahead.
The threat of terror remained, of course. There had also been a brief bout of
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nerves over military maneuvers by Anwar Sadat a few weeks earlier. But that
had come to nothing. In no small part due to the success of the raid on Rue
Verdun, Israel’s generals believed the balance of strength and security was on
our side and that, at least for a while, Israel could breathe a bit more easily.
But we were all about to be proven spectacularly wrong.
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Chapter Nine
The phone rang in our apartment in Palo Alto at 4:30 in the morning. We had
been in the US for barely six weeks. It was the Sixth of October 1973: Yom
Kippur, the holiest date on the Jewish calendar. I was still a bit groggy from the
night before. We had been out at a get-to-know-you event for some of the
several dozen Israelis, and several hundred American Jewish students, at
Stanford. While I only vaguely recognized the voice on the other end of the line,
her words instantly jolted me awake: “The boss is busy,” she said. “But he
wants you to know. A war has started back home.”
Her boss was Motta Gur, who was by now Israel’s military attaché in
Washington and was my nominal commander for my period in the United
States. “I need to talk to Motta,” I said. She passed him the phone. “I want you
to know I’m going back,” I told him. Motta’s reply took my mind back 15
months, to our on-again-off-again mission to abduct the Syrian officers, with
Motta and Dado in the command post, intent on reining in the “young bulls” of
the sayeret. “Ehud,” he said, “from what I’m hearing, I don’t think we are
missing a major war.”
“What’s this we?” I said. Motta was a general, at the upper reaches of the
armed forces, officially posted to Washington. I was a young officer, just
starting to work my way up the chain of field command. “I can’t afford to miss
even a non-major war,” I said. “I’ll check in with you when I get to New York.”
“Major” would turn out to be, if anything, an understatement. Yet all I knew,
as I kissed Nava and Michal goodbye and got a cab to San Francisco airport,
was that Israel was again at war. By the time I joined the swarm of Israelis
around the El Al desk at Kennedy eight hours later, the picture was clearer, and
more worrying with each new report from back home. Surprise attacks by Syria
and Egypt – armies we’d not just defeated, but humiliated, six years earlier –
had pinned down and pushed back our forces on the Golan Heights and in the
Sinai. Without any advance call-up, many reservists were only now reaching the
front lines.
As hundreds of people pressed for seats on the El Al flight, I was fortunate to
receive a boost up the pecking order from another man in line. Since the Sabena
operation, the existence of Sayeret Matkal had become a bit less secret. Still, the
identity of the sayeret commander was known to just a few people outside the
unit. So skittish were the army security people that before I’d left for Stanford,
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they even insisted I change my name. I was no longer Ehud Brog. I’d
Hebraicized it: to Barak, which seemed near enough to the original. Among the
few dozen outside the unit who did know about my role, however, were
paratroopers who’d joined us on various missions. One of them now told the El
Al people who I was. Not only was I given a seat on the first overnight plane
back to Tel Aviv. I found myself helping the airline establish a priority for
assigning seats to others: first, active officers in fighting units: armor, infantry,
the air force. Then, reservists, with the emphasis on those who’d seen active
service most recently.
As we were waiting to board, I phoned Uzi Dayan and asked him to meet me
at Lod the next morning. Then I called Motta again. “Ehud,” he said, with no
trace of irony, “it is an extremely serious war. Syrian tanks are getting close to
the outer fences of Nafakh” – our main command post on the Golan. “Good
luck.”
Uzi was waiting for me when we landed. Walking to his car, we ran into two
reserve armored officers who had also just arrived home. They expected to be
sent north, to help beat back the Syrian advance. When they asked me where I
thought I’d be going, I said, truthfully, I had no idea. “Wherever I can help,” I
said. Uzi drove us to the bor, the bunker built two floors underground in the
kirya. Usually, it functioned as the day-to-day operations center. But it was
where the commanders of the armed forces operated during times of war.
At officers’ school, we’d heard and read about the importance of throwing
the enemy “off balance”. Now, we were the ones off balance. The faces I saw
around me were gray and drawn. There were dead looks in the eyes of the
commanders and their staff. Some 30 hours after the surprise attack, all the selfconfidence
we’d felt since 1967 seemed to have evaporated. I looked into
several of the rooms where, months earlier, I’d run through operational plans as
sayeret commander. Inside each, a large wall map traced the course of the
fighting. Israeli forces were marked in blue, the Syrians and Egyptians in red,
with a timestamp for each position report scribbled at the side in black magic
marker. But I saw that the latest addition was from at least twelve hours earlier.
It was as if we’d lost track of what was happening, or were simply
overwhelmed by the pace of events.
I spoke briefly with Talik as he walked along the corridor. He looked 10
years older than when I’d last seen him. Then I spotted Ahrahle Yariv, who had
been called back into military intelligence at the start of the war. Looking
surprised to see me back in Israel, he pulled me close to him. “It’s important
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that you came back,” he said. “We’ll need each and every one of you to get the
job done.” Then he hugged me again. It was as if, knowing I would soon be
heading for the front line, he wondered whether we’d see each other again.
I made my way to the office that the chief of staff used in the bunker and
asked Dado’s secretary if I could see him. As she was deciding whether to let
me in, he emerged. Though obviously aware of the seriousness of the situation,
Dado radiated his usual calm and confidence. For the first time, I felt a bit more
hopeful. “Ma nishmah, Ehud? he asked, in Israelis’ everyday greeting. “What’s
up?” I told him I’d just come from the airport. “I can help in special forces,
infantry, armor. Whichever is most needed.”
“Leading a tank unit,” he said. “They’ve suffered heavy losses. Go see
Tzipori.” Motke Tzipori was in charge of organizing the armored units. He sent
me to Julis, the training base between Tel Aviv and Beersheva, where tanks
from maintenance units around the country were being brought. Once they were
reasonably operational, and as more reservists arrived from abroad, I would lead
a makeshift battalion to help reinforce our badly depleted forces in the Sinai.
* * *
I was just one of dozens of officers, in command of thousands of tireless and
courageous troops called on to try to turn the tide. Most were reservists. Many,
like me, had rushed home in the knowledge that for the first time since 1948,
there was the real risk Israel would be defeated. By the time I got my battle
orders – October 14, the ninth day of the war – Israeli forces on the Golan, at
enormous cost, had managed to turn back the Syrian attack. In this war, the men
from Sayeret Matkal were not bystanders. Most of the unit joined the fightback
in the north, where, under Yoni Netanyahu’s command, they took on and
defeated a Syrian commando force in the heart of the Golan. Yoni himself
risked his life to rescue a wounded officer from another unit behind enemy
lines.
In the Sinai, however, the situation remained dire. An initial counterattack,
launched while I was on my way to Julis, ended up in tatters, with whole
battalions all but destroyed, as our tanks came under fire from rocket-propelled
grenades and, above all, the wire-guided Saggers. Israel’s main advantage in
1967 – our command of the skies – was all but gone. By moving their surface-
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to-air missiles to the bank of the Suez Canal after the truce in the War of
Attrition, the Egyptians had created an effective no-fly zone a dozen miles into
the Sinai. After the failed counter-attack, with the commander of the air force
warning that we were nearing our minimum “red line” number of fighter jets,
Golda contacted the Americans to propose a cease-fire in the south. But having
retaken the Suez Canal and pushed into the Sinai, President Sadat was in no
mood to call a halt to the fighting. The only way we were going to end the war
was to retake the canal and defeat the even larger Egyptian forces on the other
side.
To the extent that my part in war was different from other junior officers, it
was because of my history in Sayeret Matkal. Other Israeli sayerets were
attached to specific fighting forces. Sayeret Golan, for instance, was part of the
Golani infantry brigade in the north; Sayeret Tzanhanim, was part of the
paratroopers. But “matkal” is the Hebrew word for the general staff, since it was
the generals in military headquarters who had allowed Avraham Arnan to create
the unit. From the start, we had answered directly to the kirya, which ultimately
had to approve our operations. When I rushed back from Stanford at the start of
the war, I was still just a 31-year-old lieutenant-colonel. I had spent two years in
command of the equivalent of an infantry battalion. But I knew, and in many
cases had worked with, the men at the very top of the armed forces, including
Dado, the chief of staff. So while other young reservists were reporting to their
former units for assignment, my first port of call was the command bunker,
where Dado himself, aware that I’d done intensive tank training before taking
command of the sayeret, ensured that I would play my part in trying to turn
back the Egyptian advances. I also knew, or at least had met, many of the
generals plotting the counteroffensive in the command bunker in the south:
Shmuel Gonen, known as “Gorodish”, who was head of the southern command;
Arik Sharon, who had left the same job for politics a few months earlier, but
was now commanding a division near the canal; and Chaim Bar-Lev, the former
chief-of-staff whom Golda had called back into emergency service. I even knew
the bunker. It was Um-Hashiba, the command and intelligence post from which
we had run Sayeret Matkal operations into Egypt after 1967.
So during the last, decisive 10 days of the war, I would witness first-hand the
tension among our top commanders in the Sinai, especially between Sharon and
Gorodish, since Arik wasted few opportunities to suggest, rightly but not always
helpfully, that his successor was woefully out of his depth. I would lead my
company back across the canal with one of the other main armored brigades in
the Sinai; take out Egyptian missile sites and help restore our jets’ command of
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the skies; strike out alone at night, with sayeret-issue night goggles, to bring
back the surviving soldiers after we realized we’d lost one of our APCs in a
battle with Egyptians; and even, because I’d been there before on sayeret
missions, leading a joint armored force across the Egyptian desert to complete
the encirclement of Sadat’s Third Army and effectively end the war.
Still, the memory which has stayed with me longest – summoning back all
the miscues and misjudgements of some of Israel’s top commanders, and the
terrible price paid by the men on the ground to turn things around – was the
fight for an experimental agricultural facility located just a few miles back from
our side of the Suez Canal.
* * *
On Israeli military maps, it was called the Chinese Farm. In fact, it was
Japanese experts who helped set it up in the then-Egyptian Sinai before the Six-
Day War. When we captured it in 1967, deciphering the characters on the
equipment had evidently proven beyond our linguistic capabilities. Thus,
Chinese Farm. Now, it was back in Egyptian hands. The sprawling complex,
with its web of large irrigation ditches, controlled the main transport corridor
from the Sinai to the bank of the canal.
Before dawn on October 16, one of the battalions in Arik Sharon’s brigade,
under a veteran paratroop commander named Danny Matt, had managed to
cross the canal on rubber rafts with an advance force of some 750 men and a
few dozen tanks. But it was a precarious beachhead, vulnerable to Egyptian air
strikes, artillery and Sagger fire. Hopes for any large-scale Israeli counterattack
rested on moving forward an enormous roller bridge, and hundreds more tanks,
to complete the crossing – impossible without retaking the Chinese Farm.
The first I knew of the scale of Egyptian resistance there was about four in
the morning on the seventeenth. I got a radio call ordering me to get my
battalion ready to move, ASAP. We were attached the other main armored
force, along with Arik’s, assigned to lead the crossing. It was under the
command of Avraham “Bren” Adnan, the former overall commander of Israeli
tank forces. “You’re going north of Tirtur 42,” Bren’s operations officer told
me. Even without checking our coded map, I knew it was the road running
along the upper edge of the Chinese Farm. He told me that the parachutists of
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Battalion 890, under Yitzhik Mordechai, were in trouble. “Go. Find them. Help
get them out.”
I knew Yitzhik personally, from his years in the paratroopers’ elite Battalion
890. I knew the man who was now in overall command of the paratroopers even
better: Uzi Yairi, who was in charge of Sayeret Matkal during my final years of
reserve duty at Hebrew University. Helicoptered into the Sinai just hours
earlier, the paratroopers had been sent to the Chinese Farm shortly before
midnight. As I would soon learn, they had no more idea than I did about what
they were about to face. They were told they were going in simply to clear out
bands of “tank-hunters”. They weren’t told of repeated attempts by some of
Arik’s top tank, paratroop and reconnaissance units to take the farm over the
previous 36 hours – attacks which had not only failed, but had cost dozens of
tanks and hundreds of men. Without artillery, armor or air support, they
immediately came under rifle, machine-gun, mortar and heavy artillery fire.
Our job was to get them out. Ordering my men to get ready for our first
combat mission of the war, I found myself face-to-face with a distraught and
determined friend from military intelligence. Yishai Izhar had arrived at Bren’s
headquarters the day before. When he saw me, he’d asked to join my battalion.
He was a brilliant electronics engineer and was about to assume command of
the technology unit in military intelligence. I told him we already had our
complement of tank crews, and I knew he’d never had any armored training. So
I found him a place in one of our APCs. But before joining military intelligence,
he’d been a company commander in Battalion 890. Hearing that we were going
to rescue his old unit, he insisted on joining me on the lead tank. I tried several
times to refuse, but he said I had no moral authority to stash him in an APC
when we were going in to rescue his friends and comrades. Aware that each
wasted minute might cost more of the paratroopers’ lives, I relented. I told
Yishai he’d be sitting across from me on the turret, right above Yasha Kedmi,
another friend who, having served under me in my first tank company in the
War of Attrition, had asked to join back at Julis. Yasha was our loader and
radio-operator. He got Yishai a machine gun, extra magazines for his Uzi and a
box of grenades.
We moved out through wave-like dunes in total darkness. After the first few
miles, the terrain leveled out a bit. Still, the sand was deep and the going slow.
When we got within a couple of miles of where I assumed Yitzhik and his men
would be, I radioed him. His voice was chilling. “They’re very close to us,
shooting,” he said. “I’ve got many wounded. Get here as quick as you can.”
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As we got closer, I could still see no sign of them. As dawn was about break,
I radioed Yitzhik to suggest he fire off a flare, but he thought that would put
them at even greater mercy of the Egyptians. Instead, he tossed out a smoke
grenade. We spotted it, more than a half-a-mile away, slightly below us and to
our right. I ordered us forward, leaving my second tank company behind for
covering fire. I led Company A, which included my most experienced tank
commander, Moshe Sukenik. Immediately behind us were our APCs, including
two carrying our medical team. My aim was to engage the Egyptian fire while
starting to evacuate Yitzhik’s men to one of the long, dry, irrigation ditches, 600
yards behind us.
We moved forward in a broad line with my command tank in the center. We
held our fire until we got closer. I still couldn’t see exactly where the men of
Battalion 890 were and didn’t want to risk hitting them. Only when we got
within about 70 yards did I spot the first of the paratroopers. They were in
groups of three or four in a thin line stretching 200 or 300 yards on either side
of us. They were lying behind whatever cover they could find: a bush, a clump
of debris, a small rise in the sand. Some were firing. Others were wounded.
From just a few yards away, Egyptian infantrymen were raking them with rifle
and machine-gun fire. They were now shooting at us as well, and we returned
fire. But the Egyptians, far outnumbering Yitzhik’s men, were spread out in a
network of foxholes, in some places connected by trenches. As we moved
forward, I ordered my APC commander to start evacuating the paratroopers
back to the irrigation ditch, with the support of a further group of courageous
reservists from another nearby APC unit.
A shell suddenly exploded 20 yards ahead of me. Others rained in around
our tanks. The source of the fire was straight ahead, about 1,300 yards away:
three SU-100s, Soviet-made World War Two “tank destroyers”. I trained the
main gun of my tank on one of the SU-100s and ordered the gunner to fire. I
used the battalion-wide radio frequency so the others would hear the order. But
when the dust and smoke had cleared, the SU-100s were still there. I ordered a
sight correction and said, again: “Fire”. Still, we missed. It was only then that I
realized why. Almost none of the tanks brought brought into Julis from the
maintenance units had included their “commander’s notebook” with their
checklists for calibrating and firing – a major problem, since many of the
reservists had last been in a tank years before. I ordered the gunners to use their
telescopes, parallel to the main gun, instead.
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We were being hit by small-arms and RPG fire from all sides. On the turret
of our tank, Yishai and I were firing back, our Uzis on automatic, and throwing
grenades. I could hear bullets pinging off the turret and the body of the tank.
Then, from our far right flank, came the shoulder-mounted Saggers, honing in
with their eerie blue-red glow, juddering towards us as the Egyptian soldiers
corrected their trajectories. One of the missiles barely missed us, and the silky
wire from its guidance mechanism was tangled over our turret. I tried using my
binoculars to identify where they were coming from, but it was no use.
To my right, I could see that the APCs had completed their first evacuation
run and were coming back for more of Yitzhik’s men. There was a raggedness
about it all: one APC, then a couple of others, then a gap, then another one or
two. They were doing whatever they could, whenever they could, as the
Egyptian fire continued to intensify. A few of Yitzhik’s men, whether desperate
or dazed, simply stood up and starting walking west, toward the canal, only to
be cut down by Egyptian gunfire.
I directed Moshe Sukenik to take half the company and head toward the
Saggers to try to take them out, even though we both knew that he’d have to
risk heavy fire before they got close enough. He had two-inch mortars on his
turret, but their range was only 500 yards, far less than the Saggers. Every 45
seconds or so, a salvo of Saggers zeroed in on our tanks and APCs. Within a
couple of minutes, two of the tanks were hit. One was on fire. The SU-100 tankdestroyers
were still there as well. Egyptian infantrymen were spraying us with
small arms fire. The whole area was swathed in grayish smoke. Every minute or
two, another tank or APC took a direct hit. There was a smell, too, which, once
experienced, never leaves your memory: the scent of burnt human flesh.
The fire from the foxholes was getting worse. “Run over them,” I ordered
my tank driver. “Start with the foxhole in front of us.” He jerked us forward and
we plowed over the first Egyptian position. “Reverse, get the one to the right,” I
said. As he backed up, I was shocked to see a surviving Egyptian soldier,
shrugging off a thick blanket of sand from his shoulders, raise an RPG launcher
at us from just 15 feet away. We were close enough to look into each other’s
eyes. I raised my Uzi and shot him before he could fire. Rifle and grenade fire
continued from along the line of foxholes. A second length of the Saggers’ silklike
guidance wire tangled over our main gun. Yishai was firing at the
Egyptians from the other side of the tank. We both tossed grenades in the
direction of the worst of the gunfire.
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It was then, suddenly, that I saw Yishai had taken a bullet in the side of his
neck. Blood was spurting from the wound. His face was contorted in pain. He
looked at me, raising his hands upward, as if to say: “I did my best. It’s over
now.” I pressed hard on the wound, trying to stem the flow. But he slipped out
of my grasp and collapsed into Yasha Kedmi’s arms. Yasha propped him up and
kept trying to staunch the bleeding. I turned toward the Egyptian soldier who
had shot Yishai, less than 20 feet to my left. Keeping myself as low as possible
above the turret, I fired into his chest. He tumbled into the foxhole. As I kept
shooting, Yasha told me Yishai was dead. “Are you sure?” I asked. When he
said yes, I ordered the driver to back up. We drove a few dozen feet, to where a
group of the paratroopers was taking cover. With their help, we lowered his
body from the tank, and then returned to the battle.
Barely ten minutes had passed since it began. Two SU-100s were now
spewing smoke and out of action. The third had withdrawn. But the Egyptians
were still firing. Five of our tanks had been hit. Two were on fire. One APC was
smoldering, its commander severely wounded. I knew that if we stayed much
longer, we would end up like other armored units during Israel’s first, failed
counterattack in the early days of the war. We would risk being wiped out. As
far as I could tell, all the surviving paratroopers had been brought out or had
managed to hobble to the irrigation ditch. I ordered Sukenik to abandon his
attempt to take out the Saggers, and we withdrew behind the irrigation ditch.
It was only then that I realized that alongside two of our crippled tanks there
was still a group of a dozen men: six crew members from my battalion and six
of Yitzhik’s men. It took nearly two hours to get them out. We used our tank
guns to try to reduce the intensity of the fire from the Egyptians around them. I
ordered one of our APCs to go get them. I rounded up all our smoke grenades,
and the APC crew used them to create a smokescreen, the only way I could
think of to reduce the danger of being targeted by the Saggers. It worked, but it
required incredible guts for the men in the APC to pull it off.
The battle had required guts of every man in the battalion. They had found a
way to conquer the first and most powerful enemy on a battlefield: fear. I felt it,
too. But it’s easier for a commander. When you’re leading people into combat,
you don’t have time to be afraid. You have to assess and evaluate, second by
second, everything going on around you. You have to make instant decisions
and ensure they’re being carried out. The people under your command are
waiting to hear your voice, and watching your actions, too. If you lose control at
any point, not only is your life at stake. Theirs are too.
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Early that evening, we were ordered to rejoin Bren’s division to be ready for
the crossing. When I reported that three of my soldiers were still missing, I was
ordered to inform the commander of the battalion replacing us to find the
missing men. The fight for the Chinese Farm was still not over. It would be
another 12 hours before, in a co-ordinated push by a strengthened armor and
infantry force, Israeli forces finally drove most of the Egyptians out. What
tenuous gains we’d made until then had come at an enormous price. Of
Yitzhik’s 300 men, nearly 40 were killed, and many others wounded. I’d led
around 130 people into battle. More than 35 were injured. Eleven were dead,
including Yishai Izhar and Motti Ben-Dror, our medical officer, killed while
treating the wounded. One of our missing soldiers was found alive. The other
two could only be brought home for burial.
As I began to hear the details of the previous days’ fighting, I became more
astonished, and angry. Israel’s tactics in the battle for the Chinese Farm had
involved a series of piecemeal strikes by units obviously too small, and
inadequately supported or co-ordinated, to succeed. The problem wasn’t the
choice of units. No one could doubt the record of Battalion 890, or of the men
Arik had sent in before Yitzhik arrived. But there was no way they were going
to take the area on their own. I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t an attempt
to assemble a force that might actually have been strong enough: parachutists,
tanks, artillery. I felt I knew at least part of the answer from the two nights I had
spent in the Um-Hashiba command post before joining Bren’s division. By
dawn on October 16, the first of Arik’s men had crossed the canal. By the
afternoon, although the big roller-bridge was still not ready, a smaller pontoon
bridge was available. Everyone knew we needed to get control of the Chinese
Farm. But all the field commanders were focused the real task, and the real
prize: crossing the canal and defeating the Egyptians on the other side.
Now, at least, the main crossing was underway. Bren had chanced the fact
that, with Yitzhik pinned down at the Chinese Farm and the Egyptians
concentrating their fire on his men and mine, he could get the pontoon bridge
through. From late afternoon on October 17, his first units began to cross. On
the morning of October 18, my battalion joined them. There was still fighting
ahead, and we were part of it: taking out the SAM sites, engaging units of the
Third Army and, with Sadat now pressing the Americans for a cease-fire and
many Egyptian units clearly losing the will to fight on, racing against the clock
to encircle and defeat it five days later.
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When the guns finally fell silent, I had time to give full rein to my thoughts.
There were obviously fundamental questions about how the war had happened,
starting with why we hadn’t known ahead of time that two neighboring states
were about to attack us – despite sayeret intercepts that could have given us
time to call up all our reserves. Disentangling the details would take months.
But we already knew the human cost of those failures. Hundreds of Israeli
soldiers had been killed. The final number would be around 2,800, nearly four
times our losses in 1967. Thousands were wounded, some crippled for life.
Many of the dead were men whom I’d grown up with or served with, including
more than 20 in my own battalion. Some of the dead in other units were close
friends.
I felt exhausted. I also realized that Nava, thousands of miles away in Palo
Alto, and my parents on the kibbutz could still not be sure I had escaped the fate
of so many others. I learned later that my parents had been making daily calls to
Digli, who was working in intelligence in the kirya. Though he had no way of
knowing where I was, he kept assuring them that he had checked with my
commanders and that I was alive and well. Nava had been relying on American
news reports and the relayed assurances from my parents, which she was
seasoned enough as an army wife to treat with skepticism.
I missed her badly, and little Michal. I felt the need to hear their voices. I
drove to one of the brigade communications units. There was a long line in front
of the radio telephone. But within a half-hour, I managed to get a crackly
connection to California. Nava burst into tears when she heard my voice. I told
her I was fine, and that I couldn’t wait to see her and our little girl. Then, my
own eyes dampening, I reeled off the names of friends who had died. In
addition to the brave men I’d lost in my own battalion, there were more than a
dozen others I already knew of. A pair of brothers from Mishmar Hasharon, a
couple of years younger than me, in separate units, but killed within hours of
each other. Another childhood friend, from a nearby moshav, named Rafi
Mitzafon. And Shaul Shalev, a gifted philosophy postgraduate and a brave tank
commander whom I’d become friends with at officers’ school. He’d rescued
three dozen troops from one of the Bar-Lev fortifications in the first hours of the
war, only to be killed trying to get to a tank crew who had taken refuge a few
miles back from the canal.
I’d lost two wonderful sayeret comrades, too: Amit Ben-Horn, the soldier
who’d relayed the order from Motta to abort our second attempt to abduct the
Syrian officers in Lebanon, and Amitai Nachmani, the officer who had
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demanded a meeting with Dado before our attack in Rue Verdun. Amit died in
the fighting near Ismailia, at the northern end of the canal, as Arik Sharon’s
units pushed on after the crossing. The day before the end of the war, both
Amitai and Amiram Levin were part of an operation to take over the Fayid Air
Base across the canal. When an Egyptian RPG hit their Jeep, Amiram was
wounded. Amitai was killed.
I thought, too, of Yishai Izhar: the friend struck down beside me, who I’d
cradled in my arms on the top of my tank, trying to stop the bleeding.
“Oh Ehud,” Nava said. “It’s like 1967 all over again.”
“No,” I said. “Worse. Much worse.”
A few weeks later, I was coming out of the kirya when I ran into another
friend, whom I’d first met at Hebrew University. Like me, he had been a junior
officer in 1967. His name was Ron Ben-Ishai. He would go on to become a top
journalist, covering the military for Israel’s best-selling newspaper, Yediot
Achronot. In the early autumn of 1967, we were still transfixed by the idea of
being able to visit areas of biblical Israel, which for years had been under
Jordanian rule. With a few other friends who were young officers, nine of us in
all, Ron and I embarked on a trek from the southern edge of Jerusalem, weaving
our way through the Judaean Desert toward Kumeran, on the Dead Sea.
Now a very different war had come and gone. I’d fought in it. Ron, as what
is now called an embedded journalist, had been with Danny Matt’s paratroopers
when they’d crossed the canal. He was alongside another of Arik’s units
fighting out of the bridgehead on the far bank of the canal. That both of us had
seen terrible suffering over the past few weeks did not need saying. But Ron
said he wanted to show me something. Fishing into his wallet, he took out a
carefully folded photograph. He had taken it in 1967, just six years earlier, to
mark our Judaean trek. There we were. All nine of us. Young. Full of optimism.
And probably a bit full of ourselves as well.
Ron and I were the only two left alive.
* * *
We had won the war, and not just because our forces were now within 60
miles of Cairo, and only 25 from Damascus. We had been attacked by two huge
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armies: one-and-a-half million soldiers. Thousands of tanks. Hundreds of
fighter jets. Other, much larger nations had endured months, even years, of hell
before prevailing in such circumstances: the Soviet Union, for instance, with its
huge strategic depth, or France, rescued by its American-led allies, during
World War Two.
But any pride in having prevailed was outweighed by simple relief Israel had
survived. Even that was nothing compared to the sadness felt over friends lost,
and the resentment and sense of betrayal toward the generals and political
leaders who had failed to prepare the country for the surprise attacks, or the
initial confusion and dissension in some of our commanders’ response to the
early setbacks on the ground. Dozens of meetings were held in military units
after the war to talk about what had gone wrong. I was not the only young
officer to notice that the higher up the command chain they went, the more
unedifying they became. After we’d heard one too many senior officer finetuning
his account with each retelling, minimizing his share for the huge losses,
a new phrase entered Israeli army slang. Sipurei kravot – “battle stories” – were
the words usually used to describe a normal debriefing process. That expression
was now amended, to shipurei kravot. Battle improvements.
I was assigned to convert my makeshift force into a regular armored training
unit: Battalion 532, and that slightly delayed my reunion with Nava and Mikhal.
But in their absence, I found us a larger apartment in the Tel Aviv suburb of
Ramat Hasharon. Nava and I agreed that at the first opportunity, I’d return to
California and we’d fly back together. I went at the end of the year. We bought
a refrigerator and a washing machine for the new flat – better models, and
cheaper, than those available in Israel – and came home. Those few December
days in Palo Alto were a jumble of emotions. Happiness, at being back together.
But also a sobering sense, now that I was outside Israel for the first time since
the war, of the enormity of the threat we’d faced and the frustration and fear
Nava must have felt as we’d fought to defeat it. The year-end news
retrospectives we watched on American TV were full of film clips from the first
hours of the war, when it looked very possible we would lose. I remember being
struck by the thought that, if we had lost, if Israel had ceased to exist,
ceremonies of memorial and mourning would have been held across America,
probably in Stanford. But that once the shock and sadness had passed, Israel’s
disappearance would not have impinged on a single NFL Sunday, or delayed a
single family shopping visit to J. C. Penny.
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My command of Battalion 532 lasted only a few more months. On April 1,
1974, an official commission of inquiry published its initial report on the war. It
was scathing in its assessment of our intelligence failings, for which it placed
the main blame the officer who had been promoted the year before as head of
military intelligence: Eli Zeira, the man who had addressed us on the sayeret
base before the the 1967 and so confidently predicted the outcome. It also took
aim at two other commanders. Gorodish, as head of the southern command, was
one. The other was Dado. As chief-of-staff, he was held ultimately responsible
for the intelligence failings and for not having ordered at least a partial call-up
of our reserves.
In Eli’s case, I recognized the very fact of our being caught by surprise made
his position untenable. In fact, as I learned more details about what had
happened, I realized the commission had, if anything, understated the
seriousness of his errors. In the run-up to the war, Eli had resisted multiple
requests from other intelligence officers to activate what the commission called
our “special sources” of intelligence: the communications intercepts we’d
planted deep inside Egypt. Worse, he had indicated to the few generals who
were aware of their existence that he had activated them, implying that his lack
of concern about the possibility of an Egyptian was based on our intercepts.
Because Dado was one of the people misled, his fall struck me as profoundly
unfair. He had devoted his whole adult life to the defense of our country. After
the inquiry report, he was never again the same person. He developed an
obsession with fitness and exercise. Psychologists might have called it
displacement activity. I wondered whether it was a kind of self-punishment.
Either way, it may well have killed him. At age 50, less than three years after
the war, he died of a heart attack after a day of running and swimming.
Almost every level of command was thrown into flux after the inquiry
report. So was the political landscape. Both Golda and Dayan bowed to growing
public pressure and resigned. The premium was on finding replacements who
were sufficiently experienced, but did not bear responsibility for the errors of
the war. For Prime Minister, the choice fell on Yitzhak Rabin. He had strong
military credentials, of course. But he had left the army and entered politics, and
had been out of Israel for several years as Israel’s ambassador to Washington.
He had joined Golda’s government only weeks before the war, in the relatively
minor role of Minister of Labor. Much the same thing happened in the army.
Only one of the generals who had been in the running to succeed Dado before
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the war was unscathed: Motta Gur. He, too, had been in Washington. Within
days of the inquiry report, he was called back to replace Dado as chief-of-staff.
My role changed, too. Not everyone emerged from the war with his
reputation diminished. The lion’s share of the credit for Israel’s eventual victory
went to the rank and file of our citizen army. But in the officers’ corps, there
were also examples of coolheadedness in crisis, and leadership. One was
Moussa Peled, who was now made head of the armored corps. My overall
wartime commander, Bren, replaced Gorodish as head of the southern
command. And Dan Shomron, whose 401 st armored brigade played a critical
part in defeating the Egyptians, was another. Dan and I had first got to know
each other well at Karameh, then during my period as sayeret commander. We
would go on in the years ahead to work more closely together than almost any
senior officers in the military. He was now promoted as well. He became
katzhar, overall head of infantry and paratroop forces, and he recommended me
as his successor in Brigade 401.
Still, I knew that the Motta would have the final word, with input from the
two senior officers most directly affected: Peled and Bren. I don’t think either of
them had anything against me personally. But both were tank officers through
and through. There were other candidates to succeed Dan who, unlike me, had
spent their whole careers in the armored corps.
I heard formally I was being considered as I was about to return to my
battalion from Ramat Hasharon one Sunday morning. I was ordered to report to
Motta’s office. When I got there, he gestured toward the small table at the side.
He already had two other visitors: Moussa Peled and Bren. “You probably
know you’re a candidate for taking over 401,” he said. “These two gentlemen
think you’re not yet ready. What do you say?”
If I’d had more time to prepare, I might have answered more subtly. But I
did very much want to be given command of the 401st, and had no doubt I
would be a worthy and dedicated commander. “I don’t know exactly what the
two gentlemen mean by whether I’m ready,” I replied. “So I have a proposal.
Find a battle-tested officer whom you trust. Have him check who among the
three of us, me or these gentlemen, is more familiar with the tank and its
systems. Who of us knows better the terrain, in Syria or Egypt, day or night,
where we have to fight? Who knows the operational requirements for an
armored force, and the armored doctrine these gentlemen signed off on. Finally,
which one of us has spent more time in a turret of a tank, on the battlefield,
shooting at enemy forces and being shot at by the enemy?”
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There was silence, a grave look from Peled and Bren, the hint of a smile on
Motta’s face, and the meeting was over. Several days later, I was notified of his
verdict. I would indeed be named the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade
in the Sinai, and promoted to full colonel.
Our base was a 15 miles from the canal. It was a huge expanse of sand
ringed by metal fencing. We spent three months at a time in this forward
deployment and three months in our rear base, 50 miles from the canal. During
one of our forward deployments, Motta came on an inspection visit. He wanted
to discuss how we planned defend the area near the canal in the event of a
repeat of the 1973 war. I told him everything we were doing in the brigade was
aimed at ensuring flexibility. I had also been thinking about some of the broader
issues relating to our defenses in the south. “No matter how good our tactics or
plans,” I said, “what worries me is that we’re still not looking at our overall
approach to defense against Egypt. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that in 1967, when
we captured Sinai, it was in order to have a buffer zone. We had 150 miles of
sand between southern Israel and the canal. But when the Egyptians attacked in
1973, we defended the desert as if it was the walls of Jerusalem!”
Since the 401st was one of two regular brigades on the Egyptian front, it was
not easy to make the four-hour drive home to Ramat Hasharon. When I got
word Nava was going into labor with our second child, I was leading a training
exercise five or six miles from our base. As she was on her way to the hospital,
I grabbed my car and headed north. Unlike Michal’s birth, this one was not
easy. When the baby emerged, she was struggling to breathe. The immediate
danger passed, but she was placed in an incubator. When I got to the hospital,
Nava was asleep. I was taken to see our tiny daughter, Yael. When the nurse
left, I noticed the baby’s pinkie trapped in the plastic cover of the incubator. I
started banging on the window of the room. The nurse rushed back. With a look
of sympathy mixed with world-weary experience of other fathers in similar
panic, she raised the cover, folded Yael’s tiny hands onto her stomach, and all
was well.
It was another health crisis which hastened the end of my period as brigade
commander. But this time, I was the one in the hospital. I nearly collapsed from
high fever and exhaustion. The initial suspicion was some kind of
contamination linked to the rudimentary sanitation in the Sinai. When the
symptoms persisted, the doctors suggested I probably had hepatitis B. Years
later, better diagnostic tools ruled all that out. I’ve never discovered what the
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illness was. But for nearly six months, getting through the day, sometimes a
single task, remained a struggle.
I did not want to leave my command. I was still barely 18 months into the
role, and anxious to get further command experience. But just as I was feeling at
my weakest, there was another belated casualty from the 1973 war. This time, it
was Uzi Yairi. No one could reasonably have held him responsible for the
losses suffered by Battalion 890 at the Chinese Farm. I’m sure that if he’d
known what happened to the Israeli forces that had already tried to take it over,
he would never have allowed Yitzhik to go in without adequate armor and
artillery support. Still, he blamed himself. In obvious distress after the war, he
was reassigned as an operational officer in military intelligence in the kirya.
He was still at his desk when Fatah terrorists landed on Tel Aviv’s seafront a
little before midnight on March 4, 1975. They were spotted by a police patrol,
which opened fire. The Fatah men ran from the beach, firing Kalashnikovs and
tossing grenades. A block in from the sea, they burst into a modest, three-story
building: the old Savoy Hotel. They shot and killed three people in the lobby
and took the rest of the staff and guests hostage.
Sayeret Matkal was called in. As the unit went through final preparations for
their assault, Uzi showed up. He had a rifle. He was in his everyday officer’s
uniform, unlike the sayeret team, which was weighted down by special-forces
gear. As a former commander of the sayeret, he persuaded them he could help
take out the terrorists and locate the hostages. Shortly before dawn, led by
Amiram Levin, they attacked. They killed three of the Fatah men within
seconds. But another terrorist set off an explosion, collapsing most of the top
floor. Uzi joined a couple of the other sayeret men in search of the hostages. He
was shot in the head and neck. Seven of the eight terrorists were killed, the
other captured. Though five hostages were freed, five lost their lives. Uzi died
on the operating table of Ichilov Hospital, a few hundred yards from the kirya.
* * *
Though I doubt Uzi’s family and friends would agree, my gut feeling was
always that his death was one more result, however indirect, of the shambolic
way in which we’d organized our attacks on the Chinese Farm. That was part of
the reason for my reluctance when Motta told me he wanted me to take Uzi’s
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place in the kirya. I realized I was the only available replacement with a similar
background, and sayeret experience. But I was still gaining brigade command
experience. And I couldn’t help feeling the role was intended as a kind of restand-recovery
cure because of my illness, not too different from the reason Uzi
had been given the job. Still, I did need rest and recovery. Even if fully healthy,
I’m not sure I could have convinced Motta to change his mind. In my weakened
state, I had no chance.
Skeptical though I was about the job, it opened up a new world to me. The
kirya itself was not new territory. But now, I became exposed to how how the
huge range of intelligence information we gathered was collated, evaluated,
assessed and ultimately applied. Helping with this process was my new
assignment. There were, in fact, two of us. We were both colonels and together
we provided the intelligence background for military operations. I had the post
on inside the military intelligence department. My opposite number was in the
operations department – the more senior role, in a way, because he had a more
direct link to the people actually doing the operations. He was a friend from
officers’ school: Dovik Tamari’s younger brother, Shai. Once a week, Shai and
I put together an assessment report. Then, we’d join Motta’s operations meeting
with the general staff, often attended by the man who’d followed Dayan as
defense minister, Shimon Peres.
The analysis of military intelligence included separate teams for Egypt and
Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Iraq and other neighboring states, as well as other
countries and superpower relations. It relied on all our raw intelligence material,
from both military intelligence and Mossad, as well as academic and specialist
literature. Each desk dealt not just with military issues, but political and
economic developments. I was responsible, along with Shai and a few others,
for bringing all this together. This meant frequent meetings with members of the
analysis teams. For the first six months or so, I barely uttered a word in these
sessions. I listened, not just absorbing the information but getting to understand
the way the analysts worked and thought.
Our whole intelligence department was responsible for drafting an annual
strategic assessment for the army and the government. The final report was
written by Shlomo Gazit, who had succeeded Eli Zeira as head of military
intelligence. Before we sent it to print, he held a long meeting, inviting the
views of all the military intelligence officers. The focus in 1976, just three years
after the war, was on the risks of a new surprise attack. At the end of the
discussion, however, he said: “We know we run a real danger for the country if
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we fail to spot the signs of a war. But has any of you asked yourselves
something I find myself wondering from time to time? Is there not a similar risk
if we miss the signs of an opportunity for peace?”
His words stuck with me for the rest of my time in public life. They also had
a strong impact on me at the time. One of the benefits of my job was that I
could read the full inquiry report from the 1973 war, including the portions that
had been kept classified. Some dealt with the political situation before the war.
Golda had relied heavily on a “kitchen cabinet” of trusted ministers and a few
close advisers. The inquiry material described how Sadat had been extending
negotiating feelers before the war. And how Golda, Eli Zeira, Dado and Dayan
had responded. It was like an exercise in collective reinforcement. They agreed
the Arab countries would not simply go on living with the humiliation of their
defeat in 1967. At some stage, they would try to regain the initiative, on the
battlefield. But none appeared to think through the implications of this for our
political approach. Perhaps, like Eli Zeira in 1967, they assumed a kind of
historical inevitability of Israeli triumph. Though we’d ending up prevailing in
1973, it was impossible not to wonder whether, as Shlomo suggested, we had
missed the signs of a possible peace beforehand.
Now, however, we were facing an escalating challenge from an enemy with
no interest in peace: the armed Palestinian groups. The Democratic Front took
over a school in northern Israel a half-year after the war. In March 1975, Fatah
had seized the Savoy. And about a year into my posting in the kirya, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched an even more audacious
operation.
It became known by the name of the airport where the ordeal ended.
Entebbe. And when it began I, like Uzi Yairi, was sitting at my desk.
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Chapter Ten
Sunday is an ordinary working day in Israel, and the first sign that June 27,
1976 would be any different came shortly after noon. It was an urgent message
from Lod Airport, now renamed in honor of David Ben-Gurion, who passed
away after the 1973 war. Radio contact had been lost with Air France Flight 139
from Tel Aviv to Paris, shortly after a stopover in Athens.
We couldn’t know for sure what had gone wrong. Maybe a mechanical
malfunction, a glitch in the electronics, a crash. Or a hijack. But we did know
there were roughly 300 passengers and a dozen crew on board. Many of the
passengers were Israelis, and others were Jews from abroad. Ever since the
Sabena hijacking four years earlier, whenever a civilian airliner was thought to
be under attack within three hours of Israel, step-one in our response had been
automatic. Sayeret Matkal was ordered to the airport.
Because I’d commanded the Sabena operation – the first, and still the only,
time we had attacked and freed a hijacked plane – it was probably inevitable I
would take some part in figuring out how, or whether, to intervene if the Air
France plane turned out to have been hijacked. But my pivotal role, as the crisis
intensified, was down to a combination of factors: my broader experience as
sayeret commander, the fact that I now worked in the kirya, just one floor up
from the chief of staff, and, as so often, pure chance.
As the sayeret assembled at the airport, its current commander –Yoni
Netanyahu, my former deputy – was hundreds of miles away in the Sinai,
preparing for an operation across the canal. So it was Mookie Betzer, now
Yoni’s deputy, who began briefing the men for a possible hostage rescue in case
the jet returned to Israel. At the kirya, we were also without our commander:
Motta was in the Negev observing a major military exercise. So it was his
deputy – the head of the operations branch, Kuti Adam – who buzzed me on the
intercom at two in the afternoon and summoned me to his office.
By now, we knew the plane had been hijacked, but that it wasn’t heading
back to Israel. The terrorists had renamed it “Arafat” and it was on its way to
Libya. I took the stairs down to Kuti’s office, two floors below mine, and he
immediately handed me a large, black-and-white aerial photo. It showed the
international airport in Benina, just outside Benghazi on the eastern edge of
Libya. “Can we do anything, Ehud?” he asked me. I didn’t say no outright. But
I told him that even if we had a treasure trove of intelligence about Benina –
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which, I soon verified, we didn’t – the obstacles would be enormous. Unlike the
Sabena jet, this one was a wide-bodied Airbus, and El Al had none of those in
its fleet. Even we could find a way to make sure a sayeret team got briefed on
the airliner, we’d be mounting an attack-and-rescue operation a thousand miles
away. And even if we could take out the terrorists, we were almost certain to
face opposition from the former army colonel who ruled Libya, Mummer
Ghaddafy. The chance of success seemed slim, the risks enormous.
Soon, however, Kuti’s question ceased to matter. Later Sunday night, Flight
139 took off again. Before leaving Libya, the hijackers freed a passenger: an
Israeli dual national, with a British passport as well, who managed to convince
them she was going into labor. We learned through her that there were four
hijackers: two Arabs and two Europeans. It was a PFLP operation, but included
members of the far-left West German Baader-Meinhof terror group. They
forced the pilot to head for the east African state of Uganda. On Monday
evening, it landed at Entebbe Airport, 20 miles outside the Ugandan capital of
Kampala and just a couple of hundred yards from the shore of Lake Victoria. It
was five times further away than Benghazi.
Yet with each passing hour, increasingly alarming radio and television
reports focused on the obvious agony of the hundreds of captive passengers. To
this day, I’ve never been able to establish why it was a further 24 hours before
we started seriously to work out if there might be some way for us to free them.
Prime Minister Rabin was clearly asking himself the same question, however,
because on Tuesday afternoon, he called Motta in the Negev. It was now a full
53 hours after the hijacking, he said. What the hell we were doing to try to come
up with a plan? Motta was immediately summoned back to Jerusalem for an
emergency meeting of the government. As he was on his way back from there
to the kirya, Kuti called me back down to his office. “Motta just told them that
there is a military option,” he said, with a wry smile. Kuti had been a Haganah
officer in 1948, in charge of the Golani brigade, head of both the northern and
the southern command, and had known Motta for years. “That means we now
have to find one.”
I had just begun briefing a few of the analysts in my office when Motta
returned. When I got to his office, Kuti waved both of us across the hallway to
the big, rectangular conference room where general staff meetings were held.
On the side of the room was a globe. Giving it a spin, he said: “Nu, Motta. Tell
me, when you told the government we had a military option, did you even know
where Entebbe is?” Motta didn’t so much as crack a smile. “We have to find a
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response,” he said. “I’ve committed us. Ehud, I want you to check what can be
done. Take whatever you need, from wherever you want. Bring me suggestions
by seven tomorrow morning.” Then, he said, we would go brief the Defense
Minister, Shimon Peres.
I assembled a team the same way we’d prepared for special-operations
missions in the sayeret: looking for information, intelligence and above all
experience and insight from whoever I thought was likely to make that alwaysnarrow
difference between failure and success. My first calls went to Mookie
Betzer and another of my most trusted and experienced sayeret comrades,
Amiram Levin. Then I brought in Ido Ambar, the personal aide to air force
commander Benny Peled, and Gadi Shefi, the commander of the Shayetet 13
SEALs. Finally, two officers from Dan Shomron’s office. Since Dan was
katzhar, in overall command of paratroop and infantry forces, it was critical to
keep him in the picture. I told them all that we’d be working through the night,
and that I had to be able to tell Motta and Shimon by the morning whether we
really could mount a rescue mission.
I still thought I’d end up having to tell them no. However difficult the
obstacles we’d faced with Sabena, they were almost child’s play compared to
getting a sayeret assault team 5,000 miles across the continent of Africa,
surprising the terrorists, freeing the hostages unharmed and getting them out.
That was even assuming, as I did at that point, that we wouldn’t face armed
opposition from the troops of Uganda’s increasingly tyrannical president, Idi
Amin. Amin had begun to align himself politically with the Palestinians in the
past few years – one reason, no doubt, the terrorists had landed there. But he
had actually been on a paratroop course in Israel before taking power in 1971.
We had sent officers to help train his army in the early 1970s.
Now, I discovered, Mookie himself had been on one of the training missions.
“Their men aren’t great fighters, at least at night,” he said, an insight of obvious
relevance to planning a commando attack, if we could get that far. When
Ambar, the air force aide, spoke up, I finally began to feel we might at least be
able to put together the outline of a plan. He’d brought with him a copy of the
standard reference book on world airports, which gave us at least a general idea
of the layout of Entebbe. He also said that the air force had run a training
program for the Ugandans. In Entebbe. He’d contacted one of the reserve pilots
who had been on the training mission, and he was on his way to join us.
Still, time was short we were nowhere near being able to recommend a
specific plan of action. The hijackers had set a deadline – noon on Thursday,
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July 1, now less than 36 hours away. Having moved the passengers off the plane
to one of the terminal buildings, they were threatening to start killing them
unless we freed a list of 53 Palestinians and PLO supporters, forty of them held
in Israel and the rest in a number of European countries, and paid a ransom of
five million dollars.
Well past midnight, we started looking at our options. One which seemed –
briefly – to hold promise drew on suggestions from Ido Ambar and Mookie.
Ido’s almost rhapsodic description of the capabilities of our C-130 Hercules
transport planes convinced us we could parachute in a Sayeret Matkal team, as
well as vehicles for them to use on the ground. Mookie and I agreed that to
ensure surprise, we would disguise the commandos as Ugandan troops, in
“Ugandan” Jeeps. The final twist came with the arrival of the reserve air force
officer who had been on training duty in Entebbe. He brought a reel of 8mm
film from an official ceremony at the airport. At the start, a Ugandan army
general could be seen arriving in a black Mercedes. “That’s it!” Mookie said.
“The Mercedes. Every top Ugandan military officer has one.” We decided to
swap one of our Jeeps for a jet-black limousine.
Yet by daybreak on Wednesday, when I went up to brief Motto, we’d set
aside the option of a parachute drop. Any initial surprise would be outweighed
by the risk of exposure from the very start of the assault. We’d also gone cold
on a second option, to infiltrate sayeret teams along the shore of Lake Victoria
from across the nearby border in Kenya. I doubted we had enough time to
navigate all the operational and diplomatic obstacles before the deadline
expired. That left option three: having the SEALs, along with a core team from
the sayeret, parachute onto Lake Victoria with rubber dinghies and attack the
airport from on foot. We arranged to do a test parachute assault off the Israeli
coast in Haifa later in the day, but if that went well, it seemed the only practical
alternative.
Motta and I went met Peres around 8:30am. Shimon had no first-hand
military experience, having played a political role alongside Ben-Gurion from
Israel’s early years. So he was not really interested in the details. But he was
keen to hear our assurances that a military option did exist. He was even more
intrigued when we were joined by the head of the air force, Benny Peled.
Unaware of the airborne parachute drop we had been discussing overnight,
Peled suggested something far more ambitious. Rather than using a single
Hercules, he proposed using four of the giant transport planes to ferry in a larger
force, some 200 men in all, land them on one of the runways and take over the
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entire airport. Though I didn’t say so, I had my doubts it would work. It was a
bit like the initial option for the Rue Verdun raid Dado had rejected: a classic
ground assault which, in addition to eliminating any chance of surprise,
obviously ran the risk of igniting a small ground war. But I did think that some
combination of Peled’s idea and the surprise commando strike we’d been
looking at might provide an answer.
A few hours later, the hostages’ ordeal took a chilling turn, which soon also
provided us with our first real detailed picture of the scale of the challenge we
faced. In a haunting echo of the Nazis’ “selection” process in the Holocaust, the
terrorists separated all the passengers with Israeli passports or Jewish names.
They let the rest of them go, and allowed them to board a special Air France
flight back to Paris. We immediately dispatched Amiram Levin to debrief the
freed passengers. On a scrambled teleprinter line Wednesday night, Amiram
came up with far more than we could have hoped for. One of released
passengers was a French woman who had managed to hide the fact she was
Jewish. She confirmed reports we had been getting that the hostages were being
held in the airport’s former terminal building, about a mile from its newer
terminal and the main runways. Other passengers revealed that the hijackers had
placed explosives around the old terminal building. And that, despite my hope
that Idi Amin would stand aside if we did decide to go in and rescue the
hostages, his troops were helping to guard the area.
So in addition to taking on the hijackers, we’d have to find a way to deal
with Ugandan soldiers. In another round of discussions in my office through the
late hours of Wednesday night, we finally settled on our plan: Peled’s major
airborne operation, but with a Sayeret Matkal strike force, with its “Ugandan”
motorcade, spearheading it. Minutes later, three other C-130s would fly in
additional troops to secure the rest of the airport, deal with any Ugandan army
resistance, and fly out the Israeli soldiers and the hostages.
An operation on that scale naturally meant bringing in Dan Shomron. After
I’d taken the plan to Kuti Adam, he briefed Dan on the full detail and called me
down to see him again. Dan had left to start preparations for the operation. He’d
made just one request, Kuti said: that I be in command of the sayeret force.
* * *
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I could see why Dan had said it. Working with Mookie and the rest of my
team, I’d been in charge of all the initial planning. I was in command of the
Sabena assault, the only remotely similar operation Israel had attempted.
Though an attempt to rescue dozens of terrified hostages in Entebbe, with both
the terrorists and possibly Ugandan soldiers armed and ready, would be much
harder. As Sayeret Matkal commander, I’d conceived and commanded other
missions that requiring us to break new ground. But – and it was a huge but – I
knew from the moment I left Kuti’s office that I would have to find a way to
avoid undermining the current sayeret commander, Yoni. Dan had clearly been
aware of that as well. He’d stressed to Kuti that he meant no disrespect to Yoni.
“But I know Ehud,” he said. “I’ve worked with him. I want him to lead it.”
Yoni was still in the Sinai. I’d phoned him before our first overnight
planning session to tell him I was bringing in Mookie and Amiram. Mookie had
been giving him daily updates. But the clock was ticking. Under the initial
deadline, the hijackers had threatened to begin “executions” on Thursday.
Today. The deadline had now been pushed back, but only until Sunday morning
– and only after Rabin felt he had no option but to drop our public refusal to
consider negotiating with them.
When Dan called our first operational briefing for Thursday night, Mookie
sent a plane to bring Yoni back. Dan set out the plan with his customary
confidence. The four Hercules would take off on Saturday evening from Sharm
el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of the Sinai, to cut the flying distance at least
slightly. The first plane would land on the runway near the new terminal. Inside
would be a small unit of paratroopers, the sayeret strike force, a pair of Jeeps
and the Mercedes. The next Hercules wouldn’t arrive for another seven minutes:
the most critical minutes of the whole operation. That was when our “Ugandan
motorcade” would make its way to the old terminal, burst in and take care of the
terrorists. The second Hercules would include another Sayeret Matkal team, to
reinforce the attack unit and secure the perimeter of the old terminal. Hercules
Number Three, a minute later, would carry a joint force of sayeret fighters,
paratroopers and a Golani team. Their job would be to take over the new
terminal and the rest of the airport and deal with any Ugandan army resistance.
The final plane was a flying medical unit, to provide treatment for the hostages
and carry them back to Israel.
Yoni arrived just as Dan was finishing his presentation. He looked focused,
energized, and eager to play his part. I realized it was important to explain to
him the decision to place me in command. Despite our close relationship, I
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knew that would be a sensitive task. We spoke only briefly before he and
Mookie drove back to the sayeret base to begin more detailed preparations.
Yoni was insistent that he should be in charge. I told him I understood, and I
did. In his position, I would have felt exactly the same way. But for a variety of
reasons, Dan wanted me in command. Still, I stressed my determination not to
detract from his authority. Yoni would lead in the main assault unit. He and
Mookie would choose the other officers and soldiers, decide their roles and take
charge of training, briefing and logistics. I could tell he was still not satisfied.
But I told him and Mookie I’d join them later that night. We could talk further,
ahead of the next full briefing, which Dan had set for nine o’clock on Friday
morning on the sayeret base.
When they left, I joined Dan, Motta and Kuti to go see Rabin. Shimon Peres
was there too. He would later say that, as Defence Minister, he was a crucial
voice in pressing to go ahead with the rescue mission. He’s right, and had he
been sceptical, or opposed the idea of a recuse, it would have made things much
more difficult. But his position was far easier than the Prime Minister’s. He
lacked Rabin’s hands-on command experience, his grasp of the details of what
we were proposing to do and the obvious risks. All Israelis were aware of this. I
the operation failed, or if we decided in the end not to attempt it, it would be
Rabin who would bear the responsibility and get the blame.
Even under the best of circumstances, Rabin was naturally cautious – the
flipside of the meticulousness with which he ran through the fine detail of every
military mission. As I remembered from when he was chief of staff, in our
slightly surreal conversation about the danger of a booby-trapped
communications intercept exploding as I defused it, he would focus on
everything that might conceivably go wrong with an operation before approving
it. Now, he was also under huge additional pressure. From the start of the hijack
crisis, there had been calls from the hostages’ families to do something to end
the ordeal. But as I later discovered, one of the leading scientific engineers in
Israel, Yosef Tulipman, had a daughter among the passengers. Like Yitzhak, he
had been a Palmachnik. He’d come to see the Prime Minister and implored him
not to attempt an operation that might endager her or the others. “I demand one
thing only,” he said. “Don’t go on any adventures. Do not play with the lives of
these people, with the life of my daughter.”
After Entebbe, there would be suggestions that Rabin’s readiness to
negotiate with the terrorists had been a ploy, designed to buy time. Yet his
message to us that night was that if there was a military option with a
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reasonable chance of success, he would approve it. But otherwise, we could not
let dozens of hostages be murdered if by talking, even deal-making, we could
have saved them. He turned to Dan and asked whether there indeed was a
military option with a reasonable prospect of getting the hostages out. Dan said
yes. Rabin turned to me next. I agreed: we had a plan, and we felt we could
make it work. Motta was a bit more hesitant. He suggested we couldn’t know
for sure until we’d finished testing key parts of the operation. But for Rabin, it
seemed to me Dan’s was the key voice. So he told us that he was approving it.
In principle.
He said he still needed answers to two questions. The first was whether it
was physically possible to cross from the new terminal area, where we’d be
landing, to the old terminal buidling. He was right to press us. If a retaining wall
or a drainage trench had been added druing the modernization work on the
airport, any element of surprise could be lost. Rabin’s second condition was that
we find a way to make absolutely sure, by the time the first Hercules landed,
that the hostages were still in the old terminal building. I knew why that
troubled him, from a remark I’d heard him make a few years earlier when
describing an American hostage-rescue raid behind enemy lines in North
Vietnam. That operation went exactly as planned. Except that the POWs had
been moved.
I drove to see Yoni and Mookie at the sayeret base. We spent most of the
meeting on the opening few minutes of the operation: the rolling out of the
vehicles, the drive to the old terminal, and how to handle the possibility that we
might meet Ugandan resistance. Mookie remained adamant about the
Ugandans, from his time training them a few years earlier. Even if we did run
into a group of Amin’s troops, even if they were armed, even if they were
pointing their guns at us, even if they shout at us to stop, they “wouldn’t dare
open fire on a Mercedes.” I trusted his experience. I kept emphasizing that we
had to go in with the mindset of not engaging Ugandan troops unless there was
no choice. If we did need to do so, we would use only small, silenced Berettas –
since I’d made sure the unit trained on the Berettas after Sabena.
I also raised another critical condition for success. “There will definitely be
an armed presence in the control tower,” I said. We needed to designate a
special unit whose sole job would be to train machine guns, rifles and grenadelaunchers
on the tower as soon as we got off the Hercules. “The moment that we
lose the element of surprise, they open fire.”
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Dan began the next morning’s briefing with a stage-by-stage review of how
the operation would unfold. But just as he was getting to the detail of the
motorcade attack, I felt a young sayeret officer tap me on the shoulder. Kuti had
phoned to say I was to go see him at the kirya. “He said immediately,” the
officer added, “and not to discuss it with anyone. Just to tell Dan Shomron that
you’ve been taken out of the operation.”
* * *
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. But I allowed myself to
believe the decision to “take me out” could still be reversed. Not only was I
ready to command the critical first part of the operation. I believed I was best
placed to ensure it succeeded. I felt that was best for Yoni, too, due to tensions
inside the sayeret of which both of us were aware.
There was no officer to whom I was closer than Yoni. He had extraordinary
strengths as a soldier: in the Six-Day War, in 1973, and afterwards when, with
my encouragement, he’d taken command of a tank battalion in the north left
almost in tatters from the Yom Kippur War. But there was more to him as well.
I used to marvel how at the end of 16 hours of sayeret training, he could spend a
further two or three reading history, or a novel or poetry. He always struggled
between the impulse to devote his life to fighting for the State of Israel, and to
studying, reading and living as a more “normal” family man.
His drive to serve, and to excel, was stronger. Tuti Goodman, the young
woman he’d met as a teenager and married, understood what drew him to a life
in uniform. But that wasn’t what she had signed up for. At one point, Yoni
asked me to speak to Tuti. She asked me to speak to him. I did my best to
explain each to the other. But the gap between what each of them wanted for
their lives was just too wide. Before the 1973 war, they’d separated. After the
war, professionally fulfilled but personally shattered, Yoni heard that I’d found
an apartment in Ramat Hasharon, and he asked me if there were other flats in
the building. It turned out that the owner of the flat below ours was willing to
rent it. Yoni snapped it up.
Over the past year or so, with Yoni leading the sayeret and me in the kirya,
we’d seen more of each another. For the first time in years, he seemed to have
found a sense of peace, and fulfillment, in his personal life. That was in large
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part because of Bruria Shaked, his girlfriend, whom he’d met while
commanding the tank unit after 1973. While he was a thinker and a brooder and
in many ways a loner, Bruria was outgoing, playful, funny and full of life. She
sensed his need for a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold at the movies or on a
Saturday stroll on the beach. They made their apartment a home. The shelves
creaked under the weight of Yoni’s books. Often on a Saturday, when Nava and
I dropped in to see them, an old 33 rpm record would be playing on the stereo.
Yoni would be sitting puffing on his pipe, reading, and smiling.
But outside this domestic haven, he still struggled. He had looked forward to
commanding Sayeret Matkal. But there was a growing distance between him
and those he led, a kind of dissonance between these more typically Israeli
youngsters and the aloof, reflective, intellectual side of their commander. There
was another tension as well. Sayeret training was notoriously tough. Yoni
earned the admiration of his men by participating personally in the most
difficult of the exercises. But just as he pushed himself to his limits, he insisted
relentlessly on seeing the same drive in them. This was a challenge all sayeret
commanders faced to some extent. I had, too. But a number of the officers had
gone to the kirya to urge that Yoni be replaced. He knew this. Though I tried to
reassure him, telling him that every sayeret commander was different, with his
own strengths and weaknesses, he became only more determined to push
himself and those around him harder.
No we were in the final countdown for Entebbe. It was a life-or-death
mission not just for us, but the hostages, an operation in which even a second’s
hesitation or tension or uncertainty could prove fatal. I was worried that the
rumblings of uneasiness in the unit might prove an additional obstacle that
wasn’t worth the risk.
When I tried to persuade Kuti to stick with the original plan, however, he
was insistent. He told me to get ready to fly not into Uganda, but to Nairobi. I’d
been re-assigned to accompany a Mossad team to Kenya. Our first task would
be to get the answers to the questions Rabin had asked us. Then, we would be in
charge of arranging for the Kenyans to allow us to refuel the C-130s on the way
out, and to set up a medical facility for any injured soldiers or hostages. During
the attempted rescue, I would also be the channel of communications from the
Nairobi side of the operation to Kuti, tens of thousands of feet above Entebbe in
a command 707. Dan, as overall commander, would be in charge on the ground.
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* * *
The Kenyans were not exactly allies of Israel. But relations between
President Jomo Kenyatta’s security services and Mossad had been close for
some years. I flew in with three leading Mossad men. While one of them called
on the aging President Kenyatta, our main point of contact, was the head of
Kenya’s security services. Since the secrecy of the mission had to be preserved,
we couldn’t make advance preparations for refueling or the additional 707
which we intended to fly in as a field hospital. But he smoothed the way for us
to do both, without anyone asking too many questions.
The Mossad men took the lead in arranging to get Rabin’s questions
answered. They contacted a pilot they knew. The pilot flew to Entebbe early on
Saturday morning, circled, and, after he was cleared to land, claimed
mechanical difficulties and flew out again. I had his telephoto pictures by midmorning
and phoned Rabin’s intelligence officer to let him know we’d
confirmed there was a clear path to the old terminal. We still had to make sure
the captive passengers were there, however. A nurse from Kampala who had
been allowed to visit them made three further visits: late Saturday afternoon,
then shortly after the first Hercules had taken off from Sharm al-Sheikh, and
finally around nine at night. I was able to reassure Rabin that the question to his
second question was also “yes”. Although all of the C-130s were already
airborne, it was only then that he gave the mission the final go-ahead.
As commander of Sayeret Matkal, I’d always found running an operation
from a command post hugely frustrating. This was even worse. Once we got
word the Israeli force was on the way to Uganda, we put in place the
arrangements for refueling. If all went well, the first C-130, with Yoni’s assault
team and at least some of the hostages, was due to reach Entebbe and begin the
assault at midnight Saturday. Assuming there were no major problems, it would
take an hour at most. All I could do now, from 300 miles away, was wait.
Shortly after midnight, Kuti radioed me with a terse message: the first of the
Hercules had left Entebbe for Nairobi, and the command plane was returning to
Israel. About quarter to one in the morning on July 4, the transport planes began
their staggered arrival. When the first Hercules taxied to a halt, I went out to
meet it. As its giant rear door lowered, Dan was the first person I saw. I could
tell from the awkward silence, the lack of any greeting, something must have
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gone wrong. “Ehud,” he said finally, “Yoni’s dead. We got the hostages out.
But Yoni was killed.”
I sought out two other friends: Mookie and Ephraim Sneh, the Battalion 890
doctor, who had been with us at the Chinese Farm. Both were obviously torn
between a sense of accomplishment in having freed the hostages and the blow
of losing Yoni. I asked Ephraim to take me to the front of the plane’s huge belly
to see him. He was on a stretcher, covered with a blanket. I peeled it back.
Yoni’s face had lost all color. But when I touched his forehead, it seemed
slighty warm, almost as if there was still a spark of life inside him.
I couldn’t raise Kuti by radio, so I used the landline in the airport director’s
office to phone Motta.
“Yoni is dead,” I told him.
“Are you sure?” he asked. I said: “Yes. I’ve seen him.”
Before the transport planes began leaving for Israel, I made another call. It
was to Nava. She was asleep. I told her that the operation to free the hostages
had succeeded. “But Yoni has been killed.” I could hear her gasp. “Listen,” I
said, “you have to go downstairs. Tell Bruria. Before some army officer shows
up at her door. Or worse, because they’re not married, no one may come and
she’ll hear it on the radio. Go. Tell her. Stay with her.” At first, she seemed not
so much unwilling as unable to do it. “What can I say?” I said I knew how hard
it would be, but that she needed to make sure Bruria heard the news from a
friend. Later, Nava told me she’d waited until daybreak, not wanting to make
things worse by waking her. Then, she went downstairs. She told Bruria what
had happened, stayed with her, talked with her, and held her, during those first
few awful hours.
I found Yoni’s death even more upsetting when I learned from Mookie and
others how it had happened. As the sayeret motorcade began making its way
from the Hercules to the terminal, with Mookie and Yoni in the Mercedes, two
Ugandan soldiers had seen them. One of the Ugandans raised his rifle. Rather
than relying on Mookie’s assurances the soldier wouldn’t actually fire, Yoni and
another soldier shot him with their silenced Berettas. But they’d only wounded
him. In case he managed to fire back, another soldier in the Jeep behind them
killed him, with his un-silenced machine gun.
Now that all surprise was gone, the commandos abandoned their vehicles
and began sprinting towards the old terminal. Only seconds later, still 80 yards
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or so from the terminal, Yoni was hit. He’d been shot from the control tower. I
realized that unexpected setbacks or slip-ups were inevitable in any operation.
But the crucial first stage of the attack had not only gone wrong. It had gone
wrong in exacrly the way that we had first discussed back at the sayeret base,
and now Yoni was dead because of it.
I had to remain in Kenya for a few more days. Though we’d rescued 102
passengers and crew, three of the hostages had been killed in the crossfire.
While most of the injuries to the others were minor, we arranged to have several
of the more seriously wounded taken to a Nairobi hospital. So I was unable to
join the gathering of hundreds on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem for Yoni’s funeral.
Or to hear Shimon Peres praise him in terms I knew must have filled his parents
and Bibi, too, with enormous pride. Shimon described him as “one of Israel’s
finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of its most promising
commanders.”
The first evening I was back, however, I visited the Netanyahus at their
family home in Jerusalem: Ben-Zion and Tzila, the parents; Ido, the youngest of
the three children, and Bibi, who was still at MIT. It was a few nights in the
shivah, the seven days of mourning, and there were dozens of other wellwishers
there as well. I spoke to Bibi first, outwardly strong but I sensed still
overwhelmed by their loss. Hugging him, I said the weeks ahead would be
tough, not just because of Yoni’s death, but because much of the responsibility
of providing emotional support for his parents, both in their sixties, would fall
on his 26-year-old shoulders. This was the first time I’d met the father, Ben-
Zion, face to face, but I was struck by how this balding, professorial figure
seemed able to keep inside the pain and loss he must have been feeling. He did
clearly know of me, both from Bibi and from the frequent letters always wrote
to him at Cornell. Now, after I’d said what I could to comfort him, he asked
whether we could meet again. When we did, a few days later, he was clearly
conscious of the his late, lost son’s bourgeoning place in Israel’s pantheon of
national heros. He asked me to be one of the speakers at Yoni’s shloshim, a
commemorative event in Jerusalem which, in Jewish religious tradition, would
mark the end of the first month of mourning. “You knew him well,” he said, and
proceeded to stress the importance of using my remarks to explain, and
elaborate on, Yoni’s powerful accomplishments and personal legacy.
I thought about what he wanted, and about Yoni himself, in the days ahead.
About the tragedy of his death, but also the way in which all of us now had to
draw meaning, value, and ideally something of permanence from the feelings of
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loss. As I prepared my notes, I also spent time working out how to square what I
felt I needed to say, with what many in the audience, and certainly Ben-Zion
and Bibi, would expect me to say. Not only was Yoni being mourned across
Israel after Entebbe. He was being elevated – in the spirit of Shimon’s words at
the funeral –to something approaching sainthood. I did not want to detract from
his evolving status as national hero, or his importance as a symbol of a
commando success which had, for the first time since the 1973 war, restored a
measure of Israeli sense of self-confidence. A victory, over all logic and all
odds. But I also wanted to find a way of capturing Yoni as he really was: a
brave man, an extraordinary fighter and officer. But also a man sometimes
feeling torn inside, and alone.
I began with words of ancient rabbinic wisdom about the path which all of us
travel from birth to death, and to whatever comes after. The quotation I chose –
from the 2,000-year-old volume known as Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers
– seemed right to me. “Know where you came from: a putrid drop... Know
where you are going: to a place of dust, maggots and worms... And know before
whom you are destined to give your final account, the King of Kings.” I spoke
of the loss of Yoni, and said it was impossible not to think about the meaning of
what lay between the “putrid drop” where each of us begins our life and our
final reckoning. “I believe that life is not just a sum of the hours and days
between the beginning and the end. It is the content we pour into the space in
between,” I said. I’d known people who were given the gift of a long life but
who, by that definition, had hardly lived at all. There were also people like
Yoni. He’d lived only briefly. But he had learned and loved. Fought and trained
others to fight. Grappled with the most profound puzzles of existence, and yet
remained open “to the wonders of a smile. A journey. A flower. A poem.” If
there was any consolation for a life ended cut off at age 30, I said, that was it.
But I wanted to give a more personal, nuanced picture of the life that he, and
we, and lost. “Our Yoni… We have seen him torn between his passion for
knowledge on the one hand, and the sense of mission and of personal fulfillment
that he found in uniform. There was the Yoni of history and philosophy books:
Plato and Marx. Who saw the history of Israel not just as a compendium of
facts, but a source of inspiration, and a call for action. The Yoni who rebuilt a
tank battalion reduced to ashes and dust on the Golan. And there was the Yoni
at peace. Tranquil. At home. With his pipe and his phonograph records, out of
uniform. We saw him in his hours of supreme achievement and satisfaction. We
saw him, too, sometimes standing alone, with pain in his heart, biting his teeth,
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carrying the heavy, lonely burden of commanding the very fighters who he was
leading when he fell.
“We have seen him on the battlefield, engaging the enemy, heading into a
test of fire with courage and wisdom and his indomitable spirit – the very
essence of the spirit that made possible the operation in which he would lose his
life.” Because, make no mistake, I said: beyond the weapons used, the people
who participated, the training and exercises before the fleet of Hercules had
taken off; beyond the fine balance required in the planning, execution, and
decision-making; it was “this spirit, this essence, that was tested at Entebbe.”
When I saw Yoni’s family afterwards, though they thanked me for my
remarks, I could see that they were still bleeding inside. I am sure that affected
they way they related to Bruria. Even before Yoni met her, he had told me how
hard his parents were finding his separation from Tutti. Bruria attended the
funeral and the shloshim. But she didn’t sit with the family. I think that with the
shock of his death, mixed with the pride they felt at his emergence as a national
hero, they found it difficult to include her, a woman they hardly knew, in their
mourning.
A few weeks later, I go a call from the Netanyahu family’s lawyer, Erwin
Shimron. It was an odd, rambling conversation. He seemed to insinuate that, as
her and Yoni’s neighbor and friend, I was encouraging the unwelcome idea that
Bruria was part of the immediate circle of the bereaved, that this mere girlfriend
was somehow his widow. He wanted me to withdraw whatever mantle I might
be providing, and help separate her from Yoni and his legacy. He went so far as
to say that one reason he was calling me was because he didn’t want to have to
take “legal steps” to make that happen. I saw no point in getting into an
argument. I sensed that, while it would take time for the grief felt by those
closest to Yoni to begin to heal, the issue would gradually resolve itself. But I
saw even less point in leading the lawyer to believe I would do what he was
suggesting.
“Mr Shimron,” I told him. “I knew Yoni. I know Bruria. I do not know you.
But I have a musical ear. I don’t like the undertone I hear in what you’ve been
saying. I’ve seen them close up. Bruria gave Yoni, at a critical time in his life,
probably more warmth than he ever received from any other human being.”
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Chapter Eleven
Yet despite Entebbe, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, and the cracks it
had shaken loose in Israeli society and politics, were yet to play themselves out.
The hostage rescue was like a sugar rush, an intoxicating reminder that the army
still had the capacity for initiative and precision, audacity and quick-fire victory
– like our air strikes in the first hours of the 1967 War. But the real reckoning
over 1973 was about to come. It would change Israel beyond recognition, with
repercussions still being felt today. It would dramatically alter the course of my
life as well.
I still remember the moment it hit home, on the evening of May 17, 1977. As
Nava and I watched in our tiny living room in Ramat Hasharon, Chaim Yavin,
the anchorman on the country’s only TV channel, was handed an exit poll from
Israel’s latest national election. He began with three words: Gvirotai verabotai,
Mahapakh. “Ladies and Gentlemen, a revolution.” For the first time since the
state was declared, Israel’s government would not be in the hands of David
Ben-Gurion or his Labor Zionist heirs. Our next prime minister would be
Menachem Begin, who had inherited the mantle of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist
Zionism. He’d headed its youth wing, Betar, in eastern Europe, and led the
Irgun Zvai Leumi, the main right-wing militia force before 1948. Lacking the
intellectual depth and subtlety of Jabotsinky –a liberal intellectual who, among
other things, translated Dante into Hebrew – Begin drew his political strength
from his powerful oratory, and a refusal to countenance any compromise in
securing what he viewed as the ultimate goal: a Jewish state in all of biblical
Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, with whatever military
force was necessary to secure and sustain it.
But perhaps Yavin should have used a different metaphor in his dramatic
election-night broadcast: reidat adamah, an earthquake. Begin’s victory, after
the loss of eight straight elections over three decades, was the culmination of
seismic rumblings which had been building for years. The big, decisive, shock
was the 1973 war. Yet this was not just because of the colossal intelligence
failure, or the myriad errors of our military commanders and political leaders. It
was the fundamental loss of trust in the cosy, self-perpetuating establishment
that had dominated all aspects of Israeli politics, society and culture from the
start: Palmachniks like Rabin and Dado; political players like Golda and
Shimon Peres; Haganah veterans like Dayan and Bar-Lev; and, of course, the
kibbutznik pioneers. Almost all were of East European background –
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Ashkenazim – and their prominence and privilege had stoked increasing
resentment among Israel’s disadvantaged Sephardi majority, with their roots in
the Arab world and especially north Africa.
Begin not only sensed this. While he’d never lost the formal bearing – or the
accent – from his childhood in Poland, his long years in Israel’s political
wilderness mirrored the wider exclusion felt by the Sephardim. The last election
he had lost, in December 1973, proved too soon for the earth to part. But he told
his supporters: “Even though Labour has won these elections, after something
like the Yom Kippur War happens to a country, and to a government, they must
lose power. They will lose power.” He was right. Only twice in the four decades
that followed would a Labor leader defeat Begin’s Likud party: Rabin’s election
victory in 1992, and mine over Bibi Netanyahu in 1999.
During the first two years of Begin’s rule, however, I was 7,000 miles away.
Ten days before the election, I’d gone to see Motta, and he’d agreed that I could
return to Stanford, to finish what I’d barely begun when the 1973 war broke out.
I had been in the army, with the one hiatus as a sayeret reservist at Hebrew
University, since the age of seventeen. I did not regret committing myself to a
life in uniform. But Stanford offered an extraordinary opportunity to broaden
my horizons. Even in the few weeks I’d spent there before the war, I’d felt
reinvigorated. It engaged a different kind of intelligence, a different part of who
I was: the books, the professors. A chance to listen to, and at least try to play,
beautiful music. And to spend more than a few stolen evenings or weekends
with my family.
The timing had nothing to do with the election. Like most other Labor
Israelis, and many of Begin’s own supporters, I hadn’t expected the Likud to
win. It was because I felt I’d reached a natural punctuation mark in my military
career. I’d led Sayeret Matkal. I’d commanded a tank company, a battalion in
1973, and, more briefly than I’d hoped, the 401 st Brigade after the war. I’d spent
the last two years in the kirya. The next step up the command chain would be to
lead a full armored division. But at age 35, I was probably too young, and I
figured I’d have a far better chance in two years’ time. I also feared losing the
chance to go to Stanford altogether. Motta’s term as chief of staff would end the
following year. Among those in the frame to succeed him was Raful Eitan.
Recalling Raful’s dismissive, almost sneering, opposition to my making the
Sayeret Matkal into Israel’s SAS, I wasn’t exactly confident I could count on
his support.
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Reluctant though I’d been to leave the 401 st for the kirya, I had particularly
enjoyed the last year. I was promoted to Shai Tamari’s job, in charge of the
intelligence team for our military operations, when Shai left to command a tank
brigade. My office was no longer on the third floor, but in the underground
bunker, the bor. I was part of nearly all high-level planning meetings, often with
Motta, sometimes also including Peres. Almost everyone around the table was
older than me, and outranked me by some distance. Yet with my intelligence
brief, I was often the one with the most thorough command of the details.
Though still just a colonel, I’d risen through Sayeret Matkal. I knew the
planning process from the other side as well, having attended the same sort of
meetings, from the early 1960s, to present our operations. So I was often asked,
and always welcome, to weigh in on what would work, what wouldn’t, and
why.
My final year in the kirya also further cemented my relationship with Motta.
Though as chief of staff, he tended to keep a formal distance from all but his
fellow generals, he did seem to enjoy having me around. He even put me in
charge of a new department of my own. Not officially. The “department” was
strictly ad hoc, as was the name which Motta gave it: Mishugas. The Yiddish
word for craziness.
All army commanders, in all countries, receive their share of unsolicited
advice. But I can’t imagine any of them gets the number, or sheer range, of wild
suggestions which make their way to the kirya. Everything from levitation
machines, to ideas for making tanks fly. Motta didn’t have the time to read all
the letters, much less sit down with the self-styled inventors or sages who
showed up in person. Still, he couldn’t be sure that a jewel of an idea wasn’t
lurking inside one of them. As an insurance policy, he began sending all the
letters, and every supplicant, to me.
I never found the jewel. The most vivid memory I have is of a visit from a
former soldier in Shaked, Israel’s Negev reconnaissance and tracking unit. He
had taken up meditation, and the study of ancient civilizations. Fresh from a
period of contemplation in the desert, he arrived in my office with a pamphlet
he’d written. It was about special-forces strategy and training, as practiced eight
centuries earlier, in the time of Genghis Khan.
I listened for nearly an hour, enjoying his enthusiasm, the history lesson, and
the simple weirdness of it all. I did check his facts afterwards. If nothing else, he
proved an assiduous student of the Mongols. He explained to me that in their
largest battles, involving tens of thousands of troops, they would designate a
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commando unit of a couple of dozen men. Its sole task was to seek out and kill
the enemy force’s leader. The key to their success was mind-training. Over a
period of months, sometimes years, the commandos’ self-perception was
altered. They were taught to believe that they had already died. Since their lives
on earth were done, all that remained was a formal passage through the turnstile
into eternal happiness, and to go out in glory. My visitor not only suggested that
Israel establish exactly this kind of death-cum-suicide unit. He volunteered to
train the men himself, and lead the first mission. With as straight a face as I
could muster, I thanked him for taking the time to see me. But I told him his
idea was probably not for us. Little did I know that a whole new kind of enemy,
epitomized by Al-Qaeda and the self-styled Islamic State, would build a
terrorist death cult around it.
* * *
Nava and I, with three-year-old Yael, and Michal just turning seven, left for
California in the late summer of 1977. The two years that followed were
uplifting and reinvigorating – not just because of Stanford, but a further, utterly
unexpected transformation back home soon after we’d left.
It, too had its roots in the 1973 war, but on the Arab side. Before the war,
Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had extended feelers about the possibility of peace
negotiations, only to see them ignored. Israel won the war in the end. But the
Egyptians’ surprise attack across the canal – and the panic and huge Israeli
losses in the early days of the war – had shattered our aura of invincibility.
Politically, Sadat had gone a long way to erasing the humiliation of 1967. That
freed him to do something which – after decades of Arab-Israeli conflict – was
astonishing. He travelled to Jerusalem, the capital of a country which neither
Egypt nor any other Arab country even recognized. He met Begin, and he
addressed the Knesset with a call for peace.
It is impossible to convey to Israelis who did not live through the birth of the
state, and our tumultuous early decades, the power of the emotions stirred by
Sadat’s visit. It was on November 19, 1977. With my arm around Nava, I
watched the live American television coverage as Sadat’s plane touched down
at Ben-Gurion airport. Begin was at the center of the throng of dignitaries on
hand to greet him: a who’s who of political and military leaders not just from
his administration, but who had led Israel in 1967 and 1973. Golda was there.
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Rabin, too, puffing furiously on his cigarette. When the erect figure of Sadat
emerged, there was spontaneous applause, and a serenade from Israeli army
trumpeters.
Even before Sadat’s Knesset address the next day, I understood that his visit,
his willingness to make the first, bold move toward a possible peace, marked
just the beginning of a difficult negotiating road. But there was one passage in
his speech that touched me especially. He ran through the history of how Egypt
and other Arab states had not just fought Israel, but denied our right to exist as a
state. “We used to brand you as so-called Israel,” he said. Now, the leader of
our most important Arab enemy declared: “You want to live with us in this part
of the world. In all sincerity, I tell you that we welcome you among us, with full
security and safety.”
The formula he proposed was straightforward. Egypt would agree to a full
peace, accepting and formally recognizing the state of Israel. But Israel would
have to withdraw from all Arab land captured in 1967, including “Arab
Jerusalem.” We would also have to accept the “rights of the Palestinian people
to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.” Begin’s
reply was more sensitive than I’d expected from a leader who, through my
Labor kibbutnzik eyes, I’d always seen as an extremist, unwaveringly
committed to a “greater Israel”. Though he did make it clear his views on the
shape of an eventual peace differed from Sadat’s, he proposed further talks with
the aim of finding an agreement both sides could live with. Still, like all Israelis,
I knew he would never accept at least two of the Egyptian president’s demands:
a retreat from our control of a united Jerusalem or the creation of a Palestinian
state on the West Bank of the Jordan: for Begin, biblical Judaea and Samaria.
On our territorial dispute with Egypt, I did believe a deal was possible. I
didn’t expect us to return all of the Sinai, if only because I couldn’t see Begin
agreeing to it. For security reasons, I also felt we should try to hold on to a pair
of air force bases built after 1967, with American help, just a few miles over the
Negev border. But as for the rest, I saw no reason not to give it back. As I’d told
Motta after the 1973 war, I’d long believed Israel had lost sight of the original
reason we’d held onto the Sinai after 1967. It was supposed to be a huge, sandy
security buffer. If we did manage to make peace with Egypt, there was surely no
reason to hold on to it.
The moment of truth came almost exactly 10 months later, in September
1978. American President Jimmy Carter hosted a summit with Begin and Sadat
at Camp David, in search of a “framework agreement” for final negotiations on
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a peace treaty. Again, I was watching closely, via American TV. But as the
summit was winding down, our phone suddenly rang in Palo Alto.
“Ehud, how’s it going? Are you following what’s happening here? What do
you think?”
I recognized the voice immediately: Ezer Weizman, the former fighter pilot
Begin had chosen as his defense minister. I’d known Ezer since the early 1960s,
when he’d been commander of the air force and Sayeret Matkal was planning
its first operations. Still, even though he had a reputation for batting ideas back
and forth outside the bounds of hierarchy or chain of command, I was startled to
hear from him.
“What do I think about what?” I said.
“The solution we’ve arrived at here. We found there was no way but to give
back everything.” The only exception was Taba, a sliver of land where the
Negev met the eastern edge of the Sinai, across from the Jordanian town of
Aqaba.
“Was there no way to convince them, even with some kind of a land swap, to
keep the two air bases?” I asked.
“Believe me, we wanted to,” Ezer replied. “But no way. Not if we were
going to get a peace treaty.”
So I said the obvious: if that’s what was necessary for peace, there was no
other choice.
We were now well into our final year at Stanford. Our home was in a leafy
“student village” off campus, called Escondito, for married students from
abroad. Our two-storey flat was one of a row of cabin-like structures: a bit like a
kibbutz, only smaller, American-style, a lot more upmarket. It had a fenced-off
play area for the children and, in a common room for all the village residents, an
upright piano.
I found the richness of the academic environment – and the time to explore
and savor it – enthralling. I’d chosen my master’s program at Stanford because
it offered the chance to learn across a range of different schools and disciplines.
The official home for my degree courses was the School of Engineering, in a
department called “Engineering-Economic Systems”. Its focus was on applying
mathematical modelling and analysis to decision-making in “large and complex
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organizations” such as private companies or government departments. Or the
armed forces of Israel. The theorists at Stanford were leaders in the field.
But from the start, I was drawn to other disciplines as well: business,
economics, political science, history, sociology, psychology. I studied game
theory at the business school, and the evolution of political systems under the
sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. I also went to lectures by James G. March,
on how psychological, social and other factors influenced decision-making. I
particularly enjoyed learning from Professor Amos Tversky. Born in Haifa, he
was half of an academic partnership with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman,
who was also Israeli. They were investigating the effect of human bias and other
subjective factors on how we perceive reality, and thus make decisions.
Tversky’s work especially fascinated me, because it questioned a basic
assumption in the kind of predictive formulas my own department was
advancing: that we make choices rationally, calculating the outcomes of
competing alternatives. Tversky had found that the human brain didn’t always
work that way. For choices with a fairly obvious outcome – 90 percent of cases,
say – the assumption did hold. But at the margins, the brain didn’t, or couldn’t,
always gauge the implications of a decision accurately. A couple of decades
later, he would also show that an individual’s choice could vary significantly
depending on the way the options were presented.
These behavioural and psychological approaches were at odds with what was
being taught in my home faculty. Its prevailing orthodoxy was that by using
specifically designed interview techniques, alongside mathematical modelling
of the predicted outcomes, we could isolate the effect of human agency on how,
and what, decisions were made. Yet the wider my studies had ranged, the more
sceptical I became that the complexities of human decision-making could be
accommodated by such models. I also saw problems in the methodology we
were using. Since it was based partly on interviews with participants in the
decision-making process, it seemed to me that this introduced a subjective
element into our ostensibly objective conclusions.
My department wasn’t enamored with my views on our modeling approach.
But one of the things I most valued about my time in Stanford was that, far from
discouraging my excursions into other departments, my professors combined a
confidence in their own approach with a genuine open-mindedness to other
ideas: the hallmark of true intellectuals, and of great universities.
I got something else from my studies at Stanford, although I didn’t speak
about it at the time, not even to Nava. I became aware that I had a particular
186
aptitude for focusing on the minute details of a problem, yet never losing sight
of the larger picture, the wider issues. From my experience as commander of
the sayeret and during the 1973 war, and from watching other officers whom I
respected, it struck me that this was an essential part of effective leadership.
By “leadership”, at that stage in my life, I did not mean political leadership. I
was thinking in terms of the army. But I’d now finished my masters degree, and
it was impossible to be unaware of the political context in which I’d be
returning to uniform. Since Camp David, our negotiators and the Egyptians had
been trying to thrash out a formal deal. Sadat was being denounced as a traitor
in the Arab world. Begin was seen by most in the outside world, and many
Israelis, as dragging his feet on the negotiations and risking the chance for peace
altogether. If we did manabge to sign a peace treaty, however, we would be
withdrawing for the first time from land captured in 1967. That would mean
finding a new approach to security in the south, as well as a new focus on the
majority of our Arab neighbors who were railing against Sadat and seemed less
interested than ever in making peace.
In some ways, it was hard to leave our mini-kibbutz in Palo Alto. Michal,
now nearly nine, had thrived, quickly learning English and ending up with a
perfectly American accent which has never left her. Yael has less vivid
memories of our time there. But we’d had the nearest thing to a normal family
life since our first, war-truncated, time at Stanford. During the university
holidays, we’d also travelled: to Canada. Mexico. Lake Tahoe. Even Las Vegas,
where, thankfully, we lacked the money to chance our luck, but where my years
in the sayeret suddenly came in handy. We spent the day at Circus Circus, a
joint casino-and-theme park tailored for families with kids. At a shooting
gallery in the amusement area, I had no trouble landing dead-center hits on a
passing procession of metal geese, to the consternation of the guy behind the
counter but the delight of my two young daughters. In probably the single
greatest moment of parental accomplishment I’d experienced since their birth, I
bagged a huge fluffy teddy bear for each of them.
* * *
I returned to Israel not just with the hope, but a reasonable expectation, that I
would get command of one of Israel’s two regular armored divisions: the 252 nd ,
which was responsible for defending the south and, at least for now, was based
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in the Sinai. Dan Shomron was now head of the southern command and had told
me, before we headed back from California, that he’d recommended me for the
post. It was an especially exciting prospect because the US-backed negotiations
with Egypt did finally appear to be nearing an agreement. As commander of
Division 252, I’d be coordinating and implementing Israel’s Sinai withdrawal.
But I didn’t get the job, at least not on my return. Raful Eitan had indeed
succeeded Motta as chief of staff, and he had the final say. I’d evidently been
right to assume I would figure no higher in his estimation than I had as sayeret
commander. To be fair, however, he did agree to my becoming commander of
Dan’s reserve division in the south: the same 611 th that Arik Sharon had led
across the canal in 1973. When I took up that post in April 1979 – just days
after the formal Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was indeed signed – I was also
promoted. I became a one-star general. And eighteen months later, when the
regular division post came open again, I did get the nod to command the 252 nd .
Even then, it was a close-run thing. Raful called me in to see him and said he
wanted me to return to the kirya instead, in the one-star general’s post inside
military intelligence. He said he had more than enough candidates for division
commander, but that my previous experience meant I was the best choice for the
intelligence post. I was determined to remain in the field, especially with signs
that Begin, and certainly his more right-wing supports in the Likud, were
already having second thoughts about the peace deal we’d struck with Egypt. In
part, they feared that a withdrawal from any of the land taken in the 1967 war
might create a precedent, and invite pressure, for more withdrawals. But the real
buyers’ remorse centered on the fact that, as part of the initial agreement at
Camp David, Begin had needed to accept a parallel framework for negotiations
toward a broader peace that would include the West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians.
In any case, with Raful balking a second time at giving me the division
command, I figured I had little to lose by fightinhg my corner, and telling him
exactly what I felt. “Look, I realize that you’re chief of staff,” I said. “But don’t
forget we’re both just temporarily in whatever role we hold. I’m not here as a
draftee. I’m in the army by choice. It’s your decision to tell me what position
you want me to take. But you can’t impose anything. I can always leave. Or I
can bide my time until you leave.” Raful apparently concluded he couldn’t
actually force me to take the intelligence job. With Dan having made his
preference clear, he didn’t press the point.
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My main responsibility as commander of the 252 nd was to implement the
withdrawal from the Sinai. Israel had committed itself to bring all of our forces
behind the 1967 border within next two years, and, along with Dan, I threw my
energy into planning and implementing the terms of the treaty. But especially
with Begin soon facing a reelection campaign against Labor, now led by
Shimon Peres, he was keen to play to the opponents of any further negotiating
concessions. He was positioning himself as the voice of military strength, and
painting Peres as someone who would risk our security by going further than
the separate peace with Sadat.
Begin had no more experience or knowledge of military details than Shimon.
But from his days in the pre-state Irgun, he’d been an unapologetic admirer of
men of military action. After his victory in the 1977 election, he’d formed a
government stocked with some of Israel’s best-known former generals. Not just
Ezer Weizman. He’d brought back Moshe Dayan, as foreign minister. And as
agriculture minister, the country’s most swashbuckingly self-confident, and
controversial, battlefield commander: Arik Sharon. Begin had recently lost both
Ezer and Dayan, who accused him of deliberatedly torpedoing chances of
building on the peace with Egypt. But Arik was still there, four-square behind a
more forceful military posture on Israel’s other fronts. As agriculture minister,
he had also been the driving force in a plan for settlement “blocs” designed to
encircle the main Arab towns and cities on the West Bank and foreclose any
realistic prospect of a Palestinian state.
After Begin’s second election victory, in June 1981, some commentators,
and many in Labor, insisted that he’d won because of a dramatic surprise air
strike, a few weeks before election day, against a French-built nuclear reactor
outside Baghdad. I never believed that, in part because I knew from intelligence
friends that the attack had been set for earlier, and was put back because of fears
the plan might become public. But mostly because of what I witnessed in the
heart of Tel Aviv the night before the election, when I joined one of my top
officers, a Likudnik, at Begin’s final campaign rally.
Shimon still had a narrow lead in the polls. I hadn’t been at his closing rally,
the previous evening. But like the rest of Israel, I’d heard and read about it, in
particular the warm-up act: a popular, solidly pro-Labor comedian and actor
named Dudu Topaz. Greeting the crowd, he’d said what a pleasure it was that it
was not full of chachachim. The word was sneering Israeli slang: for uncouth,
uncultured Sephardim, not far from the equivalent of using the “n” word in
America. In a single sentence, he’d managed to sum up everything the
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Sephardim resented about the Ashkenazi, Labor Zionist establishment. Begin, at
his rally, played it like a virtuoso. “Did you hear what they called you?” he
cried. Chachachim. He slightly mispronounced the word, as if he’d never heard,
much less used, it before, and that even having to repeat it made his blood
curdle. “Is that what you are?” There was pandemonium. Maybe Begin would
have won anyway. But it was close, just one Knesset seat between the two
major parties. And win, he did.
I became increasingly convinced in the weeks that followed that Begin’s
second government, with Arik now moved to defense minister, would further
put the brakes on any follow-up negotiations for a deal with the Palestinians. I
did not yet know that Arik, in particular, had a far more ambitious, military plan
to try to bury the possibility of a Palestinian state once and for all. But I did
know he had his eyes on a possible thrust across our northern border into
Lebanon, where Arafat and the PLO were based.
There was no public mention of any of this. But several times in 1981, I was
ordered to move a large part of my division onto the Golan Heights for weeks at
a time: two brigades, 200 tanks and dozens of APCs in a massive motorcade
from the bottom to the top of the country and back again. We dubbed it
Cinerama, from the Hebrew words for Sinai and the Heights, Ramah. If there
was an escalation of hostilities, the northern command’s regular division would
cross into Lebanon. Our role would be to take their place in defending the
Golan, and possibly follow them in.
When I returned from my final episode of Cinerama in the late summer of
1981, the Sinai withdrawal was entering its final stage. I organized a full-scale
military exercise on the roughly one-third of the Egyptian desert we still held,
knowing that we’d no longer have the room to do so after the final withdrawal.
It was the largest exercise I’d ever commanded. The advances and tactical
retreats, the flanking maneuvers and ambushes and fighter jet attacks were like
a very big war in a very small place.
But a war game was not a real war. The Sinai was not like the Golan, or the
cramped, hilly confines of Lebanon. And it was in Lebanon, the following year,
that the war came. It was different from any in Israel’s history. Arik was in
charge. And I would become involved in ways which began to change the way I
saw not only Arik, but the political and military direction of our country.
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Chapter Twelve
My own part in the Lebanon war would change dramatically as a result of
that last military exercise in the Sinai. Arik Sharon was now Minister of
Defense, and he came for the final afternoon. From his experience as a frontline
commander – in 1956, 1967 and 1973 – he knew the dunes and wadis and
sprawling expanses of sand as well as any general in Israel. Watching our
intricate mini-war draw to its close, he made no effort to hide his enthusiasm for
the kind of quick, assertive battlefield maneuvers he’d long championed. But
more than that, his closest aide soon began sounding me out on my views about
the long-term organization, force balance and funding for the Israeli military. A
few weeks later, Arik offered me a promotion: a return to the kirya, as a twostar
general, to become head of planning for the armed forces.
I don’t know why he chose me: the Sinai exercise perhaps, the fact he knew
I’d studied “large and complex organizations” at Stanford, or maybe just the
fact our paths had first crossed two decades earlier when I was in Sayeret
Matkal. But even though it meant leaving my division command, especially
tough since the final Sinai withdrawal was approaching, it was an offer I never
contemplated turning down. Not just because of the second star on my uniform.
Ever since the 1973 war, along with a few other senior officers including Dan
Shomron, I had been making the case for a shift to more mobile and less
vulnerable forces and weapons systems. I saw the new role as a chance to help
encourage that critically important change.
There was just one hitch: all senior military assignments required the formal
approval of the chief-of-staff, my old friend Raful Eitan. Raful did manage to
delay things for several weeks. At one point, he even brought to bear a quality
I’d never suspected he had: a sense of humor. “OK, I’ll agree to promote
Barak,” he told Arik. The next day, he said he’d meant Eitan Barak – a very
good commander, by the way, who had been one of my instructors in officers’
school. Arik insisted, however. My appointment went through.
And one, unanticipated result was that I didn’t just play the field command
role I’d anticipated, from our Cinerama deployments, in Arik’s toweringly
ambitious, ill-planned and ultimately disastrous war in Lebanon. I became part
of months of planning discussions in the kirya before our tanks finally rumbled
across the northern border on the morning of June 6, 1982.
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My new posting came not just as momentum was building toward an
invasion. It followed on the heels of a major new crisis in our peace with Egypt.
Only weeks before I gave up my Sinai command, President Anwar Sadat was
shot and killed by an extremist Muslim officer at the annual Cairo military
parade to mark the anniversary of the 1973 war.
Like many Israelis, I felt an almost familial sense of bereavement. Sadat was
not just the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. He seemed to
understand us: people who were ready, willing and able to fight, but wanted
above all to live unmolested and accepted by our neighbors. Yet for Begin and
the Likud, I knew the assassination would cast the whole peace process into
doubt. Sadat’s successor, Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, did make it clear he
would abide by the peace treaty, defusing calls on the Israeli right for us to
cancel our final withdrawal from the Sinai. But after Sadat’s killing, Begin and
those around him seemed more determined than ever to hold the line against the
wider peace negotiations agreed with President Carter and Sadat at Camp
David. At Begin’s insistence, Camp David had not proposed giving the
Palestinians a state, but instead “autonomy” and a locally elected “selfgoverning
authority”. Yet that was defined as a transitional period. The elected
Palestinians were to be included in negotiations for a yet-unspecified “final
status” arrangement for the West Bank and Gaza. That, Begin feared, left the
door ajar for something more than autonomy. Shutting that door, I would soon
discover, was a big part of Arik’s ornate reasoning for invading Lebanon.
Beyond the fact that my new job was a promotion, I had a personal reason
for welcoming the move back to Tel Aviv. Ten days after Sadat’s assassination,
I had endured a frightening few days surrounding the birth of our third daughter,
Anat. The crisis was another reminder that the demands of frontline command
rested not just on my shoulders, but my family’s. We had moved house again
early in Nava’s pregnancy, to the suburb of Ra’anana, about 10 miles north of
Tel Aviv and a few miles in from the coast. We bought one of a newly built row
of small, semi-detached townhouses which, best of all, had a backyard. It was
tiny by American standards, but was still a place for the girls to play. Once
again, however, I wasn’t there when my daughter was born. I was rushing north
as Nava went into labor.
The birth itself went smoothly. By the time I got to the hospital, both baby
and mother seemed happy and healthy. A few days later, however, when they
were back in the townhouse and I’d returned to my division, Nava felt suddenly,
desperately unwell. I shudder to think what might have happened were it not for
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the fact that one of our new neighbors was a friend from my first military
intelligence stint in the kirya. In almost paralyzing pain, Nava phoned him, and
he rushed her to the hospital. It turned out that the doctor who delivered Anat
had left part of the placenta inside. Once the mistake was discovered – as I was
again speeding north – he went back in and rectified it. When I arrived, I was
relieved, to put it mildly, to find Nava smiling bravely, and on her way back to
full health. Still, doctor friends of mine told me that if the problem not been
diagnosed and addressed quickly, she could have suffered shock, serious
infection, even death.
* * *
In my new role, I was nominally responsible to both the defense minister and
the chief of staff, but Arik made it clear to both me and Raful that he was boss.
And though my official brief was longer-term planning, almost from day-one
the issue of Lebanon overshadowed all others. I knew, from Cinerama, that
preparations for a possible military operation in Lebanon were underway. Yet
from my first meeting with Arik and Raful, it became clear it was more than just
a possibility. “Why the hell is Arafat still alive,” Arik snapped at us. He said
that when he’d been commander of Unit 101, he’d never waited for the
government to ask him to plan an operation. He’d plan it himself, and go to
ministers for approval. When I told him that I’d done just that when I was
commander of the sayeret, only to be told Arafat was “not a target,” Arik
replied: well, he is now. The PLO leader’s current residence was on the
southern edge of Beirut, and in the weeks ahead Arik left no doubt that he
meant to go after him there.
To anyone looking from the outside, there was no pressing reason to expect a
war. It is true that the potential for conflict was always there. The PLO had
nearly 20,000 fighters in Lebanon and hundreds of rockets capable of reaching
our northern towns and settlements. The Syrians were there, too. As part of an
Arab League agreement in 1976 to quell two years of terrible civil war between
Lebanon’s traditionally dominant Maronite Christians and an alliance of PLO
and Lebanese Muslim forces, some 30,000 Syrian troops had been brought in as
the core of a peacekeeping force. But in the summer of 1981, new US President
Ronald Reagan’s Mideast envoy, Undersecretary of State Philip Habib, had
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brokered a cease-fire to halt Palestinian Katyusha rocket fire into Israel. It was
generally holding.
But fundamentally, Arik’s war plan was not a response to the Katyushas. It
was a way of using military force to achieve Prime Minister Begin’s political
aim: stopping the Camp David peace process in its tracks, and ensuring it did
not go beyond the peace treaty with Egypt. And even that message was not
principally intended for the Palestinians, I suspect, but for the Americans.
Israel’s Labor-led governments had always calculated that we needed at least
some measure of support from foreign allies, especially the US. Under Begin,
we’d already bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor without telling the
Americans beforehand. Shortly after I returned to the kirya, he provoked further
anger in Washington by announcing the de facto annexation of the Golan – in
effect “balancing” our Sinai withdrawal with a dramatic reassertion of Israeli
control over other land captured in the 1967 war. Part of Arik’s plan in Lebanon
was to deliver an even more forceful riposte to any suggestion that we would
give up control of the West Bank and Gaza.
Yet these political aims, which I was gradually beginning to grasp in their
full form through my discussions with Arik, were only part of the reason I was
deeply uneasy about the plans for our Lebanon invasion. Having now spent
nearly two decades in the military, I recognized that the security challenge north
of the border was real. I did not believe it was inherently wrong for Begin’s
government to order a pre-emptive military operation with the aim of ending it.
My view, as an army officer, was that the decision on how, when and whether
to go to war was for our elected government. But for that principle to work, I
also believed that government ministers had to know what they were deciding.
The more we geared up for an invasion, the less certain I became that Begin’s
cabinet understood what we were planning to do.
Arik’s original plan was codenamed Oranim: Hebrew for “pine trees”. It
involved pushing deep into Lebanon, all the way up to the strategically critical
road that ran between Beirut and Damascus. We would link up in Beirut with
the main Maronite Christian force, the Phalangists, whom we had been
supporting and training for several years. When that plan was presented to
Begin’s cabinet at the end of 1981, however, most ministers opposed it. Thus
was born Arik’s Plan B, so-called “Little Pines”. Its stated aim was a lot more
modest. We would create a “security zone” – a 40-kilometer, or 25-mile, strip
running north of the border with Lebanon.
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I could see that Little Pines was a kind of fiction. All you had to do was take
a map and draw in the 40-kilometer line. In the areas nearer the Mediterranean,
in the western and central parts of the border area, it indeed covered territory
controlled by armed PLO groups. But in the eastern sector, there were Syrian
positions a mere 10 to 12 kilometers up from the border, well inside the
“security zone”. Not much further north were two full Syrian divisions. That
meant we’d be fighting not just the Palestinians, which was the ostensible aim
of Little Pines. We would have to take on Syria. As soon as those hostilities
began, we would have to destroy radar and SAM sites in the Syrian-controlled
Beka’a Valley further north into Lebanon. After the first costly days of the 1973
war in the Sinai, we were not about to enter a major conflict without ensuring
air superiority. Unless the Syrians retreated or surrendered, the inevitable result
would be a wider conflict, not limited to dealing with Palestinian fighters in
south Lebanon but paving the way for Arik to go ahead with his original plan
and push all the way to Beirut.
This wasn’t mere supposition on my part. In February 1982, we ran a
simulation exercise in the kirya based on Plan B. The result: Little Pines became
Big Pines. A clash with the Syrians proved inevitable, if only because one target
even under Little Pines was the main road between Beirut and Damascus. It lay
well beyond the 40-kilometer line. As the main supply route for their forces in
the interior of Lebanon, it was also of critical importance for the Syrians. So any
idea of a quick, limited strike to establish a security zone was fantasy. A few
days later, Raful chaired a wide-ranging discussion on Lebanon. Near the end of
the session, I asked him directly whether government ministers were aware that
our war plan “will inevitably lead to a clash with the Syrians”. Raful hesitated
for a second, but then answered briskly: “Yes.”
That assurance would turn out to be untrue. But my wider concern, as the
weeks passed, was Arik’s political plan, of which I was getting an ever clearer
idea from him. It struck me as not just grand, but grandiose. Part of it was to
obliterate Arafat as a political force, if not by killing him then by forcing him
and every one of his fighters from Lebanon, a country Arik wanted to place
under the unchallenged control of the most prominent of the younger generation
of Christian Phalangist politicians, Bashir Gemayel. I felt all that would be
challenging enough. But in Arik’s eyes, this was only part of a complete
reordering of our conflict with the Arabs. He expected Gemayel’s Lebanon to
openly align itself with Israel and expel all Syrian troops. As for the expelled
Palestinians, they would go back to Jordan where they would resume – and, this
time, win – their civil war with King Hussein. The result, with Hussein deposed,
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would be a “Palestinian state” in Jordan, which would free Israel to retain openended,
unchallenged, control of the West Bank.
Even the Labor party, fifteen years into Israel’s occupation of the West
Bank, was still speaking about a “Jordanian option” for an eventual political
settlement with the Palestinians who lived there – though this meant a kind of
confederation with Jordan under Hussein’s rule. Very few Israelis began
seriously to engage with the Palestinians own separate identity or national
aspirations until later in the 1980s – when I, too, would do so, amid the
widespread Palestinian unrest known as the intifada. But even without a fully
thought-out view on these issues, I was taken aback by Arik’s almost godlike
supposition that he could use fire and brimstone, or the modern military
equivalent, to remake the Middle East as he and Begin wished to see it. If only
because of the tacit assumption that the outside world, and especially the
Americans, would sit by and let the whole drama play out as scripted, it struck
me as an exercise in self-delusion.
There was also the matter of Arik’s vision of a “new” Lebanon under Bashir
Gemayel’s Phalangists. Unlike the other generals in the kirya, I’d never actually
met any of our “Lebanese Christian allies”. Yet a few weeks after taking up my
new post, I was invited to a lunchtime discussion with a group of Phalangist
officers on a training course in Israel. I emerged both unsettled and
underwhelmed. They were obviously politically astute. They bandied around
military vocabulary proficiently enough. But they were a bit like teenagers
playing with guns: full of macho, and too much after-shave. Hardly the kind of
“army” I could see as a lynchpin in Arik’s plan to redraw the geopolitical map
of the Middle East.
* * *
By June 1982, Arik’s invasion was a war simply waiting for a credible
trigger. On the evening of June 3, Palestinian terrorists shot and critically
wounded Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. Appalling though the
attack was, as a catalyst for a full-scale invasion, it seemed unlikely to be
enough for the Reagan Administration. Habib’s cease-fire terms did not include
terror attacks like the one in London. It was meant to keep the PLO from firing
across our northern border. Even to some Israelis, the attack on Ambassador
Argov seemed more a rationale than a reason for war. But Begin summoned an
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emergency cabinet meeting the next day. His adviser on terrorism, Gideon
Machanaimi, was someone I knew well. When the cabinet convened, he pointed
out to the ministers that the London terrorists were from a fringe Palestinian
group led by Abu Nidal. Far from being an ally of Arafat, he had been
sentenced to death by Fatah. According to Gideon, Begin wasn’t interested in
the distinction. Even less so were the two leading military figures in attendance:
Arik and Raful. They said all Palestinian terror was the responsibility of Arafat,
and that now was the time to hit back hard. The cabinet was informed that our
initial response would be limited: aerial and artillery bombardment of PLO
targets throughout Lebanon. Yet Raful told the cabinet that the Palestinians
would almost certainly respond with shell and rocket fire into Israel. Then, he
said, we could strike more forcefully. In other words, the invasion would begin.
It did. Dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee” to convey the aim of protecting
northern Israel from shell and rocket fire, it got underway at around 11 a.m. on
Sunday June 6. The publicly declared aim was Little Pines: the establishment of
our 40-kilometer security zone. Both Israelis and the Americans were led to
believe it would be a relatively short operation aimed at destroying the PLO’s
military capacity in the border area. We also said that we wouldn’t attack Syrian
forces as long as they didn’t attack us.
That last public pledge had particular relevance to my role on the ground. I
was deputy commander of the largest of Israel’s three invasion forces, under
Yanoush Ben-Gal, head of the northern command until shortly before the war.
We had 30,000 troops and 600 tanks and were responsible for the “eastern
sector” – from the edge of the Golan Heights, north through the Bekaa Valley
along Lebanon’s border with Syria. At first, we deliberately stopped short of
Syrian forces. We deployed our main reserve division just 10 kilometers across
the border, below the first Syrian positions at the bottom of the Bekaa. But
despite the public assurances we were in Lebanon to establish our security zone,
we had no orders to halt at the 40-kilometer line. From day one, our part of the
invasion force began a pincer movement around the area of eastern Lebanon
where large numbers of Syrian soldiers were based. My former Sinai division,
the 252 nd , came down from the Golan and started making its way up alongside
the Syrian border. Our other units, further inland, also began pushing
northward.
For the first couple of days, we did avoid a confrontation with the Syrians.
Yet on June 8, day three of the war, the morphing of Little Pines into Big Pines
began.
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The two other Israeli invasion forces had crossed the border parallel to us,
one pushing up through the steep hills and twisting valleys of central Lebanon,
and the other along the Mediterranean coast. The central force was now ordered
to mount an attack that would bring them within striking distance of the Beirut-
Damasus road. The first skirmish came in the hilltop town of Jezzin, still barely
within the 40-kilometer zone. The Syrians had a commando force and tanks in
the town. An Israeli battalion was ordered in, and it took Jezzin by the evening
of June 8. But it came under assault from Syrian units with grenades, RPGs and
Saggers, as well as shellfire from a nearby ridge. Shortly before midnight,
another unit of Israeli tanks and infantry passed through the central Lebanese
village of Ayn Zhalta, to the north of Jezzin and beyond the 40-kilometer line,
and began winding its way through a valley toward the Beirut-Damascus road.
They waded into a Syrian ambush, and for hours found themselves in a fierce
battle with Syrian units.
I don’t believe Arik specifically planned to confront the Syrians in Jezzin
and Ayn Zhalta. But he could not have doubted that, given the enormous scale
and range of our invasion, a clash with Syrian forces would happen at some
point. Now that it had, all that remained was for him to tell the cabinet that
Israeli forces had come under Syrian fire and insist, as defense minister, that the
imperative for our forces on the ground was to strike back.
On the afternoon of June 9, the fourth day of the war, we got the order to go
on the offensive against the Syrians in the Bekaa. As our artillery pounded the
southernmost SAM sites, nearly 100 Israeli jets swarmed into the Bekaa Valley
and attacked Syria’s air defenses in eastern Lebanon. When a second wave
screamed in an hour later, the Syrians sent up their Soviet-made MiGs to
intercept them. Forty-one Syrian planes were shot down. Seventeen of the 19
SAM batteries were destroyed by the end of the day. The other two were taken
out the next morning, and another 43 Syrian jets shot down.
There was no longer any pretence about our war aim: to fight our way
through any resistance and reach the Beirut-Damascus road. But after the Bekaa
air battle, and the most serious air losses for an Arab state since 1967, Yanoush
and I knew that international pressure for a cease-fire would quickly escalate.
Aware we were racing against the clock, we began a co-ordinated push
towards the Beirut-Damascus road. The left arm of our “pincer” was ordered to
make its way toward a town called Jobb Janine. It was still some distance from
the Damascus road, but an important way-station: Syrian headquarters on the
western side of the Bekaa Valley. The eastern part of our pincer, the 252 nd
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Division, advanced up the Bekaa, alongside the Syrian border, toward the town
of Yanta, across from Jobb Jannine.
But as it was making its way there, we got word a cease-fire had been
agreed. It was set for noon the next day, Friday, June 11. The main focus of our
advance shifted to a crossroads a few miles east of Jobb Janine. It was a flat,
open area surrounded by hills, codenamed the Tovlano Triangle on our maps.
We knew we would meet some Syrian resistance. On the way up the valley,
we’d seen signs of reinforcements from inside Syria. But we had overwhelming
superiority in tanks, artillery and infantry in the area, as well as full control of
the air. In our command post, about five miles back from our frontline forces,
Yanoush set in motion the plan for a pre-cease-fire advance to take the hills
overlooking the Tovlano Triangle. It was still about eight miles short of the
Beirut-Damascus road. But the idea was to establish a more secure defensive
position by the time the truce took effect, and to put us in position to advance
further if the cease-fire collapsed or was delayed.
Shortly before sunset, Yanoush left by helicopter for a field commanders’
meeting with Raful in northern Israel. That left me in charge, alongside
Yanoush’s de facto chief-of-staff, Amram Mitzna. A decorated veteran of 1967
and 1973 whom I knew well, Amram had the added distinction of being disliked
by Raful almost as much as I was. Our main reserve division had been ordered
to take control over the hills south of the Tovlano Triangle. One of its brigades,
led by a former Sayeret Matkal soldier named Nachman Rifkind, was sent to
take up a position immediately south of the triangle. Soon after nightfall,
Rifkind radioed in that he was there, and that the area seemed clear of enemy
forces. The divisional command post then ordered a second brigade to move
toward the hills dominating the crossroads.
The first sign of trouble came around midnight. From our overall command
post, we were listening in on all radio traffic, and heard the second brigade
report that it had come under fire while moving toward the crossroads. At first,
we assumed it must be from the remnants of a retreating Syrian unit. But
Rifkind, who had reported the area was clear, now said that he could see flashes
of shellfire two or three miles to his north. Only the following morning did it
become clear that he had not deployed immediately south of the triangle as
planned. He had mistakenly halted at a hill about two miles short of there.
By the time Yanoush returned to the command post a little after midnight,
we were facing another problem. The battalion nearest to the south of the
triangle had spotted a dozen large vehicles armed with missiles a few hundred
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yards ahead. The missiles seemed to be pointed north, away from them. But the
battalion commander was asking us for permission to open fire.
“Do not open fire,” I was saying as Yanoush arrived. “I repeat: do not open
fire.” When Yanoush asked me what was going on, I told him the lead unit had
reported unknown vehicles with missiles and wanted to know whether it could
attack. “Tell them yes,” Yanoush said. I looked first at him, then at Mitzna. “We
can’t,” I said. “It’s dark. The situation is confused. We don’t know whose
missiles these are. It doesn’t make sense they’d be Syrian, just sitting there,
pointed north. At least give it a few minutes.” I think Yanoush would have
grabbed the microphone and told the unit to fire had not Amram been there as
well. Together, we convinced him to hold off. I ordered the brigade commander
to get one of the battalion’s APC crews to go out on foot and get as near as
possible to the missiles. It was nearly 15 minutes later when they returned. They
said they’d never seen this kind of missile vehicle, but that the soldiers manning
them seemed to be speaking Hebrew. It turned out to be a new ground-toground
missile, not yet formally in service, which had been sent into Lebanon
without our knowledge by the northern command.
While that trouble was averted, much worse lay ahead. Yanoush asked to be
brought up to date on our progress in taking control of the area around the
Tovlano Triangle. We briefed him on the situation as we understood it: that
Rifkind had reported the triangle was clear, but that the second brigade had still
not reached it. Yanoush tried to radio the divisional commanders. When he
couldn’t raise them, he ordered the brigade and battalion commanders to pick
up their pace and move forward.
With Yanoush back and the advance resumed, I tried to grab at least a few
hours’ sleep. But around 3:45 am, a junior officer shook me awake. When I
rejoined Yanoush and Amram, they told me the lead battalion was now in deep
trouble. It was led by Ira Ephron, one of Dan Shomron’s best company
commanders during the 1973 war. For reasons I’ve never been able to establish,
Ira’s orders were not to take the hills south of the triangle as we’d planned, but
to go through it to a point two miles or so north. Minutes after crossing the
triangle, his tanks came under heavy fire. Hoping to escape, he kept going, only
to find himself surrounded by a Syrian armored force. They were trapped near a
village called Sultan Yacoub, nearly three miles north of Tovlano. Since it was
early June, it would be light soon, and his predicament could only get worse.
At dawn, he reported he was under heavy artillery, anti-tank missile, RPG
and close-range rifle fire. The only realistic hope was to retreat. We were unable
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to get air support, but the commander of our artillery force called in all available
units, and they drew a kind of protective box of shellfire around Ira’s men as
they moved back. We sent our other reserve division towards the crossroads to
provide support, and Amram went with them to co-ordinate the operation. But
Ira still had to fight his way out. It was 15 minutes of hell. By the time he
reached safety at around nine in the morning, he’d lost ten tanks and nearly 20
men, four of them during the final, frantic retreat. Five more were missing. The
reserve division also found itself in a fierce firefight with the Syrians, and lost
eleven men.
We were now just three hours from the cease-fire. We did advance nearer to
the Beirut-Damascus road. An hour before noon, our dedicated anti-tank unit
destroyed 20 of Assad’s top-tier tanks, Soviet-made T-72s. Under different
circumstances, those successes might have been a cause for consolation. Yet it
was hard to dwell on them given what had happened north of Tovlano. After the
war, Sultan Yacoub created fertile ground for conspiracy theories, half-truths
and finger-pointing. That there had been many oversights and errors was clear,
though there was never a full and formal debriefing process to identify in detail
what had gone wrong. I found it deeply frustrating that, unlike in 1973 when I’d
been in a battlefield command role, I was now at several steps removed from
what was happening on the ground. But everyone involved shared responsibility
for the failures – including the overall commanders: Yanoush, and me as well.
That weight felt even heavier because the tragedy occurred only hours before
our own force’s involvement in the Lebanon War was over.
* * *
It was not, however, the end of the war. The cease-fire held only
intermittently in the rest of Lebanon, barely at all in some areas. Freed from
fighting in our sector, Yanoush, Amram and I began spending time with units
elsewhere. A couple of days after the cease-fire, I found myself alongside a pair
of generals, Uri Simchoni and Yossi Ben-Hannan, south of Beirut. In front of
us, troops from the Golani Brigade were completing their takeover of Beirut
airport. “You were right,” I told Uri and Yossi. They had been in charge of the
simulation exercise in the kirya, predicting how Arik’s ostensibly more limited
invasion plan would inevitably develop into Big Pines. Even as we were talking,
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another Israeli unit broke through to the Beirut-Damascus road. On the far side
of Lebanon’s capital city, they linked up with Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists.
I remember a mix of feelings at the time. Partly, amazement that through
sheer determination and political maneuvering, Arik seemed to have pulled off
his grand plan – or at least the Lebanon part of it. Yes, we’d ended up fighting a
kind of half-war against the Syrians which, though we’d won it, still left 30,000
of Assad’s men in Lebanon. And they showed no signs of leaving. Our main
strategic threat north of the border was not, in fact, the Palestinians. Syria was
in military control of Lebanon and, after the peace with Egypt, our most
powerful adversary. And no matter what Big Pines might have achieved, it
seemed to clear to me that the Syrians would be free simply to replace the
weaponry we’d destroyed and fight another day.
In Arik’s mind, Bashir Gemayel would soon be in a position to fix that. But
beyond my skepticism from having met some of his boy officers in Tel Aviv, I
couldn’t see how that would work. I strained to imagine Gemayel daring to
form what would amount to a formal alliance with Israel and ordering the
Syrian troops to leave. And given what would be at stake for Damascus, I
certainly couldn’t see the Phalangists being able to drive them out by force.
The more immediate, open question involved Arafat and the Palestinians.
Our other two invasion forces had driven almost all the PLO fighters out of
south Lebanon, though not without costs and casualties. Most of the
Palestinians, however, had retreated north to their de facto capital, the
southwestern neighborhoods of Beirut. The idea of a ground assault – street-tostreet
battles in an area packed with fighters, weapons and tens of thousands of
civilians – didn’t bear thinking about. After the war, some of the officers around
Beirut said Arik seemed to hoping that the Phalangist milita would go into the
overwhelmingly Muslim western side of Beirut. At one point, he was even
considering an Israeli attack. Fortunately, given the Phalangists’ record of
violence bordering on savagery during the Lebanese civil war, Bashir Gemayel
wasn’t willing to send them in. As for an Israeli assault, Begin’s ministers
weren’t ready to sign off on it, and the Americans let it be know, repeatedly,
that they were vehemently opposed to the idea.
Arik again turned to a fallback plan. He knew that Begin did share his
determination to get Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon. Even the Americans
were ready to support such an arrangement, assuming it could be negotiated and
implemented in a way that would bring the fighting to an end. Whether by
intent or political fortune, the mere prospect of Arik further expanding the
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invasion had the effect of persuading Washington to send Philip Habib back
into the diplomatic fray. With no early sign, however, of Arafat agreeing to
leave, Arik now steadily tightened what amounted to a siege on west Beirut. For
seven weeks in July and August, our forces pounded the PLO-controlled
neighborhoods from land, air and sea; intermittently cut water and electricity
supplies; and hoped that the accumulated pressure, and casualties, would force
Arafat and his men to agree to Habib’s terms for a wholesale evacuation.
By this point, I was spending most of my time in the kirya, with periodic
visits north, sometimes with Arik or Raful, to our positions on the eastern,
Phalangist-controlled, side of Beirut. On several occasions, I helicoptered back
with Habib or his deputy, Morris Draper. In one instance, I accompanied Draper
into a meeting with Arik. In what I imagine had become a familiar, and
frustrating, part of the US mediation mission, he pressed Arik to rein in our
bombardments, arguing that we were in danger of ruining the chances of getting
a negotiated deal on Arafat’s leaving. Arik argued straight back. His view was
that unless the PLO felt squeezed into submission, they would stay put.
On that, I thought Arik was probably right. Other Israeli generals with far
more experience, and weight, also seemed to agree. Notably, Yitzhak Rabin. He
was no longer in government, nor even in charge of Labor. But he had always
had a soft spot for Arik, as did Sharon for him. With uneasiness, questions and
outright criticism of the siege building both internationally and inside Israel,
Arik got Rabin to helicopter north with him to Beirut. Yitzhak spent six or
seven hours there. His verdict on the siege, at least as reported in the Israeli
press, was more than Arik could have hoped for. Lehadek, he said. “Tighten it.”
In the end, I’m convinced the siege did have a critical effect on getting the
evacuation deal. But unleashing our single most relentless series of air attacks,
on August 12, when the deal was basically done, seemed both perverse and
excessive, and not just to me. Habib, and President Reagan himself, fumed. So
did a lot of Begin’s own ministers, with the result, unprecedented in Israeli
military annals, that they formally removed Arik’s authority to decide on future
air force missions. That turned out not to matter, however, because August 12
effectively marked the end of the siege.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 21, the first shipload of an eventual
total of nearly 10,000 Palestinian fighters left Beirut harbor for Cyprus, and then
for a variety of new host countries. On this score at least, Arik’s grand design
had proven beyond him: the Palestinians were not bound for Jordan. By far
most of them headed for the PLO’s new political base, the north African state of
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Tunisia. Arafat himself left on August 30.
Still, as the evacuation proceeded, another one of Arik’s central aims in Big
Pines was also achieved. On August 23, the Lebanese parliament elected Bashir
Gemayel as the country’s new president.
* * *
During the several weeks that followed, there was a confident feeling among
Arik and his inner circle in the kirya. To the extent that Arik and Raful saw any
cloud on the horizon, it was their concern about “several thousand” Palestinian
fighters who they were certain had stayed on in Beirut despite the evacuation.
True, Bashir Gemayel hadn’t been formally inaugurated as president. There had
been reports that he was privately assuring Lebanese Muslim leaders that he
would be conciliatory once he took office, and that he was not about to consider
a formal peace with Israel. He had also been resisting Israeli efforts to make an
early, public show of friendship, such as an official visit to meet Prime Minister
Begin. But there was an undisguised hope that this was just a brief political
hiatus, for appearance’s sake, and that before too long Lebanon would become
the second Arab country to make peace with Israel. Not just peace, but
something more nearly like an alliance.
Though I still looked through the eyes of an army officer, not a politician
and certainly not an experienced diplomat, I had serious doubts this would
happen. Simple logic seemed to suggest that, since Gemayel knew we had no
realistic option of turning our back on him, his political interests were best
served by keeping his distance and trying to build bridges at home. But on the
early evening of September 14, nine days before his scheduled inauguration, not
just that question but the whole new political edifice Arik had envisaged in
launching the invasion, became suddenly, irretrievably, irrelevant.
I was at my desk on the third floor of the kirya, getting ready to go home,
when the news broke: a huge bomb had exploded at the Phalangist Party
headquarters in east Beirut as Gemayel was beginning to address hundreds of
supporters. For a while, the reports from Beirut suggested that Gemayel had
survived the blast, but shortly before eleven at night the confirmation came: the
president-elect was dead.
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Though no one claimed responsibility, there was no shortage of suspects.
During and since the civil war, Gemayel had at various times been at odds with
a whole array of enemies or rivals: Muslim militias, the PLO, other Maronite
factions and, of course, the Syrians. But I think for all of us, even Arik, the issue
of who was behind the bombing was hardly the most urgent concern. The
immediate danger was a revival of the kind of rampant bloodletting Lebanon
had endured in the civil war. The day after the assassination, I joined a halfdozen
other members of the general staff and helicoptered up to the Lebanese
capital. Arik, ignoring weeks of US pressure not to do so, had already ordered
Israeli troops into west Beirut – not to fight, but to take control of key junctions
and vantage points and keep basic order.
But the question obviously on everyone’s mind was how to make sure the
situation remained under control. It was early afternoon when we reached an
Israeli command post in the largely Palestinian southwest part of the city. It was
set up by Amos Yaron, the former paratroop commander whose division had
landed by sea at the start of the invasion and was part of the push north to the
capital. At his side was Amir Drori, the head of the northern command. They
had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I
had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun
operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a
couple of hundred yards closer to us, Shatila.
Raful was with us as well. So was Moshe Levy, the deputy chief-of-staff,
and Uri Saguy, the head of the operations branch in the kirya. I listened rather
than spoke. All I could gather from the other generals’ conversation was that
they were trying to figure out how to handle the Palestinian camps. No one
explicitly mentioned the idea of Israeli troops going in, presumably because
they realized that, far from helping ensure order, that might well inflame things
further. Even Raful, at least in my earshot, made no reference to the “several
thousand” PLO fighters that he and Arik still wanted out of Beirut. The only
note that struck me as odd was a general agreement that the Phalangists had not
been carrying their load of the fighting during the war. One comment in
particular stuck with me, though I didn’t take it as referring to the Palestinian
camps in particular. I can’t remember which general said it, only that everyone
seemed to agree: “Why the hell do we have to do their fighting for them?”
It was not until the next morning, back in Tel Aviv, that the alarm bells rang
for me, and by then it turned out to be too late. It was Friday, the eve of the
Jewish New Year. Yet in the wake of Gemayel’s assassination, the kirya was
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crowded. I heard the first rumors from a staff officer in military intelligence,
though neither he nor anyone else I asked was sure if they were true. But it
seemed that the Phalangists had been sent into Sabra and Shatila. And that they
had begun killing people.
I’d like to think that, in Amos Yaron’s or Amir Dori’s place, I’d have been
sufficiently wise not to have allowed the Phalangists into the camps in the first
place. But the truth is that I’m not sure. If the decision was to send someone in, I
certainly wouldn’t have sent in Israeli troops. But unlike other Israeli generals,
my first-hand knowledge of the Phalangists was limited to a single lunchtime
encounter in Tel Aviv. My impression from that meeting was that they were
overblown, post-adolescent thugs, not murders. I did, of course, know the
milita’s reputation for untrammelled violence in the Lebanese civil war. Still, I
might conceivably agreed to have the Phalangists go in – under strict orders to
limit themselves to keeping order – in the knowledge that our own troops were
stationed in the area immediately around the camps.
Yet from the moment of the first rumors – as soon as I heard even the hint
that killings were underway – I had not a second’s doubt about what had to be
done next: get the Phalangists out. Immediately. I felt a particular urgency
because of the rooftop gripe I’d heard the day before, about our troops having to
do their fighting for them. That made me pretty certain that, at the very least, we
had indeed sent the Phalangists into the camps.
I tried to reach Arik, but couldn’t get through to him. I contacted Oded
Shamir, the former intelligence officer who was his main liaison with the army.
I told him that if the Phalangists were inside the camps, he had to urge Arik to
get them out. Then I called Tsila Drori, Amir’s wife. I asked whether she’d
spoken to him that morning. She said no. He’d called her the day before,
however, and she was sure he’d be in touch before the New Year. “Please,
swear to me, Tsila, you’ll give him a message,” I said. “I was there yesterday.
Tell him please do whatever he can to stop this action. It will end very, very
badly.” I told her he would know what I meant.
It was too late to stop it altogether. The slaughter – the round-ups and the
beatings and the killings of Palestinians in the two camps – had indeed begun
the night before. Amir found out about it late on Friday morning. Not from me,
I believe, but from his staff officers. He ordered the Phalangists to stop. But
they didn’t. No one in command acted, at least successfully, to make sure that
the militiamen got out of the camps. The atrocities went on. It was another 24
hours before the militamen finally withdrew.
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One night’s massacre would have been enough to produce the outcry that
resulted once the first news reports, photos and TV pictures were sent around
the world. That the bloodletting was allowed to continue after we knew what
was going on, beyond the cost in innocent lives, made the fallout even worse. In
Israel, the response was unlike anything in the past. There had been some
opposition to the war: from parts of Labor, from political groups further to the
left and particularly the pressure group Peace Now, formed in 1978 to protest
the Begin government’s obvious desire to use the peace with Egypt as a means
to limit, rather than actively explore, prospects for a wider agreement with the
Palestinians.
After Sabra and Shatila, Peace Now was the driving force behind demands
for an inquiry into the Israeli role into what had happened. But the trauma went
deeper. Israelis of all political stripes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the
Kings of Israeli Square in the heart of Tel Aviv a week after the massacre.
There were soldiers, too: 20somethings back from the fighting and reservists a
decade or more older. Some estimates put the size of the crowd at as many as
400,000, almost ten percent of the population of Israel at the time. The protest
was nominally aimed at forcing the government to empower a commission of
inquiry, which it did a couple of days later. But the mood in the square was
more like an outpouring of shock and shame. While the catalyst was the
massacre in the camps, it tapped into a rumble of growing questions, and
doubts, about the war itself, which had been building ever since the prolonged
siege of west Beirut: what the invasion was for, how it had been planned and
prosecuted, and what it said about our country, our government and our armed
forces.
I was at home with Nava, watching the coverage of the demonstration on
television. I shared the protesters’ view that an inquiry was needed. In the days
since my phone call to Tsila Drori, I’d remained troubled not just by our failure
to stop the killings once we knew what was going on, but by the response from
Begin, Arik and some other ministers to the massacre. Determined to shift the
blame and responsibility elsewhere, they kept driving home the point that it was
Phalangists, not Israelis, who had carried out the killings. That was true. But it
could not erase the failures of judgment and control on our part. We were the
ones who had allowed them into the camps. Our forces were deployed around
the perimeter. And the killers were our “Lebanese Christian allies”.
The formal picking-apart of Israel’s share of responsibility would be the job
of the inquiry commission. I did take some heart from the very fact such large
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numbers of Israelis, and ultimately the government, had ensured a truly
independent probe would now go ahead.
But other ways in which the war had gone wrong were already glaringly
apparent. Some were operational. It is true we ended up overcoming Palestinian
and Syrian resistance. Given the numerical balance of forces, that was a
foregone conclusion. But with all the attention paid to the political aims of the
invasion, we’d never sufficiently planned for operating against a wholly
different kind of enemy than in our previous wars, and on a wholly different
kind of terrain. Huge columns of Israeli armor had found themselves stuck on
the winding roads of central Lebanon, running low on gasoline, vulnerable to
relatively small ambush squads. In some instances, a dozen Palestinian fighters
or Syrian commandos had halted the best-armed, best-trained, tank forces in the
Middle East for hours on end. Overall, the pattern of past wars had been broken.
Even in 1973, once the surprise attacks had been turned back, Israeli forces had
advanced, attacked and broken enemy resistance. That hadn’t happened here.
There was a deeper problem as well. At the start of the conflict, Begin had
declared, boastfully almost, that this was Israel’s first “war of choice.” That
wasn’t true. Both 1956 and 1967 were wars of choice. Yet those preemptive
attacks, especially in the Six-Day War, were in response to a sense of strategic
threat that was commonly understood by almost all Israelis. There was a sense
not just of consensus, but national unity. This war was different. It had been
launched in pursuit of a specific political vision: a marriage of Begin’s political
credo and Arik’s determination to use overwhelming force to bulldoze a new
political reality in Lebanon.
The findings of the inquiry commission were published in February 1983.
They were all the more powerful for the forensic language used. The inquiry did
concede Begin’s point: it was Gemayel’s men who had actually done the
killing. But it said that the Israeli commanders’ decision to allow the
Phalangists into the refugee camps “was taken without consideration of the
danger – which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to
foresee as probable – that the Phalangists would commit massacres.” The
commission added that “when the reports began to arrive about the actions of
the Phalangists in the camps, no proper heed was taken. The correct conclusions
were not drawn. No energetic and immediate action was taken to restrain the
Phalangists and put a stop to their actions.”
Arik bore personal responsibility for this, the report said. So did Raful, and
the head of military intelligence, Yehoshua Saguy. The commission
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recommended that Begin fire Sharon and Saguy. They left Raful in place, but
only because his term as chief-of-staff was due to end in a matter of weeks. Arik
at first refused to go, and Begin refused to fire him. Yet in the end, popular
pressure forced the issue. When another demonstration was called in protest at
Sharon’s continuing as Defense Minister, a right-wing political activist tossed a
grenade into the crowd, killing a young Peace Now member. Even Arik was
evidently shaken by the spectre of one of his presumed political admirers
murdering a fellow Israeli for peacefully protesting. Or at least shaken enough
to step down as Defense Minister. He did remain in the government as a
minister without portfolio. Still, Begin himself would quit as Prime Minister,
retiring into virtual seclusion, about half-a-year later.
Like the rest of the senior officers corps, I tried with difficulty to get on with
my own job. I imagined the contribution I could best make for now would be, as
Head of Planning, to ensure the mix of forces and weaponry deployed in any
future conflict were better suited to the task than in the Lebanon war. But I
didn’t believe that such technical failings or planning lapses, however serious a
contribution to the more than 650 Israeli lives lost, were what had mainly
caused the war to go wrong. The central mistake was what had bothered me all
along: the invasion was not a considered response to a particular security threat.
It was an overreaching exercise in geopolitics, with sleight-of-hand used to
evade the need to make and win support from government ministers and,
critically, the public. Even with questions still to be resolved about when and
how to withdraw the thousands of Israeli troops that were still inside Lebanon, I
remember wondering aloud to a few army friends, and to Nava as well, whether
we would look back in a decade’s time and see the war as “our Vietnam”. In
fact, Israeli troops would still be in south Lebanon nearly two decades later,
when I had left the military and was about to become Israeli Prime Minister.
Even as a two-star general in the kirya, I doubted I would be in a position to
help fix the deeper issues raised by the war. Any real influence would be in
positions like the chief-of-staff and his deputy; the head of operations; the head
of military intelligence. They were the core of the armed forces’ leadership and
had the most regular dealings with senior figures in government.
But I’d failed to factor in the effect of the inquiry recommendations. Within
days of the report, Israel had a new Defense Minister: Moshe Arens, who
returned from his post as ambassador in Washington. Among his first orders of
business was to act on the inquiry’s verdict on Raful and Yehoshua Saguy. As
chief of staff, Arens settled on a choice I suspect most senior officers saw as the
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right man for the moment: Raful’s deputy, Moshe Levy. Well over six feet tall,
he was known as Moshe Vechetzi. “Moshe-and-a-Half.” He was reserved and
soft-spoken, a safe pair of hands after the trauma of the war.
But Arens also had to name a successor to Saguy as head of military
intelligence. And for that job, he nominated me.
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Chapter Thirteen
It was a huge responsibility, and not just because I was suddenly in charge of
an intelligence apparatus ranging from Unit 8200, our sophisticated signals
collection and decryption unit, to the operational units like Sayeret Matkal. It
was what was at stake if things went wrong: success or failure in war, and the
life or death of thousands of men on the battlefield. It was a price we’d paid
painfully in 1973. And now again, just nine years later, in Lebanon.
If I needed any reminder, it was conveniently placed on my new office wall:
the photographs of each of my nine predecessors since 1948 as Head of the
Intelligence Directorate, or Rosh Aman in Hebrew. All had come to the role
with talent and dedication. All but three had either left under a shadow, or been
fired. Sometimes this was because of ultimately non-fatal lapses, like a botched
mobilization of our reserves in 1959, or the Rotem crisis a few months later.
Sometimes, it was due to lethal failures like the Yom Kippur War and Lebanon.
I went to see all eight former directors who were still alive. “You know, I
used to read the newspapers and listen to the BBC in the car to work,” Shlomo
Gazit told me. He was the director I’d worked for in operational intelligence,
the one who’d so memorably made the point that we might endanger Israeli
security not only be missing the signs of a war, but signs of an opportunity for
peace. He was also one of the few to have left office without blemish. “By the
time I got to the kirya, I already knew 80 percent of what I could about what
was going on,” he said. “Then I’d spend six or seven hours reading intelligence
material, to fill in at least part of the remaining 20 percent.” His message,
echoed by my other predecessors, was that the job wasn’t mainly about the raw
information. It was what you concluded from the information, what you did
with it. It was about judgement.
The intelligence did matter, of course. For all of Israel’s strengths in that
area, I knew from my own experience at Sultan Yacoub that there was still
room to get more, better, and more timely information about our enemies, and
make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. And while the
details of many operations I approved for Sayeret Matkal and other units remain
classified, we did succeed in doing that – to take just one example, by finding
an entirely new way to get intelligence from inside Syrian command posts.
Yet above all, I set out to apply the lessons of the 1973 and 1982 wars. In
rereading the official inquiry reports, I saw that the intelligence failings had
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been different in each of them. In the Yom Kippur War, the problem was not
just Eli Zeira’s failure to activate the sayeret’s listening devices in Eygpt,
deeply damaging though that was. It was judgement. Inside Aman, a kind of
groupthink had taken hold. It was rooted in a confident, costly misconception
which went unchallenged: that Egypt would never risk another war without an
air force capable of breaching our defences and striking towns and cities deep
inside Israel. No one pressed the alternative scenario: that Sadat might strike
with more limited territorial objectives and, under cover of his SAM batteries
on the other side of the Suez Canal, advance into the Sinai.
In the Lebanon war, the inquiry suggested, Yehoshua Saguy did try to warn
the generals, and the government, about major risks. But individual ministers
testified that they hadn’t heard, hadn’t been there, or hadn’t understood, leading
the inquiry to stress the responsibility of a Rosh Aman to ensure not just that his
message was conveyed, but that it was received as well.
I set out to address both problems. Inside the department, I insisted on
making all our preconceptions open to challenge. I set up a unit whose sole
function was to play devil’s advocate when a consensus was reached. It began
with the opposite conclusion and, through a competing analysis of the data, and
logical argument, tried to prove it. I also wanted to be challenged on my
preconceptions. I assigned a bright young major as my personal intelligenceand-analysis
aide. He read everything that crossed my desk and could access
any material in the department. “You have no responsibility to agree with any of
the analysts, or with me,” I said. “Part of your job is to disagree.”
In the Lebanon war, Saguy had faced an additional problem. He was
excluded from some government meetings at which crucial decisions were
made. That was out of his control. I didn’t want it to be out mine. I raised the
issue with Begin in our first meeting. “If you want to get the maximum value
from your head of intelligence,” I said, “you should make sure he’s there not
just after, but when decisions are made.” Yet he was now only months from
leaving office, exhausted by the war and its aftermath. He waved his hand
weakly in response, as if to say none of it mattered. His successor, in October
1983, was Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Ideologically, he was cut from the
same cloth: an advocate from the 1940s of securing a Jewish state in all of
Palestine, by whatever force necessary. He’d broken with Begin’s pre-state
Irgun militia to set up a group called Lehi, which went further and carried out
political assassinations: the 1944 killing of Lord Moyne, Britain’s Minister for
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Middle East Affairs, and four years later the United Nations envoy, Count Folke
Bernadotte.
“Why are you so strident,” Shamir asked me, only half-jokingly, after I’d
insisted on joining a government discussion and pressing several intelligence
matters. “It’s because I’ve read the Lebanon inquiry,” I replied. “I saw what
happened when a message isn’t delivered assertively. I’m not going to be in the
position of making the same mistakes.” He nodded, and didn’t raise it again.
In fact, it was under Shamir that I began to get more involved with political
and policy issues beyond the armed forces. Part of this came with the job of
Rosh Aman. There was hardly a major domestic or foreign challenge that did
not have some security component, and no security matter on which intelligence
was not critical. But I also found myself working more closely with leading
politicians: mainly Shamir and Misha Arens, who as defense minister was my
main point of contact. Since I was a Labor kibbutznik, we made an odd
threesome. Arens was also a lifelong Jabotinsky Zionist. He had been in the
Betar youth movement in America, before going to Palestine in 1948 and
joining the Irgun. In fact, it was with Misha’s personal backing that one of my
former Sayeret Matkal officers – the son of a Jabotinsky acolyte – had recently
taken his first steps into the political limelight. After a two-year stint as Israel’s
number-two diplomat in Washington, Bibi Netanyahu had become our
ambassador to the United Nations.
With both Arens and Shamir, I built a solid relationship, based on mutual
respect, and it would deepen further when I moved on to a wider role in the
kirya a few years later. They were straight talkers. While resolute about
decisions once they’d taken them, they were genuinely open to discussion and
debate. I also sometimes found a surprising degree of nuance behind their tough
exterior.
The toughness was there, however. One of the first major security crises we
faced after Shamir became Prime Minister was known as the Kav 300 affair,
named for the bus route between the southern port city of Ashdod and Tel Aviv.
On the evening of April 12, 1984, four Palestinians from Gaza boarded the bus
and hijacked it back toward the border with Egypt. They told the passengers they
were armed with knives, and that a suitcase which one of them was carrying
contained unexploded anti-tank shells. After a high-speed chase, an Israeli army
unit managed to shoot out the tires and disable the vehicle, when it was still
about ten miles short of Gaza. One of the passengers had been severely injured at
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the start. A number of others managed to escape when the bus was stopped. But
several dozen remained inside.
I was in Europe at the time, on one of my periodic trips to discuss Middle
East issues with a fellow intelligence chief. Yet an aide called me with the news.
I was several thousand miles away from what happening. But I knew there was
every possibility Sayeret Matkal might be called in, and my instincts told me we
should proceed with caution. The situation we were facing felt nothing like
Sabena, much less Entebbe. Here, we had a single bus. Our troops, and in fact
everyone from ministers and officials to reporters and photographers, were in a
loose cordon a couple of dozen yards away. That said to me there was no sense
that the hijackers posed an immediate danger. Nor did they seem to have come
equipped for a major confrontation. In place of the AK-47s and grenades we’d
seen in previous terror attacks, these guys had knives, and, if they were to be
believed, a couple of shells with no obvious way to detonate them.
I phoned a friend in the command post set up near the stranded bus. He told
me that Misha and Moshe Vechetzi were there. There was a standoff with the
terrorists and, for now, it was quiet. The defense minister and the chief-of-staff,
of course, did not need my presence, much less my agreement, to order the
sayeret into action. But I said: why not wait? Though the last flights back to
Israel had already left, I could be at the command post by mid-morning. Beyond
wanting to be present if the sayeret was ordered in, I believed the crisis might
even be brought to an end without another shot being fired. “I’ll tell them what
you said,” my friend replied. “But I doubt it’ll be allowed to drag on much past
daybreak.”
He was right. With my Chinese Farm comrade Yitzhik Mordechai in overall
command, Sayeret Matkal stormed the bus at about seven in the morning. They
shot and killed two of the hijackers immediately, through the vehicle’s windows.
Sadly one of the passengers, a young woman soldier, died in the assault, but the
rest of the hostages were freed, none with serious injuries.
A controversy soon erupted over what came next. The sayeret commandos
had captured the other two terrorists alive and uninjured. Yet barely a week later,
first in an American newspaper and then the Israeli media, reports emerged that
the two surviving Palestinians had been killed after the hijacking was over. A
year later, Yitzhik Mordechai was – wrongly – put on trial for his alleged part in
what had amounted to a summary execution. And, rightly, exonerated. Though
the full details never became public, the people responsible turned out to be from
the Shin Bet, our equivalent of the FBI.
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Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings.
It was not so much a statement of what should or shouldn’t have happened, but a
show of genuine puzzlement. “How can it be,” he asked, “when there is a real
fight, an operation in which our soldiers are shooting, that terrorists come out
alive?” The answer, to me, was simple: Sayeret Matkal. From our earliest days,
there was an understanding that you used whatever force necessary in order to
make an operation successful. Yet once the aim had been achieved – in this case,
eliminating the danger to the passengers – it was over. I am convinced, by the
way, that Misha didn’t actually order the sayeret, or anyone else, to kill all the
terrorists. I’m equally convinced there was a tacit assumption on the ground that
Misha’s view, and Shamir’s as well, was that this would be no bad thing.
* * *
Yet by the summer of 1984, Shamir and Arens appeared in danger of losing
their jobs. Israel’s next election, the first since the Lebanon war, was due in
July. Just as the trauma of the 1973 war had helped Begin end Likud’s three
decades in opposition, the polls and the pundits were now suggesting that
Shimon Peres might bring Labor back to power. There was no prospect he’d
win an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset. No one had ever done that, not
even Ben-Gurion in his political heyday. From 1948, Israel’s political landscape
had been populated by at least a dozen-or-so parties, mostly a reflection of the
various Zionist and religious groups before the state was established. The
dominant party always needed to make deals with some of the smaller ones to
get the required 60-vote parliamentary majority and form a government.
The Likud looked vulnerable. Domestic concerns, alone, were eroding its
support. Under Begin’s turbo-charged version of Milton Freedman economics,
an economic boom had given way to runaway inflation and a stock market
crash. Lebanon, however, was the main issue, and it remained a running
political sore. The assassinated Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin Gemayel, had
become president. But Israel still had large numbers of troops there. And while
most of the PLO fighters had gone, we faced a new and potentially even more
intractable enemy in the south of the country. When our invasion began, the
area’s historically disadvantaged Shi’ite Muslim majority had been the one
group besides the Christians with the prospect of benefiting. The PLO rocket
and artillery bases had disrupted their lives and, worse, placed them in the line
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of our retaliatory fire. Some of the Shi’ite villages in the south even greeted our
invading units with their traditional welcome, showering them with rice. But for
a new Shi’ite militia calling itself Hizbollah – formed after the invasion and
inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran – our continuing
military presence was anathema. In November 1983, Hizbollah signalled its
intentions when a truck bomber drove into a building being used as our military
headquarters in the south Lebanese city of Tyre, killing more than 60 people.
Yet the election ended up as a near-tie. Peres did lead Labor back into top
spot for the first time since Begin’s victory in 1977. But he got only 44 seats, to
the Likud’s 41. After weeks of horse-trading with smaller parties, he could not
form a government. Neither could Shamir. The result, for the first time in
peacetime, was a national-unity coalition, including both main parties. Peres
would be Prime Minister for the first two years, and Shamir the final two. But
the stipulation of most relevance to me was that one man would be the Defence
Minister throughout the four years: Yitzhak Rabin.
My relationship with Rabin went back much further than with Misha. I’d
first met him when I was a sayeret soldier. I’d interacted with him more as
sayeret commander, and of course during Entebbe. Now, we began to work
even more closely, and the main challenge in his early months as Defense
Minister was what to do about our troops in Lebanon. We had gradually been
pulling back. We were more or less on the 40-kilometer line which Sharon had
claimed was the point of the invasion. But even this was costing us lives, with
no obvious benefit from controlling a large slab of territory on which nearly
half-a-million Lebanese lived. A decision was now reached to shrink our
“security zone” further, pulling back to the Litani River. It meandered about 25
kilometers north of the border, and in some areas was even closer to Israel.
I argued strongly in favor of getting out altogether. I accepted that the
“Litani line” might help impede cross-border raids. But especially since the
remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas,
with a range of up to 20 kilometers, they could fire rockets over the security
zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with between
1,000 and 1,500 Israeli troops in open alliance with a local Maronite Christian
militia, called the South Lebanon Army. This would rule out any hope of
working out security arrangements with the non-Christian majority in the south.
I tried to persuade Rabin we should withdraw all the Israeli soldiers and
coordinate security arrangements with the equivalent of a local civil-defense
guard. I suggested four separate militias drawn from the local population –
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Christian, Shi’ite Muslim, Druse and ethnically mixed – with the aim of
reflecting the balance in each part of the south.
Israeli troops might still have to cross into Lebanon, but only for brief,
targeted operations to preempt preparations for a terror attack. “We need to
remember what we’re there for,” I said. “We have no territorial claims. It’s to
protect the north of Israel. But it will end up being about protecting our own
troops inside the security zone. It will be like the Bar-Lev line in 1973, fighting
for fortifications we don’t need.” I couldn’t persuade him. I’m sure he
understood the argument, and he may even have agreed. But when Katyushas
next fell on northern Israel, he as Minister of Defense, not I, would be the one in
the political firing line.
Far from straining our relations, our frank exchanges on Lebanon seemed to
build further trust between us. We worked closely on a range of issues. When
Sayeret Matkal or another intelligence unit planned an operation across our
borders, both of us would present the action to the cabinet. During the
operations, I’d be either in the kirya or a forward command post. Since nearly
all of them happened after nightfall, Yitzhak would usually be back home,
asleep, by the time they ended. I would phone him. The trademark voice – slow,
gravelly, deep even when he was wide awake – would answer. I’d tell him the
mission was over and – with only one exception during my period as head of
intelligence – successful. “Todah,” he would say. “Lehitraot.” Thanks. Bye. He
was never a man to waste words.
For one of the very few times I can remember, he phoned me one morning in
October 1985. It came a couple of days after an especially gruesome Palestinian
terror attack. Even with Arafat now more than a thousand miles away in Tunis,
much of Rabin’s focus was taken up in responding to, or trying to preempt,
Palestinian terrorism. The issue was especially sensitive politically in the wake
of a war in Lebanon that was supposed to have eliminated that threat. For Rabin,
moreover, it had become personal. He’d had to sanction an unprecedented
exchange of 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners earlier in the year to secure the
freedom of three Israeli soldiers, including one of our men from Sultan Yacoub,
who had ended up in the hands of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine – General Command. Now a group from another of the radical factions,
the Palestine Liberation Front, had hijacked an Italian cruise ship called the
Achille Lauro en route from Egypt to Israel. They murdered one of the
passengers, a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old Jewish American named Leon
Klinghoffer, and dumped his body overboard.
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Rabin’s closest aide, whom I knew well, was aware that Unit 8200 had
intercepts that laid bare the details, and left no doubt the murderers were from a
PLO group. He called and asked me to appear on a weekly television interview
program called Moked. It was hosted by Nissim Mishal: brash, incisive, and one
of Israel’s best-known broadcast journalists. I pointed out to the Rabin aide that
I’d never done anything like this before. But he insisted it would go well. He
briefed me on the questions I could expect, not just about the Achille Lauro but
the wider issue of Palestinian attacks, as well as Syrian President Hafez al-
Assad’s efforts to re-equip his air force after his losses in Lebanon. So I came to
the interview prepared. I brought audio tapes of the hijackers, and a large
photograph of the MiG-25s which the Syrians were seeking to acquire.
My appearance will not go down in the annals of great moments in
television. But at the time, very few Israelis even knew who I was, and I felt I’d
done OK. I was surprised, however, when Rabin phoned the next day. “Ehud, I
didn’t see it. I was attending some event,” he said. But his wife, Leah, had
recorded the program. “I just watched it. I should tell you, I think it was
exceptional. You did a great job. It was highly important for us, for the army,
and, I dare say, for you.”
* * *
I was not sure what he meant by saying it might be good for me as well,
although a decade later, at the end of my army career, he would play the central
role into my entry into Israeli politics. It is true that there was also some politics
at the upper reaches of the military as well, especially around the choice of chief
of staff, and that Moshe Vechetzi’s term had only a year-and-a-half to go. But I
didn’t view myself as a serious candidate at this stage. Moshe’s own preference
seemed to be either Amir Drori, the head of the northern command during the
Lebanon War, or Amnon Lipkin, the veteran paratroop commander who’d been
with me on the Rue Verdun raid in Beirut. My own hope was that the nod
would go to any even closer friend of mine: Dan Shomron.
I had first got to know Dan well in the late sixties after Karameh, Israel’s
costly standoff with Arafat, when Fatah’s influence was in its infancy. We
exchanged impressions on what had gone wrong, and why? When I became
commander of Sayeret Matkal, we remained in touch, and he took a close
interest in all of our operations. We also crossed paths in the Sinai in the 1973,
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in which Dan’s division was key in staunching the Egyptian advance in the first
days of the war, later inflicted heavy losses on one of Sadat’s armored forces
and was part of the final push on the other side of the canal. And, of course,
during Entebbe. Dan had sharp tactical instincts, a belief in the importance of
using new technology to gain and sustain an edge, and an openness to
unconventional approaches. Faced with a challenge in planning or executing an
operation, he looked at it from all sides, determined to come up with the right
approach, not always the expected one. In a lot of these ways, we were similar,
which was no doubt one reason our relationship had grown closer as he and I –
six years younger, and a step or two behind – rose up the ranks.
In fact, Dan was the reason I’d made one of my rare forays into kirya politics
not long after Moshe Vechetzi took over as chief of staff, when Misha Arens was
still Defense Minister. I acted to derail what seemed to me a blatant attempt by
Moshe to advance Drori’s and Amnon Lipkin’s prospects for eventual
succession as chief-of-staff, and to take Dan out of the contest altogether.
I was sitting at my desk on the third floor when the chief of internal army
security, an officer named Ben-Dor, walked into my office. “Listen,” he said,
“the chief of staff has a right to give me a direct order in cases where he thinks
there is a need for a special investigation. But you’re my commander, so I
wanted to let you know.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He replied that he had been ordered to “check out rumors that Dan Shomron
is a homosexual.”
I was appalled. The whole thing stank, on every level, and not just because I
was confident the “rumors” were nonsense. “Look,” I said, “I have no idea
whether some sub-clause in army regulations allows the chief-of-staff to give
you orders over my head. But even if it does, I’m ordering you to do nothing
until I talk to Moshe.” He nodded in agreement. In fact, he seemed relieved. He
also let me know that the source of the rumors was a number of senior officers,
including a couple of generals.
I went straight downstairs and into the chief-of-staff’s office. Moshe was at
his desk, smoking a cigarette. One of the advantages he had in being nearly a
foot taller than most of us was that I found myself looking not into his eyes, but
up at them. “Moshe,” I said, “Ben-Dor told me you’ve ordered him to investigate
a rumor that Dan Shomron is a homosexual.” He said nothing. So I went on.
“I’ve told him not to do it. And I’ve come here to convince you that it’s
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improper.” This was more than 30 years ago, at a time when being gay, and
certainly being gay in the armed forces, was a much bigger deal than now. But I
still had no doubt at all that this amounted to a witch-hunt.
Moshe still said nothing. “I have no idea whether Dan is or is not a
homosexual. After knowing him for years, I have no reason at all to believe that
he is. But let’s assume, for a moment, that he is,” I said. He’s not some junior
lieutenant… This is a man who has risked his life for Israel. Repeatedly. Under
fire.” Then, I got to the real issue. “I hesitate to mention this,” I said, realizing,
and in a way hoping, that my tone would sound vaguely threatening. “But if you
order this, the very fact of doing so might be interpreted as being a result of
some other motives on your part. I’m doing my best to convince you to think
again. But I want you to know that if I can’t, I’m going from here to Misha’s
office. I’ll try to convince him of the damage from what you’re contemplating to
the whole fabric of trust in the general staff and the army, to the image of the
army.” Still, he said nothing. He nodded occasionally. He puffed on his
cigarette, put it out, lit another one. It was pretty clear he had no intention of
rescinding his order.
Within 20 minutes, was in the Minister of Defense’s office. I spoke to him for
about 10 minutes. Misha listened. At the end, he said: “I understand what you’ve
told me.” I never discovered what exactly he said to Moshe Vechetzi. But the
investigation never happened. I never spoke a word about any of it to Dan until
years later, after both of us had left the army.
The result, however, was that Dan became deputy chief-of-staff under
Moshe, the latest step in what was beginning to look like a steady rise to the top.
But Misha did make a few concessions to Moshe’s preferred candidates, and that
now turned out to have major implications for me. It was a long-accepted
practice that chiefs-of-staff had more than one deputy during their period in
charge. In the homestretch of Moshe’s tenure, he was able to bring in Amir Drori
for a spell as his number-two. And early in 1986, he also brought Amnon Lipkin
back to the kirya. Amnon was given my job, as Director of Intelligence. But I got
the post which Amnon was leaving: head of the central command area. This
meant that, for the first time, I would be in charge of one of Israel’s three regional
military commands, and we were based on the edge of Jerusalem, with security
responsibility for the West Bank.
This was my first direct exposure to the combustible mix of restive
Palestinians and the growing number of Jewish settlers. Our main brief was to
prevent terror attacks, violence or unrest from the roughly 850,000 West Bank
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Palestinians toward the 50,000 Israelis who were then living in the settlements.
At the time, by far most Palestinians were not involved in any violence. They
were mainly interested in getting on with their lives. Yet there were signs of
trouble. The PLO leaders’ relocation to Tunis had reduced their direct influence.
But the briefings I got from Shin Bet officers made it clear that some young
West Bankers had begun trying to organize attacks against police, soldiers and
Israeli civilians. The settlements were also growing in number, and their
residents were not above acts of violence against Palestinians. Further
complicating the situation was the fact the settlers enjoyed the support of key
Likud members in the cabinet: Shamir, who was about to take his turn as Prime
Minister in October 1986; Misha, now a minister without portfolio; and most of
all Arik Sharon. In an astonishing demonstration of resilience and
determination, not only had Arik remained as a minister without portfolio when
Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin. In the coalition government, he had
become Minister of Trade and Labor. Most importantly, when he’d been
Agriculture Minister under Begin, he was the driving force in plans to expand
Jewish settlement on the West Bank, including “blocs” placed around the major
Palestinian towns and cities for the first time since 1967.
I had a responsibility to protect the settlers, and I did my best to fulfil it. Yet
I believed it was essential they understood that they were subject to the
authority of the state of Israel and, like other Israeli citizens, had to operate
within the law. This was no mere theoretical problem. A Jewish underground
had been established by members of Gush Emunim, the Orthodox Jewish
movement set up in the 1970s to advance what they saw as a divinely mandated
mission to settle the West Bank. It had carried out car-bombings and other
attacks in the early 1980s, leaving two Palestinian mayors crippled for life. The
terror campaign had ended only when the Shin Bet caught the cell placing
explosives under Arab-owned buses in Jerusalem.
Hopeful of preventing misunderstandings, and ideally building a relationship
of trust, I visited many of the settlements during the early weeks in my new post
and spoke with their leaders, a few of whom remain friends to this day. But in
the spring of 1986, we faced our first major test on the ground. In a pre-
Passover event organized by Gush Emunim, some 10,000 settlers streamed into
Hebron, a city sacred not only to Jews but Muslims as well as the burial place of
Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs. Peace Now activists had planned a counterprotest,
but Rabin denied them permission. Still, anti-settlement members of the
Knesset and other Israeli peace activists did get clearance to march from
Jerusalem to Hebron.
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My job was to ensure the security not just of the Gush Emunim march but of
the counter-demonstrators, and, of course, the local Palestinian population. As
the rival marches by the Israelis proceeded, I personally delivered warnings
against any violence, both to the settlement leaders and to a pair of the most
prominent counter-protesters, the peace activist Uri Avneri and Knesset member
Yossi Sarid. The event went off without major incident. But the next day,
Davar, the venerable Labor newspaper I’d first read as a child in Mishmar
Hasharon, let rip against me. Under a photo of me with Avneri and Sarid – my
arm raised, ostensibly in some kind of threat but actually in the time-honored
Jewish practice of talking with my hands – the article accused me of siding with
the settlers. If blood was spilled in the weeks and months ahead, the newspaper
said, “it will be on Barak’s hands.”
Ordinarily, I would have ignored it. But never in my military career had I
been similarly attacked on an issue of any importance. I was especially angry
because not only was the insinuation unfounded. It was diametrically opposite to
the stance I was determined to take in this, my first regional command. Yes, I
was committed to providing security for the settlers. But especially in the wake
of the crimes of the Jewish underground, I was determined to ensure they
remained within the boundaries of the law.
A few days later, I called Rabin’s aide and asked to see the Defense
Minister, and was told to come see him after Saturday lunch at his home. When
I arrived, Rabin got right down to business. “Ehud, you wanted to see me?” he
said. “You’ve probably seen Davar,” I replied. “It was a pretty nasty piece. It
distorted things.” Yet as he began asking for details, it seemed he had no idea
what I was talking about. “Ehud, I never read it,” he said. “If you hadn’t told
me, I’d never have known there was an issue.” I assumed this was a white lie,
told to reassure me. But years later, when I was Minister of Defense, and then
Prime Minister, I sometimes found myself on the other side of such meetings.
An officer or official would come see me because of something said about them
in the media, or remarks they were quoted as having made. When I told them
I’d been unaware of it, I could see the disbelief in their eyes. By then, however,
I realized that under the multiple demands of a senior role in government, you
really could fail to notice events that others viewed as crucial to their
reputations or careers. To reassure them I truly hadn’t noticed, I’d tell them the
story of my meeting with Rabin.
* * *
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There was another, slightly less noble, reason I wanted to set the record
straight with Rabin. Though only gradually did I admit this even to myself, I
realized that my experience in a regional command had ticked the one missing
box in the CV of our top generals, meaning that I might indeed be a candidate to
succeed Moshe Vechetzi as chief of staff. At first, I resisted taking the prospect
too seriously. The job of ramatkal not only carried responsibility for overall
command of the armed forces. Since our country still faced multiple security
threats, the chief of staff was, along with Prime Minister and Defence Minister,
among the most important, influential and visible positions in Israeli public life.
Yet as the April 1987 date for the changeover drew nearer, it was difficult not to
think about it. Not only was I apparently under consideration. To judge from
media reports, and officers’ smalltalk, it appeared that Rabin had whittled down
the possibilities to two. One was Dan Shomron, and I was the other.
Still, it was only when Rabin phoned me early in 1987 that I knew it was
true – and that I would not be getting the top job. “Ehud,” he said, “I wanted
you to know I’ve decided on Dan to be the next ramatkal. I want you to be his
deputy.” I can’t say I was surprised he’d chosen Dan. It wasn’t just that he was
more experienced, or even that, since he was older, missing out on the top job
this time would probably mean missing out for good. Yitzhak had always
valued Dan’s directness and honesty, his courage and record of service. Above
all, I’d long sensed that he felt a special debt to Dan: for Entebbe. At a time
when so much could have gone wrong, it was Dan who had taken a firm,
confident, successful hold on the operation.
Still, I was now 45. For me no less than for Dan, I knew that if I was passed
over as chief of staff, there was no guarantee I’d be chosen the next time. “I
respect your decision,” I told Rabin. “And I have no doubt Dan will be a good –
a very good – chief-of-staff.” But I had to consider my own future. “Even
though I’m grateful for the offer of deputy,” I said. “I think it’s better for me to
leave. To open up a new chapter, and do something else in life.”
Rabin said he couldn’t accept that. “Come see me,” he said. “Now.” When I
got to Jerusalem, I emphasized again that I had no doubt Dan would lead the
armed forces well. But I said my decision to leave the military wasn’t a mere
whim. I had been thinking about my own future and my family’s. We had three
young daughters. A few months earlier, we had moved home again, into a wide,
one-story rambler with a big yard out back. It was in a new town called Kochav
Yair, just inside Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank, and it struck me
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as a good time to settle down in a way that would be impossible if I stayed on in
the upper reaches of the military. Perhaps do something more academic, in a
university or a policy think-tank.
For the first time, politics had some appeal, too, though I didn’t say this to
him. At that point, I had no idea how, or even whether, I might get involved.
But since my appearance on Moked, others seemed to assume it might happen at
some stage. Out of nowhere, a leading political journalist, Hanan Kristal, had
written a story in 1986 purporting to predict the successors to Israel’s political
old guard: Peres and Rabin in Labor, Begin and Shamir in the Likud. It
appeared in the newspaper Hadashot. The paper ran side-by-side photos of the
ostensible future leaders, doctored to look older, who Hanan predicted would go
head-to-head in the election of 1996, a decade away. One was Israel’s
ambassador to the UN and a protégé of Misha Arens: Bibi Netanyahu. The other
was me.
Rabin listened with patience to my obviously settled intention to leave, but
remained firm that I should stay and become Dan’s deputy. In the end, I agreed
I’d think things over and that we’d talk in a week’s time. In the meantime, I
went to see two veteran generals who had found themselves in a similar
situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer
Weizman. I saw Arik on his farm in the Negev. He was obviously enjoying his
extraordinary political rehabilitation since the Lebanon war. His expanding girth
was settled into a sofa in the living room. I filled him in on my conversation
with Rabin. “I’m considering leaving,” I said. “It just seems like a long time to
wait, even if I do get the job after Dan. There’s a lot else I want to do in life.”
Arik was probably the general most experienced in being denied the chief-ofstaff’s
office. On at least two occasions, he might reasonably have been
considered. But in a career littered with tense encounters with his superiors, it
never happened. “You should stay on,” he said. You’re not that old. It’ll
probably be good for you, and the army, to be deputy and then chief.” The only
further advice he gave me was to do all I could formally to commit Yitzhak to
making me Dan’s successor after his term ended.
I visited Ezer at his home in the seaside town of Caesarea. We sat on the
terrace, with Ezer’s gangly frame draped over one of the cane chairs. “Ehud, if
you stay, do you think you have a good chance of being the next ramatkal,” he
asked. I said that while nothing could be certain, I thought there was a good
chance. He replied without hesitation: “Then stay.” He’d come close to the top
job, he told me. On the eve of the Six-Day War, when Rabin had collapsed
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physically from the weeks of tension, Yitzhak had asked him to take over. He’d
said no. But he said he’d always believed he could and should have been chiefof-staff
– and that if he hadn’t left to go into politics, he still might have got the
job. Then, suddenly, he shouted: “Reuma!” When his wife appeared, he said:
“Tell Barak the missing piece in my life, the one I’ve never stopped regretting.”
She smiled, and said: “It’s the fact you did not become ramatkal.”
I saw Rabin a couple of days later. Though I’d pretty much decided to take
the deputy’s job, I was still bothered by the prospect of serving as deputy for the
next four years only to find someone else being named chief-of-staff. I knew
that no matter what assurances Yitzhak gave me, there was no way of being
sure. He did say he viewed me as the natural next-in-line. But I still felt hesitant.
“I want you to consider two things,” I said. The first was a formal decision that
Dan would have only a single deputy during his time as chief-of-staff. He said
yes to that. Yet the second request was going to be even more difficult.
Heartening though it was to hear I was Dan’s “natural successor”, I asked him
to put it in writing. It was not that I doubted his word. But if the surprise result
of the last election was any indication, there was no way of predicting which
party would be in power when Dan’s terms ended. I wanted him to keep a
record of our understanding in his desk and pass it on if someone else was
Defense Minister by that time. Without a moment’s hesitation, he took out a
piece of paper and wrote down exactly what he’d told me about the succession.
He shook my hand as I left. “You’ve made the right decision,” he said.
And I had, even though Dan and I – and Rabin too – would soon face by far
the most difficult challenge in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians since our
capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war.
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Chapter Fourteen
It began with an accident. On Tuesday, December 8, 1987, an Israeli tank
transporter crashed into a minibus carrying Palestinians from the Jabalya
refugee camp near the main crossing from Gaza into Israel. Four passengers
were killed.
By the time of the funerals the next day, a rumor had spread, no less
incendiary for being absurd, that the crash had been deliberate – retaliation for
the fatal stabbing of an Israeli man a few days earlier. Crowds of Palestinians
leaving the burials began shouting “Death to Israel!” They hurled rocks and
bottles at Israeli security patrols, and blocked streets with burning tires. By the
next day, the violence started spreading to the West Bank, and then to parts of
east Jerusalem. The headline-writers moved from the word “disturbances” to
“unrest” and finally to the Palesitnians’ own name for the most serious outbreak
of violence since 1967: the “intifada”. The uprising.
At least for the first week or two, we assumed its ferocity and scale would
subside. Our immediate aim was to contain it, and limit the human cost on both
sides. Yet when Dan and I began visiting units on the front line of this new
conflict, we realized that if it kept escalating, we’d have to find new tools and
strategies to bring it under control. We were in charge of an army trained to
equip and fight enemy soldiers. Now, we were asking teenage recruits to
operate as riot police against stone-throwing mobs. Before long, it wasn’t just
stones, or even bottles. In one incident in Gaza, a young soldier was surrounded
by a crowd of Palestinians and stabbed. He opened fire, wounding two of the
attackers. Yitzhik Mordechai, now the head of the southern command, told
reporters that his troops were under “strict orders to open fire only if their lives
are under threat.” That was true. But I couldn’t help wondering how long the
other part of his statement would hold: that we remained “in control of the
situation.”
We did feel in control for the first few days. Defense Minister Rabin was
away in Washington on an official visit. When his office asked us whether he
should fly back, we said there was no need. But on his return, we quickly agreed
that, as a first priority, we needed to find an alternative to live ammunition in
quelling the attacks. Otherwise, we’d be left with two equally bad options:
either simply stand aside, in order to avoid killing or injuring demonstrators; or
intervene with the inevitable casualties. But one of our most important early
discussions was about the broader aspects of the violence. The meeting, held
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outside the kirya in a facility just north of Tel Aviv, was Rabin’s idea. In
addition to Dan and me, it included key members of the general staff and senior
defense ministry officials. The idea was for us to hear a half-dozen academics
and other specialists speak about the political aspects of the sudden eruption of
Palestinian violence.
Though he spoke for barely 10 minutes, it was the last speaker who left the
deepest impression. Shimon Shamir, a professor at Tel Aviv University, began
by emphasizing he was not an expert in riot control. Finding a response to the
violence was something we were far better equipped to do. But then he paused,
looked intently at Rabin, Dan and me, and said: “What I can do is draw on
history.” One by one, he cited examples of more than a dozen broadly similar
rebellions over the past century, in the Middle East and beyond. “If we were
dealing with simple rioting, things might be different.” But he said the
Palestinians were, fundamentally, acting out of a shared sense of grievance, and
shared national identity. Both were in large part the result of Israel having
controlled their daily lives now for more than two decades. “I’m afraid I can
find no historical precedent for the successful suppression of the national will of
a people,” he said. Even when those in power used unimaginably punitive tools:
like expulsion, or forced starvation. “Even, as we know well as a Jewish people,
extermination.”
I glanced at Yitzhak and at Dan. Both of them looked like I felt: in no doubt
the professor was right, yet also aware that, in the short term, we still had to find
a way of putting a lid on the cauldron and keeping the situation for getting
irretrievably out of control.
It wasn’t as if I’d been unaware of the sense of the anger building among
many West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, or of their wish to see an end to Israel’s
military administration and the growing number of Jewish settlements. From
my time as head of the central command, I also knew that there was a young,
activist core intensifying efforts to organize attacks on troops and settlers. But
none of us had any inkling that something of the scale, longevity and political
complexity of the intfada lay ahead.
Partly, this was a failure of specific intelligence warnings. But it went deeper
than that. Sobering though it was, I had to accept that – no less so than before
the Yom Kippur War in 1973 – I and many others had for too long been
comforting ourselves with a fundamental misconception about our military
occupation and civilian settlement in the areas captured in 1967. The roots of
the myopia went back to the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, to the
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generally civil, and often friendly contacts, Israelis had with Palestinians at the
time. The local population had, after all, been under other occupation powers
before 1967: Jordan in the West Bank, and Egypt in Gaza. Assuming our
administration was less onerous, most Israelis believed a way to coexist could
be found. And that sooner or later, there would be a land-for-peace agreement
and we would withdraw from at least most of the territory. But as the years
passed, with no sign of a willingness by the PLO to consider any kind of peace
talks, we made the cardinal error of assuming the occupation was sustainable.
Yes, there might be periods of violence, but nothing that a combination of
political resolve, arrests, detention and, where necessary, military force could
not hold in check. For us, and certainly for me, the Palestinians became
essentially a security issue. As one of Israel’s finest novelists, David Grossman,
would lay bare in a bestselling book of reportage called The Yellow Wind, about
a year into the intifada, we had ceased to see the human effects of 20 years of
occupation, not only on the Palestinians but on Israeli society as well.
Yet the power of Professor Shamir’s presentation lay not so much in its
novelty as its succinctness, clarity and, above all, its timing. The rioting had
already gone on for longer than any of us had expected. It seemed to be
gathering strength. But until our meeting, we were still looking at it essentially
as a civil disturbance. That was what began to change, for all of us.
What didn’t change was the need to try to bring the violence to an end. Dan
immediately put me in charge of looking for alternatives to live ammunition. I
began with our own research and development engineers. We also asked military
attachés in our embassies to talk to law-enforcement agencies, academics, or
anyone else with knowledge of non-lethal methods of crowd control overseas.
Some of the more far-flung examples seemed promising, at least until further
investigation. South Korea had years of experience in confronting student
protests – generally, though not always, managing to avoid fatalities. But it
turned out this typically involved sending in serried rows of up to 25,000 riot
police against a few thousand campus protesters. Besides the fact we’d have
needed an army the size of the Americans’ to field enough soldiers, it was absurd
to imagine dealing with dozens of far-flung confrontations on any given day with
parade-ground formations of troops.
We looked at anything that seemed it might work. In the early stages, most
of the attacks involved rocks and bottles. Our R&D engineers developed a Jeepmounted
“gravel gun” that fired stones at a distance of up to 250 feet. They
could cause injuries, but weren’t lethal. We acquired launchers for pepper spray
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and tear gas. We even looked at the possibility of dropping nets over crowds of
attackers. Very early on, we shifted to using plastic bullets. But even that
presented problems. At a distance of a hundred feet or so, they could drastically
reduce deaths. But when a young recruit saw hundreds of Palestinians closing in
on him, he wasn’t about to take out a tape measure. Over time, we began relying
wherever possible on rubber bullets and, in extreme cases, snipers to target the
legs of the organizers or ring-leaders.
If all of this sounds soul-destroying, that’s because it was. Especially with
daily television coverage of the clashes amplifying overseas support for the
Palestinians, morale among our soldiers also took a battering. In visits to units
on the West Bank and in Gaza, Dan and I, and Rabin too, heard two opposite
responses. Some of the young soldiers wanted us to use maximum force. We are
the army, they argued. We have the weapons. Why the hell don’t we use them?
But we also heard another view, if less often: why are we here at all?
We imposed closures and curfews. We made thousands of arrests. Still,
hundreds of soldiers and settlers were being injured, a number of them
disfigured or disabled. By the end of 1998, the Palestinian death toll was above
300. In February 1989, an Israeli officer was killed by a cement block tossed
from a rooftop in Nablus. A month later, a Palestinian knifed several people in
Tel Aviv, killing one of them. And in July, in the first attempt inside Israel at a
suicide attack, a Palestinian passenger grabbed the wheel of a bus on its way
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and drove it off the road, killing 16 people.
* * *
By the summer of 1990, although the violence had begun to flag slightly, I
was feeling more drained and exhausted than at any time since my bout of
illness in the Sinai after the 1973 war. I even briefly thought of leaving the army
after Dan’s term ended the following year. I’m not sure whether I would have
done that if the situation had not begun to change. But it did, dramatically. The
intifada gradually began to subside, and an entirely new crisis suddenly
intervened.
On August 2, against a background of longstanding financial and territorial
disputes, Iraq’s Sadam Hussein sent in tens of thousands of his troops and
occupied the neighboring state of Kuwait. Though the immediate crisis was
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nearly a thousand miles away from us, he tried to divert attention from US-led
international condemnation of his invasion by threatening Israel. He said “all
issues of occupation” were on the table – the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan
Heights, and Lebanon – and vowed to “let our fire eat half of Israel” in a future
war. And we could not assume this was mere rhetoric. Iraq had an arsenal of
Soviet-made ballistic missiles. Called Scuds, they were not always accurate at
long range. But they could reach Israeli towns and cities, and could carry not
just conventional explosives but chemical warheads. Moreover, Saddam had
used chemical weapons: during the Iran-Iraq war, and to kill thousands of his
own restive Kurdish population in the town of Halabja in the spring of 1988.
Even the prospect of American military action seemed not to faze him.
Hours into the invasion, he moved an armored force toward Kuwait’s border
with Saudi Arabia, a key US regional ally, immediately prompting the President
George Bush’s administration to go beyond mere verbal condemnation. With
Saudi agreement, Washington dispatched a squadron of F-15s to the kingdom –
the first step in what would become a huge American land, sea and air force to
face down Saddam and force him out of Kuwait.
Given the credible threat of Scud missile attacks on Israel, Dan immediately
assigned me to coordinate our assessment and evaluation of what Saddam was
likely to do in the event of a US-led attack, and what defense arrangements or
Israeli military response would be necessary. We knew we’d be under strong
pressure from the Americans to stay out of any war. Israeli involvement would
be a political gift to Saddam, allowing him to convert a conflict over his
aggression against an Arab neighbor into a “defense” against “Israeli
occupation.” But we had a primary responsibility to protect our citizens.
I was now working with a new Israeli government. After Shimon Peres tried
and failed to topple the unity coalition in the spring of 1990, Shamir had formed
a Likud-led government shorn of both Peres and Rabin. Misha Arens was again
Minister of Defense. I began preparing regular, fortnightly reports for him, Dan
and Prime Minister Shamir. Within days of the invasion, I produced my initial
assessment. The bottom line was that we had to assume there would be a war. It
was impossible to imagine the Americans would commit hundreds of thousands
of troops and simply bring them home again, unless Saddam succumbed and
retreated. I was equally certain Saddam would use his Scuds against us. He’d
figure the benefits of trying to bring Israel into the conflict far outweighed the
risk of retaliation. But I was “nearly 100 per-cent sure” he wouldn’t use
chemical warheads, since that would almost guarantee an Israeli military
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response, or an American one, on an incomparably greater scale. It would also
totally isolate Saddam internationally and end any chance of peeling off Arab
support for the Americans.
It was my nearly 100-per-cent caveat that prompted a tense debate within the
cabinet. Even if the probability of a chemical attack was microscopic, any risk
of civilians being subjected to terror, panic and very possibly agonizing death
meant that the government had to take precautions. The obvious first step would
be to distribute gas masks. But in a series of meetings with Misha and Dan, I
emphasized this was not a decision that could be taken in isolation. By handing
out gas masks, we might actually raise the probability of a chemical attack. We
also had to make sure as a matter of urgency that we had a workable military
option to attack Iraq’s Scud launchers.
By early November, I was dealing both with plans for distributing the gas
masks and preparations for a possible military operation. So when I got a call
asking me to report to Shamir’s office in Jerusalem, I assumed he wanted to talk
about Iraq. “How are things?” he asked. But when I began by filling him in on
the plans to distribute the gas-masks, he interrupted me. “I called you here,” he
said, “because I wanted you to know that we’ve decided that when Dan leaves
next April, we want you to replace him as chief-of-staff.” Briefly and unusually
tongue-tied, I said: “Thank you, Prime Minister”. The news was made public
the next morning. A few days later, it was ratified by the government. There
was only one vote against, from a former chief of staff who was now Shamir’s
Agriculture Minister: Raful Eitan.
I was one of rare instances in all my years in the army when I took a step
back, appreciating a moment which felt special. It was not only, or even mainly,
a matter of a personal ambition fulfilled. More a sense that I was being given
the opportunity to apply everything I’d experienced and learned in the army,
from the day I first joined Sayeret Matkal as an 18-year-old, to improve the
security and safeguard the future of Israel. I know that sounds corny. But, while
the momentum toward war in Iraq almost immediately crowded out everything
else again, that was truly how I felt.
* * *
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By mid-December 1990, war was virtually certain. Misha and I had been to
Washington in September and agreed with the Americans that, unless we were
attacked by Saddam, we would stay out of it. To do otherwise was clearly not
just against the US-led coalition’s interests. Given the importance of our
alliance with Washington, it was against our inrerests as well. Yet with
hostilities obviously getting closer, Misha phoned Defense Secretary Dick
Cheney a few days later to remind him of the quid pro quo: we would be kept
fully in the loop about the details and timing of the initial American air strikes.
At around five o’clock on the afternoon on January 16, 1991, Misha got a call
from Cheney. He said “h-hour” would be at seven that evening Washington
time. Three a.m. in Israel.
Though we hoped to stay out, I’d now spent months coordinating and
overseeing preparations to ensure we could attack Saddam’s Scuds if necessary.
By far most of the missiles were mounted on mobile launching vehicles, and
Saddam was almost certainly going to be firing them from the vastness of Iraq’s
western desert. That meant an Israeli air strike alone wouldn’t work. We
decided on a joint air and ground operation, built around a newly created airmobile
division and other special units. A force of 500 to 600 soldiers would
take control of key areas and road junctions in western Iraq and start hunting
and destroying, or at least impeding, the Scud launchers.
We also engaged in secret diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the
obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we’d have to
overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called Tevel, a kind of shadow
foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with
which, in both side’s interests, we had a channel of backdoor communications.
It was headed by Ephraim Halevy, a London-born Israeli who had come to
Palestine in 1948 as a teenager. He had built up a personal relationship with
King Hussein, and now arranged for us to meet him at a country residence
which the king had in Britain.
A few weeks before the war, I boarded a private jet to London along with
Halevy and Prime Minister Shamir. Shamir had never met the king before and
nor, of course, had I. But we didn’t talk about the forthcoming meeting on the
five-hour flight. Instead, Shamir opened up in a way I’d never seen: about his
childhood as part of a relatively well-off family in Poland; his love of literature,
and of the Bible. In a way, it reminded me of how my father had spoken to me
when I was growing up – minus the “well-off family” part.
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When we got to Hussein’s country home, we were greeted by an
impressively self-assured man in his late 20s who, like Hussein, had studied at
Britain’s military academy in Sandhurst and then gone on to Oxford. It was
Abdullah, the king’s son and later his successor, and he explained that he would
be in charge of handling security for the talks. For a few hours in the afternoon,
we held preliminary discussions, and I presented our assessment of the
challenges and options facing all the different players in the crisis. Then we
retired to a dinner at which – despite the royal china, crystal and silverware –
the atmosphere was also surprisingly informal.
The main meeting came the next morning. Both sides recognized the
seriousness of the issues we had to discuss. Shamir began with the one we
assumed would be the least difficult. Israel was on a heightened state of military
alert, prompted by Iraqi reconnaissance flights over Jordan, and the likelihood
the Iraqis were also hoping to get a look at our main nuclear research and
development facility in the nearby Negev. It was important to ensure this didn’t
lead to an unintended conflict between us and the Jordanians. While the king
was careful to steer clear of any detailed comment on the Iraqi moves, he made
it clear that he understood our concern about stumbling into an Israeli-Jordanian
conflict and agreed that we had to avoid doing so.
Yet the issue of our overflights, if we needed to attack the Scuds, was more
sensitive. We said that if we did have to cross into Jordanian air space, we
would find whatever way the king suggested to make it as unobtrusive as
possible. We raised the possibility of using a narrow air corridor. His response
was not hostile, but it was firm. This was an issue of Jordanian sovereignty, he
told us. He could not, and would not, collaborate in any way with an Israeli
attack on another Arab state. It was Ephraim who tried to find a way around the
apparent stalemate. He suggested Shamir and the king withdraw to speak alone,
ad they met for nearly an hour. When Shamir emerged, clasping the king’s hand
and thanking him for his hospitality, he turned to us and said: “OK. We’re going
home.”
He didn’t tell us exactly what Hussein said. In the few sentences with which
he described the talks on the flight back, he said that, as a sovereign, Hussein
could not order his forces to ignore Israeli planes. But he added: “I assume there
will be no war with Jordan.” I took that to mean there might well be an attempt
to intercept our jets, with the risk that either we or they might end up with one
of our planes shot down, but that the king would use his authority and
experience to ensure this didn’t lead to a wider confrontation.
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* * *
The Israeli public’s concern over a possible Iraqi attack was growing by the
day, in part because of the precautionary measures we’d taken. We had handed
out gas masks to the whole country. Though I’d been concerned that might raise
the prospect of a chemical attack, I still thought a chemical strike was highly
unlikely. The government rightly decided that not distributing the masks would
betray a fundamental responsibility to the safety of our citizens. We’d also
issued instructions about how to equip a room, usually the shelter included in
nearly every Israeli home, as a cheder atum, or “sealed room” to keep gas from
getting in. The Israeli media was full of speculation about the likely effects of a
chemical attack. Many families had begun panic buying of food and other
necessities to prepare for the possibility of days and nights in their sealed
shelters.
In my report for Dan, Misha and Shamir a few weeks before the war, I drew
on systematic analysis by a team of experts in the Israeli air force and made my
most specific estimate yet of the damage conventionally armed Scuds might
cause. We had gone back into historical accounts of the closest equivalent: the
Nazis’ use of V-1 and V-2 rockets against London in the Second World War.
Given Saddam’s primary need to fight Americans, and the likelihood either they
or we would take military action against the launchers, we concluded we’d be
hit by roughly 40 missiles, and that, based on Britain’s wartime experience, up
to 120 Israelis might lose their lives as a result.
The first air-raid sirens wailed in Israel at about 2 a.m. on January 18, 1991,
almost exactly 24 hours after the Americans began their bombing raids over
Baghdad. I was home in Kochav Yair. Like other Israelis, we’d set up a sealed
shelter. Though I felt a bit silly doing it, having assured the government Saddam
was vanishingly unlikely to use chemical warheads, we woke up the kids and
Nava took them inside. I put on my own gas mask. But when I ran out to my
car, I removed my mask and put it on the passenger’s seat before heading in to
the kirya. I wanted to get there quickly enough so that the bor, the underground
command bunker, wouldn’t have to reopened when I arrived. I took a short-cut,
through the West Bank town of Qalqilya. That was, to put it mildly, stupid.
Although the intifada had become steadily less intense during the build-up to
the war, it wasn’t completely over. Within seconds, my black sedan was being
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pelted with stones by a half-dozen Palestinian youths. I thought to myself: this
is nuts. One of Saddam’s Scuds might well be about to hit Israel, and I’ve got
myself stuck in the middle of a West Bank town. To the obvious shock of the
Palestinians, I floored the accelerator and raced toward Tel Aviv. It still took
half-an-hour. Misha and Dan, who lived closer to the kirya, were already in the
bunker.
Ten Scuds hit near Tel Aviv and Haifa that night. It was not until shortly
before dawn that our tracker units got back to us with formal confirmation that
there had been no chemical warheads. The rockets caused a half-dozen injuries,
though thankfully none was serious. Still, the very fact Saddam had proven he
could hit Israel with ballistic missiles provoked widespread alarm. Well into the
next morning, the streets were almost empty. Misha phoned Cheney and
strongly implied we were going to have to attack the Scud sites. I know that was
Misha’s own view, and it only hardened after another four missiles hit the Tel
Aviv area the next morning. Again, no one was killed, but several dozen people
were injured from debris, shards of glass and blast concussion. I visited several
of the areas that had been hit and was shocked by the scale of the damage. One
four-story apartment building had been virtually destroyed, and there was blast
damage to other buildings hundreds of yards away.
The Americans were clearly determined, in both word and deed, to persuade
us not to take military action. They rushed an anti-missile system called Patriot
to Israel. Cheney was also giving us frequent updates on American air strikes
against suspected Scud launch sites. And the Israeli public did seem to grasp the
serious implications for the US-led coalition of our taking unilateral military
action. Opinion polls suggested most Israelis were giving Shamir credit for the
way he was handling the crisis.
Still, it wasn’t easy for Shamir to hold the line. This was the first time since
1948 that enemy munitions had landed on Israeli homes, provoking not just
fear, but a feeling of helplessness. That inevitably led to calls for the army and
the government to do something. I saw his dilemma first-hand at an emergency
cabinet meeting after the first two Scud attacks. For Arik and Raful, the political
effects on the US coalition were irrelevant. The issue, for them, was simple:
Israeli cities had been attacked, and we should respond with any and all force
necessary. Our air force commander, Avihu Ben-Nun, favored going ahead with
the joint and-and-ground attack we’d prepared, and Misha agreed with him. So
did Dan Shomron. The key voices of caution were Foreign Minister David
Levy; Ariye Deri, the leader of the Sephardi Orthodox party Shas; and two
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young Likud politicians, Dan Meridor and Ehud Olmert, with whom I had
become friendly. They, like me, were concerned about undermining the
Americans’ military and diplomatic coalition.
Shamir mostly listened, until very near the end. He then asked Dan Meridor,
Misha and me to join him in a separate room. He asked each of us for our
views. Misha, even more strongly then in front of the full cabinet, argued that
we could not allow night after night of missile attacks without responding.
Meridor reiterated his opposition, stressing the damage we’d risk doing to the
Americans’ war effort by possibly weakening Arab support for their attack on
Saddam. When Shamir turned to me, I said that if the government did decide on
military action, we were ready. From a purely military and security point-ofview,
I said, an attack made absolute sense. Even if we didn’t succeed in
destroying, or even finding, the mobile launch sites, putting a military force on
the ground would almost surely lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of
Scud launches. But, echoing Meridor, I added that a military response would
carry a price in our relationship with the Americans. My view was that, at least
for now, we should hold off.
When we rejoined the meeting, Shamir rapped his hand on the table. In the
startled silence that followed, he said he shared many ministers’ urge to hit back
against the Scuds. But he said: “At this stage, we’re not going to do anything.
We bite our lips and wait.”
Three nights later, his resolve was stretched almost to breaking point.
Missiles landed in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, and nearly 40 homes
were damaged. A three-story house was flattened. In all, nearly 100 people were
injured, and three elderly residents died of heart attacks. On the night of January
25, another seven Scuds hit. Nearly 150 apartments were badly damaged, and a
51-year-old man was killed. The pressure on Shamir was all the greater because
the Ramat Gan attack had come within range of one of the Americans’ Patriot
batteries. The Patriots had been originally designed not as anti-missile weapons,
but to attack aircraft, and they seemed to have been ineffective. Nor were
American air strikes in Iraq stopping the Scuds. Though American jets had
taken out a few fixed launch sites, they were having no luck with finding and
destroying mobile launch vehicles.
Even Shamir now felt that unless the Americans got the mobile launchers,
we would have to attack military action. I was sent to Washington along with
Misha and David Ivri, a former air force commander, to deliver that message to
the Bush administration. From the first days after Saddam’s attack on Kuwait,
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I’d been impressed by President Bush’s political acumen in assembling an
international coalition including the key Arab states. Through Unit 8200 in
military intelligence, we would only very occasionally get verbatim transcripts
of his conversations as he brought first the Saudis and other Gulf states on
board, then Morocco, and eventually even Syria. More often, I’d see the
President’s deft diplomacy second-hand, through intercepts of Arab leaders’
communications with one another. But the picture which emerged was of an
American president deftly able to stake out common ground, and common
interests, with each of the Americans’ growing number of anti-Saddam allies.
When we entered the Oval Office on the evening of February 11, Bush was
flanked by Secretary of State Baker, Defense Secretary Cheney and national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Also there was Colin Powell, a general whom
I had got to know well, and to like, over the past few years and who was now
head of the joint chiefs-of-staff. Given the seriousness of our mission, the start
of the meeting was almost surreal. The Americans had obviously been told that
I was born on February 12. Since it was just past midnight in Israel, they began
by wishing me a happy 49 th birthday.
Yet pleasing thought that was, it became clear there was a disconnect
between the tension among Israeli government ministers, and ordinary Israelis,
back home and the relaxed, self-assured, at times even jovial mood of the
President and his inner circle. Their primary focus was clearly not on Israel, but
on the overwhelming success of their air attacks on Iraq and the approach of a
ground offensive that they were confident would finish the job. That didn’t
seem to change even after a truly extraordinary interruption to our meeting,
when one of Misha’s aides passed on the news that a Scud had struck the Tel
Aviv suburb of Savyon, where Misha himself lived. He immediately excused
himself and went to phone his wife, Muriel, to confirm she was fine. When he
returned, despite their pro forma words of empathy, it seemed almost as if the
Americans thought we had cooked up the entire thing for political effect.
Bush did say the right things as the discussion turned to the missile attacks
on Israel. He told us he understood our frustration, and the pain the Scud
launches were inflicting. He appreciated our restraint. I have no doubt that all of
that was true. But the message we’d been sent to deliver clearly wasn’t hitting
home. As politely but as clearly as I could, I told President Bush that while we
didn’t want to do anything to undermine the coalition, unless someone else took
care of the Scuds, we would have no choice but to act.
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The President responded by suggesting we go to the Pentagon and talk in
greater detail about how, for both our countries’ benefit, that could be avoided.
When we convened in Secretary Cheney’s office, I delivered the same message,
but more forcefully. I felt it was essential not only to make it clear we serious
about taking action, but that we had the military capability to do so. So I told
Secretary Cheney and Colin what we were planning. I said we intended to
launch a combined air and ground assault by an air-mobile force and our best
paratroop units. At that point, Colin, who was clearly worried, suggested the
two of us withdraw to speak “soldier to soldier.” We retreated to his office.
Spreading out a map of western Iraq, I went into greater detail, explaining how
we would remain in the Iraqi desert on a search-and-destroy mission against the
mobile launchers. Colin stressed the efforts the Americans were making from
the air, and the commitment they’d shown to Israel. Not only had they delivered
the Patriots. They had allocated their best fighter jets, F-15E’s, to the task of
taking out the Scuds. It helped that he and I had got to know and respect each
other, so it wasn’t an all-out argument. But I reiterated that if the Scud attacks
kept up, we would have to act. “We will act,” I said. For a few seconds, he said
nothing. But as we headed back to join the others, he told me that only a few
hours ago, he had briefed American commanders on an anti-Scud operation by
“allied forces” like the one we were planning. “It will happen,” he assured me.
“Within 48 hours.”
That task fell to Britain’s SAS. The operation was almost exactly the same as
the one we’d planned. A force of nearly 700 commandos was helicoptered in to
Iraq’s western desert, equipped with Jeeps and Land Rovers, and anti-tank
missiles and laser targeting capability. They were also able to call on attack
helicopters and F-15 jets if necessary. The operation did not prove easy, quick,
or entirely successful. The British troops blocked the main roads and patrolled
them. But they did not find or destroy a single mobile launcher. They ended up
in gun battles with Iraqi troops. The SAS lost something like two dozen men.
Five were part of a group that got separated from the others and ended up
freezing to death in the February cold. All of the men risked their lives, with
incredible determination and bravery, in an operation to secure the safety of
Israel’s civilian population. And I have no doubt that the outcome, like the plan,
would have been almost identical if we had done it ourselves.
And it did have an effect. As I’d told Prime Minister Shamir when briefing
him on our attack plan, the very fact of a military presence on the ground made
a dramatic difference. The number, accuracy and impact of the Scuds dropped
off steeply. A few missiles kept coming, however. Since we did not yet have a
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fully detailed picture of the progress of the SAS action, skeptics and hawks in
the cabinet were inclined to see a glass half-empty. They continued to press for
Israeli military action.
In a rare public statement, I tried to reassure the country we did have a
military option, but also to urge restraint. I pointed out that the number of Scuds
had begun decreasing. Though the threat had not been eliminated altogether, we
had “very good operational plans” that would be “carried out when and if the
Israeli government instructs us to implement them.” Yet I added a caveat. “On
the political level, fingers are itching to carry out operations which, in our
opinion, can remove the threat. But in the complex situation created by this war,
neither anger, hurt, nor itchy fingers can replace rational thinking.”
The American ground invasion did turn out to be swift and decisive. In
Israel, Scud attacks continued for a few more days. But the last two missiles fell
in the Negev before dawn on February 25, among the very few to cause neither
casualties nor damage. We turned out to have been right in our pre-war
assessment about the number of missiles: around 40. Fortunately, the casualties
were far fewer than we’d anticipated. Not 120 dead, but fifteen, only one of
whom died directly because of a missile blast. The other deaths were the result
of understandable panic: the misuse of gas masks or the gas antidote drug
atropine, or from respiratory and cardiac failure. The physical damage,
however, was far greater than I’d anticipated. Buildings were destroyed. Cars
were crushed. Glass and debris flew everywhere. In financial terms, the cost ran
to hundreds of millions of dollars. The true impact was greater: on families who
saw the destruction not only their homes, but a lifetime of prized possessions.
For Holocaust survivors in particular, there was the almost unimaginable terror
of having to huddle in sealed rooms for fear of gas. And all Israelis had
experienced a new sense of vulnerability to a faraway enemy whom they
couldn’t see nor, apparently, stop.
* * *
I was due to become Israel’s 14 th chief-of-staff at the start of April, barely a
month after the last Scud attack. As the handover drew nearer, I felt fortunate,
in a way, to have missed out on the job four years earlier. Not only had Dan
excelled as ramatkal. I’d benefited from his range of experience, his judgment,
and his trust as well. We had worked together truly as a team.
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I was grateful not only to Shamir for naming me chief-of-staff, but to Rabin
and Misha. Both had honored the assurance Yitzhak had given me that I’d be
Dan’s successor. I also discovered Misha had played an even greater role than
I’d assumed. I knew there would be other candidates for the job. The strongest
turned out to be Yossi Peled, who was the head of the northern command and
possessed the undoubted credentials to be an excellent chief-of-staff. What I
hadn’t been aware of was the sentiment among some in the Likud that I was the
wrong choice politically. Not only had been born on a Labor kibbutz. There was
the small matter of the article in Hadashot several years earlier, imagining me
as a Labor leader going head-to-head in a future election against Bibi
Netanyahu for the Likud.
Yossi was assumed to be more of a Likudnik, and a few weeks before Dan
left office, I learned how Misha had rebutted the suggestion I was politically
unfit to lead the armed forces. He was visiting the north and was taken aside by
a group of Likud activists who asked how he could possibly be thinking of
supporting Barak – a Labor guy – for chief-of-staff. At first, Misha didn’t reply.
But one woman kept pressing him.
“Do you have children in the army?” he asked.
“Yes. I have a son in the Golani Brigade,” she replied proudly.
“So let’s assume your son is going on a raid across the border. Would you
want his company to be led by the best commander in the battalion? Or by a
commander who’s Likud?”
“The best commander, of course,” she said.
To which Misha said: “Well we do, too.”
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Chapter Fifteen
On the morning of April 1, 1991. I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the
graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur
War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from
his desk in the kirya to join the Sayeret Matkal attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then
Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Israel’s national military cemetery on Mount
Herzl, we stood before the resting place of Nechemia Cohen, Yoni Netanyahu,
Dado, and Avraham Arnan. From there, we went to the Prime Minister’s office.
With Dan Shomron and his wife looking on, Shamir presented me with my third
star and formally made me chief of staff.
For years, I’d developed the habit of carrying around a notebook in which
I’d jot down thoughts on things I thought that the Israeli military, and I as an
officer, could have done better: errors, oversights, and how we might fix them.
In the weeks before becoming ramatkal, I’d filled dozens of pages on issues
large and small I hoped to address as the commander of the armed forces. A lot
of them dealt with what I sensed was an erosion of cohesiveness in the army,
and, since ours was a citizen military, a fraying of the relationship between the
army and Israeli society. To some degree, this was inevitable in a country now
nearly 45 years old: developed economically and free of the kind of existential
threat we’d faced in the early years of the state. But the political divisions over
the war in Lebanon, and morale-sapping need to quell the violence on the West
Bank and in Gaza had further strained our unity of purpose.
Militarily, we were now indisputably strong enough to defeat any of the
Arab armies, even if they launched a joint attack as in 1973. Our most important
overseas ally, the United States, was committed to helping us retain that
position – what both we and they called Israel’s “qualitative edge” – in the
interest of our security and their own. But we were facing a series of new,
unconventional challenges. One of them, which had come on to Dan Shomron’s
and my radar over the past year, was Iran. Though geographically distant, it was
potentially the most serious in the longer run, as Dan himself warned Israelis in
his final interview as chief of staff. Iran was likely to become even more
assertive regionally now that the Gulf War had weakened its neighbor and rival,
Iraq. We also knew, from our intelligence sources, that the Iranians were
making preliminary efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
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Yet the most immediate security concerns were right next door. In Lebanon,
Hizbollah fighters were being armed and financed by the Iranians and by Syria
as well. They were mounting increasingly effective operations against the
Israeli troops we’d left in the security zone. Even closer to home, Palestinian
attacks on both troops and civilians, though on nowhere near the scale of the
first months of the intifada, showed no sign of ending. I had my own views on
both. In Lebanon, I still believed we should pull out all our troops and focus our
security arrangements on what really mattered: protecting the citizens of
northern Israel. As for the lessons to be learned from the intifada, my view that
we needed a political dialogue had inadvertently become public, from remarks I
made in Moshe Dayan’s honor at a memorial event a few months before
becoming chief of staff. “We are currently in a struggle with the Palestinians – a
long, bitter and continuing struggle,” I said. “A people cannot choose its
neighbors. But we will have to talk to the Palestinians about matters, especially
about issues that are vital to them.”
Still, I was the commander of the armed forces, not a politician. Though all
chiefs of staff had political influence, if only as part of the decision-making
process on all major security questions, making policy was for our elected
government. My main focus was on how to improve the military’s fitness to
respond. I’d lived through, and more recently fought in, all of Israel’s wars. I
felt that we had yet to apply some of the critical lessons from those conflicts.
Leading tanks into battle against the Egyptians’ deadly Sagger missiles in 1973,
and a decade later watching whole Israeli armored columns stalled and attacked
by small bands of PLO fighters or Syrian commandos in Lebanon, had hardened
my conviction that Israel needed a leaner, more mobile army, with more
specialised strike units, as well as more easily targeted, less vulnerable weapons
systems. I wanted to shift the emphasis to weaponry that relied on Israel’s
strengths in new technology, invention and engineering. In a sense, this was the
macroscopic equivalent of one of the guiding principles of Sayeret Matkal:
brains, not just brawn.
While cost-saving wasn’t the catalyst, I did realize that a change in strategy
would mean a change in how we allocated our resources. When Israel bought its
first Mirage jets from France in the 1960s, they cost about a million dollars
apiece. The price tag of an F-16 was now closer to fifty million dollars. The cost
of a tank had increased tenfold. I wasn’t going to deprive the air force of stateof-the-art
aircraft, key to our ability to fight and win a war. But while we still
needed a strong armored corps, it was important to realize that units like the
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new air mobile division we’d planned to use against Saddam’s Scud launchers
were likely to be a lot more important than tank formations in future conflicts.
Six days into the job, I called together every officer in the army, from the
rank of lieutenant-colonel up. I said we needed to remind ourselves of the
army’s purpose: to protect Israel’s security and, if a war came, to win it. My
budgetary rule of thumb over the next four years would be simple: anything that
didn’t directly contribute to that mission was expendable. In fact, I put it a bit
more bluntly: “We need to cut anything that doesn’t shoot.”
My first attempt failed utterly. I proposed to close, or sell off, the army’s
radio station, Galei Tzahal. Running it cost serious money. If we were going to
cut everything that didn’t shoot, it was an obvious candidate. But what I failed
to take into account was its popularity with the listening public. Although other
radio stations had opened recently, for many years it had been the only major
alternative to the state-funded Kol Yisrael. It also provided a training ground
and employment feeder for future journalists. Galei Tzahal’s alumni included
some of the country’s top media figures, and more than a few members of the
Knesset. Within weeks, a lobbying effort was underway to “save” the station. I
went to see Misha. He agreed that, from a military and budgetary standpoint,
closing it was the right thing to do. But in an early lesson in how different
politics were from the army, he told me that politically, it simply wasn’t going
to fly. “Drop it, Ehud,” he said. So I did.
Still, I did end up fundamentally retooling the armed forces during my time
as chief of staff. We developed agile new strike forces and high-precision, hightech
weapons systems with “stand-off” munitions designed to be fired from
many miles away. In the 1973 war, and for the decade or two that followed,
Saggers, and the US-made TOW missiles that Israel acquired after the war, had
the capability to transform a battlefield. Now, Israeli developers came up with
small, ground-launched missiles that could take out a tank from five to 10 miles
away, even without a direct line of sight to the target. Of even more long-term
military significance, I pushed ahead with developing pilotless drones – socalled
UAVs – making us the first army in the world to produce and deploy
them.
Yet for a security challenge like the intifada, even the most advanced standoff
munitions or UAVs offered no practical answer. The latest stage in the
violence involved knife attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, both on
West Bank settlers and inside Israel. Days after I took over, a 26-year-old from
Gaza, wielding a butcher’s knife and shouting Alahu Akhbar, killed four people,
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including a kindergarten teacher, in Jerusalem. On the morning of May 24,
1992, a 15-year-old Israeli schoolgirl named Helena Rapp was on her way to
catch the bus to school south of Tel Aviv, when another Gazan stabbed her to
death. To the extent Israelis were looking for someone to blame, there were
obvious candidates. The army, the primary defense against the intifada, was
one. The police even more so, since many of the attacks were now taking place
inside Israel. And in ugly rioting after Helena Rapp’s murder, bands of Israelis
took to the streets, some of them yelling: “Death to the Arabs”. Still, most
people understood that criticizing the army or the police, or going on a rampage
against “the Arabs” – hundreds of thousands of whom were Israeli citizens and
had lived among us since the birth of the state – would not help. Most, in fact,
placed the blame, and lodged their hopes, with the government.
By the time of the next election, in June 1992, the combination of Palestinian
violence and the still-traumatic memories of Saddam’s Scuds, left Israelis
doubtful that Shamir could fulfil the most basic responsibility of government:
ensuring their day-to-day security. Labor had once again placed its electoral
fortunes in the hands of Yitzhak Rabin, following Peres’s several failed
attempts to lead the party back into power. Knowing that Rabin had a record of
military command unmatched in Israeli politics, Labor strategists did not so
much need to convince voters as to reinforce their fears and frustrations. One of
the campaign slogans, a direct appeal to the anger over the stabbing of Helena
Rapp, was “Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv!” Labor ended up gaining five Knesset
seats, and now had 44. The Likud lost eight and was left with only 32.
That meant that my last three years as chief of staff would be with Rabin
back as Prime Minister – and, like Ben-Gurion before him, as Defense Minister
as well. He and I had been in touch only occasionally since his departure from
the unity-coalition government two years earlier. But I had, of course, spoken
with him after my appointment as ramatkal, in which he’d played an important
part. Though he was 20 years older than me, our relationship had become
steadily closer over the years, especially when I’d worked with him as Defense
Minister. In some ways, we were alike. We’d both been forged by Labor
Zionism. We were career military officers, uncomfortable with flights of
political rhetoric and convinced that Israel’s security and its future depended
less on words than on action. In large groups especially, both of us tended to be
men of a few words. Over the next few years, we would become even closer,
speaking not only in the kirya or at Yitzhak’s office in Jerusalem, but also, with
Nava and Leah, around the dinner table at Rabin’s apartment in Tel Aviv.
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* * *
But there were times of crisis, and high tension, as well. Only five months
after the election, Rabin and I faced one of the most painful periods during my
entire time as chief of staff. It began with the gruesome death of five Sayeret
Matkal soldiers during a training exercise in the Negev desert. I’d made
preventing such accidents a top priority. By the end of the 1980s, they were
claiming as many as 80 lives a year. During Dan’s tenure, we’d brought the
number down to about 35. But I knew we had to do more. When I’d addressed
the officers after becoming chief of staff, I told them: “Parents are giving us
their children in order to allow us to protect the country. They know there is risk
involved. But they expect their children not to be brought home in coffins
because of our own negligence, or stupidity.” What happened at the military
base of Tze’elim in the Negev on November 5, 1992 was not only a reminder of
how far we still had to go, however. It occurred during a dry run for an
operation unlike any that Israel had ever considered. For that and other reasons,
it would erupt into a major political controversy.
Though the reason for the exercise was meant to have remained a closely
guarded secret, foreign newspaper reports in the weeks after the training
accident made secrecy impossible. We were planning to infiltrate a Sayeret
Matkal unit into Iraq, and to kill Saddam Hussein.
The Gulf War had blunted any immediate threat from Iraq. But Saddam had
proven he could launch missiles into the heart of Israel. We knew from our
intelligence reports that, in addition to his unabated desire to acquire nuclear
arms, he retained facilities to produce chemical weapons. He was trying to
acquire and develop new biological weapons. In fact, the Iraqis had actually
acknowledged a biological weapons program to UN inspectors, claiming it was
for “defensive purposes.”
The idea for an attack on Saddam had first been raised a year earlier, when
my former Sayeret Matkal comrade, Amiram Levin, asked to see me. He was
between military postings, but had come up with the outline of a plan he felt
would allow us to isolate Saddam during a public appearance and kill him. With
my approval, he and a small group of officers in the sayeret began working
further on the idea, with the initial aim of seeing whether it was really workable.
Since Misha was still Defense Minister, I briefed him on what we were doing. I
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also briefed Rabin after the election. At that stage, there was no discussion of
whether we actually would, or should, target Saddam. I asked Misha, and then
Yitzhak, only whether such an operation might seriously be considered by the
government. If not, I said, we’d drop it. Both replied that we should go ahead
with the planning and preparation. The November 1992 exercise was intended
as a final test of its viability – before deciding whether actually to do it.
A few weeks earlier, Rabin and I had talked through the arguments for and
against. The arguments against it were obvious. Yes, in the past we had
abducted, or even killed, leaders of groups involved in terror attacks. But we’d
never contemplated targeting a head of state. Crossing that line risked being
seen not just as attacking a dictator with a record of ruthlessness and murder at
home, and aggression towards Israel, but long-accepted norms of international
relations. The arguments in favour began with the fact that Saddam was a
meglomaniacally ambitious dictator. He had also fired missiles on our towns
and cities. He retained the capability to arm them with chemical warheads,
possibly biological agents, and conceivably a nuclear warhead in the future.
Both Rabin and I agreed there were two key tests of whether an attack would be
justified: was it was the only realistic way of confronting the threat from Iraq,
and would killing him end, or at least exponentially reduce, that threat.
Though there was no final decision at our meeting, Rabin was clearly
inclined to go ahead. An Israeli TV program two decades later unearthed a
summary of the discussion, written by his military aide. “The Prime Minister
approves the target... This is an operation we should go for when the probability
of success is very high,” it said. “Thus, we have to build the operational
capability in the best possible way, and continue preparations.” In another part
of the record, Rabin is quoted as having defined the elimination of Saddam as a
“meaningful objective” with implications for “the very security of Israel.” He
added: “I do not see anyone similar to him in the Arab world.”
I, too, was on balance persuaded we should do it. In the years since, I’ve
sometime reflected on what happened with Saddam still in place: the 2003
invasion of Iraq, led by the younger President Bush, the tens of thousands of
lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on a war without any clear end, and the
near-disintegration of Iraq. But with the complexities of Iraq then and now,
there can be no simple answer to how the situation would have changed if we’d
killed Saddam. Our view, based on detailed intelligence analyses, was that the
likely result would have been a fairly rapid takeover by a few top security and
Baath Party figures and that, while the new Iraqi leadership might try to retaliate
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with terror attacks, a major military response was highly unlikely. Saddam’s
successors were never going to be Zionists. But we were persuaded that his
uniquely central role meant the threat to Israel would be dramatically reduced.
I’m much less sure whether the elder President Bush, whose election defeat
to Bill Clinton came just two days before our final exercise in the Negev, would
have agreed with the attack. After the victory in the Gulf War, Bush had
deliberately stopped short of sending American forces on to Baghdad. He was
also vice-president, under Reagan, when Israel had bombed Saddam’s nuclear
reactor – an attack publicly condemned by Washington. I did ask him some
years ago whether the Gulf War might have been handled differently if Israel
hadn’t taken out Saddam’s nuclear program a decade earlier. “What if he’d had
a couple of crude nuclear devices,” I said. President Bush smiled in response.
He said he didn’t deal with “hypotheticals.”
Yet any idea of an Israeli attack on Saddam became instantly irrelevant once
foreign media reports had disclosed the reason for our ill-fated military exercise
in the Negev. Inside Israel, the focus, and the controversy, shifted to the
accident itself.
The foreign media reports of the operation we were planning proved
remarkably accurate. Some of the details still remain classified, but we were
going to use one of our new “stand-off” weapons systems: a camera-guided
missile that could be fired from a considerable distance away and, in
coordination with one of the Sayeret Matkal soldiers nearer in, maneuvered in
for the strike. After months of planning and intelligence work, we were
confident that we’d found a way to get the sayeret unit into Iraq, target Saddam
at an event we knew he would be attending, isolate and kill him with minimal
danger of any other casualties, and get our unit out safely again. The Negev
exercise was a run-through of the entire operation. It lasted nearly 48 hours. And
it culminated in a simulation of the missile attack on Saddam.
I was there as an observer along with Amnon Lipkin, my deputy chief-ofstaff;
as well as the head of military intelligence, the head of operations and
Amiram Levin. We assembled at dawn for the simulation of the missile attack.
We watched from a few hundred yards away as a group of young Israeli soldiers
walked into a wide area in front of us: posing as Saddam” and his entourage.
We – and they – knew that this was just the first part of the exercise. In a Land
Rover more than five miles away, a member of the sayeret strike unit would be
confirming coordinates and, in rapid succession, “firing” two of the precision
missiles. But this was just to confirm that the targeting system had worked
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perfectly. No missiles would actually be shot. This stage was for the telemetry.
Once that was done, the soldier-actors would be replaced with wooden targets
and the real munitions would be tested.
The young soldiers stated chatting to one another, and milling about,
simulating as best we could the circumstances in which we expected to target
Saddam if the operation got final approval. In theory, within a minute, two
minutes at most, we would get word that the preliminary mock-firing sequence
had gone perfectly – at which point the artillery-range targets would be brought
in for the live test. But suddenly, there was an explosion. A split second of
silence. Then pandemonium. There was no need to know, and no time to
wonder, what exactly had gone wrong, or how it had been allowed to happen. It
was obvious to all of us that the live missiles had been fired. We sprinted
forward. When we got to the group of soldiers, we could see that four of the
young men were dead. Another was fighting for his life. Several others were
also wounded.
A sayeret medic and several senior officers were trying to save the most
badly injured man, but I knew I needed to get military doctors and medical
evacuation helicopters in immediately if we were to save the lives of the injured
soldiers. I had a mobile phone, but couldn’t get a signal. I ran toward a slightly
higher area a few dozen yards away and managed to get through to the kirya. I
issued orders for the nearby training base in Tze’elim and an air force near
Beersheva to dispatch helicopters to treat and evacuate the wounded.
We heard the first chopper about 25 minutes later, but it seemed initially
unable to see us, because it flew on before returning and landing two minutes
later. By that time, a medical team from the base in Tze’elim had arrived. Ten
minutes later, two other medevac choppers landed. But the soldier who had
been worst wounded could not be saved. After the doctors had been there about
20 minutes, I again retreated to the area where I could get a mobile signal, and
phoned Rabin to tell him what had happened. We agreed I should come back to
brief him in detail. It was now about 50 minutes since the missiles had hit. The
wounded were all being treated. One of the helicopters had taken off for
Beersheva Hospital. Another two, including a heavier Sikorsky transport
helicopter, were preparing to leave. I arranged for Amnon, military intelligence
chief Shmuel Arad and me to return to the kirya. I told Amiram to stay until he
had confirmed all the injured had been evacuated, and talk to everyone involved
to get a preliminary idea of why and how the tragedy had happened.
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When I got back, we immediately met with Rabin and agreed on the need to
launch a formal investigation. Rabin then asked me to brief the “editors club”, a
group of about 15 media figures that operated on a gentleman’s agreement that
there would be no publicity or leaks. He believed we should not make public the
fact that I and other generals were there when the accident occurred. At this
stage, we still hoped to hide the purpose of the exercise if possible, something
Rabin knew would be harder if it was known the top military leadership had
observed the exercise. When I briefed the editors’ club, I did tell them in
confidence that I’d been there. Though not specifying the reason for the
exercise, I told them it was for a major operation. The time-honored
understanding was that this information would go no further. But it did,
presumably at first because of leaks by Israeli journalists, then in a series of
detailed reports in the foreign press. Even more frustrating on a personal level,
some of the Israeli reports insinuated that far from giving the editors the full
story of who had been at the Negev exercise, that I’d tried to hide my presence
in order to protect my reputation or shirk responsibility.
Two official inquiries followed: the one we’d agreed with Rabin and a
standard army legal investigation. They found the cause of the tragedy to be a
mix of fatigue after some of the soldiers had spent nearly 48 hours awake,
pressure, confusion and negligence. Astonishingly, it turned out the codeword
for the mock-firing of the missiles in the first stage of the exercise was the same
as for the live missiles. Formal charges were brought against two Sayeret
Matkal officers, and reprimands issued to Amiram Levin and Uri Saguy. I was
also subject to criticism because, due to the unique complexity of the plan, I’d
put Amiram and senior officers within Sayeret Matkal in charge of different
aspects of the preparations. This was viewed as possibly reducing the clarity
over who was ultimately responsible for each aspect of the planning. Neither I,
nor of course Rabin, had played a direct role in what went wrong in the exercise
itself. To the extent I’d been involved, it was to make sure the medical teams
were helicoptered in, and that the injured soldiers were cared for and evacuated
as soon as possible. But politically, the tragedy at Tze’elim would dramatically
resurface for both me and Rabin several years later – after I’d left the military
and was on the verge of joining his government.
I was getting to know Yitzhak much better. The Defense Minister’s office in
the kirya was just down the hall from mine. Almost without fail on Friday
afternoons, he’d ask me in to chat before going home. We would sit around a
low table in the corner of the room, each of us sipping coffee, or sometimes
beer, and Rabin invariably puffing on a cigarette. He never raised questions of
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party politics. But we talked at length about Israel’s immediate security
concerns, as well as the country’s longer-term challenges in finding its place in
more stable, peaceful Middle East. How, over time, we might manage to
extricate ourselves from the escalating violence with Hizbollah; reach a landfor-peace
deal with the enigmatic President Hafez al-Assad in Syria; and find
some form of coexistence with the Palestinians.
He also spoke about international politics. I remember one afternoon in the
summer of 1992 when he mentioned the then US presidential candidate Bill
Clinton. He’d met Clinton for the first time in Washington, after two days of
talks with President Bush at his summer home in Maine. Rabin was naturally
more comfortable dealing with Republicans. Almost all his experience in public
life – as a military officer, ambassador to Washington, Defense Minister and
Prime Minister – had coincided with Republican administrations. The irony was
that he would go on to forge a much closer relationship with President Clinton
than between any previous Israeli and US leader. But his first impression was
more skeptical. “Clearly, Clinton is very intelligent,” he said. “He is
surprisingly sharp politically for someone his age. But also, I fear, a little bit too
slick.”
* * *
We did not have long to focus on the lessons and implications of Tze’elim.
For weeks before the training accident, a crisis had been building in south
Lebanon, with a sharp escalation of the now-familiar mix of clashes inside our
“security zone” and cross-border rocket attacks. Hizbollah was now armed not
just with Katyushas but Saggers, American-made TOW anti-tank missiles and
an increasingly sophisticated array of roadside bombs. A combination of
Hizbollah attacks and “friendly fire” incidents or firearms accidents involving
our troops meant that Israelis were still dying in Lebanon a decade after the
formal end of the war. It was demoralizing for the Israeli public, for the soldiers
who we rotated into the security zone and for the government as well. The
difficulty was that it was also a situation that perfectly suited Hizbollah.
In late October, a Katyusha rocket had claimed the life of a 14-year-old boy
in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona. Hizbollah escalated its rocket
fire in the days that followed, forcing tens of thousands of residents into their
shelters. Predictably, there was pressure from Likud politicians to hit back hard.
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Raful Eitan, who had founded a small right-wing party called Tsomet, went
further. He called the attacks “an act of war” and said we should “respond in
kind.” We did move troops and tanks to the border. But my view, which Rabin
shared, was that a major ground operation would risk miring ourselves more
deeply without fundamentally improving the situation. Hizbollah was the kind
of nonconventional enemy I had in mind when I’d taken stock of Israel’s
changing security imperatives on becoming chief of staff. It was a small force,
entrenched and well armed, increasingly supported by Iran and Syria. Its tactics
rested on quick-hit attacks on our soldiers in south Lebanon. Far from fearing
military retaliation, Hizbollah knew that short of a 1982-scale war – and maybe
even then – it would survive. It also didn’t care whether Lebanese civilians died
in the crossfire. In fact, like the PLO fighters who had controlled the area before
1982, Hizbollah deliberately fired into Israel from civilian areas.
Neither Rabin nor I had abandoned the idea of a large-scale military
operation at some point, particularly if the cross-border rocket fire didn’t
subside, which for a while it did. But we were determined that, if and when we
did decide to strike, we would avoid anything on the scale of the 1982 war. It
would have to be with a clear, finite and achievable goal.
That point finally arrived in the summer of 1993. In addition to renewed
Katyusha strikes, there was a series of deadly Hizbollah attacks in the first two
weeks of July inside the security zone. Each used what was becoming the tactic
of choice: a remotely detonated bomb by the side of the road on which our
military vehicles were travelling, followed by an ambush of soldiers who
survived the blast. Six Israelis had been killed in all, making it the largest
monthly toll in three years. When I went to see Rabin with our plan for a
military response, I recognized the risks. It would be the largest military
operation in Lebanon since the war. But I believed we could limit civilian
casualties, and that it was the only approach that might lead to a significant
reduction in the missile attacks on northern Israel. I began with the assumption
that, left to its own devices, Hizbollah would have no incentive to stop firing.
Since the two Arab governments with the potential to rein in the attacks –
Lebanon’s and above all Syria’s – were showing no interest in doing so, we had
to find a way to hold them to account.
The operation I proposed was intended to send a message to Beirut and
Damascus. It would not be a ground invasion as in 1982. Most of the attacks
would be from the air, in two stages. The first would target Hizbollah, both in
southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley further north, near the border with
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Syria. We could halt at that stage, in the unlikely event Hizbollah showed signs
of de-escalation. But if it didn’t, the air strikes would intensify. The aim was not
target the nearly 250,000 Lebanese civilians who lived in the immediate border
area. It was to use our attacks, along with leaflet drops and radio messages, to
encourage them to flee north. My assessment was that this would bring pressure
on the Lebanese government and, through the Lebanese, on the real power in
Lebanon, the Syrians. I doubted Damascus would respond directly by telling
Hizbollah to cease fire. I did believe they’d be ready to engage with American
efforts to stop the fighting, and that Rabin and the government could then secure
terms we were prepared to accept.
On July 25, we began our heaviest air strikes since 1982. Far from producing
a sign of a climb-down by Hizbollah, it responded with intensified rocket fire.
We escalated over the following 24 hours, but still with no indication of any
change from Hizbollah. So as planned, we expanded our bombing to wider
areas of south Lebanon. Sadly, some Lebanese civilians were killed, which I’m
sure was a much greater cause of concern to us than to Hizbollah. Thankfully,
however, the majority fled north. In south Lebanon, this meant that our jets and
artillery had much greater freedom of operation against Hizbollah, which had
now lost its human shields. In Beirut, a government suddenly overwhelmed
with the need to provide shelter for the large number of refugees from the
fighting did press Syrian President Assad to help bring it to an end. Critically,
the new Clinton Administration, especially Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, reinforced that message.
Our military operation lasted just a week. It did not end Hizbollah attacks on
Israeli troops in the security zone, something I think even most Israelis were
coming to realize was impossible as long as our soldiers remained in Lebanon.
But the rocket attacks on northern Israel did stop, with very few exceptions, for
a period that lasted nearly two years.
The intifada, however, had not stopped. Nor, as I knew from my increasingly
frequent meetings with Rabin, had the search for a way both to control the
violence, and seek out any realistic prospect of a political path to resolving our
conflict with our Arab neighbors.
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Chapter Sixteen
Rabin had inherited a peace process, put in motion by the Bush
Administration after the Gulf War. But since both Prime Minister Shamir and
our Arab enemies had reasons of procedure, politics or principle to resist the
talks, merely getting them off the ground had required the same combination of
deftness and determination President Bush had brought to assembling his
wartime coalition and defeating Saddam. After a formal opening session in
Madrid, the “bilateral tracks” – between Israel and negotiators from Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians – had quickly stalemated and stalled.
Yitzhak came to office saying he was not interested in a peace process,
which seemed to him a license for endless talk with no set endpoint, but in
peacemaking. Since I had the good fortune to be part of the informal inner circle
with which he discussed the potential opportunities, pitfalls and frustrations
along the way, I know that he wasn’t assuming we could necessarily achieve a
peace agreement with any of our neighbors. But after the twin shocks of the
Lebanon War and the Scud missiles, he was concerned that Israel would retreat
into a mix of political caution and military deterrence which he rightly believed
was short-sighted. He believed we needed at least to try to seize a “window of
opportunity” with those enemies who were at least open to compromise, if only
because we were facing new threats from enemies for whom talk was not even
an option. An increasingly assertive Iran, with nuclear ambitions, was one. But
the intifada had also thrown up new Palestinian groups grounded not in
nationalism, but fundamentalist Islam: Hamas in Gaza, which opposed Israel’s
presence on any part of “Muslim Palestine,” and Islamic Jihad on the West
Bank. And in Lebanon, we were confronting the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia
fighters of Hizbollah.
Each of us in the small group on whom Rabin relied for input on the peace
talks brought something different to the mix. In addition to me, there were four
other generals: Uri Saguy, the head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in
charge of civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza; my own former
sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was head of the central command; and
Rabin’s military aide, Kuti Mor. Also included were longtime political and
media aide Eitan Haber, and another trusted political adviser thousands of miles
away: Itamar Rabinovich, our ambassador in Washington and Israel’s leading
Syria expert. But I’m sure we weren’t chosen just for our insights. It was
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because we were people with whom Rabin felt comfortable – a counterpoint, I
suspect, to the old Labor Party rival whom he had made Foreign Minister,
Shimon Peres. Though the two men had grown to respect each another over the
years, Rabin neither trusted, nor much liked, Shimon. In fact, though Peres’s
support inside Labor had secured him the foreign ministry, Rabin had stipulated
that all peace talks would remain under his control.
Yet as I’d discover nearly a decade later, when I was Prime Minister, even
the most carefully planned negotiating strategies were always subject to
setbacks, diversions, or simply what former British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan once called “events, dear boy, events.” Rabin’s initial plan was not
to start with the Palestinians. He did feel it was essential to try to reach a
political settlement with them. In one respect, the prospects looked slightly
better than before. Arafat’s political position had been weakened: first by an
intifada driven as much by local insurgents as by the PLO in faraway Tunis, and
then by his decision to break with his longtime Gulf Arab financial supporters
and support Saddam Hussein the Gulf War. In 1988, as the entry price for a
formal dialogue with the Bush Administration, he had also agreed to a statement
in which he renounced terrorism and accepted the principle of a two-state peace
agreement with Israel. Still, there remained a yawning gap between the “selfrule”
envisaged in the Camp David accords of 1978 and the Madrid conference,
and the independent state the Palestinians wanted. Negotiations to bridge it were
likely to be fraught and long.
So he’d decided to begin with Syria. President Assad was obstinate, and
publicly opposed to the idea of making peace with Israel. But he’d been in
power for more than two decades and, crucially for Rabin, had lived up to the
few, indirect agreements Israel had made with him. The substance in any
agreement, though politically difficult, was also more straightforward. We knew
what Assad wanted: the recovery of the Golan Heights, in return for the
absolute minimum level of political normalization with Israel. We knew what
we wanted: security guarantees and assurances regarding water resources, and a
full and final peace treaty. For Rabin, there was an additional attraction in
beginning with Syria: if we did reach a deal with our main Arab enemy, the
pressure would intensify on the Palestinians to follow suit.
The dramatic turn of events that ultimately forced him to change tack began
in January 1993 in the sitting room of a villa outside Oslo, at an ostensible
“academic seminar” convened by the Norwegian diplomat Terje Larsen. It
included two Israeli academics with personal ties to prominent Palestinians:
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Yair Hirschfeld, and the historian and former Haaretz journalist Ron Pundak.
Three PLO officials were there, led by Arafat’s closest economic aide, Abu
Ala’a. Though both of the Israelis were friends of Yossi Beilin, a protégé of
Peres and our deputy foreign minister, even Peres didn’t know about the
meeting until Yossi told him the following day. Rabin knew an hour later. I first
learned of it from Uri Saguy, after Unit 8200 intercepted Arabic-language
traffic concerning a briefing the Norwegians had given their Arab contacts. At
first, even Peres was skeptical that the paper agreed at the “seminar” – calling
for international aid to the West Bank and Gaza on the scale of the Marshall
Plan, and an initial Israeli withdrawal limited to Gaza – would lead to serious
negotiations. But Rabin authorized follow-up sessions in mid-February, late
March and again in April. Our intelligence teams continued to provide detail,
and occasional color. Uri Saguy and I even began to use the Arabic shorthand,
from the intelligence reports, for the two Israeli academics. The burly, bearded
Yair Hirschfeld was “the bear”. The slighter Ron Pundak was “the mouse”. Yet
the main political impetus in driving the process forward came from two men
who were not there: on our side, Yossi Beilin, and for the Palestinians, Arafat’s
trusted diplomatic adviser, and eventual successor, Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu
Mazen.
Since Rabin knew I was following the ostensibly secret talks, we discussed
them often. For quite a while, he remained dismissive. He believed the chances
of a breakthrough were remote. He was also suspicious of the involvement of
Peres and Beilin, whom he called “Shimon’s poodle”. And he deeply distrusted
Arafat. The PLO had been founded with the aim of “liberating” every inch of
Palestine. The fact that Arafat had agreed to the Bush Administration’s demand
to accept the principle of land-for-peace struck Rabin as mere sleight-of-hand.
By the third Oslo meeting, it was clear that the Palestinians were open to an
agreement that would fall well short of “liberating Palestine”. Still, Rabin was
leery. He tried briefly to return the focus to the stalemated Madrid-track talks
with the Palestinians. Yet when, with obvious PLO encouragement, the
Palestinian negotiators stood their ground there, he seemed almost resigned to
supporting Oslo. When we discussed it, he used a battlefield metaphor. “When
you have to break through, you don’t necessarily know where you’ll succeed.
You try several places along the enemy’s lines. In the sector of the front where
you do succeed, you send in your other forces.” It was a matter of “reinforcing
success.”
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“It’s the opposite in this case,” I replied. “In a battle, the enemy is doing
everything it can to stop you. When you break through, it’s against their
resistance. Here, the other side will choose to make it easiest for us in the place
it prefers. If Arafat thinks he’ll get more from the Bear and the Mouse than from
the other talks, it’s hardly a surprise we’re finding that only Oslo seems to offer
a way forward.”
Rabin did make one more move, not so much in a bid to end the talks in Oslo
as to slow them down and create a context more favorable for the kind of
agreement he wanted. He shifted his attention to his original peacemaking
priority: the Syrians. In an effort to remove a roadblock to even beginning
serious talks, he offered the Americans what they would later call his “pocket
deposit.” He authorized Secretary of State Warren Christopher to tell Assad that
Washington’s understanding of our position was that, assuming all our own
negotiating concerns were addressed, we accepted that peace with Syria would
include withdrawing from the Golan. The formula was agreed in a meeting in
Israel between Rabin and the Clinton Administration’s Middle East negotiator,
Dennis Ross. Rabin didn’t tell Peres or other ministers about it, though Itamar
Rabinovich did know. I did as well. Since acceptance of the need for a
withdrawal had security implications, Rabin and I talked about it in detail
before Ross’s visit. We formulated the “deposit” together. We used an English
acronym: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” The point was to convey to the
Syrian president that if he addressed our requirements for a demilitarized zone
and early warning facilities; non-interference with our critically important water
sources; as well as a full peace including embassies, open borders and joint
economic projects, we knew the trade-off would be to return the Golan.
It was by diplomatic accident that the Syrian overture went nowhere. The
reason even the Americans had called our proposal a “pocket deposit” was that
it was to be kept in the Christopher’s pocket, to be pulled out as an American
understanding of our position if he felt it might lead to a breakthrough. Our
intelligence accounts of the Christopher-Assad talks, however, suggested it had
been presented as a straight message from Rabin to the Syrian president, giving
it the status of Israel’s new, formal opening position in negotiations.
The distinction may seem minor. But for Israel, it mattered greatly. In any
agreement with Syria – or, indeed, the Palestinians – there was bound to an
imbalance. Both parts of a “land-for-peace” exchange were important. But land
was not just the more tangible asset. Once given up, short of resorting to all-out
war, there was no going back. The “peace” part of the equation was more
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difficult. Genuine peace, and trust, would inevitably take years to reach fruition.
That was no mere academic problem in a conflict where, for decades, our
enemies had defined Israel’s mere existence as illegitimate. The reason for
Rabin’s reluctance to have his “deposit” presented as a set negotiating position
was that it meant dealing away our only card – territory – before the hard
questions about peace had been answered. When he phoned Christopher, I don’t
think I’ve ever heard him as angry. That was not what we agreed, he insisted.
He said it had spoiled any prospect of serious negotiations on the peace side of
the balance. Christopher didn’t agree there had been any real damage, nor that
Assad had failed to understand the context.
It might not have changed things anyway, since by this stage, the Oslo talks
had almost completed a draft agreement. In mid-August, Rabin gave Peres the
go-ahead to initial this “Declaration of Principles.” It provided for a period of
interim Palestinian self-government; the start of a phased Israeli withdrawal
from Gaza and the West Bank with the creation of a Palestinian police force to
deal with internal security; and a commitment to reach a full peace agreement
within five years. In early September, ahead of the formal signing of the Oslo
declaration, there was an exchange of “letters of recognition” between Arafat
and Rabin. Arafat’s letter also renounced “terrorism and other acts of violence”
and declared invalid “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny
Israel’s right to exist.” A few days later, the signing ceremony was hosted by
President Clinton in Washington. Thus emerged the famous photo of Rabin and
Arafat shaking hands, on either side of Clinton, who was beaming, arms
outstretched in conciliation. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In
this case, you needed barely a dozen. Rabin’s demeanor, his posture, the look
on his face, all seemed to say: “I would rather be shaking the hand of anyone on
earth than Arafat.” Still, the image was on front pages worldwide. The news
stories spoke of a new spirit of hope. Now that these old enemies had grasped
hands, surely a full peace agreement was within reach.
My feeling, as I watched it on TV in the kirya, was more guarded. I did hope
for peace, of course. I also recognized that the signing on the White House lawn
was just a beginning, and that my role would be to ensure that Israel’s security
needs were met under whatever formal peace agreement might eventually be
reached. And the security omens were hardly encouraging. Despite Oslo,
Palestinian attacks were continuing. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other dissident
factions saw Arafat’s concessions as treachery, and were setting out to drive
home that point with violence.
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* * *
Yet as I approached my final year as chief of staff in early 1994, we were
suddenly confronted by an appalling act of Israeli violence: mass murder,
committed by a West Bank settler. Terrorism, no less than the worst Arab
attacks on Israeli civilians. The settler was named Baruch Goldstein, a
physician, who lived in Kiryat Arba. One of the first post-1967 Jewish
settlements, it sat on a hill outside the West Bank town of Hebron. At the heart
of Hebron lay the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish
faith: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob and Leah. Since Abraham
is also revered as a prophet in Islam and a mosque had stood on the site for
nearly a thousand years, our post-1967 arrangements set out separate times of
worship for Muslims and Jews. Goldstein chose to attack during a holiday
period for both faiths: Purim for the Jews and the Muslim holy month of
Ramadan. He arrived shortly after the Muslims’ Friday prayers began on the
morning on February 25. He was dressed in his reserve army uniform and was
carrying an automatic rifle. He opened fire on a group of nearly 800 Palestinian
worshipers. He had killed 29 and wounded 125 others by the time several of his
intended victims knocked him unconscious and beat him to death.
I rushed to Sde Dov airport in north Tel Aviv, a few minutes from the kirya,
and boarded a helicopter for the old British fort near Hebron, used by the
Jordanians until 1967 and now Israeli headquarters. After visiting the scene of
the killings, I sought out local Palestinian leaders, to voice my condolences and
the sense of outrage I shared over what had happened, and to urge them to do all
they could to maintain calm. I then went to Kiryat Arba and conveyed the same
message.
Our immediate task was to prevent more deaths, on either side. It was a
frustrating, and violent, week. Protests reminiscent of the first days of the
intifada erupted around the West Bank, in Gaza, in east Jerusalem and in several
Arab neighborhoods and towns inside Israel. While I had no trouble
understanding the Palestinians’ anger, I also had a responsibility to prevent the
violence spiraling out of control. We turned to the same tools we’d used at the
beginning of the uprising – though with even greater emphasis on the need for
soldiers to use the only the necessary force to restore order, and to avoid causing
fatalities wherever possible. We closed off the West Bank. We imposed curfews
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on the main West Bank and Gaza towns and refugee camps. We also imposed a
curfew on Kiryat Arba and, for the first time, were given the authority to use
administrative detention orders not just against Palestinians, but specific Jewish
settlers. We arrested about a half-dozen leaders of Kach, the far-right, anti-Arab
political movement founded by the American Rabbi Meir Kahane, of which
Baruch Goldstein had also been a member. Still, there were repeated clashes
anyway – and dozens of deaths as a result – before things finally began to
subside a week or so later.
The massacre had made me feel more strongly than ever that our
responsibility to protect the security of the settlers could not extend to allowing
them to defy the government or the law. The principle would be put to the test
within a few weeks. A settlement near Hebron, called Tel Rumeida, had been
set up without government approval in 1984. As part of the response to
Goldstein killings, Rabin was thinking of closing it down. That prompted a
number of right-wing rabbis to issue a formal religious ruling against any such
action. Rabin called me in to ask whether it would be operationally possible to
dismantle Tel Rumeida and remove the settlers. I said yes, by sending in a
Sayeret Matkal force after midnight, as long as news of the operation did not
leak ahead of time. “We’ll take over the area, close it off and get control.”
Given the tensions in the wake of the massacre, I did add that I couldn’t promise
that our soldiers would hold fire. “There are people in there with weapons,” I
said. “If someone shoots at them, they will shoot back.”
“Should I do it?” he asked me. Maybe I should have given him an answer.
But I didn’t feel it was my place to add to the pressures around what was clearly
a finely balanced call, especially since my inclination would have been to tell
him to go ahead. I said it was something only he could decide. “What I can tell
you is that we can do it.” When I left, my sense was that he was sufficiently
angry over what had happened in Hebron that he felt it essential to draw a line –
the line of law – over what settlers were allowed to do. But the Passover holiday
was now a couple of days away. I think what happened is that he realized the
operation would not be possible until after the holiday period. By then, he was
concerned he would have lost the clear political logic for moving against Tel
Rumeida. The settlement has remained in place, a flashpoint in the conflict
between settlers and Palestinians in the area around Hebron.
The wider repercussions, and the controversy, from the massacre
reverberated widely. Rabin and his cabinet immediately decided to establish an
inquiry, under Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir Shamgar. It would look into
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every aspect of the killings – including any failings by the army, the Shin Bet,
the police or other authorities that might have allowed the tragedy to happen.
The commission interviewed dozens of witnesses, Israeli and Palestinian, in 31
separate sessions. I knew early on that the inquiry would throw up difficult
issues. I was especially upset to learn that two soldiers and three border guards
scheduled for guard duty at the mosque had shown up late on the morning of the
killings. By the time I testified in late March, the inquiry had heard from a range
of senior and local commanders and individual soldiers. A picture had emerged
of a series of security breakdowns, equipment malfunctions, oversights and
confusion around the site where the murders took place.
I did not try to dodge the fact that security lapses around the Cave of the
Patriarchs that day had contributed to what happened. In addition to the fact that
the guard unit was not at full strength until after the murders took place, several
of the security cameras weren’t working. I acknowledged that if the cameras
and the guards had done their job, at the very least some lives might be have
saved. Yet I also made the point that this specific act of mass murder was
something the army could not have anticipated. I told the commissioners to
remember that they were judging things after the fact. They knew how the
tragedy had ended. In the context in which we were operating, the prospect of
an Israeli settler, a reserve soldier, walking into a place of worship and
deliberately killing defenseless Palestinians had come as “a bolt from the blue.”
The commission’s report did not apportion blame to any of the army officers
or commanders. But an inescapable conclusion from the testimony of the many
witnesses was that the way in which we’d become conditioned to viewing the
settlers had blinded us to the kind of crime Goldstein had committed. Even
before I testified, I’d been disturbed to hear soldiers saying that even if they had
seen him shooting a Palestinian, their orders were not to open fire on a settler,
so they wouldn’t have intervened. When asked about this by the commission, I
said it was a fundamental misunderstanding of our rules of engagement. “In no
case is there, nor can there be, an army order that says it is forbidden to shoot at
a settler even if he is shooting at others... A massacre is a massacre. You don’t
need special orders to know what to do.”
Yet I also knew that the soldiers’ “misunderstanding” was all too
understandable. As I acknowledged to the inquiry, the army on the West Bank
and Gaza was predisposed to see Palestinians who were carrying weapons as
potential terrorists, especially since the outbreak of the intifada. The settlers, by
contrast, were assumed to be carrying arms in self-defense. One lesson I took
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from the massacre was that the mix of Jewish settlers, some of whom felt they
were on a messianic mission to resettle all of Biblical Israel, and restive
Palestinians who wanted sovereignty and control over their own lives was
potentially toxic, for both sides. Ideally, the process which had begun with Oslo
might start to disentangle it, though I remained far from confident that anything
resembling full peace would come any time soon.
* * *
Rabin, and even more acutely Shimon Peres, believed it was important to
press ahead with the opening phase of the handover of Israeli authority mapped
out by Oslo. In May 1994, a draft of the so-called “Gaza and Jericho First”
agreement was completed. Once it was ratified, the five-year interim period
would begin, with further withdrawals and parallel negotiations on the
“permanent status” of the territories. In this first step, Israel would transfer civil
authority in Gaza Strip and the Jordan Valley town of Jericho to the
Palestinians, and local security would be in the hands of a newly created
Palestinian police force.
My primary concern, and my responsibility, was the security provisions in
the agreement, since the Israeli army retained its role in charge of overall
security. When I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet meeting to
approve the Gaza-Jericho agreement, I told him I was worried that it left room
for potentially serious misunderstandings, friction and even clashes on the
ground. There was no clear definition of how our soldiers would operate
alongside the new local police in the event of a terror attack, violence by Hamas
or Islamic Jihad, or, for that matter, a car crash involving an Israeli and a
Palestinian. He agreed this needed to be addressed, although it was clear he
intended to do so with Arafat, via the Americans, not by reopening and delaying
the formal agreement.
But I had a deeper concern about the entire Oslo Agreement, which I also
now raised with Rabin. I did not doubt the importance of reaching a political
agreement, and ideally a peace treaty, with the Palestinians. But I’d now read
the Oslo Declaration in greater detail, and discussed it with lawyer friends of
mine. I’d also re-read the 1978 Camp David framework on which the self-rule
provisions were based. The endpoint was pretty clear, just as it had been at
Camp David: Palestinian authority over the West Bank and Gaza, defined as a
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“single territorial unit” under Oslo. In essence, and very probably in name, this
meant a Palestinian state. I wasn’t opposed to that in principle, if it was in return
for a full and final peace. But the Oslo process meant that we would be handing
back land, and control over security, in an ever-larger portion of territory before
we’d reached any so-called permanent-status agreement. In fact, before we even
knew whether that would prove possible. It wasn’t “land for peace.” It was land
for the promise, or maybe only the hope, of peace. It was the same problem
Yitzhak had faced over the Americans’ misuse of our “pocket deposit” on the
Golan. I realized that, having come this far with Oslo, neither he nor the
government was likely to back away from approving the Gaza-Jericho accord.
But he did say he thought the points I’d raised were important, which I took as
meaning he was comfortable with my raising it with the cabinet.
I spoke near the end of the four-hour cabinet meeting to ratify the Gaza-
Jericho plan. The ministers seemed attentive as I ran through the security
concerns I’d raised with Rabin, even nodding when I compared the agreement’s
security provisions to “a piece of Swiss cheese, only with more holes.” But then
I said that I wanted to say a few words which I recognized were beyond my
responsibility as chief of staff. “I’m speaking just as an Israeli citizen,” I told
the cabinet, “and as a former head of military intelligence.” Referring to specific
provisions in Oslo, and in the Camp David framework agreed by Begin and
Sadat 15 years earlier, I said it was important for ministers to realize that, even
though permanent-status issues were yet to be resolved, “you will be taking us
nearly the whole way toward creating a Palestinian state, based on the
internationally accepted reading of Camp David.” The reaction to my comments
was a mix of defensiveness and hostility. In the latter camp were ministers from
Rabin’s left-wing coalition partners, Meretz, who seemed especially angry
when I quoted from Camp David. The Prime Minister motioned them for calm.
“Ehud had a responsibility to talk about security questions, and we had a
responsibility to listen. As for his additional remarks, they are not a surprise to
me,” he said. “He made these points to me, and I said he could repeat them here.
It is right that he should raise them.” He said there was no need for ministers to
agree with me, but that it was proper that the points I’d raised should be heard.
Many clearly didn’t agree with me, or simply believed the Gaza-Jericho
agreement still had to be ratified, which it was. But my remarks did lay the
groundwork for my objection to the next, more far-reaching stage in the Oslo
process barely a year later. By then, I was no longer chief of staff. I was a
member of Rabin’s cabinet.
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* * *
It was still my responsibility to ensure that Gaza-Jericho was implemented,
and that the initial withdrawals and redeployments went ahead smoothly. And
they did. But I also was soon playing a part in a renewed effort by Rabin to use
the momentum of Oslo to achieve peace agreements with our other Arab
neighbors: the Syrians, although he knew that would be tough, and first the
Jordanians. I would always have had some role, by virtue of the need for a chief
of staff to weigh in on security issues. But as Yitzhak had done from the start,
he involved me and others in his inner political circle in wider discussions on
the whole range of negotiating issues. Especially after Oslo, he seemed
determined to keep Peres’s role to an absolute minimum.
No peace talks are ever completely straightforward, but the process with
Jordan was very close to that. The main issues on the Jordanian side involved
ensuring a proper share of scarce water supplies; and dealing with Israel’s de
facto control of a fairly large area near the southern end of our border. A
number of kibbutzim and moshavim were farming the land there. But under the
post-1948 armistice, it had been allocated to Jordan. Israel’s priorities were to
put in place a fully open relationship of peace and cooperation, and to get
assurances Jordan would not allow its territory to be used by Palestinian groups
to launch terror attacks.
I was struck by how much more easily compromises can be found if you
truly trust the party on the other side. From my earlier meeting with Hussein in
England, before the Gulf War, I’d been impressed by the king’s thoughtful and
measured, yet warm and open, demeanor. That, in itself, inspired trust. But ever
since 1967, even in times of high tension, Israel and Jordan had kept open secret
lines of communication, and both sides had generally demonstrated a shared
desire, and ability, to steer clear of conflict. The main trade-off in the search for
a formal peace turned out to be not too difficult. We agreed to ensure water
provision, and to accept Jordanian sovereignty over the 1949 armistice area, in
return for which the king allowed the Israelis who had been working the land to
stay in place as lessees. On the final Wednesday of October 1994, near our
border crossing in the Arava desert, I watched as Rabin, King Hussein, and
President Clinton formally seal the full “Treaty of Peace Between the State of
Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.”
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Syria was always going to be harder. But Rabin had moved past his anger
over the “pocket deposit”, and we began a new effort via the Americans. Our
aim was to lay out a comprehensive, staged proposal to trade nearly the entire
Golan for peace. With Rabin, Itamar Rabinovich and the rest of the team, we
put together a framework limiting Syria’s military presence on the Heights. We
envisaged phasing out the restrictions as Syria took steps toward the kind of
peace which had proved possible with Egypt and Jordan. But indirect exchanges
in the autumn of 1994 produced little progress. In December, Rabin proposed to
the Americans that I meet with a Syrian representative, and President Assad
agreed. Later that month, I was sent to Washington for talks with Syria’s
ambassador, Walid Muallem. With the Americans’ Mideast envoy, Dennis
Ross, as host, we met in Blair House across the street from the White House.
I began by explaining the security provisions we envisaged for the Golan,
which included early-warning provisions, force limitations and other means of
safeguarding Israel against any surprise attack. Muallem’s response was
formulaic, almost icy, with no indication he was ready to discuss any of the
specifics, much less offer ideas of his own. But then Dennis led us out into the
garden, where the atmosphere, if sadly not the weather, was a bit warmer. I told
Ambassador Muallem I believed Israel’s issues with Syria ought to be
resolvable. Both sides understood the broad terms of an eventual peace. But we
needed a context of trust in which to negotiate. President Assad, and we as well,
were always going to be reluctant formally to commit ourselves to a position
until each side was be satisfied that the other side understood its core needs.
Politically, both sides also faced constraints. “In formal meetings, a record is
taken and negotiators have to explain and justify every last word back home,” I
said. “I think our negotiators can get further in conversations like the one we’re
having now.” Though Muallem nodded agreement, he did not explicitly say he
believed that informal exchanges were the way forward. Still, he did obviously
pass back a broadly positive message to Damascus. Before the Blair House
discussion, our understanding had been there would probably be a kind of
mirror arrangement for a follow-up meeting: between our ambassador in
Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, and a high-ranking army officer from the
Syrian side. Instead, we received word that Assad wanted me to meet directly
with General Himat Shihabi, who was not only my counterpart as Syrian chiefof-staff
but Assad’s oldest and closest political ally and the effective numbertwo
man in the régime.
General Shihabi and I met over a period of two days at Blair House. He had
greater authority, and thus a greater sense of self-assurance, than the
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ambassador. But not for the last time in negotiations with Syria, any real
progress was blocked by an apparent combination of misunderstanding and
miscommunication. The discussions were lively. Shihabi had served as Syria’s
liaison officer with the UN force set up along the cease-fire line after the 1948
war. “Go check with the UN,” he said at our first meeting. “You’ll see almost
all the exchanges of fire in the late 1950s were provoked by Israel.” I didn’t
respond directly, though I did note it was the Syrians who had tried to divert
water from the Jordan River in the early fifties. “You did it first,” he retorted.
So it continued. Only later did we learn that while Muallem had sent back a
generally encouraging impression from our garden talks, and his conclusion that
Israel was ready for substantive talks, he had neglected to convey our
expectation that any early progress would occur in informal exchanges. The
result was probably to raise General Shihabi’s expectations, which made him
reluctant to show any real engagement. After a phone call with Rabin after our
first day of talks, I became equally cautious. He agreed that we wanted to avoid
a repeat of our experience with the Golan “deposit”. We did not want to put
concessions on the record before we got an indication that the Syrians were
genuinely ready for peace talks.
Still, the fact that we’d established the precedent of a “chief-of-staff
channel” was a step forward. My successor as ramatkal, Amnon Lipkin, would
meet again with Shihabi in early 1995.
* * *
I was confident Amnon was inheriting an army stronger, better prepared and
better equipped than at any time since the Six-Day War. We also had peace
treaties not only with Egypt, but now Jordan, and none of the substantive issues
with the Syrians seemed insurmountable.
But the main security challenges were the unconventional ones. In the long
term, a resurgent Iraq, and very likely Iran, might make strides towards getting
nuclear weapons. There was every sign that Hizbollah in Lebanon; and Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and their supporters in Gaza and the West Bank, would escalate
violence and terror. As the negotiations with Jordan were entering their final
phase in early October, a further Hamas attack – this one, a kidnapping – had
brought home that threat. On Sunday, October 9, Hamas men dressed as
Orthodox Jews abducted an off-duty soldier named Nahshon Wachsman near
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Lod. Two days later, Israeli television received a videotape showing the 19-
year-old, hands and feet bound, pleading for his life in return for the release of
the founder of Hamas, whom we had arrested and jailed in 1989. “The group
from Hamas kidnapped me,” he said. “They are demanding the release of
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and another 200 people from Israeli prison. If their
demands are not met, they will execute me on Friday at 8 pm.”
As soon as we got word he was missing, I spoke to Rabin. Since we assumed
he was being held in Gaza, I ordered a unit from Sayeret Matkal to head south
and co-ordinate efforts to locate him with the Shin Bet and the southern
command. But it gradually became clear he might be much closer to where he’d
been seized. The Shin Bet got a description of the kidnappers’ car, and found it
was a rental that had been picked up and returned in east Jerusalem. They
tracked down the man who rented it. A little before dawn the morning of
October 14, barely 12 hours before the Hamas deadline, Shin Bet established
that Wachsman was being held in a village on the road to Ramallah, north of
Jerusalem, in a house owned by a Palestinian who was living abroad.
The hostage soldier’s ordeal was made even worse by the fact his mother,
Esther, was a Holocaust survivor, born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany
at the end of the war. Rabin had been ready to approve a rescue attempt from
the outset, assuming we could locate Wachsman and come up with a plan that
might work. But as with Entebbe, he said that if we couldn’t be reasonably
confident of success, we would negotiate. Now that we knew where
Waschsman was being held, I ordered Shaul Mofaz, the commander with
responsibility for the West Bank, to prepare for a possible rescue.
Before going to brief Rabin, I arranged for another commando unit to begin
visible preparations for an operation in Gaza, in an effort to reassure Hamas we
still believed he was being held there. Assuming we could retain the element of
surprise, there were several things working in our favor. The house was
relatively isolated. It was in an area where Israel, not the incipient Palestinian
authorities, still had control. And Sayeret Matkal had expertise and experience
in this kind of mission. Still, no plan could be foolproof. I told Rabin that the
fact Hamas was holding a single hostage meant that if our assault teams were
delayed for any reason at all, the kindappers might kill him before we got in.
But I said we had to weigh the risks of not acting. We were no longer trying to
find a missing soldier. We knew where he was. We had a unit ready. Unless
Hamas relented, he was facing death within hours. In those circumstances, the
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precedent of doing nothing would, in my view, be very serious. I recommended
that he approve the operation, and Rabin agreed.
I attended the final briefing shortly afterwards. I was impressed by the
determined faces of the men in the two sayeret teams. One of the officers was
23-year-old Nir Poraz, whom I remembered from operational briefings in the
kirya on previous sayeret missions. Wachsman was being held in a room on the
first floor. The commandos would simultaneously detonate explosives on three
doors: at the front, on the side, and a third one leading through a kitchen to the
room where the kidnappers had their hostage. The attack began fifteen minutes
before the Hamas deadline. The explosive charges went off, but only the one in
the front blew open the door. Poraz and his team rushed in, but one of the
kidnappers opened fire, killing him and wounding six others. The other team
had by now made it to the first floor. But despite firing at the metal lock, they
had trouble getting the door to open. By the time they got in, Wachsman had
been killed, shot in the neck and chest.
I was in the command post a few hundred yards away. I called Rabin and
then went to see him in the kirya. The head of personnel for the army had gone
to see the Wachsman family and break the news to them. Now, we had to tell
the country. Rabin and I appeared on television together. Rabin insisted –
wrongly – on saying he bore full responsibility. What had gone wrong, I had
tried to impress on him, was not the decision to attempt the rescue. It was the
rescue itself. That was not his responsibility. It was mine.
The next day, I visited Wachsman’s parents, and tried to convey how painful
the failed rescue was to me, Rabin and every one else involved. I was inspired
and humbled by their response. His father had told a reporter he wanted to
convey his condolences to the parents of Nir Poraz. “This added loss has shaken
me terribly,” he said. He told me he also believed that the Prime Minister had
approved the rescue using his best judgement on the information that he had
available. I spent time separately speaking to Mrs Wachsman. I tried to explain
that in fighting an enemy like Hamas, people who not just threaten to kill but
had proven they had no hesitation in doing so, I’d felt there was no choice but to
attempt the rescue. I admitted we’d known the risks. But we’d tried to do the
right thing, both for the country and her son. I think she understood, though I
knew that nothing could alter the terrible sadness of her loss. The pain would
take years to heal. Some part of it never would. Still, I felt it was important she
and her husband know that we, too, felt their loss. For years afterwards, Nava
and I continued to visit them.
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By then, however, I was no longer chief of staff. In fact, barely ten weeks
after the kidnapping, I handed over to Amnon Lipkin. I left the kirya proud of
all I had sought to accomplish during my 36 years in uniform. I also realized
there had also been failures and setbacks, none more painfully fresh than our
inability to rescue Nahshon Wachsman. But I was about to find that the area of
Israeli life which I now chose to enter – national politics – could be a battlefield
as well. And that when trouble hit, even your allies sometimes ducked for cover.
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Chapter Seventeen
It was an ambush. It came in July 1995, six months after I’d left the army
and only days before I was expected to named as Interior Minister in Yitzhak
Rabin’s government. The effect, and clearly the intention, was to threaten my
political career before it had even begun – by reviving, and lying about, the
tragic training accident at the Negev army base of Tze’elim, during our
preparations for the operation against Saddam Hussein.
When the “story” broke, I was nearly five thousand miles away. I was
accompanying Nava’s brother, Doron Cohen, on a business trip he was making
to China – and savoring my last few days as a private citizen between my three
decades of military service and my entry into politics. I’d got a hint of the storm
that was about to engulf me a few days before we left for the Far East. It was a
letter from a reporter at Yeidot Achronot, Israel’s largest-selling newspaper,
with a list of questions about Tze’elim. The thrust of the questions made clear
the case Yediot seemed intent on building: that after the live missile strike
which killed the Sayeret Matkal men, I had abandoned the injured and
immediately “fled” to Tel Aviv. I probably should have answered the letter. But
I assumed even rudimentary checks would reveal the story to be false. I’d had
similar questions from a TV journalist a few months earlier. I did phone him
back. I explained the true details of what had happened. I suggested he talk to
others who were there, like Amnon Lipkin, the current chief of staff and my
former deputy, to confirm my account. The story was dropped.
But Yediot evidently decided not to let the facts get in the way of the
“exclusive” it ran in its weekend edition on July 7. Under a banner headline – an
undeniably clever Hebrew pun, Ehud Barakh, “Ehud Ran Away” – it accused
me of having stood by, paralyzed with shock, when the missiles struck and then,
as other officers tended to the wounded, rushed away by helicopter.
Doron and I were having dinner in Beijing when Nava phoned. She’d just
seen the newspaper story, and read it to me. I’d never been angrier. As best I
could work out, it had been concocted from a patchwork of accounts long after
the fact. To the extent the notion of my “fleeing” had been raised, I could only
imagine that Yediot’s “sources” had misunderstood the arrival of the first
medical helicopter, when the pilot was unable to see us and flew on before
returning a couple of minutes later. But in every single detail about my actions
after the tragedy occurred, it was a pure and simple lie.
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I was not just angry, but frustrated at my inability to rebut the story in
person. Doron and I immediately made arrangements to return to Israel early,
which, since there was no direct air connection, meant finding the first flight out
through London. But before we left, Nava phoned again, almost sputtering in
fury. She told me that she’d just received a call from Aliza Goren, Rabin’s
media spokesperson. “Does Ehud know about the Yediot story?” she’d asked.
When Nava said yes, Aliza told her: “It is important that Ehud knows that we
are not going to get involved in getting him out of this.”
Welcome to politics, I thought. Rabin knew that the story was untrue. I’d still
been in Tze’elim when I’d phoned him about what had happened. He knew I’d
remained there to order in the medical helicopters and arrange for the
evacuation of the wounded before returning to brief him. Still, he did not say a
single word in public – nor, for that matter, speak to me – as the controversy
continued to gather force.
During our stopover in London, I sat with Doron and talked through how to
get my voice heard. I telephoned Yoni Koren, the officer who’d been my top
aide in the kirya and whom I’d asked to work for me in the Interior Ministry,
assuming I now actually got there. I told him to phone Amnon Lipkin and say
that I had expected him to answer the fabrications. Not only had he and I been
at the site of tragedy together. We’d left together, on the same helicopter.
Amnon did now issue a statement saying that he knew Yediot’s allegations were
wrong. But the story had been allowed to stand for too long. His rebuttal caused
barely a ripple.
As I read the latest Israeli newspapers before landing in Tel Aviv, I found
that at least I wasn’t totally on my own. Reporters had been phoning politicians
for comment. Most responded like weathervanes, going with the prevailing
wind, which was gusting against me. But three Knesset members dissented. One
was Ori Or, a friend even before we’d both gone into the army, and who had
now joined Labor. The other two were leading members of Likud: Dan Meridor
and Benny Begin, Menachem Begin’s son. All three said they were sure the
allegations were false. Did they know the details about the accident, they were
asked. No, they replied, they didn’t need to. They knew me.
Now all I had to do was convince the rest of the country. It had been nearly a
week since the Yediot’s “exposé”. It was Yoni Koren who passed on a request
from Channel 1 television, our equivalent of the BBC. They were proposing that
I appear with Nissim Mishal, the man who had interviewed me 10 years earlier,
at the urging of Rabin’s political aide, on my first TV appearance. For Mishal,
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the interview would be a journalistic coup. For me, it was a risk. He was a
famously combative questioner, a bit like Sam Donaldson at White House
briefings, or Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys in Britain.
On the night of July 13, I drove to the television studio in Tel Aviv. Mishal
confronted me with Yediot’s version of events. I was angry, and showed it.
“This report was not some night editor’s mishap,” I said. “It was authorized by
the highest levels of a mass-circulation newspaper which is power-drunk,
corrupted by power, and manipulative. The so-called ‘story’ was an amateurish
and distorted depiction of a chief-of-staff who sees wounded soldiers, turns his
back, deserts them and flies away. That is an evil, vain falsehood.” As Mishal
pressed me about the allegation that I had fled, I cited, by name, other officers
who had been there with me and had confirmed precisely the opposite. I had left
Tze’elim, along with Amnon Lipkin, a full 50 minutes after the missiles struck,
I said. And only after the helicopters had arrived, the injuries had been treated
and the choppers were evacuating the wounded. “A chief of staff’s job is not to
treat the wounded, when others are doing that already,” I added. My
responsibility was “to keep my head, and ensure a safe and speedy medical
evacuation.” That was what I’d done. “I’ve given years of my life to serving this
country,” I said. “I have been shot at. I have shot men dead from as close as I
am to you now. How did the hand that wrote these things against me not
tremble?”
It was certainly high drama. But it was not an act. The way that I’d gone
after Yediot prompted some pundits to suggest my skin was too thin. One
commentator even said I was obviously not suited to politics. Yet what mattered
most to me was what the rest of Israel felt: people who were not reporters or
editors, commentators or politicians. Opinion polls the day afterwards showed
that something like 80 percent of Israelis believed what I’d said. I think this was
only partly due to the details of the argument I made. When you’re under such
close, direct scrutiny, I’m sure viewers have an innate sense of whether what
they are hearing is the truth.
Almost as soon as I’d got home from the interview, the phone rang. It was
someone who, of course, already knew it was the truth: Yitzhak Rabin. “Ehud,”
he said, “you did well. Let’s move forward.”
* * *
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I later worked out why he’d wanted to steer clear of the whole thing. Yediot
had been planning the story for months. It had been ready to go with it earlier,
when it was assumed I would be joining the government as early as April. The
editors had held it to coincide with my arrival as a minister. That, I suppose,
was simply what newspapers did. But it turned out that at least two influential
Labor politicians had played a part in steering Yediot toward the story, and
urging the newspaper to run with it: Haim Ramon, a veteran party figure and
cabinet minister, though he’d quit the government the year before over the
party’s failure to follow through on health-policy reform; and Shimon Shevess,
one of Rabin’s top advisers. Ramon would later say that they hadn’t wanted to
“kill Barak” as a new minister. “Just fire some bullets at this legs, so he’ll enter
politics with a limp.” It was a way of cutting me down to size.
I suppose that was understandable. I was by no means the only former
general to enter Israeli politics. Other chiefs-of-staff had gone on to play
prominent roles in government: Dayan, Motta Gur and, of course, Rabin. But
the fact that I was going directly into the cabinet, and so soon after leaving the
army, was seen by the Israeli media – and a number of Labor politicians – as a
reflection of my close relationship with Rabin. Some commentators had even
been speculating I might eventually be a candidate to succeed him as party
leader and Prime Minister.
It was true that Rabin had personally urged me to join the government,
starting with a lighthearted remark only days after I’d ended my term as chief of
staff. It was at a farewell organized by my staff. The event began with film clips
from my years in the army, and a series of entertaining cameos from men I’d
served with and led. Rabin spoke at the end. He said he’d recently been on an
official visit to South Korea. He’d met the president, who told him he was the
first Korean leader not to have been an army general. Rabin said he’d replied
that he was the first Israeli Prime Minister who was a general. Then, smiling
and looking straight at me, he added: “Nu, Ehud?”
I did want to join his government. But I had been in the army since the age
of seventeen and was now in my early fifties. For my family’s sake, as well as
my own, I had figured on taking a year or two to explore other things. Two
options appealed to me especially. One was business. My brother-in-law, in
addition to having a successful law practice, was involved in a number of
business ventures, and we’d discussed areas we might jointly explore. But I had
also received offers from think tanks in the United States.
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Despite Rabin’s quip about ex-generals and Prime Ministers, I was surprised
when, a couple of days later, he asked me to come see him. He smiled as I
entered his office. Then he said: “Ehud, now that you are out of uniform. I
would be glad to see you come into politics, together with us, and be a member
of the government.” He said he’d discussed it with Peres. “It’s a joint
invitation.” Though I did, of course, say yes, I also told him I was planning to
take some time off, probably at first with a think tank in the US. Though I
wasn’t exactly sure about the legal provisions for officers leaving the army, I
reminded him that there was a set period of time during which they could not
enter politics. He replied, a bit enigmatically, that he would be sending an
“operative” to talk to me further about the timing.
The operative was Giora Einy, a uniquely important figure in Labor because
he was trusted both by Rabin and Peres. I liked him immediately. Throughout
my years in politics, I would come to rely on him for his experience, good
humor and good judgement. He did know about the rules for former army
people going into politics: there was a 100-day moratorium. “Rabin wants you
immediately,” he said. “I guess we’ll tell him that ‘immediately’ will have to
mean sometime in April.” In fact, I told Giora that I’d hoped it would be much
longer. So we agreed that in order to give me at least a few months in the US,
he’d tell Rabin he could get in touch at any time from March 1996 with his
invitation to join the cabinet. As soon as he did so, I would formally cut my ties
with the military, meaning I could join the government in the summer.
Nava, the girls and I left for Washington in January. I joined the Center for
Strategic and International Studies and was given the delightfully overwrought
title of Distinguished Visiting Statesman and Senior Associate. The reason the
CSIS had invited me was to write and speak on the Middle East. About two
months in, I presented a paper. I began by welcoming the constellation of
changes which seemed to offer at least an opportunity for stability, security and
peace: the unravelling of the Soviet Union; the Oslo Agreement; the peace
treaty with Jordan and the continuing talks with the Syrians. As long as we had
partners committed to reaching an agreement, I believed Israel would be ready
“to consider major compromise and to take upon ourselves significant
calculated risks.” But with a frankness which seems surprising even to me in
retrospect, I delivered much the same message as I had to ministers on the
potential dangers inherent in the Oslo process as we moved forward.
I pointed out that Arafat had made no move to rein in groups like Hamas,
and that more Israelis had actually been killed by terror since Oslo than in the
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year before. “We signed a three-phase contract with Arafat,” I said. “Try to
imagine one of you selling me three pieces of property. If I fail to pay for the
first one on time, you might not immediately cancel the contract. You might
even be ready to help me collect the necessary money. But you would never
proceed to deliver the second property before I paid for the first one, unless you
were a fool.” I also warned of longer-term dangers: “terrorism, radical Islamic
fundamentalism, the proliferation of surface-to-surface missiles and weapons of
mass destruction, and threats to the long-term stability of the more pragmatic
Arab regimes.” I singled out Iran, because it was determined to export its brand
of fundamentalism Islam, sponsor terror and develop a nuclear weapon.
I also accompanied CSIS colleagues on speaking engagements to other
American cities. I was about to board a flight to Seattle in April when I got a
message saying Rabin wanted to talk to me. After we took off, I used the onboard
phone facility and, with a swipe of a credit card, was soon on the line to
the Prime Minister. Since the exchange was in Hebrew, I’m fairly sure anyone
overhearing me had no idea what we were talking about. “I need you to come
back as soon as possible,” Rabin said. I already knew, from Giora, that he was
anxious to find a long-term replacement as Minister of Interior. The leading
light in the Sephardi religious party Shas, Arye Deri, had had to leave the post
under allegations of bribe-taking. After Rabin had taken on the portfolio himself
four 18 months, he had placed Labor’s Uzi Baram there, but only as a
temporary arrangement. I didn’t feel I could refuse outright. But I reminded him
that under army rules, “as soon as possible” still meant another 100 days. And
ideally, I said I wanted to finish the best part of a year in Washington. I asked
whether it would be possible to join the cabinet in the middle of November
instead. “What difference will a few more months make?”
Rabin said he needed me now, and that mid-November would be too late.
“Ehud, in politics, you can never predict what will happen by then.” Neither of
us could have known how terribly prophetic his words would turn out to be.
* * *
I was not only new to cabinet politics. I wasn’t even a member of the
Knesset. But in addition to naming me as head of a major ministry – in charge
of everything from citizenship and immigration to planning, zoning, and the
funding of local government – Rabin made me a member of his “inner cabinet”
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on security and foreign affairs. Barely three weeks after I joined the
government, we had to decide on the most important agreement with the
Palestinians since Oslo. Dubbed Oslo II, it involved a major transfer of
authority and territory. The process would begin with our pulling out from more
than a quarter of the West Bank, including the major Palestinian towns and
some 450 smaller towns and villages. After that, there would be three further
redeployment phases, at six-month intervals, in so-called “Area C” of the West
Bank – a mix of unpopulated land, settlements and a number of points we’d
designated as strategically important. Under Oslo, and its parent agreement
Camp David, it was all part of ensuring the Palestinians could exercise their
“legitimate rights” in the “single territorial entity” of the West Bank and Gaza –
in other words, a path to statehood. But only by the time the final three phases
of redeployment were complete were we required to begin the “permanentstatus”
talks on issues like land and borders, Israeli settlements, the future of
Jerusalem: the real core of a peace agreement.
By the time I joined the discussions on Oslo II in August 1995, the main
points had already been agreed. Rabin was in favor, as were virtually all the
cabinet ministers. Whatever scant influence I might exercise would have to
come at the decisive cabinet meeting, set for August 13. From the objections I’d
raised to the Gaza-Jericho deal as chief of staff, Rabin knew I’d be concerned
not only to ensure the security provisions avoided potential misunderstandings
on the ground, but about the longer-term implications, especially since the scale
of the Israeli withdrawals was much larger this time. In fact, the agreement
could be interpreted as requiring us to cede Palestinian control over virtually all
of Gaza and West Bank by the end of the third redeployment phase –quite
possibly before talks on the permanent-status questions had even begun.
I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet vote. I explained why I
thought the agreement was flawed. I argued we should either delay some of our
redeployments or bring the permanent-status negotiations forward. He listened
to me. He barely spoke. He knew I’d be against Oslo II, and knew the reasons
why. But we both knew something else: having been brought into government
by Rabin, I would be expected, on a vote of this importance, to be in his corner.
The cabinet vote wasn’t happening in a political vacuum. Likud’s defeat in
1992 had meant the end of Yitzhak Shamir’s leadership. The new Likud leader
was the former Sayeret Matkal officer with whom I’d shared a newspaper cover
in 1986 predicting that he and I would end up facing each other at the ballot
box: Bibi Netanyahu. Positioning himself as the fresh young face of Israeli
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politics and vowing to defeat Labor, Bibi had seized on Oslo II to accuse Rabin
of “surrendering” to Arafat, and by extension to Hamas terrorism.
I couldn’t sleep the night before the cabinet meeting. I had no desire to be
disloyal to Yitzhak. I certainly didn’t want to add to the pressures on him, much
less add further impetus to Bibi’s rhetorical onslaughts. But the more I thought
of it, the less I could see the point of entering politics if I wasn’t going to vote
with my conscience. The cabinet meeting lasted for hours. It was near the end
that I spoke, calmly and in detail, about my reservations. Many of the ministers
seemed barely to be listening. They’d long since made up their minds. But when
I’d finished, two ministers passed me notes. Both said the same thing: Ehud,
don’t do anything crazy. Don’t vote against it. So I didn’t. But I couldn’t vote
for it either. I abstained.
Rabin was bitterly upset. He didn’t tell me directly. But when the meeting
broke up, his longtime political aide, Eitan Haber, took me aside to tell me how
that what I’d done was “terrible”. Giora Einy came to see me the next day, after
Rabin had phoned him in a mix of anger and disbelief. “What is this,” he’d
asked Giora. “The first big vote, and Barak abstains?” It wasn’t until a few
weeks later that Rabin and I spoke alone, over a beer in his office. He didn’t
raise the question of the vote. So I did. “Yitzhak, I understand it’s caused you
pain,” I said. “But I think you understand I was acting out of what is genuinely
my belief and my position.” I asked him why, unlike the other ministers, he
hadn’t passed me a note before we’d cast our votes. “Ehud,” he said, “I never
write requests or orders on how to vote. Ministers must vote according to their
conscience.” He didn’t mean what I’d done was right. He meant my conscience
should have told me, given the importance of the issue, to vote yes.
The tension between us did ease somewhat in the weeks ahead. But the
tension around us escalated after the cabinet vote. Opinion polls showed the
country split down the middle. Settlement leaders and extremist rabbis launched
a campaign against the legitimacy of the government, and of Rabin as Prime
Minister. Right-wing religious leaders issued a decree rejecting the planned
redeployments on the West Bank – “the evacuation of bases and their transfer to
the Gentiles” – as biblically prohibited. A new group called Zu Artzenu
organized a campaign of civil disobedience to try to bring the government
down.
The sheer venom hit home during a pair of events I attended with Rabin, to
award of the status of “city” to towns which had crossed the required threshold
in population and economic activity. By tradition, this was marked by a
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ceremony with both the Interior Minister and the Prime Minister present. The
first was in Ofakim, near where I’d worked in the fields with Yigal Garber in
the 1950s. Shortly after we arrived, a group of protestors started shouting at
Rabin. Manyac, they yelled, “maniac”. Boged: traitor. At the second event, near
Haifa, busloads of protestors from right-wing religious schools shouted abuse at
Rabin when he rose to speak.
As the Knesset vote on Oslo II approached, the hatred reached new levels.
The day before, thousands of protesters packed into Jerusalem’s Zion Square.
Some shouted “Death to Rabin!” Others burned pictures of him, or passed out
photos of him dressed in an Arab keffiyeh, or even a Nazi uniform. Bibi had
publicly declared that opposition to the agreement must remain within the
bounds of the law. Yet as he addressed the baying mob from a hotel balcony, he
uttered not a single word of reproach. In fact, he called Rabin’s government
“illegitimate”, because it relied in part on the votes of Israeli Arab Knesset
members.
The day of the vote, the mob descended on the Knesset. Rabin had called a
government meeting beforehand. When I got there, the crowd was so large that
I was taken in through a special security entrance away from the front of the
building. But the Housing Minister, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, arrived late and
tried to drive through the main gate. Protestors pounded furiously on his car and
tried to break the windows. Our meeting had already begun when he arrived. He
had spent nearly as long as I had in the army, but he was shaken. Interrupting
Rabin, he banged his fist on the table. “I’ve been on battlefields,” he said. “I’ve
been shot at. I know how to read a situation. I saw their faces. It’s insane! It is
beyond anything rational, this kind of hatred.” Pounding the table again, he
shouted: “I warn you. It will end with a murder! It will end with a murder!”
Rabin motioned for calm. He, too, was concerned by the rhetorical violence,
even more so now that it was becoming physical violence. But as he would tell
an interviewer a few weeks later, he simply didn’t believe that “a Jew will kill a
Jew.” Nor, at that point, did I.
After the Knesset vote, which passed by a margin of 61 to 59, plans got
underway for a rally in defense of the peace process, and against the tide of
hatred on the right. It was the idea of two people: Shlomo Lahat, a Likud mayor
of Tel Aviv who now backed Oslo, and a French Jewish businessman named
Jean Frydman, a friend of Shimon Peres whom I had got to know and like. But
in several of the early planning discussions in which I was involved, Rabin was
against the rally, which was to be held in the huge Kings of Israel Square in the
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heart of Tel Aviv. He was worried that not enough people would show up, and
that those who did would be from the left: Meretz, not Labor, people who would
be there mainly to criticize him for not going far, or quickly, enough in pulling
out of the West Bank.
In the end, he was persuaded it should go ahead. In fact, by the time the date
approached – Saturday evening, November 4 – he seemed to be feeling more
energized, and upbeat. I wouldn’t be there, because I was going to New York as
the government’s representative at a fundraising dinner that same night for the
Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial. A few hours before leaving, however, I met
with Rabin. We’d found a 15-minute window in his schedule, but we ended up
talking for an hour. He said he knew that, in some ways, the difficulties
surrounding the peace talks were likely to get worse. Hamas would not abandon
terror. The kind of intolerance we were seeing from the right wing was not
going to go away. He was furious at Bibi, who in his view was hypocritically
going through the motions of calling for restraint and pretending to be unaware
that the mobs were full of Likud voters. “They’re his people,” he said, “and he
knows it.”
But he was relishing the idea of taking on Bibi in the next election, due in
about a year’s time. Though Rabin was trailing in the polls, he was confident of
turning that around once the campaign began. “The main thing is that the party
isn’t focused. We have to get serious about preparing,” he said. He was worried
about the effect of inevitable tensions between his supporters and Peres’s over
how to run the campaign. “Bring back Haim Ramon,” I suggested. I knew by
now that Haim had helped orchestrate the false story which Yediot had run
about Tze’elim. But I also realized he was a Labor heavyweight and that,
although he’d left the government, he remained personally close to Yitzhak.
“Yes,” Yitzhak replied, nodding, suggesting that we talk through the idea in
detail when I returned from New York.
I was in my room at the Regency Hotel, on New York’s Upper East Side,
when the phone rang on Saturday afternoon. I was dimly aware that the Tel
Aviv rally had been going on back home, but was more focused on preparing
my speech for the Yad Vashem event. “Ehud, Ehud!” It was Nava, her voice
barely understandable through the sobs. “Rabin has been shot!”
* * *
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Danny Yatom called me a couple of minutes later. He said Rabin was still
alive. But from the details he gave me, I knew it would take a miracle for him to
pull through. “Three shots, from close range,” Danny said. “From an Israeli, a
Jew.” Like Rabin, like me too until this had actually happened, it was something
Danny was struggling to believe. He said that he’d call me back when he knew
anything more. But I had the TV on in the room. Before he did, I watched Eitan
Haber announce that Yitzhak Rabin was dead.
Although I hadn’t known it until I’d arrived, Yossi Beilin was also in New
York, for meetings and a speech of his own. Though he was a Peres protégé,
and I was seen as closer to Rabin, the two of us had become friends. We
immediately made plans to get the next flight home. But before leaving for the
airport, I phoned Leah Rabin. However inadequate I knew it would be in
helping her even begin to cope with the loss, I told her that my, and Nava’s,
thoughts were with her. That Yitzhak’s death would leave a tremendous hole, in
all of us, in every single Israeli. “They shot him,” she kept murmuring. “They
shot him. They shot him. They shot him.” I called Peres, too. “Shimon, you
have a mountain on your shoulders,” I said. “But your task is to carry on. All of
us will be with you, supporting, helping however we can.”
It was the saddest flight I’d ever taken. Yossi and I barely spoke. Each of us
was deep in thought. I found myself lost in memories of Rabin – from the very
first time I’d met him, in the sayeret, to that last, long talk we’d had in his office
a couple of days earlier. For some reason, I kept wondering whether, when the
shots had been fired, he’d been turning to look behind him. It was an
idiosyncrasy he had, whenever he was leaving a meeting or an event – even, as I
now recalled vividly, when the two of us were leaving the municipal ceremony
in Ofakim. I was behind him as we left. “Ehud,” he said, turning back, “are you
there?” It was a senseless detail. It wouldn’t change anything. But I still felt torn
up inside thinking about it.
After we landed at Ben-Gurion, I went with Nava to the Rabins’ apartment
in Ramat Aviv. There were hundreds of people outside, and nearly a hundred
crowded inside the flat. Leah looked exhausted, her face ashen. “They shot
him,” she said over and over as Nava and I hugged her. “Three shots. In the
back. Why?” I said there was no sane answer, but that with Yitzhak’s death,
Israel seemed different, the world seemed different, and emptier. Before we left,
we added our candles to the forest of flickering memorial lights outside the
apartment block. Then, we drove the Kings of Israel Square. Thousands of
people were huddled in small groups throughout the plaza, sitting around
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thickets of candles and chanting, almost prayerlike, anthems of mourning and of
peace.
For reasons I couldn’t explain, I felt the need to see the place, near the front
of the square, where Rabin had been murdered, by a 25-year-old Orthodox Jew
and settlement activist named Yigal Amir. Standing there with Nava, I felt even
more strongly what I’d told Leah by phone from New York after hearing
Yitzhak was dead: his murder would leave a huge hole – in me, in all Israelis.
He was an extraordinary mix of qualities: a brave officer, first in the pre-state
Palmach and then the new Israeli army; a chief of staff and defense minister at
critical periods in our history. Shy, even at times uncertain or hesitant, and
naturally cautious. Decisive, too, when he felt that he, and Israel, needed to be:
whether on Entebbe, or the prospect, with all its risks, of launching an operation
to kill Saddam Hussein. Humane, too: ready to negotiate with terrorists to save
the lives of those they were planning to kill, unless he was confident our
soldiers could save them first. Underpinning it all was a dedication to fighting
and defeating Isael’s enemies, yet a mindfulness that the real victory, if and
when it was possible, would be genuine peace with our neighbors. He and I had
had differences over particular policies: leaving our troops in Lebanon, for
instance, or more recently the architecture of Oslo. But I never doubted that we
were lucky to have Yitzhak leading Israel on the inevitably fraught road to a
negotiated peace. I never ceased to believe there was no politician more suited
to the role: that he would do everything he could to achieve it, yet would step
back if he saw that he was putting Israel’s security at risk.
On Sunday evening, Peres called a cabinet meeting in the kirya. He said our
task was to continue what Rabin had begun, and that at least for now he would
fill Rabin’s shoes not just as Prime Minister but Defense Minister as well. The
whole country stood still, shocked, until the state funeral two days after the
assassination. It was attended by dozens of leaders from around the world. My
role was to escort King Hussein and Queen Noor. On our drive into Jerusalem,
we passed the Old City walls. We were barely a mile from the stone terrace,
above the Western Wall of our ancient temple, where the golden Dome of the
Rock and the Al-Aqsa mosque stand. I knew Hussein had been there as a boy
when his grandfather, King Abdullah, was shot and killed by a Palestinian amid
rumors he was contemplating peace with Israel. Now, Rabin had been
murdered, by an Israeli. “To me, it’s like the closing of a circle,” Hussein said.
“Those who are murdered because they are not extreme enough. Because they
look for normalcy, and peace.”
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Yitzhak’s murder had acted like a kind lightning strike, freezing Israelis in a
mix of disgust over what had occurred and awareness of the dangers this brand
of hatred and extremism posed. I was concerned the moment would be allowed
to pass. My hope was that we could seize the opportunity to bring together all
those Israelis – on left and right, secular and Orthodox, Ashkenazi and Sephardi
– who were prepared to stand up against the fanaticism, the violent messianism,
of which Yigal Amir was just a part. That was the main reason I wanted Peres
to call an early election, an issue that would be discussed, off and on, over the
next few months. I felt the time was right to present the country with a choice:
not just between those for and against specific compromises being contemplated
in pursuit of peace, but between those who wanted a tolerant, functioning
democracy and those who were ready to use demagoguery and violence to get
their way.
Peres’s first order of business was to put in place a new cabinet. He did,
briefly, consider giving up the Defense Ministry and putting me there. But
instead, he made me Foreign Minister. Like Rabin before him, Shimon
stipulated that he, as Prime Minister, would retain authority over the peace
negotiations. Still, with his agreement, I was involved in all the discussions
around the peace talks, and in meeting many of the Arab leaders we’d have to
negotiate with if we were to find a lasting resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Just a few weeks after the assassination, I represented Israel at a Euro-
Mediterranean Partnership conference in Barcelona. Its only real diplomatic
work consisted of ironing out the wording of the communique. The real value
was in the corridors, and at the dinner held at one of King Juan Carlos’s palatial
estates, and, for me, a first opportunity to meet not only Arab foreign ministers
but Yasir Arafat.
My first, brief encounter with Arafat began a bit embarrassingly. I’d arrived
a few minutes early for the conference dinner and was led into an impressive
hall that was almost empty except for a wonderfully cared-for royal Steinway. I
sat down to play. Lost in the beauty of a Chopin sonata, I was completely
unaware of PLO leader’s approach behind me. A bit awkwardly, I rose to greet
him. I grasped his hand. “It’s a real pleasure to meet you,” I said. “I must say I
have spent many years watching you – by other means.” He smiled. Our hosts
had set aside time after dinner for the two of us to talk at greater length, with no
aides present. But my hope was to begin by establishing simple, human contact;
to signal respect; to begin to create the conditions not to try to kill Arafat but, if
he shared the same goal, to make peace with him. “We carry a great
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responsibility,” I said. “Both of our peoples have paid a heavy price. The time
has come to find a way to solve this.”
In the half hour we spent together later, I could see that, physically, the Fatah
leader from Karameh was not just older. He had a frailty about him. His skin
seemed almost translucent in places. His hands shook slightly, with the early
signs of Parkinson’s. He spoke softly. But despite this ostensibly vulnerable
exterior, I could see how daunting, and frustrating, he must be a negotiating
partner. Henry Kissinger has described how Mao Tse-Tung, rather than engage
directly in discussion or debate, tended to wrap his remarks in parables. Without
stretching the parallel too far, Arafat was like that. While I tried to engage him
on how each of us might help cement the Oslo process, and ensure that the
interim agreement indeed led to a full peace, he responded with stories, or offtopic
remarks, which I was left to unwrap and decipher.
He began our discussion by saying that now that I was Foreign Minister, he
was glad to meet me. He said that he’d heard “reports” from his intelligence
people that when I was chief-of-staff, I had organized a kind of dissident band
of generals who were working to torpedo the Oslo agreements. He compared
this to the OAS, the military cabal in France that had opposed De Gaulle. I
could only laugh. I told him I’d actually spent two months with OAS men years
earlier, in Mont Louis, but that Israel was different. Even at times of the
toughest of disagreements, we were a family. An “Israeli OAS” would never
work, even if I had been crazy enough to contemplate such a thing. Which, I
hastened to add, I was not.
There was another idiosyncrasy I encountered in Arafat. He was constantly
writing notes as we spoke. I didn’t mind that. But it did strike me as slightly
diluting the kind of frankness and openness I would find in most of the one-onone
meetings I went on to have with foreign leaders as Peres’s Foreign Minister.
Maybe he did it just as a kind of aide-memoire. But certainly in later meetings I
had with him, it did have the effect to making me choose my words more
carefully. That, I believed, reduced the prospect of exploring more creatively
the boundaries of each of our official positions. It also helped Arafat to argue, as
he did on more than one occasion, that Rabin, or Peres, or whatever Israeli
interlocutor he chose to name had promised him such and such. He always
implied this was based on his written record, though he never produced any
evidence to that effect. He also never seemed to have recorded anything that he
had promised Israelis.
I tried, with only partial success, to engage some of the other Arab foreign
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ministers when we’d arrived in the banqueting hall. I did have a good talk with
Egypt’s Amr Moussa, and the foreign ministers of Morocco and Tunisia. When
I tried to start a conversation with Syria’s Farouk al-Sharaa, however, he
pointedly, though politely, said he felt that would not be appropriate. President
Assad had broken off talks with us earlier in the year, insisting that we first
commit explicitly to honor Rabin’s “pocket deposit” on the Golan Heights. Still,
in my formal remarks at the dinner, I urged both sides to resume our effort to
negotiate an Israeli-Syrian agreement. Sharaa’s response was, again,
unencouraging. But I did notice, and take heart from, the fact that it was neither
polemic nor overtly hostile towards Israel.
When I returned to Israel, I found that Peres, too, wanted to restart the
negotiating process with the Syrians. The effort took on fresh momentum after a
meeting at Peres’s home in Jerusalem in early December, ahead of his visit to
Washington for talks with President Clinton. Itamar Rabinovich and I had each
met with him separately a few weeks earlier to brief him on how the talks with
the Syrians had gone under Rabin, and why they’d reached an impasse. We
emphasized Assad’s insistence on a preemptive agreement on our leaving the
Golan. Peres now came forward with a plan. It was the diplomatic equivalent of
what the Americans, a few years later in the second Gulf War, would call
“shock and awe.” This was “dazzle and befuddle.” As Peres explained it, we
would flood Assad with proposals: not just on land or security, but everything
from water and electricity to tourism and industrial zones. Assad was in
personal control of the Syrian side of the talks. The mere volume, range and
complexity of the simultaneous engagement Peres had in mind would, he
hoped, dilute his focus on the Golan. “The best results are extracted from
confusion,” he said. Having watched President Assad operate for years, when I
was head of intelligence and chief of staff, I said I was skeptical. I used the
image of a bulldog. “It comes into your living room with one aim: to lock on to
your ankle. You can throw fireworks, cookies, balloons, a tasty bone. But it’s a
bulldog. It’s still going to move another step toward your ankle.” For Assad, the
ankle was the Golan.
I understood why Peres wanted to make a new effort to get peace with Syria.
Obviously, it was something to be desired in itself. It would transform the terms
of our conflict with the Arabs, and maybe even bring within reach the hope of
ending it altogether. But there was a political consideration as well. For all his
other accomplishments, Peres had a record of repeated electoral defeat as head
of Labor. This next election would be the first held under a new set of rules.
Instead of merely choosing lists of Knesset candidates, Israelis would cast two
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votes: one for a party list and one for a directly elected Prime Minister. This
would be a personal test, an opportunity for Shimon to build on the still-tenuous
achievement of Oslo and finally secure the endorsement of the Israeli people.
It seemed, for a while, I might even have a role. A few days later, Peres and I
met again. In Israeli elections, the campaign manager is called head of hasbarah
– media and public-information planning. He told me he still didn’t know
exactly when he would call the election. But he asked me to take on that role.
* * *
Both Peres and I proved to be right about the Syrians. The negotiations did
resume, and two rounds of talks were held at Wye River, on Maryland’s eastern
shore, in December 1995 and January 1996. They did focus on the whole range
of issues in an eventual peace, just as Peres had hoped, and some progress was
made in identifying areas of potential agreement. But the bulldog never took its
eyes of our ankle. There was no escaping the fact that without addressing the
question of our withdrawal from the Golan Heights, we weren’t going to get to
the next stage. So a decision had to be made.
Peres, no less than Rabin, knew what the trade-off would be. Israel needed a
series of ironclad security arrangements, and a genuine peace, rather than just
agreement to a cessation of hostilities. Syria would demand to get back all, or at
least virtually all, of the Golan. Peres now focused on clarifying, in his own
mind, whether we should be willing to agree to trade the Golan for a peace
treaty. Our key meeting took place in early February, in the underground bunker
in the kirya. Peres asked Amnon Lipkin, as chief of staff, and our other top
generals for a presentation on their view of the security arrangements required
with Syria under a peace deal. They recommended that Israel insist on keeping a
sizeable part of the Golan, as well as a range of demilitarization provisions
which reached pretty much to the edge of Damascus. I’d been asked for my
view by Rabin when I was chief-of-staff. Obviously, from a purely military
standpoint, the ideal situation would be to keep the whole of the Golan Heights.
No chief of staff was going to recommend pulling out. But I’d always added a
rider: to withdraw as part of a peace agreement, with all its other likely benefits,
was not a military question. It was a decision for the government. The relevant
question for a chief of staff was whether we could ensure the security of Israel if
the government decided on a withdrawal, to which I answered yes.
284
I suspect Amnon would have said much the same thing. But that wasn’t the
question he’d been asked. As the proceedings wound down, Peres looked glum.
Maybe he was anticipating the potential leaks of army concerns about a Golan
withdrawal if we did get closer to a deal, and the venomous political attacks he
could expect from the right. Bibi’s stated view on a deal with Syria at the time
was that we could get peace and keep the Golan. It was classic Bibi, spoken
with verve and conviction as if simply saying it would make it true.
When the presentation was over, Peres called us into a small room in the
bunker reserved for use by the Defense Minister. As Foreign Minister, I was the
only cabinet member with him – along with Uri Savir, Peres’s senior deputy for
peace negotiations and several other Peres aides. If there had been a discussion,
I would have told him that as long as he felt the talks were progressing, he could
ignore Amnon’s presentation. If we didn’t get a deal, it would be irrelevant. If
we did, the military could find ways to deal with the security issues. But he just
looked at us and said” “We’re going for elections.” A few days later, the date
was set for May 29, 1996. Yet that would turn out not to be the end of Peres’s
doubts or difficulties. It was only the beginning.
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Chapter Eighteen
The first attack in the wave of Hamas suicide bombings destroyed a Jerusalem
bus at 6:42 a.m. on February 25, 1996. It left 26 people dead, and nearly 80 injured
from nails and shrapnel packed into the explosive charge. The second was near
Ashkelon. The bomber, dressed in Israeli uniform, joined a group of young soldiers
and blew himself up, killing one of them. A week later, a third suicide attack
blasted the roof off a bus on the same Jerusalem commuter route, leaving 19 more
dead. And on March 4, a 24-year-old Palestinian walked up to the entrance of Tel
Aviv’s busiest shopping center, on Dizengoff Street, detonated 30 pounds of
explosives, and killed 13 people. At the bomb scenes, bloodied survivors and
crowds of pedestrians surveyed a hellscape of twisted metal, shards of glass and
mangled body parts. While most Israelis were too shaken to worry about the
immediate political repercussions – and Bibi was careful, at least in the immediate
aftermath, not to try to score political points –Peres’s reelection campaign seemed
to lie in tatters almost before it had begun.
The attacks were not a surprise. As I’d argued to the Washington think-tank
audience before joining the government, the peace promise of Oslo had been
assailed from the start by a new alliance of Islamist Palestinian violence: mainly
Hamas, and Islamic Jihad on the West Bank. They saw Arafat as a traitor who had
sold out to Israel. For them, the issue wasn’t just Israel’s capture of the West Bank
and Gaza in the 1967 war. It was 1948: they opposed any Jewish state, anywhere in
Palestine. In a campaign of terror that made the first weeks of the intifada seem
almost easy to deal with, they began sending self-styled holy warriors to murder
Israeli civilians, and sacrifice their own lives, in the expectation of Allah’s rewards
in the world to come. During the two years following Oslo, they’d mounted ten
suicide attacks, leaving nearly 80 Israelis dead. The attacks had actually stopped
since the summer of 1995. But when the election date was announced – with Peres
holding a roughly 15-per-cent lead in the polls – political commentators both in
Israel and abroad began speculating about a resumption of terror. For Hamas, the
election presented not just an opportunity to kill innocent Israelis but, by helping
defeat Peres and Labor, perhaps to kill Oslo as well.
Even before the bombings, our campaign was struggling for focus, energy and
even purpose, beyond the aim of getting more votes than Bibi Netanyahu. Despite
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Peres’s assurance that I’d be the campaign manager, that hadn’t happened. I wasn’t
really surprised by that, however. When he offered me the job, I wondered how
he’d managed to clear it with much more established Labor politicians. It turned
out he hadn’t. Haim Ramon, the veteran whom I’d urged Yitzhak to bring back for
the election, was put in charge. Shimon did ask me to head a small advisory team
which reported directly to him, but all the key decisions were taken at weekly
strategy sessions chaired jointly by him and Ramon. I still hoped to make the
campaign a referendum on Yitzhak’s murder, and on the need to recommit Israel to
democracy and dialogue over vitriol and violence. But Haim began with the
assumption that, given Peres’s lead in the polls, we should simply play it safe,
ignore the issue of the assassination, and try to ignore Bibi, too. He described it as
a soccer match. We were leading by two goals, he told our first strategy meeting.
The other side was never going to score unless we screwed up. “To win, we do
what all good teams do. We play for time. We kick the ball around. We kick the
ball into the stands. We wait for the final whistle.” I tried, without success, to argue
that we were underestimating Bibi. “He may be young and inexperienced in
national politics. But I know him from when he was even younger. He knows how
to analyze a task, break it down, work out a plan and execute it systematically and
tenaciously. If we play it safe and don’t define the campaign, he’ll seize on every
error we make and he will define it.”
I wanted us at least to connect with Yitzhak’s legacy. I argued to both Peres and
Ramon that we should promote Shimon as the candidate with the background,
experience and vision to take forward what he and Rabin had begun. I also wanted
us to echo a core assumption in all that Yitzhak did as a military and political
leader: that peace was achievable only if Israel and its citizens felt secure. Even
before the renewed terror attacks, I argued that we had to recognize that, much as
Israelis yearned for peace, many were conflicted and fearful about the Oslo
process. I said our central campaign message should be bitachon ve shalom.
Security and peace. “In that order,” I added. “We should tell voters openly that we
expect groups like Hamas to try to launch attacks. But they don’t want a secure
Israel. They don’t want peace. Don’t play their game.”
Yet the scale and intensity of the bombings threw everything into crisis. After
the bomb in the Dizengoff shopping mall, Peres called an emergency cabinet
meeting at the kirya. He knew that we had to find a way to reassure Israelis we
were getting a grip on the situation. We had got a start in our regular Sunday
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cabinet meeting the day before, by reviving an idea I’d supported under Rabin: to
build a security fence all along the edge of the West Bank, with a series of
controlled crossing points for people and goods. Yitzhak had said no at the time,
because he was worried it would be seen as a de facto border and undermine the
idea of building coexistence. My view then, and even more so now, was that we
would never get to the point of negotiating a final peace with the Palestinians
unless we could stop at least most of the terror attacks before they happened. Peres,
too, had been worried about “undermining coexistence.” But now, he and the rest
of the cabinet were so shaken by the carnage Hamas had left that they approved the
idea of a security barrier.
At our kirya meeting, hours after the latest bomb had exploded less than a mile
away, Peres recognized we had to go further. Under Oslo, we had begun giving the
Palestinians control over internal security in Gaza and parts of the West Bank.
Since the new Hamas attacks, Arafat had been saying the right things. After the
first bomb in Jerusalem, he’d phoned Shimon to offer condolences, telling
reporters afterward that this was “a terrorist operation. I condemn it completely. It
is not only against civilians, but against the whole peace process.” Yet when it
came to action, we saw no sign that he was willing, ready, or perhaps able to crack
down on the Islamist terror attacks. So Peres now announced that, if necessary in
order to detain known terrorists, we would for the first time send Israeli troops
back into areas where control had been handed back. If Arafat didn’t act, we
would.
On the political front, Peres did get some good news: President Clinton, anxious
to preserve the progress he’d worked so closely with Yitzhak to achieve, organized
an unprecedented show of international condemnation of the terror attacks. With
Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, he co-chaired a “Summit of Peacemakers” in Sharm al-
Sheikh with the participation not just of an equally concerned King Hussein, and of
course Arafat, but leaders of Arab states from North Africa to Saudi Arabia and the
Gulf. The only significant holdout was Syria’s Hafez al-Assad. He objected
because he said the conference was too focused on Israel. As Foreign Minister, I
accompanied Shimon to the summit. A single day’s meeting was never going to
end terror. But it was unprecedented in the breadth of Arab engagement in an
initiative that, as Assad had anticipated, didn’t just condemn terror in general. It
specifically denounced the attacks being launched inside Israel.
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I’d met President Clinton briefly once before, when he received Syrian chief-ofstaff
Hikmat Shehabi and me after our Blair House talks in 1994. But the Sharm
conference provided my first opportunity to spend time with him face-to-face.
When Peres and our delegation were about to leave, a Clinton aide approached and
said the President had asked whether I’d like to join him on the flight back to
Israel. Though as surprised as I was by the invitation, Shimon nodded at me to
signal it was okay, so I headed off for Air Force One. I spent most of the brief
flight talking to the President in the office space carved into the middle of the
plane. I would later discover that he quite often tried to engage with foreign
leaders’ colleagues or advisers on overseas trips, and not limit himself to summit
negotiations. It was part of his voracious appetite for information or insights which
he believed were essential to get a rounded understanding of the complexities of
the issues he was trying to address. Still, it was an extraordinarily fascinating 20
minutes. I got my first real look at Clinton’s natural gift for person-to-person
politics, as well as his mastery of both the detail and nuance of Israel’s
predicament, and of the wider conflict in the Middle East. Looking straight at me,
almost never breaking eye contact, he encouraged me to feel I had something of
value and importance to share with him. In fact, he created the impression that I
was the first sentient, intelligent human being he’d ever met. He made no grand
policy statements. Mostly, he asked me questions: what were the prospects of
Arafat reining in Hamas and Islamic Jihad? How were our relations going with
King Hussein? What was my view of the chances of concluding a peace with
Hafez al-Assad, despite his boycott of Sharm al-Sheikh? If Shimon did go on to
win the election, what new diplomatic opportunities could he as president, and we,
exploit in the search for peace? And, finally, what if Bibi won? I dare say this first
meeting was more memorable for me than for the president. But it would turn out
to provide a foundation for our joint efforts, in a few years’ time, to resolve the
very issues we’d talked about on Air Force One.
* * *
Though the summit restored a small opinion poll lead for Peres, that merely
reinforced Haim Ramon’s soccer-game strategy. I was more convinced than ever it
was wrong. Haim still wanted to ignore Bibi, but I pointed out that for at least one
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reason, that was absurd. Near the end of the campaign, there was going be a headto-head
television debate. In the meantime, though Bibi might be many things, he
wasn’t stupid. He was already telling voters that while Peres was making deals
with Arafat, ordinary Israelis were being left to wonder where the next terrorist
would strike. He would surely ramp up the accusations that Peres was “weak on
security,” especially if there was more violence. To assume that if we just sat back
we would win seemed to me complacent and risky. Yet when I mentioned to
Shimon that a couple of our internal polls still actually had Bibi slightly ahead, he
just laughed. “I have good polls,” he said. “Why should I believe the bad ones?”
Then, however, violence intervened again. It was not Hamas this time.
Beginning on March 30 and escalating sharply 10 days later, Katyusha rockets
rained onto towns and settlements in northern Israel by Hizbollah – the first
sustained attack since the cease-fire in 1994. It was pretty obvious that, like
Hamas, the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia in Lebanon was not just targeting Israeli
civilians, but Oslo, and Peres’s chances of winning the election. The last thing
Shimon wanted was for tens of thousands of people in the north of Israel to be
cowering in shelters during the final stretch of the campaign. So on April 11, he
ordered a major military operation in Lebanon.
I wasn’t party to the discussions about the operation. But the model chosen was
similar to the one I’d drawn up in 1994: a large-scale air and artillery assault
designed to hit Hizbollah hard, force civilians to flee and persuade the Lebanese
and Syrian governments to commit to a US-mediated end to the rocket attacks.
Again, all of that happened. But not before a tragic accident which brought a storm
of international criticism and hastened the end of the operation. An Israeli specialforces
unit was ambushed while providing laser targeting support for an air force
strike. When it called in artillery support, four of the shells fell on a UN compound
near the Lebanese village of Qana, killing more than 100 civilians seeking shelter
inside.
Peres phoned me a few hours later, distraught not just because the wayward
artillery strike had laid us open to charges of “targeting” civilians in an operation
designed to try to avoid doing so. Also, because the accident seemed likely to deal
a further blow to his efforts to convince Israel’s voters that he, rather than Bibi,
was the man best placed to lead the country. “We’re in trouble,” he said. Yet
within days, it became clear that our basic campaign strategy – ignore Bibi and
“kick the ball into the stands” – was not going to change. I did make one last
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attempt to help put us on the political offensive, after I was asked to record on of
Labor’s TV campaign messages. I knew what I wanted to say. I’d talked it over
with the small group of campaign experts Peres had asked me to assemble
alongside Ramon’s main team. Rather than ignore Bibi, I was going to use my
position as his former commander in Sayeret Matkal, someone who knew him
well, to explain why Peres should lead Israel.
“How many of us can really understand what it means to be a Prime Minister?”
I began. “As head of intelligence, and chief of staff, I have seen, close-up, what it
takes to be a Prime Minister. It is not a game. We’ve had good Prime Ministers:
Ben-Gurion, Peres, Rabin, Begin... Bibi, we know each other well, from the days
when you were an officer under my command. A young officer, and a good one.
Prime Minister is the most important and serious role in this country. Bibi, it’s not
yet you. We need an experienced leader, who will know how to guide us with
wisdom, strength and sensitivity. Shimon Peres is that man.”
Yet we were never going to be able to avoid engaging with Bibi altogether. The
face-to-face television debate between the two candidates was set for May 27, two
days before the election. By American standards, the format was fairly tame. No
direct exchanges were permitted, only a series of questions directed at each
candidate by a leading political journalist, Dan Margalit. Still, it would place
Shimon and Bibi side by side. We spent two days prepping Peres, with Avraham
Burg – an early Peace Now supporter, former Peres aide and Knesset member –
standing in for Bibi. Avraham played the role well, anticipating the lines of attack
Shimon would face. But as I watched, I worried that even he couldn’t replicate one
of Bibi’s key advantages. During his time at the embassy in Washington, and
especially as UN ambassador, Bibi had become a frequent presence on American
television interview shows. Always articulate, he was now also an experienced,
and completely comfortable, television performer. In our debate rehearsals, Peres
sounded well versed on all the issues. Yet I sensed his problem wasn’t going to be
the message, but the medium. He sounded a bit distant, unengaged, almost as if the
TV debate was something he knew he had to go through, but which he thought
slightly sullied the proper purpose of politics.
In the real debate, Shimon seemed to convey the sense that merely being in the
same studio with a pretender as raw and untested as Bibi was offensive. When each
of the candidates was given the opportunity at the end to ask a single question of
the other, Peres didn’t even bother. He did come over as the man with much more
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experience, gravitas, substance. He also had what was probably the best line in the
debate, saying that if Israeli voters were choosing a male model and not a Prime
Minister, Bibi might indeed be their man. Yet Bibi was much the more polished
performer, and the more focused. No matter what question Margalit asked him, he
almost invariably answered with the driving message of his campaign: that because
of Peres, Israeli citizens were living in fear, wondering where the next suicide
bomber would strike or the next Katyusha would land. And unavoidably, there was
another contrast as well: Bibi, who, after all, was 26 years younger, projected
greater youth, energy and confidence. When it was over, and Peres asked us how
he’d done, we all hemmed and hawed. Only Avraham Burg was prepared to offer a
clear verdict. He told Peres that Bibi had been the clear winner.
Still, it remained possible that Ramon’s football-game strategy might work.
Though Peres’s poll lead had been narrowing by the day, he was – just – ahead.
With a large number of voters undecided, however, Bibi pulled one final trick out
of his campaign bag. Under Israeli law, election spending is tightly regulated and
nearly all campaigning is barred during the last 48 hours before polling day. Yet
with the backing of wealthy overseas supporters, the Netanyahu campaign
suddenly flooded Israel with blue-and-white banners under the slogan: Bibi, Tov la
Yehudim. “Bibi is good for the Jews.” Would it swing tens of thousands of votes
among the Orthodox voters who were the main target? It was impossible to say.
But it seemed clear it was going to be a very close election.
I had worried for some time we might lose. That was why Nava and I had
persuaded Michal, our eldest daughter, to bring forward her wedding. She was
marrying her teenage boyfriend, a wonderful young man named Ziv Lotenberg.
They had originally planned it for a week later. But we did want to risk having it
overshadowed by an election defeat. The wedding took place in a beautiful area of
lawns and gardens called Ronit Farm, north of Herzliya. It was how weddings are
meant to be, full of smiles, good food and dancing. Near the end, Shimon showed
up. As he walked over to greet us, one guest after another shook his hand, patted
him on the back, hugged him, wished him luck. It was as if all the pressure and
tension of the campaign had suddenly flowed out of him. He smiled, returned the
embraces, even joined in the dancing. When he left, I told him that he’d done all he
could to secure victory, and that I hoped the voters would make the right choice.
The first exit polls suggested he was going to win. But our internal polling was
less clear. As more and more votes were counted, Shimon’s margin inexorably
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narrowed. It wasn’t until the next morning that the final result was clear: Bibi
Netanyahu had won. By 29,000 votes. If a mere 15,000 of the three million ballots
cast had gone in our column instead of his, Shimon Peres would have remained
Prime Minister.
I knew he’d be feeling crushed. Not just on a personal level, because this latest
electoral defeat had been in was a direct, head-to-head vote for Prime Minister. He,
like all of us who had campaigned for him, knew what was at stake for the country.
It had been barely six months since Rabin was gunned down in Tel Aviv’s main
square, by a fellow Israeli riding a tide of hatred so blinkered that it could paint
Yitzhak – who had worked all his life to create, defend and help develop the
Jewish state – as a traitor, even a Nazi. All because he had decided to try to make
peace with the Palestinians, at the price of ceding control of part of the biblical
land of Israel. Bibi had gone through the motions of urging restraint. But
politically, he had ridden their wave. It was hard not to see his victory over Peres
as a triumph for the ugly intolerance and the venom that had claimed Yitzhak’s
life. In policy terms, it was in large part a rejection of both men’s vision of an
Israel that, while still ready to fight if necessary, could explore compromise in the
search for the ultimate prize of peace. The last time Yitzhak and I had talked, he’d
been confident of defeating Bibi at the polls, and I do believe he would have won.
But despite his differences with Peres, I’m equally certain he would have wanted
Shimon to win, not just for his sake but for Israel’s.
I had got to know Shimon, too, during my years in the kirya. In fact, he was the
Labor leader who first spoke to me openly about one day moving into politics,
something Yitzhak was always punctilious in not broaching before I’d left the
army. Shimon had also taken to including me – usually along with Yossi Beilin
and Shlomo Ben-Ami, a bright young historian who would become our
ambassador to Spain before entering politics himself – in a coterie of “youngsters”
he would bring along to meet visiting dignitaries from abroad. He occasionally
invited me to chat about military and security issues in his and Sonya’s flat in
Ramat Aviv. My personal ties to Rabin were stronger, of course. After I joined the
government, Shimon’s and my relationship became slightly more circumspect. But
since the assassination, some of the old warmth had returned. Not just as his
foreign minister, but in discussions on wider questions of security as well, we
worked closely together.
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Within days of the election, however, there was a new source of potential
friction between us: Shimon’s future, and possibly mine, in leading our opposition
to Bibi and bringing a Labor government back to power.
* * *
The question of Peres’s leadership was unavoidable. Labor’s constitution
mandated a vote for party chairman within 14 months of an election defeat. But the
widespread assumption was that Shimon would run again. A little before midnight
on election day, with the returns beginning to show we might lose, I was invited to
a morning-after breakfast by two senior Labor ministers: Fuad Ben-Eliezer, the
man who had delivered the table-thumping warning that the hatred on the far-right
would lead to a murder, and Avraham Shochat, Finance Minister under both Rabin
and Peres. Both had been in the Knesset since the 1980s. Both were part of two of
Peres’s earlier, failed, election campaigns. Both now said that they weren’t
prepared to see him lead us into electoral battle the next time around. “Everyone in
the party understands the meaning of this defeat. Shimon is done,” Shochat said, as
Fuad nodded his agreement. “You will have to go for the leadership.”
Though their endorsement was a surprise, it would be disingenuous to pretend I
hadn’t been thinking, at some stage in the future, of running for the party
leadership. But my election-campaign differences with Ramon and Peres were not
just for the sake of intellectual argument. I badly wanted us to win: both for Peres’s
sake and the country’s, and to redeem and continue all that Yitzhak had sacrificed.
Despite my misgivings about some aspects of the Oslo process, I did believe there
was a possibility of achieving peace with the Palestinians. I knew, from my
involvement in the talks with the Syrians, that the outline of a possible peace
agreement with Assad was already in place. I frankly wasn’t confident that Bibi
was the man to lead it forward. Yes, he was smart. He was organizationally astute.
He’d been a good sayeret officer. Yet as I’d said it my TV spot, being Prime
Minister required much more than that. I was now an elected Knesset member. But
I had gone into politics in the hope of making a difference to how Israel confronted
its defining challenges of war and peace. The prospect of spending the next few as
a mere opposition foot soldier, making speeches and sitting in committee sessions,
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seemed to defeat the purpose of going into politics in the first place.
Still, I had no appetite for rushing into a challenge to Peres’s leadership, both
because it was bound to be difficult for both of us, and frankly because it seemed
rash, premature and maybe even unnecessary. Bibi was beginning the negotiations
to form a government, and that process was likely to take at least a few weeks.
Shimon had yet to signal whether he did intend to stay on. Still, when he invited
me for a late-night chat at his apartment a week after the election, I was concerned
he might raise the leadership issue and I knew that, if he did, I would have to be
honest and open with him.
The conversation went very differently than I’d expected. After he’d poured
each of us a glass of Armagnac, and offered me a plate of Sonia’s cakes, he spoke
for a while about Bibi, though he could not even bring himself to utter the name.
This man, he said, knew nothing about leadership, much less about running the
country. He would be outmaneuvered, overshadowed and ultimately controlled by
the “real strongman” in the Likud: Arik Sharon. I said I thought we were again
underestimating Bibi’s strength, as well as the effect of the country’s new electoral
system. He was the first Prime Minister to enjoy a direct, personal mandate. That
turned upside down the balance of power and influence in our politics. As he
assembled his coalition, the other parties, if they wanted to be in government,
would have to deal with him on his terms. So, to a much greater extent than before,
would potential internal rivals.
As we talked, I was struck that Shimon seemed resigned to the election defeat,
relaxed, more at ease with himself than at any time since the start of the grueling
campaign. Then, quite suddenly, he said: “Ehud, I understand the meaning of the
election result. “You will have to take on the leadership, and lead the party.” He
said he didn’t plan to spend the rest of his years hanging around the apartment. He
would remain active – “working for peace” – but no longer in the party political
arena. “I understand the meaning of what has happened,” he repeated. “I will pass
the Labor leadership torch to you. We should find a way to do it quickly, and in the
right way.”
It was nearly three in the morning when I left. I was not just surprised, but
touched, by what he’d said. Shimon was now nearly 73. He’d had a life in our
country’s politics, and in Labor, stretching back to before the state, when he’d been
a favored protégé of Ben-Gurion. Walking away was going to be hard. I was
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touched as well by the fact that he had decided to “pass the torch” to me, someone
more in the mold, and closer to, Rabin. But I remained cautious, too. When I got
back home, Nava, knowing where I’d been, was still awake. I told her everything
that Shimon had said. I told her how extraordinary it felt to have the prospect, at
least, of leading Labor in opposition to Bibi, without the need to confront, or to
inflict personal hurt, on Shimon. But I added: “It seems a bit too good to be true.”
It was. The next morning, I joined other ministers and party officials with Peres
in his office. It was as if our conversation a few hours before had never happened.
Shimon set out his strategy for Labor going forward. And the first thing he said
was that the party needed to push back any leadership election beyond the
mandated 14 months.“It’s too early,” he said. He said we needed to focus on two
other strategic imperatives: to reconstruct the party, and consider the issue of
joining a possible “unity” government with Bibi.
Though Bibi went on to form his government without us, in alliance with a
number of smaller Orthodox parties, the idea of a Labor leadership change seemed
off the agenda, at least for now. In early August, I was standing next to Giora Einy
– the “political operative” Yitzhak had sent to help bring me into his government,
and a friend of Peres as well – when Shimon rose to speak to the dozens of wellwishers
at his 73 rd -birthday celebration in Tel Aviv. He was at his old, selfconfident
best. With just a few thousand extra votes, we would have won the
election, he said. He was sure Bibi’s coalition – “a coalition against peace” –
would not survive for long. Giora, smiling, turned to me and said: “It doesn’t
sound like a farewell speech. It seems like he’s ready for the next round. He lost
twice to Begin. He lost once to Shamir. And only once to Bibi. He’s not going to
stop without giving it another go.”
Another of Peres’s old friends, a few weeks later, urged me to press him on the
need to step aside. I’d become closer to the French Jewish businessman Jean
Frydman during the election campaign. Since he had helped organize the fateful
peace rally at which Rabin was shot, he felt – wrongly, but powerfully – a sense of
responsibility for what had happened. He wanted to do everything possible to
ensure that Rabin’s political legacy, and Shimon’s, survived. He invited Nava and
me to visit him for a few days. When he asked about the birthday celebration, I
told him what Peres had said. “He’s making a huge mistake,” Jean told me. “After
every election, he goes through the same process. Always, he’s convinced that next
time he will win.” I said how I dreaded the prospect of being part of an effort to
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force Shimon out. But Jean said he’d been giving a lot of thought to everything
that had happened since Rabin was killed. He felt I was the only potential Labor
leader who could defeat Bibi in an election and “bring back sanity to Israel, lead it
to peace.” He said he was convinced that Peres’s time had passed. “I can say that.
I’m from his generation. And as a very close friend of Shimon, I will be the first in
line to help you.”
Early in September, having let Shimon know through Giora and then phoning
him directly, I declared publicly that I would be running for the Labor leadership.
Though he’d thanked me for telling him beforehand, he said he thought I was
making a mistake, and was still against having a leadership election at all. That
made his public response to my announcement puzzling. He went on Israeli TV
and said he would not be a candidate for Prime Minister in four years’ time. “The
time has come for a change,” he said. But while everyone took that to mean he was
reconciled to a change of party leadership as well, it turned out that we had jumped
the gun. He intended to stay on as chairman.
During the early months of 1997, Shimon and I held a series of late-night
meetings at his apartment to thrash out an agreed course. It was a process that was
hard for both of us, and hurtful for him. He was now at least reconciled to the
inevitability of an election for a new party leader, if only because his protégé Yossi
Beilin had also put his name forward. But he kept proposing to push back the vote.
I insisted that since the deadline under party rules was June 3, it was only right that
all of us abide by that. I do remember a particularly poignant moment from one of
our sessions. Peres had left the room for a minute, and Sonia came in. “Ehud,” she
said to me, “keep your nerve. You’re the only one who can talk to him this way.
He should have retired from politics years ago. You’re the only one around him
who tells him the truth.”
We ended up with a compromise. Shimon accepted that the leadership election
would be held on June 3. I agreed that in the unlikely event Bibi decided to invite
us into his coalition during the three months after the leadership vote, Peres would
select the Labor ministers. Our last meeting ended at nearly four in the morning.
He told me he’d arranged a reception for the party leadership at 10 a.m., in barely
six hours’ time. He suggested we meet in his office an hour beforehand. I didn’t
know what to expect. After months of discussions, I hoped he understood that I
had wanted the process to go differently. I had been open and honest with him
throughout. But I knew that, deep down, he still wanted to stay on, that he believed
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that his long record of service should have earned him that right, and that it would
be painful for him to accept that, by June, there would be a new Labor leader.
He was relaxed and gracious when I arrived. We went through the details of
what we’d agreed, and worked out what each of us would say to reporters. What
came next, as the party faithful filed in, was simple human nature, I suppose.
Seeing some of his oldest supporters, he had second thoughts. His comments to
reporters afterward were more hedged than what we’d discussed. Giora told me
that after all of us had left, Peres turned to him and said: “Look what Barak is
doing to me. What have you been doing?” Giora, who had been a conduit between
us at the very beginning of our discussions, replied: “You asked me to bring Barak
to you.” At which point, Shimon said: “OK. So probably I made a mistake.”
At a convention of 3,000 party activists in mid-May, a few weeks before the
leadership election, he made a final attempt to mitigate that “mistake”. Nissim
Zvili, the secretary-general of the party and a longtime Peres ally, introduced a
motion to vote him into a new post of party president. A couple of Shimon’s
friends urged me to back the idea, describing it essentially as a ceremonial role.
But I feared it was a recipe for prolonging the agony. Whatever powers “President
Peres” would have, the idea of two captains on a ship would almost certainly mean
trouble. I was especially reluctant to go along with it because our particular ship
had been in rough waters for so long. Labor needed to steer a calm, decisive course
toward the next election if we were going to defeat Bibi.
What followed was one of the most painful spectacles I’ve ever witnessed.
When Peres rose to make his case for becoming party president, he said: “I don’t
want powers. I don’t want honors. But I also don’t want insults. I announced my
decision to resign from the position of party chairman. Did someone push me into
it? Am I trying to hold on to my job?”
“Yes!” many hundreds of the delegates shouted back at him.
Stung, he reminded the meeting that it was he who had led Labor back from the
battering it took in the 1977 election against Begin. In 1981, he’d helped us
recover a dozen of our lost seats. Even so, because he hadn’t succeeded in forming
a Labor government, people had called him a loser! “Mah? Ani loser?” he asked,
using the English word. “Am I a loser?”
“Yes! Yes!” came the shouts.
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Yet the saddest note came at the end. “I apologize for being healthy, for not
getting old according to plan,” he said, adding that even without the title of
president, he would keep working for peace.
There were three other candidates for party chairman: Yossi Beilin; Ephraim
Sneh, the friend who’d been the paratroopers’ chief medic when we’d fought at the
Chinese Farm in 1973, and at Entebbe too; and Shlomo Ben-Ami, the academic
and diplomat whom Shimon had taken along with Yossi and me to meet visiting
foreign politicians, and who was now also a newly elected member of the Knesset.
When the vote came, it was assumed by most political commentators that I was
going to win. The only question was whether I’d get the 50 per cent of votes
needed to avoid a run-off, where the outcome might be less predictable. But I got
57 percent against Yossi’s 28, with the remaining 15 percent split between
Ephraim and Shlomo-Ben Ami.
* * *
Now, we had to put ourselves in a position to defeat Bibi and the Likud. Policy
priorities were ultimately what would matter most: strong and credible steps to
confront terror and safeguard our security, allied with the leadership and will to try
to negotiate a peace with Syria and the Palestinians; and, at home, a recommitment
to the values of an open, tolerant democracy. But in at least one important way, I
approached my new role as if it was one of our operations in Sayeret Matkal, or the
need to reshape our armed forces when I was chief-of-staff. My first priority was to
put in place the practical foundations for a successful election challenge against
Bibi. Through Jean Frydman and other business supporters with the means and the
desire to help, my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, assembled sufficient funding for
us to begin engaging with the strategists who had helped deliver electoral success
for a trio of other centre-left political leaders overseas: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair in
Britain and later Gerhard Schroeder in Germany.
My main early political focus was on holding Bibi and the government to
account in the Knesset, above all on the torturous process of ensuring our security
while implementing the West Bank redeployments agreed in Oslo II. We’d made a
small start under Rabin and Peres, but the three major withdrawal phases due in the
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five-year interim period had yet to begin. In one respect, I had some sympathy for
Bibi’s predicament. The reason I’d tried to get Yitzhak to alter the terms of Oslo II
was that it required us to hand back control before we knew what a “permanentstatus”
peace deal would look like. But where my sympathy ended was in how Bibi
handled the situation. Despite my concerns about the way the Oslo process had
been designed, I never doubted that killing it off would be by far a worse
alternative. Bibi had been elected to lead Israel. Instead, he acted as if he was
playing some sort of pinball match, flipping the ball first one way, then the other,
with no obvious aim beyond keeping it in play – and, where Oslo was concerned,
simply stalling for time. Rather than setting out any vision of where he hoped to
move the negotiating process, he seemed more concerned with keeping the rightwing
of Likud and the smaller, even more extreme parties from turning against
him.
In late September 1996, Bibi and the Likud mayor of Jerusalem, Ehud Olmert,
decided to go ahead with the festive opening of an archeological tunnel that
provided access to a larger portion of the Western Wall of the ancient Jewish
temple. It was a decision that, under both Rabin and Peres, we’d delayed out of
concern about inflaming tensions with the Palestinians. As Shimon rightly said
publicly after the three days of violence that followed, we understood that, at a
minimum, it would need to be coordinated beforehand with Arafat. As the unrest
spread into the West Bank and Gaza, there were media warnings of a “new
intifada,” the difference this time being that the Palestinians newly established
police had entered the fray. By the time urgent US diplomacy, our efforts and
Arafat’s, brought it to a close, 25 Israeli soldiers and nearly 100 Palestinians had
been killed. He did not slam the brakes altogether on the American-led efforts to
move ahead with the Oslo. In early 1997, in fact, he and Arafat reached a separate
agreement on the critically important question, and potential flashpoint, of Hebron.
It stipulated that about 80 percent of the area would be under Palestinian authority,
with Israel retaining control and responsibility for nearby settlements and key
security points. Despite right-wing and settler opposition, it was approved by a
wide margin in the Knesset, with Labor’s backing. But a few months later, in the
spring of 1997, Hamas launched a new campaign of suicide bombings in shopping
areas of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, leaving 24 people dead. While not suggesting that
Bibi took the human cost of terror lightly, he did use the attacks to drag out further
US-mediated talks on the details of implementing the Oslo II redeployments.
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By November, even his Foreign Minister, David Levy, was making noises
about quitting. He said it would be a waste of time to stay in the cabinet if it was
going to bring the peace process to a halt. I warned Bibi, both in the Knesset and in
a series of speeches, about the alternative on the Palestinian side if those who
wanted a negotiated peace had nothing but stalemate to show for it. And lives, I
insisted, were at stake. Both through closed-door sessions of the Knesset’s security
and foreign affairs committee, and my own contacts in military intelligence, I was
convinced that the result would be a second, much more deadly, intifada. Not with
Molotov cocktails, but guns, and suicide bombs.
I was not out to score political points in keeping the pressure on Bibi to move
forward. In fact, I announced that if Bibi did go ahead and finalize the terms for
our Oslo redeployment, Labor would once again provide the extra Knesset votes
needed for him to get it approved.
Early in 1998, he sent word that he wanted to talk. The message came through
Yaakov Ne’eman, his Finance Minister and a prominent lawyer whom I knew and
liked. He and I held an exploratory meeting at which he proposed talks with Bibi
on the prospect of a unity government that would help move the peace process
forward. I said I’d talk, with one proviso: the discussions would be genuinely
secret, with no leaks. I was not prepared to engage in political gamesmanship. In
May, Bibi sent an assurance of confidentiality through Ne’eman. The first of about
a half-dozen meetings came a few days later at the Prime Minister’s residence in
Jerusalem. Then, we shifted venue, meeting at a Mossad-owned villa north of Tel
Aviv. I brought along Bougie Herzog, a bright young lawyer, and Labor Party
member, who was working in the same law firm and Ne’eman. It was by no means
clear we’d agree on a unity government. To my amusement, if not altogether to my
surprise, I got word that Bibi was putting out separate political feelers to Shimon
Peres. But before long, it became clear there was a specific political motivation
behind his approaching me. It was indeed the peace process. But it wasn’t the
Palestinian peace process, something Bibi still clearly wanted to avoid as much as
humanly possible. It was an attempt to engage with Syria.
He asked me about the talks under Rabin and Peres, and my views on the
possibility of a deal with President Assad. He also wanted my assessment about
whether the army could work out arrangements to safeguard the country’s security
if we handed back most, if not all, of the Golan Heights. If so, what kind of
security arrangements, with what timeline? We met through the summer, as the
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talks with the Americans on the further West Bank redeployments meandered
ahead. We also discussed in detail how a unity government would work. We
agreed it would be presented, like the Shamir-Peres partnership in 1984, as a crossparty
response to an important challenge for the country: in this case, security and
the peace process. I would be both Defense Minister and “Vice-Prime Minister”,
with the understanding that Bibi and I would jointly discuss all major issues before
jointly agreeing to bring them to the full cabinet.
But in August, the talks ended, after news of our talks finally leaked. I
immediately phoned Ne’eman. I reminded him that at the outset, I’d said that
would mean the discussions were over. He did call me back later in the day to say
Bibi insisted that he’d had nothing to do with the leak. My guess was that the
source was my old comrade from the Chinese Farm, Yitzhik Mordechai, who had
presumably heard that Bibi was ready to make me Defense Minister as part of a
unity government. There was, of course, already a defense minister: Yitzhik.
Bibi’s idea to reopen efforts to get peace with Syria didn’t last either. Although
I’d learn of this only a few years later, he’d approved a visit to Damascus by the
American Jewish businessman Ronald Lauder to meet President Assad. The visit
made it clear to Bibi what successive Israeli leaders had learned: a deal might be
possible, but only if Israel was willing to commit in advance to pulling out of the
Golan. Assad told Lauder to come back to him with a detailed map setting out
Bibi’s view on delineating the Israeli-Syrian border under a peace agreement.
Though no one in the cabinet knew the initiative was underway, Bibi realized that
before sending back the map Assad wanted, he would need to tell the two senior
ministers directly affected: Arik Sharon, who had replaced David Levy as Foreign
Minister; and Yitzhik Mordechai. Both of them said no, with Yitzhik pointing out
that a signed map would inevitably become part of the negotiating record. It was a
step that, in future negotiations, could not be undone.
Bibi’s coalition was now creaking. The Syrian option was off. David Levy had
already jumped ship. Yitzhik, increasingly concerned about Bibi’s delay and drift
on Oslo II, seemed to be thinking of leaving as well. Right wing ministers and
Knesset members were no happier: they opposed even the slightest prospect of
movement on Oslo. In October, Bibi did finally try to seize the initiative. He
wrapping up the redeployment details in a summit with Arafat and Clinton and
Arafat in Wye River. But as soon as he got back home, he started backtracking,
rather than risk facing down his right-wing critics in the cabinet. Implementation of
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the deal was due to begin in early November, but he kept putting off a vote in the
cabinet. When the vote came, on November 11, Bibi squeaked through by a margin
of 8 to 4, but with five abstentions. That meant less than half of his ministers had
voted for it.
The easy part for him was Knesset ratification, since I had committed Labor to
supporting Bibi on any move towards continuing the peace process. The day after
the Knesset’s vote, Bibi won the cabinet’s clearance for actual implementation to
begin. But it didn’t. With hard-line ministers threatening to bring down the
government if it did, Bibi again stalled. That was the turning point. I’d made it
clear our parliamentary support would remain for as long as Bibi moved ahead
with what had been agreed at Wye River. It was not intended as a blank check, or
an offer to prop up a Prime Minister who now seemed to be looking for any way
possible not to implement the agreement.
My key ally in what came next was Haim Ramon. Despite our differences over
the direction of the Peres election campaign, we had become effective
parliamentary partners. He had a depth of political experience and knowledge I still
lacked. While I found the details of how the Knesset operated arcane and often
tiresome, Haim knew all of it instinctively. When it came to the need for discreet
discussions or bargaining with other parties, not only could he draw on his
personal relationships with Knesset members across the party divide. He had the
additional advantage of being able to avoid the scrutiny that would follow a direct
approach from me. Before Bibi had gone to Wye, Haim and I had discussed how
we might move to force early elections. The peace process, and the country, were
drifting. There seemed no point in waiting, if we could be confident of lining up
the necessary votes among the growing number of others who were also convinced
Bibi should go. After the Wye summit agreement, I put all that on hold. But now
that Bibi had shifted into reverse, I told Haim to resume his efforts.
In early December, he told me he had enough votes for a no-confidence motion,
under his name, to dissolve the Knesset and pave the way for early elections. The
axe fell on December 20. Bibi had lost the support of the right-wing, who wanted
Oslo ended altogether. He had now lost me, too. I felt his approach to the peace
process was leaving Israel rudderless. The way we were heading, we would not
just forfeit any potential benefits from Oslo. We would be leaving a political and
diplomatic vacuum at a time when a serious new explosion of Palestinian violence
was becoming ever more likely. In the Knesset debate, Bibi made one final bid to
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save himself: by suggesting a delay of 72 hours for talks on a “unity” government.
I said that I was all for unity. But I reminded him that, time after time, we’d saved
his government in order to continue the peace process. We could no longer help
out a “government that is not interested in upholding the Wye agreement, but only
in its political survival.”
The vote of no-confidence went against him by the yawning margin of 81 to 30,
with nine Knesset members abstaining or staying away. A few days later, the date
for the election was announced: May 17, 1999.
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Chapter Nineteen
A few hours before Haim Ramon introduced his no-confidence resolution, he
came to see me in my office in the Knesset. He was worried. Not about the vote,
but about what would come after. “Ehud, I’m sure we can topple the government,”
he told me. “But only you know whether we’re ready – whether you’re ready – to
defeat Bibi in an election.”
“I’m ready,” I said. “We are going to win.”
Few agreed. In fact, there had been times during my first year-and-a-half as
Labor leader when I wondered if I’d be able to hang on to the job. I was in charge
of a party whose grassroots were on the left. I was, by intellect and instinct, a
pragmatist and a centrist. I did share Labor’s vision of a socially just and
democratic Israel. Especially after seeing far-right rabbis egg on the fanaticism that
ultimately killed Yitzhak Rabin, I felt strongly that we needed to separate
organized religion from our day-to-day politics. But I’d been raised with a deeper
respect for our Jewish traditions than many on the left. Right after Yitzhak’s
murder, I’d gone to see Zevulun Hammer, the leader of the National Religious
Party. It had been part of both Labor and Likud governments ever since 1948,
though not Rabin’s. The NRP, too, had been drifting steadily rightward. But it still
basically subscribed the idea of a strong, democratic Israel under the rule of law. I
wanted to bring the NRP back into the government under Peres, as part of the
widest possible political alliance against the assassination and the campaign of
hatred that had fostered it. Sadly that didn’t happen, in part because of the anger
against all Orthodox politicians after Rabin’s murder. Yet in my readiness to
engage politically with Orthodox leaders who did not reject the very idea of peace
negotiations – whether in the NRP, or the increasingly influential Sephardi
religious party, Shas – I was outside Labor’s mainstream, and its comfort zone.
On my approach to peace as well, I differed from many on the left. Though I
was determined to pursue any realistic avenue to negotiations, I was convinced that
security considerations had to be paramount in what we were prepared to give up
or accept in negotiations. I was cautious about ceding too much too soon, in case
the Palestinians or the Syrians proved either unequal to, or uninterested in, making
the hard decisions required for peace. That was an approach with, like Yitzhak
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before me, provoked more left-wing parties like Meretz to suggest that if I really
wanted peace, I’d be ready to give away more, and more quickly.
My position wasn’t helped by the way I had come over in the media during my
first months as Labor leader. A number of newspaper commentators wrote that
while they found talking with me stimulating, I seemed to be operating in a world
of my own, either unable or unwilling to give straight answers and a single, clear
message. They were right about that. If asked a question, especially one which
obviously involved an issus of nuance, my instinct was not to come up with a
sound bite. It was, as best I could, to answer fully and accurately. The difficulties
that could sometime cause hit home in an interview with a leading Israeli journalist
in the spring of 1998. He asked how my life might have turned out if I’d been born
and raised not as a kibbutznik, but a Palestinian. I answered: “At some stage, I
would have entered one of the terror organizations and fought from there, and later
would certainly have tried to influence from within the political system.” I did
hasten to add that I abhorred terrorists, describing their actions as “abominable…
villainous.” But that was lost in the political storm that followed. All I’d done was
answer as honestly I could. What if I had been one of the Palestinian babies in
Wadi Khawaret, but with the same mind and same impulses that had defined my
life as an Israeli? I assumed that instead of becoming an Israeli soldier and
politician, I would have become the closest thing to a Palestinian equivalent. Still,
as even my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, told me when he phoned a couple of
hours later, it was not the most astute thing to say as a potential candidate for
Prime Minister.
None of this might have mattered if I’d been able to show I was bringing Labor
nearer to defeating Bibi. But the only measure of progress that the media paid
attention to was the opinion polls. Briefly, in late 1977, I did pull ahead, during the
period leading up to Bibi’s agreement to pull out of most of Hebron. But for much
of 1998, I was running behind, and questions about my leadership surfaced
publicly by the summer. The media commentators spoke of the need for a Labor
“liftoff.” Why, after a full year as leader, had I failed to deliver it?
* * *
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There was a part of politics for which I was naturally suited after my life in the
army: to plan an operation, prepare and execute it. An ability to get the lie of the
land, assess your own and your rivals’ strengths and vulnerabilities, and to win.
And the “lie of the land” struck me as more encouraging than many Israeli
commentators believed. When I became Labor leader, I didn’t expect Bibi to fall
anytime soon. But I believed it was inevitable that at some point he’d have to make
tough choices about the peace process, and I doubted his coalition with the more
right-wing Orthodox parties would survive. I also took encouragement from the
fact that the political winds in other developed democracies seemed to be blowing
in our direction. Bill Clinton had won in the United States. In Britain, which had a
parliamentary system much closer to Israel’s, Tony Blair, as leader of a party
renamed as New Labor, had ended eighteen years of Conservative rule and swept
to victory. Behind the scenes, I immediately made sure that, with financial help
from Jean Frydman and other supporters, we began the practical work of learning
from the experience of center-left parties in other countries.
Within weeks of my election as Labor chairman, I used my acquaintance with a
British Jewish businessman named Michael Levy to see what lessons our Labor
party might learn from Tony Blair’s. Levy had been an early supporter of Blair and
persuaded the Prime Minister to welcome me through the famous black door of
Number 10 Downing Street. After chatting in the front hallway, the British Prime
Minister led me into the back garden to discuss how he had refashioned his party
and brought it back into government. In addition to modifying or abandoning
rigidly left-wing positions that most British voters had rejected, he had created a
formidable campaigning team under an ally and adviser named Peter Mandelson.
When I asked Blair whether it would be possible to meet Mandelson, he said he
couldn’t “give me Peter.” But he did put me in touch with Philip Gould, the polling
expert and strategist who had partnered Mandelson in designing and running the
election campaign.
We met at Labor headquarters in Milbank Towers so Philip could show me the
“war room” – modelled, in part, on Bill Clinton’s campaign operation – from
which the victory had been planned and executed. It was a large, open-plan space,
nothing like the warren of offices and conference rooms from which Labor in
Israel operated. Pride of place went to an advanced computer system, the heart of a
“rebuttal unit” which charted every statement from the Conservative Party so it
could be answered, neutralized or used to adjust Labor’s own campaign. I was
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struck by how different the approach was from our campaign for Peres. As I filled
my notebook with the details, Philip added a final bit of advice. “If you want to
win, have it run by the best professionals you can find. Not politicians. They
always have personal agendas. Focus is everything. Distractions and arguments
and infighting can be fatal.”
Philip recommended one professional, in particular, to get us started: Stanley
Greenberg, the pollster who had advised not only Blair’s campaign, but Clinton’s.
Doron used his contacts in New York to put us in touch not only with Greenberg
but the strategist behind the Clinton victory, James Carville, and another leading
Democratic Party consultant and speechwriter, Bob Shrum. We began working
with all of them well before the no-confidence vote in the Knesset. Philip had a
wonderfully British understatement and reserve. Stanley, with his eyeglasses and
demeanor too, came over as slightly professorial. With Bob, it didn’t take long to
understand why he was such a gifted speechwriter. He loved words, especially the
way they could be used to inspire a connection with important campaign themes:
above all with the idea of hope, and new beginnings. Carville was the human
equivalent of a volcano. If he hadn’t been a campaign strategist, he could have
made a living as a hybrid of a cowboy and a stand-up comedian. But they all
shared the easy, infectious self-confidence of people who were very good at what
they did, and knew it.
When I went to New York with Doron to meet Carville in Feburary 1988, my
confidence as Labor leader was taking some fairly hard knocks. But from the
moment he walked through our hotel-room door, it was impossible not to like him.
He showed up in a T-shirt and tennis sneakers, walked straight across the room,
slouched into a chair and said: “General Barak, I don’t get it. You’re a known
public figure, with a great mind and a great military record. It’s already been a
year-and-a-half since Israel got Netanyahu. What have you done to go after him?
Why haven’t you gone on the attack?” He said it was time for me to wake up, and
change tack. “Can you run through your stump speech for me,” he asked,
motioning me toward the center of the room like a film director.
“I don’t have one,” I said. To which he replied briskly that I should have had
one months ago.
When Stanley paid a preliminary visit with Philip to Israel, they, too, urged me
to sharpen my message and pay more attention to my image with the public.
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Stanley was worried by polling data that suggested most Israelis saw Bibi as
“strong.” I argued that strength was one area where we wouldn’t have to worry.
“No way, in a campaign, he’ll end up coming over looking stronger than me.”
Stanley seemed not entirely convinced.
Both in “strength” and other ways, I think my background did prove an
advantage. The 35 years I’d spent in the military had given me a singleminded
determination to set goals, follow through and achieve them. After Haim Ramon
came to my office before the no-confidence vote to ask whether I was sure I
wanted to go ahead, and I answered with an unhesitating “yes,” Haim had told a
couple of reporters: “Barak has balls of steel.” In truth, I was puzzled he’d even
asked me. As when I was in uniform, it would never have occurred to me to ask
him to try to line up the necessary votes if I hadn’t thought it through and intended
to go ahead with it.
Still, my military background was not always an asset as I found my feet as
party leader and prepared to take on Bibi in the election campaign. In searching for
the tools, the structure, and the people I felt would give us the best chance to win, I
sometimes failed to pay due attention to the party’s existing apparatus and
institutions. This alienated a number of established Labor politicians, eventually
including Haim himself. So as the campaign approached I tried to shore up my ties
with the party establishment. I drafted in Bougie Herzog to act as my regular
liaison with leading figures in the party. I was careful to include a number of Labor
politicians in our campaign team as well, though, as Philip Gould had
recommended, I made sure they didn’t actually run it.
The closest equivalent to the role Haim had played in Peres’s campaign went to
a young businessman, PR professional and Labor supporter named Moshe Gaon.
As spokeswoman, we brought in someone who, though she’d been a messenger of
doom during the Tze’elim controversy that engulfed me before joining Rabin’s
government, had undeniable experience and ability which I valued and respected:
Yitzhak’s former media aide Aliza Goren. As campaign coordinator, I chose Tal
Silberstein, who at the time was in charge of a citizens’ group called Dor Shalem
Doresh Shalom: “A Whole Generation Demands Peace.” I relied on frequent, less
formal input from political friends whose judgement I had learned to trust, like
Eitan Haber and Giora Eini. Also playing a key role was a group of four young
women, led by Orna Angel, a successful architect and a former soldier in Sayeret
Matkal. She built from scratch an army of nearly 20,000 volunteers who helped
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organize events and contact voters during the campaign. We outfitted our own war
room in an open-plan floor of offices on the edge of Tel Aviv. Philip called it
“Milbank South.” As organizational head of the campaign, I chose Chagai Shalom.
An industrial engineer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was
chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him
Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend
and former sayeret deputy.
* * *
But all that was process. Winning or losing would come down to how our
message, our ability to forge alliances, and my own personal and political appeal,
measured up against Bibi.
The new system of separate elections for party and Prime Minister meant that in
order to win a majority, I would need the support of voters outside Labor as well. I
set out to establish a broader movement, a big tent under which a majority of
Israelis could coexist politically. I realized this risked provoking anger among
some Labor activists. But I wanted to convey to voters that I was reaching out
beyond my core party constituency: to “soft” right-wingers nearer the political
center; to the Sephardim who since 1977 had overwhelmingly voted Likud; to the
growing number of Russian immigrants who had helped Bibi defeat Peres; and to
those among the Orthodox who still subscribed to tolerance and moderation in the
mold of the old-style National Religious Party in the first few decades of the state.
Though the candidates on our Knesset election list would all be from Labor, I ran
the Prime Ministerial campaign under the broader banner of Yisrael Ahat – One
Israel. I envisaged it as an alliance of at least several different parties with Labor at
its center.
I began with Bibi’s jettisoned Foreign Minister, David Levy. He was a
Moroccan-born 1950s immigrant whose career had begun at the grassroots, in the
northern town of Beit She’an, but who went on to become a key part of Begin’s
victory in 1977. The leading Sephardi figure in the Likud, he was at one point
mentioned as a future leader. Many Israelis, especially on the left, now portrayed
him as a figure of ridicule. But I’d always had a higher opinion of him. During the
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1982 Lebanon War, with two sons fighting on the ground, he’d been a rare voice of
common sense, and caution, in the Begin cabinet. I’d also seen him operate in
Shamir’s inner security cabinet, when I would come, as deputy chief of staff, to
present military operations for approval. I remember one occasion when an air
force general laid out the details of a planned helicopter-borne mission into
Lebanon. I added a few remarks in summary. Raful Eitan and Arik Sharon were
both ministers. Within seconds, they were peppering the general and me with
questions. Why were the aircraft taking one route north instead of another? Why
not closer to Mount Hermon? Shouldn’t they fly lower? Levy interrupted.
“Gentlemen,” he said, “we are not in company commanders’ course. We’re in the
inner cabinet of the government of Israel. We have a chief of staff and other
generals and military professionals. It’s their job to decide the operational details.
Our job is to balance the reasons for doing an operation against the risks as
presented to us.”
I met with him in the Knesset cafeteria before Bibi went off to the Wye River
summit. Levy now headed a small breakaway faction from Likud called Gesher,
Hebrew for “bridge.” Without explicitly suggesting we join forces, I explained my
hope to run my eventual campaign for Prime Minister in alliance with a few other
parties. I told him I wanted to make my candidacy a legitimate choice for voters
from the center-right, the Orthodox, as well as the Russian community. I took a
napkin and drew a big umbrella to illustrate what I had in mind. He said he
understood – though he did tell me to make sure I tore up the napkin. There came a
point, at the end of November when it looked like my overture had failed.
Scampering for a way to shore up his coalition, Bibi tried to lure Levy into the fold
back by offering him the Finance Ministry. But with resistance from other
ministers, Bibi broke off the talks with Levy, leaving him humiliated and furious. I
met with him several more times, and we brought in Gesher as our first “One
Israel” partner. The second to join us, early in the new year, was a small religious
party called Meimad, inspired by an openly pro-peace Orthodox rabbi named
Yehuda Amital and including a former Chief Rabbi of Norway, Michael Melchior.
By the end of January 1999, several months before the real campaign, I was
feeling better about where we stood, in part because of a series of hits Bibi was
taking from former friends and allies. The first salvo was fired by Misha Arens,
who had helped engineer Bibi’s move into national politics. He announced he was
going to put himself forward for the Likud leadership before the election, saying
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that he and others were convinced Bibi couldn’t win. A couple of weeks later,
Yitzhik Mordechai seemed on the verge of becoming the latest of Bibi’s ministers
to resign. He was openly flirting with the idea of joining a new centrist party that
had been formed by Likud’s Dan Meridor. Bibi struck back with a mixture of
subtlety and venom. He fired Mordechai, accusing him of being driven by personal
ambition. Then he offered the Defense Minister’s job to Misha Arens.
Yitzhik did join the Center Party, as did Amnon Lipkin, who had ended his
term as chief-of-staff and, with initial opinion poll numbers suggesting he’d do
well, even briefly entered the race for Prime Minister. Now, he endorsed Yitzhik
Mordechai instead: a man not only with strong military credentials, but of Sephardi
background and religiously observant, and a proven politician and cabinet minister.
It was clear that he would be going after many of the same votes I needed to win.
That situation wasn’t ideal, to put it mildly. But all I could do at this stage was
to put our own campaign house in order. I hoped that if we ran the campaign I
expected, there wouldn’t be a run-off.
* * *
At the start of April, the final list of candidates was set. There were five. In
addition to Bibi, Yitzhik and me, Benny Begin had decided to run on the right.
Also in the contest was Knesset member Azmi Beshara, the first Israeli Arab
citizen to seek national office.
When we chose “One Israel” as the name of our campaign alliance, it was not
meant just as a catchy phrase. Though now a half-century old, the country had
rarely seemed so diverse, and in many ways divided. It was not just the old fault
line between Labor and Revisionist Zionism that defined our politics, or even the
Ashkenazi-Sephardi gulf that had predominated since the late 1970s. There were
new, younger, more assertive, more right-wing and more pro-settlement voices
among the Orthodox. There was the contrast between the overwhelmingly secular,
politically and socially liberal, and culturally Western Tel Aviv, with its lively
cafés and restaurants, and the constellation of wealthy suburbs to the north; and
smaller Israeli towns and cities in the interior, Jerusalem as well, not to mention
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the settlements on the West Bank. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, hundreds of
thousands of Russians had also flowed into Israel. Most were Jewish in culture
more than religious observance, but they were instinctively inclined to support
candidates – Rabin in 1992, and Bibi the last time around – who they felt were
likely to take a tough line in any peace negotiations with the Arabs.
I was never going to get the backing of many West Bank settlers, or of core
supporters of the Likud and parties even further to the right. But I would need to
make at least some dent in Bibi’s hold on the Russian voters who had supported
him by a wide margin in 1996. I focused first on Yisrael Ba’Aliyah, the main
Russian immigrant political party. It had been set up by the iconic Soviet-era
refusenik Natan Sharansky – or, as he was then known, Anatoly Sharansky. He’d
been an ally of Andrei Sakharov, an outspoken human rights advocate and, until he
was finally released and allowed to leave in 1986, a political prisoner in the gulag.
Though Natan’s party was not going to offer a formal endorsement for any
candidate, I met with him to press the case for “security and peace,” the message
I’d tried to advance with Shimon three years earlier, and to emphasize the need to
bring unity and shared purpose back to the country. Though I think he would have
been receptive anyway, it didn’t hurt that he, like me, was a mathematics graduate
– from Moscow’s Physics and Technology Institute. He was also a chess
aficionado. When I was rash enough to face him across the board, as I recall, it
took him all of five minutes, and seven moves, to checkmate me.
But I also made dozens of visits to Russian community groups, and met with
individual families whenever I could. Often, I found myself talking to older men
and women among the immigrants about the military details of the Great Patriotic
War, as the Russians called World War Two. On a number of occasions, I accepted
the invitation to sit down and play on a sitting-room piano. I think the first time I
got a sense that any of this might be having an impact was in a quote from a
Yisrael Ba’Aliyah official in an Israeli newspaper. Though still stopping short of a
formal endorsement, the official was quoted as saying: “A month ago, young
Russians thought Barak was a boring, left-wing socialist party leader who doesn’t
look good on TV and mumbles a lot... Today, they see him as a high-ranking
Israeli general who knows how to play the piano. The Russian immigrants like
strong, cultured people.” Except for the bit about mumbling, I couldn’t have
wished for more.
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The next key moment in the campaign involved something I did not do. This
time, the Israeli television debate came earlier in the campaign, a month before the
election. Bibi, Yitzhik Mordechai and I were all invited, as the three main
candidates. But I told the TV people I had a conflicting personal engagement. I
figured I had nothing to gain by going. To join a three-way debate risked creating
the impression this was a genuine three-man race, and I still held out hope it would
come down to just me and Bibi. Besides, I thought a debate between the other two
would help me. Yitzhik knew Bibi well. He had served in Bibi’s government.
Though not a natural orator, he was always forthright, and often pugnacious, in
making his points. And he couldn’t stand Bibi.
Unlike the 1996 debate, this time there was a knock-out blow, and Bibi was the
one left on the canvas. It was a bit like Senator Lloyd Bentsen’s killer riposte when
Republic vice-presidential candidate Dan Quayle compared himself to John F.
Kennedy in their debate, a few months earlier: “Jack Kennedy was a friend of
mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy…” Bibi entered his television showdown
with Yitzhik Mordechai with much the same strategy he’d used against Peres. He
went on the offensive. He tried to portray himself as an indispensable bulwark
against those, like Yitzhik or me, who he said would cosy up to Arafat and Assad
and endanger Israel’s security. But Yitzhik was up for the fight. He also knew that
only months earlier, Bibi himself had been exploring the idea of giving up the
Golan Heights to the same President Assad. He didn’t actually refer to the secret
mission by Ronald Lauder, or explicitly accuse Bibi of hypocrisy. But his reply –
and Bibi’s visible discomfort – were just as effective. Smiling sardonically, he
said: “I know your outbursts, and they won’t do you any good.” He challenged
Bibi to just “look me in the eye” and admit what he really thought about the future
of the Golan. The media verdict was unanimous. Mordechai had won. Which
meant I had won.
Though my American and British brains’ trust had little input into our day-today
campaign, they did play a role in the thrust and strategy. I tried to drive home
two things as we entered the two-week homestretch in May. My first, broad
message was an echo of James Carville’s central theme in the Clinton Presidential
campaign: “change, versus more of the same.” It had worked in the US not because
it was clever, but because it resonated with large numbers of voters. I sensed from
the start of the campaign that it was true of Israel as well. Different groups had
different gripes, and different ideas of what they hoped I would provide as Prime
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Minister. But fewer and fewer Israelis were enthusiastic about four more years of
Bibi. But I also was keen to convey the substance of what my premiership would
be about. Domestically, I spoke of the need to narrow gaps in education and
opportunity – particularly, though not only, the continuing disadvantage of many in
the Sephardi communities who had arrived in the early years of the state. I wanted
to try to build bridges between the secular and religious as well. My hope was to
begin to recreate the “One Israel” of my youth.
In terms of policy, I believed my primary job would be deliver “security and
peace” – in that order. I declared my commitment to continue, and build on, Oslo
and to make a new push in negotiations with Syria. Deliberately following the
model Philip Gould had used in Tony Blair’s election campaign, we also
distributed nearly a million copies of a six-point policy “pledge card”. It included a
promise to hold a referendum on any peace deal we reached with Syria or the
Palestinians, as well as several domestic policy pledges, including an end to
discrimination against Russian immigrants whose Jewish religious status had been
called into question.
Yet the most widely reported promise was that I would pull out all Israeli troops
from Lebanon within a year. I realized that even among those who knew that made
sense, voices would be raised both in the Knesset and the kiyra against
withdrawing. As with the Bar-Lev Line before the 1973 War, the longer the
“security zone” was in place, the more difficult that politicians had found it to say
it was a mistake. Yet it had now been there for nearly two decades. The main
argument for keeping it – that it protected the security of northern Israel – was
undermined by the fact that thousands of Katyusha rockets had been fired over it.
And in the low-grade war we were fighting against Hizbollah inside the security
zone, around 20 Israeli soldiers had been dying each and every year. When I’d first
visited our positions in south Lebanon in the early 1980s, chatted with the troops
and asked them how they were doing, the invariable response was: we’re OK.
We’re just worried about our young kids back home. Now, those children were
manning the same outposts, facing the same danger, in a sliver of land on which
we had no claim, which we had no desire to hold, and which was, at best, of
questionable security value.
* * *
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I’d tried not to pay too much attention to newspaper polls during the campaign,
perhaps because even the “good” ones, to use Shimon’s phrase, had me with just a
narrow lead, with Yitzhik Mordechai’s 10 or 11 percent still likely to prevent
outright victory in the first round. But in the second part of May, our internal
polling showed things were moving in our direction. In mid-May, they had me
above 40 percent. A final batch of internal polls, on the Friday before election day,
had me just short of 50 percent. But I told our pollsters that under no circumstances
were they to divulge the results to anyone in the campaign team. This wasn’t just
because I wanted to guard against complacency. It was because, deep down, still I
didn’t trust the numbers.
I retreated to Kochav Yair on Friday evening. On Saturday, two days before the
election, I had a surprise visitor, someone I knew from Yitzhik Mordecai’s team.
He said he had a letter for me, with terms of a proposal under which Yitzhik would
announce an eleventh-hour withdrawal from the race. I still could not be absolutely
confident I’d win, at least in the first round. Yitzhik’s pulling out would help. But
if I did win, I wanted to start the process of assembling a coalition with a blank
slate and an open mind. Doing a deal was not the way to begin. I didn’t accept or
open the envelope. “Go back to Yitzhik,” I said. “Tell him, as he knows, that I
have a lot of respect for him. But this is a decision that he has to make on his own.”
The next day, less than 24 hours before the polls opened, all of the three other
candidates announced they were pulling out. Benny Begin and Azmi Beshara were
never going to affect the outcome. But Yitzhik’s withdrawal very possibly would.
When he spoke to reporters, he said it had been one of the most difficult decisions
he’d had to make, but that he’d concluded he wouldn’t get enough votes to reach
his “primary goal” of defeating Bibi. “The prime minister was given a chance and
he failed,” he said. “We must give Barak a chance.”
I got up early on May 17, confident we’d done everything we could to put
ourselves in a position to win, but also aware, from Shimon’s defeat, that the
smallest of details, and the narrowest of margins, might determine the outcome.
After the 1996 election, I’d learned of cases where Peres volunteers outside polling
stations in the Negev or the north of the country had left early, in order to make
sure they’d be back to Tel Aviv in time for the “moment of victory.” Now, I sent
out word that all our volunteers must stay in place until the polls had closed. After
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Nava and I voted, we attended an event for Labor supporters north of Tel Aviv,
before flying to Beersheva to spend the final hours in the Negev. I’d arranged for
Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Kiryat Shmona in the north – emphasizing, as
throughout the campaign, our determination to broaden our support beyond
Labor’s heartland. The polls closed at 10 o’clock. I knew Bibi would be staring at
the same Channel One newscast as I was, each of us ready to put the best spin on
things, especially if there was no clear sign at this stage which one of us had won.
But the exit poll findings came as a shock: Barak, of One Israel, 58.5 percent;
Netanyahu, Likud, 41.5 percent. It was a landslide.
The full impact hit me only when I got to the fifth-floor suite in the Dan Hotel
in Tel Aviv, our election-night headquarters. My three brothers, and Nava and our
daughters, were waiting for me. Leah Rabin, too. Our eyes teared up as we
embraced. My parents were by now too frail to come. But I’d promised to phone
them, whatever happened. “We did it,” I told my father, who said mazaltov with a
depth of feeling which had become rare as his health began to fail. My mother had
always been a bit conflicted about my going into politics, despite her lifelong
belief that the issues of politics mattered, especially after Yitzhak had been cut
down and killed for following the path on which I hoped to continue. Still, I could
hear the pride, and relief, in her voice when I said: “Remember, ima. I did promise
you that if I ran, at least I’d make sure to win.”
When we’d finished speaking, Bibi called. He had conceded publicly as soon
as the exit poll was out. He had also stunned the Likud crowd by immediately
resigning as party leader. “Congratulations,” he said, sounding, more than
anything, tired. “I accept that the voters have spoken.” I thanked him for taking the
trouble to call. I said I appreciated the contribution he’d made to the country, and
that we’d meet in the next few days to discuss how best to handle the political
transition. “Thanks,” Bibi said. “And again, mazaltov.”
By the time I got off the phone with Bibi, the TV was showing pictures of tens
of thousands of people celebrating the results in the central Tel Aviv square, now
renamed in Rabin’s memory, where he had been murdered nearly four years
earlier. Before leaving to join them, I fielded a stream of calls: from friends, other
Israeli party leaders and leaders from abroad, including Tony Blair and Bill
Clinton, both of whom not only offered warm congratulations but said they looked
forward to working with me as I tried to move Israel forward and to finish the
work Yitzhak had begun.
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At the start of my brief remarks at the hotel podium before going to Rabin
Square, I had to call for quiet when I mentioned the phone call from Bibi. “No,” I
said, raising my voice to be heard above the boos, “we will not boo an incumbent
Prime Minister of Israel… A short time ago, I spoke with Prime Minister
Netanyahu and thanked him for his service to the State of Israel.” Then – with both
Leah and Shimon Peres at my side – I paid tribute to “that one special person who
had a unique role in our reaching this moment – somebody who was my
commander and guide, and the person who led me into politics: Yitzhak Rabin. I
pledged to fulfil his legacy, and complete the work he’d started. And I extended a
hand to “secular and religious, the ultra-Orthodox and the residents of the
settlements, to Israelis of Middle Eastern origin and Ashkenazi extraction, to
immigrants from Eithopia and the former Soviet Union, to the Arabs, the Druze,
the Circassians, the Bedouin. All, all of them, are part of the Israeli people.”
It was not long before sunrise when I reached the square. As the crowd shouted
and sang, I began with a line borrowed from Bob Shrum. It seemed particularly
apt: “It is the breaking of a new dawn,” I said.
But was it? As I paid tribute to Rabin – “in this place where our hearts broke” –
and dedicated myself to completing the work he’d begun, I could feel the
thousands in the square willing me on. Even in my more nuanced comments on the
talks with the Palestinians: the need to achieve peace, but at least for now by
disengaging rather than joining hands with the Palestinians, ensuring we had
military and border provisions to safeguard our security, and with the stipulation
that Jerusalem would remain our undivided capital, under Israeli sovereignty. But
some in the crowd were carrying posters saying “No to the charedim” – the strictly
Orthodox. Others were chanting, in anticipation of the negotiations needed to put
together a coalition: Rak lo Shas! Anyone but Shas! It was a reference to the
Sephardi Orthodox party, which in addition to being more nuanced and flexible
than other religious parties on the issue of peace talks, had been the big winner in
the election. It had gained seven seats and now had only two fewer than the Likud.
I did not specifically mention Shas. But I said: “I tell you here that the time has
come to end divisions. The time has come to make peace among ourselves,
whether we are traditionalists or secularists… We must not be enemies of each
other.” Paying tribute to all those in the square who had worked for our election
victory, I added: “I know it would not have been possible without your support.
But I also know it would not have been possible without the support many in the
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Likud. I appreciate that as well. And I undertake to be rosh hasmemshalah shel
kulam: Prime Minister for all Israelis.
Yet as fervently as I hoped to be able deliver on that pledge, I knew, even as I
spoke, that actually fulfilling it was going to be much, much tougher.
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Chapter Twenty
As Prime Minister, I would sometimes be criticised as emotionally buttoned up,
even stoic, and there was some truth in that. It was partly just a reflection of who I
was: a kibbutznik who’d grown up in the early years of the state, and had then
spent most of his life in the army. But while it may not have shown, I felt a churn
of emotions when I formally presented my government to the Knesset in July 1999
as Nava, our three daughters, her parents and mine looked on proudly from the
gallery. Even more so, when I entered the office of the Prime Minister. I’d been
there before: as head of military intelligence, chief of staff and a cabinet minister.
Yet to sit behind the vast wooden desk and know that the buck now truly stopped
with me – to become just the tenth person in Israel’s history to have that honor –
was very different.
What I felt most powerfully, however, wasn’t the honor. It was the
responsibility. I knew that Israel faced two deepening crises. The first was
domestic. Though Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin was now in jail, the divisiveness and
hatred of which he was a product and symbol had not gone away. Nor had other
rifts: between the privileged and disadvantaged, Ashkenazim and Sephardim, and,
perhaps most of all, secular and religious. The second, more immediate challenge
was on our borders. The peace process was stalled. If we were going to revive it,
we were running against the clock. President Clinton, a key player in any hope of
turning the promise of Oslo into real peace, had only 18 months remaining in
office. In terms of Israel’s security, the timetable was even less forgiving. From my
very first intelligence briefings as Prime Minister, I was even more convinced of
what I’d been warning Bibi for months: without a political breakthrough, a new,
much more deadly intifada was only a matter of time.
That would have been reason enough to make peace efforts my first priority.
But even as I was addressing the victory rally in Rabin Square, I sensed that the
simple arithmetic of the election results would leave me no other choice. I was
entering office with the largest electoral mandate in our history. But that was
because of Israel’s new voting system, with separate ballots cast for Prime Minister
and party. That system had had precisely the opposite effect on party voting. In
previous elections, most Israelis had chosen one of the two main parties, knowing
that only they had a realistic chance of forming a government. Now they could
directly choose the Prime Minister, giving them the luxury to vote in much greater
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numbers for an array of smaller, issue-specific parties. The result: though I’d won
by a landslide, and One Israel had the largest number of Knesset seats, even with
our natural left-of-center ally, Meretz, we would have only 36 Knesset seats – well
short of the 61 needed for a majority. Even if we included a few smaller parties,
there was no choice but to bring in one of the two larger ones: the Sephardi
Orthodox Shas, with 17 seats; or Likud, which, after Bibi’s sudden resignation,
was now led by Arik Sharon, and had 19.
It wasn’t just a math problem. It had a critical policy implication. If I wanted to
tackle the domestic challenge – to reassert the values of secular-led democratic
government over increasingly assertive religious involvement in our day-to-day
politics – that would mean choosing Likud over Shas. But it would also signal the
effective end of the peace process. Even though Arik assured me privately that he
understood my determination to reopen peace efforts with Arafat and Hafez al-
Assad, I knew Arik. The path toward peace agreements, assuming they were even
possible, would be tough. Sooner or later – and certainly if we faced the need to
consider painful compromises in the negotiations – I was certain that Arik would
act as a kind of opposition from within. That was why, over the angry opposition
of Meretz leader Yossi Sarid, I decided to go with the Sephardi Orthodox party. I
realized that even Shas might walk out if the scale of any land-for-peace
concessions proved too high. But it was the least extreme of the major religious
parties on the question of peace with the Palestinians. In my conversations with the
party’s spiritual leader and guide, the 79-year-old rabbi and Talmudic scholar
Ovadia Yosef, I was struck by his intelligence, erudition and subtletly of thought –
but, above all, his commitment to the core Jewish principle of sanctifying human
life over the specifics of Oslo redeployments, where his inclination seemed to be to
trust the judgment of those with the experience and expertise to evaluate the
security implications.
To Meretz’s additional consternation, I included two smaller, right-of-center
Orthodox parties in the coalition. It was not just to make good on my pledge to be
Prime Minister for all Israelis. Knowing that I was going to put top priority on the
peace process, I wanted to avoid an undiluted left-of-centre, secular thrust to the
government. When I’d stood in front of the tens of thousands of cheering
supporters in Rabin Square after the election, I thought to myself: they think that
with Bibi gone, peace is around the corner. I wanted a coalition broad enough to
keep Meretz, and Labor ministers as well, from forgetting a crucial fact: the
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compromises that we might have to contemplate during peace negotiations were
still anathema to many other Israelis.
* * *
Syria was always my first negotiating priority, as it had been for Rabin and, for
a brief period, Bibi as well. This was not just because the shape of a final
agreement with the Syrians was clearer, to both sides, than with the Palestinians. It
was because I was determined to make good on the main specific policy pledge of
my campaign: to bring our troops home from Lebanon. No matter what the
increasingly emboldened fighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would
be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their “anti-occupation” rationale
for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us
politically to strike back hard if that proved necessary. It was clear to me that
Hizbollah would try to make the withdrawal as difficult for us as possible. But the
real power in Lebanon rested with the Syrians, who, along with Iran, were
Hizbollah’s main backers. If we could get a peace agreement with Assad, there
seemed every reason to hope he would rein in Hizbollah, and perhaps open the way
to a peace treaty with Lebanon as well.
Still, there was no way of hiding an additional attraction in getting a deal with
Syria first: it would increase our negotiating leverage with the Palestinians. That
would certainly not be lost on Yasir Arafat – one reason that I realized the
importance of an early meeting with him, to convey my commitment to keeping
the Oslo process alive, and, if possible, achieving a full and final Israeli-Palestinian
peace.
* * *
I went to see Arafat a few days after taking office. We met for well over an
hour at Erez, the main crossing point into Gaza. It was swelteringly hot inside. At
least I was in an ordinary business suit, but I couldn’t help wondering how Arafat
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was coping in his trademark military uniform. Still, the mood music going into the
meeting was encouraging. After the election, Arafat had tried to use his ties with
the ayatollahs in Iran to get them to release 13 members of the tiny Jewish
community in Shiraz who had been jailed on patently absurd accusations of spying
for the “Zionist régime.” Iran had told him no. Given its support for Hizbollah, and
its serial diatribes about destroying the State of Israel, this was hardly a surprise.
But it was a gesture nonetheless, and I told him I appreciated it. I also arrived with
a gift: a leather-bound volume with both the Hebrew Bible and Koran. I began our
meeting with what I felt I most needed him to hear: that both of us were trying to
achieve something hugely important, nothing less than a new relationship between
Israelis and Palestinians based on trust. As I would discover in the months ahead –
as Yitzhak had found as well – Arafat responded warmly to such general appeals
of principle. He replied that he viewed me as a partner, and a friend. But the key
issue of substance – the difference between how I envisaged taking Oslo forward
and what he wanted – was impossible to avoid.
I emphasized that I was committed to the further Wye River summit
redeployments Bibi which had agreed, although not implemented, as well as to a
release of Palestinian prisoners agreed at Wye. Yet then came the more difficult
part: explaining my view of how we could best move toward a full peace
agreement. I said I was convinced the prospects would be much better if we
delayed the redeployments and brought forward the start of the real negotiations:
on “permanent-status” issues like final borders, settlements, Jerusalem, refugees. In
any case, I said, I’d need a few months for a thorough assessment of the issues
involved, and to reach a settled view with my negotiating team on how to proceed.
Arafat seemed to accept the idea of a pause for reflection and planning. But he held
firm in his opposition to any further delay in the Wye redeployments. More
worryingly for the longer-term prospects of an agreement, he ignored altogether
my suggestion that we move ahead toward the permanent-status talks.
Speaking to reporters, I was careful to accentuate the positive. I said the reason
I’d come to see Arafat so soon was because of the importance I attached to his role
in “shaping peace in the Middle East.” I said I would not waver in continuing on
the path which Rabin and he and begun. And while the security of Israel would be
my paramount concern in negotiations, “I also want each Palestinian to feel
secure.” Both sides, I said, had suffered enough. The open question, however, was
whether I had done enough to persuade Arafat that his exclusive focus on
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redeployments – on only the land part of a land-for-peace deal – meant we risked
ignoring the core issues that would determine whether a full peace agreement was
achievable.
More urgently, I knew from our diplomats in the US that the Americans would
not necessarily be receptive to a further delay in moving ahead with Oslo, even if it
meant focusing on trying to make peace with Syria. That made my first visit to see
President Clinton as Prime Minister especially important.
* * *
It was billed as a “working visit” and work we did. After a gala dinner for Nava
and me in the White House, we helicoptered to the presidential retreat at Camp
David. President Clinton and I spent more than 10 hours discussing shared security
challenges in the Middle East, especially terrorist groups and states like Iran that
were backing them, and, of course, how best to move forward our efforts to
negotiate peace. These face-to-face meetings set a pattern that would last
throughout the time he and I were in office. On almost all key issues, my
preference was to deal directly with the President, something I know sometimes
frustrated other senior US negotiators like Secretary of State Madeleine Albright
and Mideast envoy Dennis Ross. This was not out of any disrespect for them. It
was because the decisions on which negotiations would succeed or fail would have
to be made at the top, just as President Clinton and I would ultimately carry the
responsibility, or the blame, for errors, missteps or missed opportunities.
Our first meeting ran until three in the morning. When the President asked me
how I saw the peace process going forward, he smiled, in obviously relief, at my
answer: I wanted to move quickly. He had only a limited time left in office, and I
was determined that we not waste it. Much is often made about the personal
“chemistry” in political relationships. Too much, I think, because the core issues,
and the trade-offs of substance, are what truly matter when negotiating matters of
the weight, and long-term implications, of Middle East peace. Still, chemistry does
help when moments of tension or crisis arise, as they inevitably do. My first few
days with President Clinton laid a foundation that allowed us to work together even
when things got tough. I benefited, I’m sure, simply by not being Bibi. The
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president and his negotiating team had spent the previous few, frustrating years
trying alternately to urge, nudge and cajole him – and, of course, Arafat – toward
implementing Oslo. Clinton did finally succeed in getting the Wye River
agreement. But it, too, remained to be implemented.
Nava’s presence, and Hillary Clinton’s, contributed to an informal, familial
atmosphere. Before my first round of talks with the President, we joined Bill and
Hillary for dinner. Though I would work more closely with Hillary in later years,
when she was Secretary of State under President Obama, this was the first time I’d
had the opportunity to engage in anything more than small talk with her. She was
less naturally outgoing than her husband. Yet not only was she bright and
articulate. She was barely less informed on the ins and outs of Middle East peace
negotiations than the President. She, and Bill as well, also spoke with us about
things well beyond the diplomacy of the Middle East: science, music, and our
shared interest in history. What most struck Nava and me, however, was the way
the Clintons interacted with each other. The scandal surrounding Monica Lewinsky
was still fresh. I suppose we expected to see signs of tension. Whether they were
there, we had no way of knowing. But what the two of them did palpably have was
a deep respect for each other’s intelligence, insight and creativity in looking for
solutions where so many others saw only problems. It was impressive.
Still, there was little small talk in the long discussions I had with the President.
From the outset, I wanted him to know exactly what I hoped we could accomplish
and how, in my view, we were most likely to get there. I wasn’t trying to impose
“ground rules” on the President of the United States, something I neither would nor
could do. But I was explicit with him about my own approach the negotiations. I
assured him I was prepared to be flexible. But I said I’d be relying on two critical
assumptions. The first was that when we and the Americans agreed a position on a
specific issue, there would be no unilateral “surprises” – by which I meant, though
didn’t say, things like the unfortunate American redefinition of Yitzhak’s “pocket
deposit” assurance regarding the Golan. The second assumption, I know, may
seem overly legalistic. It was that, until and unless we reached a full and final
agreement with either Syria or the Palestinians, any Israeli negotiating ideas or
proposals would not be binding. If no agreement was reached, they would become
null and void. I wanted to avoid a situation, as had happened so often in past
negotiations, where an Israeli proposal was rejected by the Arab side but then
treated as the opening position in the expectation of further concessions in later
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talks. I did realize that, “null and void” or not, our proposals or suggestions would
not simply disappear from memory. But I felt the point of principle was essential if
Israel was going to be able to consider the kind of far-reaching concessions which
final peace deals might require.
In the end, I realized that we might simply discover that Assad, and certainly
Arafat, were not willing or ready to make peace. We might, initially at least, have
to settle for a more incremental step. “Right here in Camp David, Begin, Sadat and
Carter couldn’t complete the process,” I pointed out. “They signed a ‘framework
agreement’ and it took months of further diplomacy to reach a peace treaty. Maybe
we’ll end up doing the same.” But I told the President I was convinced that if we
didn’t try to get agreements, we’d have no way of knowing whether the will to
make peace was there on the other side. Assad, I suspected, was the more likely to
reciprocate. That was a major reason I wanted to start our efforts with him. But so
far, his true intentions had never been tested, beyond his obvious determination to
get back the Golan. Nor had Arafat’s, beyond his focus on the detail and extent of
West Bank redeployments.
President Clinton did not object to an early effort to reopen our efforts with the
Syrians. But he was worried about the effects of ignoring the already-creaking
prospects of fulfilling the promise of Oslo. If we were going to delay focusing on
that, Clinton told me, he needed to be able to assure Arafat the wait would be
worth his while. What could we give the PLO leader in return for putting off the
Wye redeployments further, he asked. And then, the real question on his mind:
“Ehud, when we get to the final redeployment and a peace deal, how much of the
West Bank are you prepared to hand back?”
I simply didn’t know at this stage. Much would depend on whether we could be
sure Arafat could or would deliver a final peace. But even if I had known, I would
have been reluctant to name a precise percentage. Though I had full trust in
President Clinton, I knew that everything he and I said would be shared with at
least a few of his closest policy aides and negotiators. Sooner or later, word would
get to Arafat. When we did begin negotiations, he’d take whatever number I gave
as a mere starting point. Still, I knew I had to signal the President that I was serious
about negotiating with Arafat when the time came. I also knew the main source of
his concern. In order to get the agreement at Wye, the President had signed on to a
provision that the dimension of the third and final redeployment phase would be
determined by Israel alone. By that stage, when we got there, Arafat would have
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control of something like 40 percent of the West Bank. That meant – at least in
theory – that Israel could limit phase-three to a mere token pullout, leaving the
Palestinians with less than half of the territory.
“I don’t know what percentage, exactly,” I replied. “But one of my cabinet
ministers thinks that a formula of 70-10-20 would work, meaning 70 percent for
the Palestinians, ten percent to allow us to retain and secure the largest of the
settlement blocs, and the rest to be worked out in further talks.” When he nodded, I
added: “Peres thinks it could end up at 80-20, and says he thinks Arafat would find
it hard to walk away from getting control of four-fifths of the West Bank. But it’s
not about the number. It’s about the area needed for the major settlements, and
whatever else is required to safeguard our security. Beyond that, we don’t need a
single inch of the West Bank, and we won’t ask for a single inch.”
I replied in much the same vein when President Clinton urged me to help kickstart
new talks with Assad by formally reaffirming Yitzhak’s “pocket deposit” on
the Golan Heights. As with the Palestinians, I was not going to cede a major
negotiating card – our only real negotiating card – before we had any indication
Assad was serious about making peace. But I did feel it was necessary to reassure
Clinton that I was serious. I told him that, if and when the Syrians showed real
signs of readiness to address our needs in a peace agreement, I would reaffirm the
“pocket deposit.”
I’d come to Washington hoping that President Clinton would be with me on the
main issues of substance. But what I needed most at this point was his support on
the procedural decisions I’d made in order to get to real peace negotiations:
engaging with Syria first, and shifting the emphasis on the Palestinian track away
from the redeployments toward the core permanent-status issues we’d have to
resolve in order to get a peace agreement. What emerged from my first meetings
with President Clinton was essentially a trade-off. He knew I would be ready to
make concessions in pursuit of genuine peace. I was confident that on the route
that I was proposing to take, he would have my back.
But what I couldn’t be sure of was whether my own government would have
my back. On paper, we had a comfortable Knesset majority: 75 out of the 120
seats. But I knew it was inherently vulnerable, both to friction between the
Orthodox parties and assertively secular MKs from Meretz and inside Labor, and
to possible defections over the concessions we might have to consider in peace
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negotiations. The first stirrings of discontent had begun even before I went to see
Clinton. On the basis of my commitment merely to try for peace, Arik Sharon had
presented a no-confidence motion in the Knesset. It was never going to pass. But
only days after I’d made him Interior Minister, Natan Sharansky let it be known he
was going to vote against us. He didn’t. He stayed away from the chamber, in
effect abstaining. But I’d been put on notice.
I did lose my first coalition partner in September: the small United Torah
Judaism party, with five Knesset seats. It wasn’t over land-for-peace. In an echo of
a similar crisis that brought down the government during Rabin’s first spell as
Prime Minister in the 1970s, it was over a violation of the Jewish Sabbath. It
turned out that Israel’s state electric company had been transporting a huge steamcondensation
machine from the manufacturing site near Haifa to a power plant in
Ashdod. The unit was the size of a small apartment. It weighed 100 tons. It
couldn’t be driven across the country without bringing weekday traffic to a
standstill. The obvious solution was to do it when road use was lightest, on
Shabbat. Precisely the same procedure had been followed – 24 times – under Bibi.
But when I asked a United Torah Judaism leader why he’d seemed happy when
Likud had waved it through, he replied: “Past sins cannot pardon future ones.” Eli
Suissa, one of the Shas ministers in the cabinet, took his side, saying: “Every hour
is good for the keeping of Shabbat.” Most other ministers agreed with me that we
should stand firm. So I did. But UTJ walked out of the government. Shas did
remain. But I was now increasingly certain that at some stage its ministers, too,
would leave.
In the midst of the Sharanksy rebellion, Haim Ramon, who was the minister in
charge of liaising with the Knesset, insisted I “punish” him for his political
grandstanding. “You should fire Sharansky. Act like a leader!” I just laughed. “The
coalition doesn’t need a leader,” I replied. “It needs therapy.” In truth, I suspected
that if we ever got near to a peace agreement with Assad or Arafat, even therapy
might not help. But that was a main reason that I’d promised a referendum on any
final peace deals. I believed that in the choice between concessions, even painful
ones, and a genuine peace deal with Syria or the Palestinians, by far most Israelis
would choose peace.
I relied on a strong, close team around me, people I knew well and who shared
my determination to stay focused on the central goal: to put Israel in a position
where its citizens could be given that choice. I made Danny Yatom, my former
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sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy,
former head of military intelligence; Gilad Sher, a gifted lawyer I’d known for a
quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored
brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon Lipkin, the paratroop commander at Chinese
Farm and my successor as ramatkal when I left the army. Also, Shlomo Ben-Ami,
the Moroccan-born, Oxford-educated historian and diplomat who had run against
me for the Labor leadership. Shlomo had a gift for systematic analysis and keen
judgement, especially on security issues, which I highly valued.
It did not escape the attention of Israeli commentators, or other politicians, that
almost all of them were former soldiers whom I’d known from my time in uniform.
But that observation missed a more important point: we were all members of the
“generation of 1967 and 1973.” We had been soldiers during the Six-Day War. In
the years immediately after it, like almost all Israelis, we had allowed ourselves to
believe that our victory had been so comprehensive, and so quick, that any threat
from the defeated Arab states was gone for good. We assumed that inevitably,
inexorably, they would realize they needed to sue for peace, and that there was no
particular urgency on our part to do anything more than wait. Then, on Yom
Kippur 1973, all of that had been turned on its head. We had not only learned the
lessons, of 1973. We had internalized them. Even had we not known of the danger
of a new Palestinian campaign of terror, the option of simply watching and waiting
– and assuming that our military strength, which was now even greater, could
make events around us stand still – would not have made sense to us. Besides, as I
remarked to Danny and others, to do so would run against the founding purpose of
Zionism: to establish a state where Jews would no longer be victims of events, but
would take control of their destiny and try to shape them.
* * *
Yet making peace, like making war, takes two. Much as I’d wanted to begin
with Syria, until well into the autumn of 1999 President Assad was holding firm on
his insistence that without our “deposit,” without a prior agreement that he’d get
back the Golan, there could be no substantive progress. This was particularly
frustrating because I was getting reports from our intelligence services, and
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Western envoys who had seen the Syrian president, that Assad’s many years of
health problems had left him almost skeletally frail, even at times disoriented.
Even my own negotiating team urged me to concentrate on the Palestinians
instead. President Clinton kept stressing the importance of showing Arafat at least
some movement on the Oslo front. In September 1999, I took a first, significant
step in that direction. I agreed to a timetable that would deliver the Wye
redeployments by the end of January 2000, while also committing us to negotiating
a framework agreement, on the model of the Begin-Sadat Camp David accords, on
the “permanent-status” peace issues. In early November, I joined Clinton and
Arafat for talks around an event in Oslo – a deliberate echo of the optimism with
which the peace process had begun, held on the fourth anniversary of Rabin’s
assassination. Both Leah Rabin and Peres came with me. Its centerpiece was a
memorial service, at which Leah spoke very movingly of the need for both sides to
finish the work Yitzhak had begun, a responsibility I pledged that we would do
everything in our power to fulfill. Only Arafat struck a discordant note. He paired a
tribute to Rabin with a polemic call for an end to “occupation, exile and
settlements.”
After the ceremony, he, President Clinton and I met at the American
ambassador’s residence. I was still struck by Arafat’s public comments: by his
apparent desire, or need, to play to hardliners back home in what was supposed to
be a time to remember and honor Yitzhak. I didn’t raise his remarks directly, but I
told him that each of us was approaching a moment of truth for the future of our
people. The decisions required wouldn’t be easy politically, for either of us. “But if
we don’t have the courage to make them, we’ll be burying thousands of our
people.” Worse, I said, those deaths would not advance his people’s position, or
mine, by a single inch. When future Palestinian and Israeli leaders did finally prove
equal to the challenge of making peace, they’d be looking at the same conflict,
requiring the same compromises. “The only difference will be the size of our
cemeteries.” Arafat nodded occasionally. But he said little, beyond saying that he
considered Rabin to have been a friend, and repeating his now-familiar,
nonspecific, pledge to “do what is necessary” for peace.
“The hardest part won’t be the tough decisions in negotiations,” I continued. “It
won’t be facing each other. It will be facing our own people.” We would need to
make the case openly, honestly, strongly that the peace agreement we reached was
in the interest of both Israelis and Palestinians. And in this, each of us had a
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responsibility to support the other. With President Clinton looking on, I steered
Arafat toward the window of the ambassador’s fifth-floor apartment. “Look
down,” I said. “Imagine that we each have parachutes, and we’re going to jump
together. But I have my hand on your ripcord, and you are holding mine. To land
safely we have to help each other… And if we don’t jump, many, many innocent
people who are now walking the streets of Gaza and Ramallah and Hebron, Tel
Aviv and Jerusalem, will die.” Arafat again just nodded, leaving me, and the
President, unsure whether anything I’d said had struck home.
The true test of that would come only when we got to the stage of negotiations
when the “difficult decisions” could not be evaded. Yet only weeks after I returned
from Oslo, the focus did finally shift to the Syrians. President Assad suddenly
signalled his willingness to resume talks without any preconditions – a message he
delivered first to my British Labor Party friend Michael Levy, who was visiting
Damascus as Tony Blair’s roving Mideast envoy, and then to Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright. Assad said he would send Syrian Foreign Minister Farouk al-
Sharaa to meet me for initial talks in Washington in December, ahead of a fullscale,
US-mediated attempt to negotiate peace at the start of the new year.
* * *
The broad terms of a potential deal had long been clear, both to us and the
Syrians. The danger was always that the process would get derailed, or never really
get started, due to domestic political opposition. Syria had a tightly state-controlled
media and an intelligence service concerned mainly with crushing any signs of
dissidence. That meant Assad’s main concern was to ensure broad support, or at
least acquiescence, from top military and party figures. In Israel, however, every
sign of a concession would risk igniting charges that we were “selling out” to
Syria. The Likud and the political right would obviously denounce the idea of
giving up the Golan Heights, even though Bibi had been ready to do just that when
he was Prime Minister. But even on the left, there was little enthusiasm for
returning the Golan. There were far fewer Israeli settlers there than on the West
Bank, not even 20,000. But most of them, far from being religiously motivated
ideologues, were Labor supporters. And almost no Israel, of any political stripe,
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viewed Hafez al-Assad as a natural partner for peace. For years, he’d been a
constant, sneering presence on our northern border, denouncing not only Sadat but
any Arab leader who’d shown willingness to engage or negotiate with Israel. Amos
Oz, one of our finest writers and a cultural icon for Labor Zionists, probably put it
best. He said the Syrians seemed to think that “we will give them the Golan, and
they’ll send us a receipt by fax.” The consensus was: forget Assad. Keep the
Golan. In fact, before I left for the US, the Knesset voted on whether it supported
my attempt to negotiate an agreement with Syria. We could muster only 47 votes,
14 short of a majority. An opinion poll found only 13 percent of Israelis favored a
full withdrawal from the Golan.
The message I drew from this was not that we should give up on the chances of
a peace agreement. After all, before Begin and Sadat went to Camp David in 1978,
an almost equally tiny minority of Israelos had been in favor of withdrawing from
the Sinai. Yet once they had seen the other side of the equation – full, formal peace
with our most powerful neighbor – the opposition all but evaporated. The problem
I saw was that if we and the Syrians couldn’t find a way to insulate our
negotiations from leaks, speculation and a swirl of opposition to our efforts at
home, we’d never get to the key issues of substance.
I’d been making that point to the Americans for weeks. At first, I tried to
persuade them to hold the talks at Camp David, ensuring the same, media-free
isolation that had yielded the historic Israeli-Egypt agreement. But Dennis Ross
replied that the very association of Camp David with that breakthrough meant it
would be a non-starter for President Assad. I then suggested we consider sites
outside of the US: NATO’s Incerlik air base in Turkey, for instance, a British base
in Cyprus, an American naval ship in the Mediterranean. Even, half-jokingly, an
abandoned missile silo in South Dakota. Yet the point I was making was serious, in
fact critical, I believed, if the talks were going to have a chance.
In the end, the Americans settled on a beautiful, and undeniably remote, town in
West Virginia called Shepherdstown. But from the outset, I was worried it couldn’t
provide the kind of environment we needed. As soon as our plane landed at
Andrews Air Force base outside Washington, I got a call from the head of our
advance team. He told me the news media were already there and that reporters –
Israeli, Arab, American and European – could be seen chatting with American,
Israeli and Syrian officials in the town’s coffee shops. I knew the press would have
to publish something about potential concessions as the negotiations proceeded.
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Whether the stories were true wouldn’t matter. They would still make the real
bargaining necessary for peace far more difficult, perhaps even impossible.
I also had doubts whether Assad was ready for real peace: embassies, open
borders, personal contact between Syrians and Israelis, and ideally an
internationally backed free-trade manufacturing area on the Golan to give Syria a
tangible stake in ensuring the peace lasted. In earlier talks, under Shimon Peres,
Syrian negotiators had at one stage brought a message from Assad. What did we
mean, he wanted to know, with all this emphasis on peace, peace, peace? Syria had
peace with El Salvador, but without any of the trappings we were insisting on.
Peace, in Assad’s mind, seemed to mean merely an absence of war. Plus, of course,
getting back the Golan.
I did, however, come ready to negotiate. Though I was still not prepared to
reconfirm Rabin’s “pocket deposit” as a mere ticket of admission, my position
remained essentially the one I had worked out with Yitzhak in formulating the
deposit: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” Meaning that if Assad showed a
readiness to deal with Israel’s requirements in a peace deal, I did, of course,
recognize we would leave the Golan Heights. In addition to early-warning
facilities, we envisaged an open border with a demilitarized area on either side, as
well as guarantees that important sources of water for Israel would not be blocked
or diverted. As Assad knew, despite his presumably feigned puzzlement about
Syria’s arrangements with El Salvador, we also needed the agreement to embody a
mutual commitment to real peace: through elements like an exchange of
ambassadors and the establishment of the free-trade zone. As with the Begin-Sadat
peace, we assumed that our Golan withdrawal would come in phases, parallel to
the implementation of the other provisions of the treaty.
In our initial meetings in Shepherdstown, Foreign Minister al-Sharaa showed no
inclination even to talk about these other issues. So on the second afternoon we
were there, I suggested to President Clinton the Americans try to break the logjam
by drafting a paper of their own. It would detail all the issues in an eventual
agreement, with parenthetical references to those on which we and the Syrians still
differed. Then each side could respond with a view toward narrowing the gaps.
The President liked the idea. So did Al-Sharaa. Three days later, the President
presented the eight-page American draft. With his customary eloquence, he
emphasized the need for us to use it as a springboard for peace, not to score
political points, and each side agreed to take a couple of days to look through it. It
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seemed to me we might finally be on a path to substantive negotiations. There was
obviously not going to be a deal at this round of talks, but I agreed with President
Clinton that when they ended, he could phone Assad and tell him that I had
confirmed Rabin’s “pocket deposit.”
Yet by the time we left for home, the prospects suddenly looked much worse –
for the reason I’d feared from the moment we arrived. There were two major leaks.
The first came in an Arabic-language newspaper in London. Given the thrust of the
story, it had presumably come from the Syrians. But it was more annoying than
truly damaging. The second leak, however, was in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz,
which published the entire US negotiating paper. This was unwelcome for us, since
it confirmed we were ready to go far in return for peace. But for the Syrians, the
fact the final-border section was still a work-in-progress, with the parentheses to
prove it, created the impression that they’d decided to negotiate the details of a full
peace without first nailing down the return of the Golan Heights. Assad’s image as
a strongman, implacably tough on Israel, had been built and burnished over his
three decades in power. The embarrassment of being seen as amenable to talking
about a Syrian embassy in Israel without an agreement on the Golan struck me as a
potentially fatal blow to the prospects for a deal, since it dramatically narrowed the
scope for the flexibility needed by both sides to negotiate. I can’t say I was
surprised when Clinton phoned me when we got back to Israel to say that Assad
had refused to send Al-Sharaa back, as planned, for a further round of talks in 10
days’ time.
I didn’t give up, however, and neither did President Clinton. In February, at the
Americans’ request, I sat down with Danny Yatom and US Ambassador Martin
Indyk in Jerusalem to draw up a “bottom line” proposal on a withdrawal from the
Golan Heights. Since I’d already empowered Clinton to reaffirm the “pocket
deposit”, I saw no reason not to do this. If only because of Assad’s failing health, I
believed it was the only way we could know whether an agreement was possible.
We worked on a large satellite map of the Golan and the valley below, and drew
our proposed border in red. We marked out a strip of several hundred meters on the
far side of the Sea of Galilee. It included, or came near to, a handful of Syrian
villages that had been there before 1967. But we were careful to adjust the line to
exclude any area where buildings had stood. We compensated – with slightly more
territory – by bending the border westward to give the Syrians part of the slope
overlooking the lake, in what was now Israel. We also included the hot springs at
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al-Hama, which I knew Assad had said he considered rightfully Syrian during talks
held under Rabin.
But the details turned out not to matter. President Clinton agreed to present the
map to Assad in what we both hoped would be a step to reopening the path for
peace. The two of them met in Geneva in late March. Though the President also
came with full details of our positions on the other negotiating issues, he began by
telling Assad that I had agreed to the Syrians’ longstanding point of principle on
our future border: it would be “based on the June 4, 1967 line” before the Six-Day
War. Then, the President unfurled the map.
It was shortly after five in the afternoon in Israel when Clinton phoned me. He
sounded as if he’d been punched in the stomach. “Ehud, it’s not going to work,” he
said. “The moment I started, he tuned out. He just said: ‘Do I get my land?’ I tried
to get him to listen, but he just kept repeating: ‘Do I get all my land?’ According
the President, Assad would countenance nothing less than being able to sit on the
shore of the Sea of Galilee and “dip his feet in the water.” Clinton said he’d done
his best, and that was true. “I understand the effort is over,” I replied. “Probably,
he’s too frail and ill by now.” In fact, Assad would die of leukemia barely two
months later. His immediate focus was on ensuring an uncontested succession to
his son, Bashar.
When Dennis Ross came to see me in Jerusalem, I think he expected to find me
more distraught than I felt. Of course, I was disappointed. But I told him I was
grateful that Clinton had stayed with a negotiating effort that had been frustrating
for all of us. When I became Prime Minister, I’d assured the Americans that as
long as our vital security interests were protected, I was ready to go further than
any previous Israeli leader to get peace with Syria, and with Arafat too. I might
fail, but it would not be for lack of trying. I believed that even a “failure” would
tell us something: whether the other side was truly ready for peace. With Syria, I
told Dennis, “It’s not what we hoped for. But at least now we know.”
* * *
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My own negotiating team, not to mention the Americans, assumed I would now
turn my attention to the Palestinians. Arafat was pressing for us to go ahead with
phase-two of the Wye redeployments. In fact, he now wanted us to add the transfer
of three Arab villages on the edge of east Jerusalem: Eizaria, El-Ram and, most
importantly, Abu Dis, since from there you could see the golden dome of the
mosque above the Western Wall in the Old City. I understood why the villages
were politically important for him. But in practical terms, I also knew I’d have to
secure the support of the cabinet and the Knesset for what the Likud, and the main
religious parties too, would interpret as a first step toward “handing back
Jerusalem.”
For me, this underscored the problem at the heart of Oslo. We were transferring
land to Arafat, yet still without any serious engagement from the Palestinians on
the “permanent-status” questions, like the furture of Jerusalem, that were critical to
the prospects for real peace. They were critical, in fact, even to reaching a
framework agreement, or a declaration of principles, as a basis for a final treaty. I
probably should have seen the crisis-ridden spring of 2000 as a harbinger of the
difficulties when we finally got to that stage. I did make a first major effort to find
compromise ground on the main issues. I sent Gilead Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to
begin back-channel talks with a Palestinian team led by Abu Ala’a and Hassan
Asfour, the architects of Oslo. But as I prepared to seek Knesset approval for
returning the three additional villages to the Palestinians, my main Orthodox
coalition partners, Shas and the National Religious Party, as well as Sharansky’s
Yisrael ba’Aliyah, all threatened to walk out of the government. I did manage to
keep them on board, but only by getting the Knesset vote classified as a noconfidence
motion. That meant that if we lost, the government would fall and there
would be new elections. That was something none of them wanted. They feared
that Arik and the Likud would do better this time around, and they would end up
with fewer seats.
Still, even that didn’t avert a different kind of crisis. The vote was on May 15.
For the Palestinians, this was also Al-Naqba Day, the annual marking of the 1948
“catastrophe” of the founding of the State of Israel. Danny Yatom told me the night
before there were intelligence reports of large protests planned for the West Bank
and in Gaza. President Clinton immediately got the American consul to deliver a
message to Arafat, saying that the President expected him to intervene against any
sign of violence. But Arafat’s reply was that, while he’d do what he could, he
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couldn’t guarantee anything. In the months ahead I would come to understand what
that meant, because it would happen again. I don’t think Arafat himself
orchestrated the violence. Maybe he couldn’t have stopped it completely. But I
have no doubt – nor did President Clinton – that he stood aside and let it happen.
Even worse – since he did have control over them – his security forces, with
arms that Israel had provided as part of Oslo, fired on our troops as they tried to
keep order. All of this, while I stood in the Knesset battling to get approval to give
him the villages. As news arrived in the chamber of gunfire just a couple of miles
away, it was not just Likud or other right-wing MKs who were furious. I certainly
was. Yet I also knew that the price of losing the vote would be the fall of the
government. We did win the vote, by a margin of eight, meaning that I now had
full authority to return the three villages. Fuming over what had happened,
however, I called President Clinton and told him I was going to delay the
handover. I was not about to return the villages under gunfire, or reward Arafat for
breaking even his existing security commitments.
That meant that prospects for serious negotiations with the Palestinians were
again on hold. But another, immutable, priority would probably have delayed any
new initiative anyway: my pledge to get our soldiers out of Lebanon within a year
of the election. I was determined to go ahead with it not just because I’d promised
Israelis to do so. It was because I knew from experience that without setting a
deadline and sticking to it, it wouldn’t happen. I had been against keeping the
security zone from the start. Over the years, many Israelis, both inside the military
and beyond, had come to accept we would be better off pulling out. It wasn’t just
the attritional loss of Israeli soldiers’ lives, but the fact that there was no obvious
point, and no obvious end, to our mission there. Especially when major tragedies
occurred – like the collision of two Israeli helicopters a couple of years earlier,
leaving scores of young soldiers dead – there was talk about a withdrawal. Yet
there was always a reason to reconsider, to put it off: a Hizbollah attack in the
security zone, accusations of weakness from right-wing politicians, or simple
caution in the kirya. The only way to get it done was to decide, and to do it.
My self-imposed deadline for the pullout was now just eight weeks away.
Hizbollah had already begun escalating pressure on our outposts in south Lebanon
with the obvious aim of making the withdrawal as difficult as possible. They were
also targeting our local surrogates, the Maronite-led South Lebanese Army militia.
I’d been meeting regularly with Shaul Mofaz, the former paratroop officer who
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was now chief of staff, to ensure we had a plan to get our troops out as quickly and
safely as possible once the order was given. But complex though the operational
issues were, that was not the most difficult part. The withdrawal had not just a
military aim, but a critical political one: to denude Hizbollah, with full
international support, of its “occupation” fig-leaf for targeting and terrorizing the
towns and villages of northern Israel. Shaul and a number of other generals in the
kirya tried to make the security argument for keeping several small hilltop outposts
just north of the border. But I insisted not a single Israeli soldier or emplacement
remain on Lebanese soil. Throughout the spring, we had been coordinating every
detail of the planned pullout with UN cartographers on the ground, to ensure that
they, too, recognized it would be a full withdrawal to the border, fulfilling the
terms of the Security Council resolution adopted after the 1982 Lebanon War.
Ordinarily, an operation on this scale would have been carried out over a period
of weeks. But when we handed over a pair of military strongholds to the South
Lebanon Army, and Hizbollah promptly moved in to take them over, it was clear
that even several days might risk chaos, and casualties, as we left. The head of the
northern command now supported an immediate withdrawal, and I agreed.
Frustratingly, we did have to hold off for a further 36 hours, in order to ensure the
UN staff on the ground could complete their verification process. But on the
afternoon of May 23, alongside Shaul Mofaz at a command post on the border, I
ordered the pullout of all Israeli troops, vehicles and other equipment within the
space of 24 hours. I then flew back to Jerusalem for an urgent meeting to secure
formal cabinet approval. The field commanders ended up getting it done in less
than 24 hours, mostly overnight, without a single Israeli casualty. For nearly two
decades, our troops had been serving and dying on a strip of land on which we had
no claim, no settlements, and for which there was no rational security need.
Finally, we were out.
As I should have anticipated, there were accusations from Hizbollah and its
allies that our UN-verified withdrawal was incomplete. At issue was a cluster of
villages where Lebanon meets Syria, known as the Sheba’a Farms. But as I knew
first-hand, they were not part of Lebanon. I’d met their Syrian inhabitants when I
helped “capture” the villages at the very end of the 1973 war on the Golan. When
Syria now publicly supported Hizbollah’s efforts to get the UN to say the area was
in fact part of Lebanon, I decided to call their bluff. Through the Americans, I
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suggested that Damascus confirm in writing that this part of the Golan was indeed
Lebanese. The Syrians never responded.
Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the
Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in Katyushas and in blood. The
reality was that in the half-dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon
border was quieter than at any time since the late 1960s. The main personal impact
of the withdrawal, however, was to remind me of why I’d run for Prime Minister in
the first place. Despite the challenges, and inevitable setbacks and frustrations, of
my first year in office, I was in a position to act on what I believed to be critical
issues for my country’s future. On Lebanon, I’d succeeded, mainly because the
withdrawal was something we could do unilaterally. With Syria, I’d tried hard to
get an agreement, only to find that Assad was unwilling, unable, or perhaps too ill
to join in the search for a deal.
I still recognized, however, that no issue was more important to Israel’s future
than our conflict with the Palestinians. I knew that resolving it would be even
tougher than the talks with the Syrians. But the only way to find out whether peace
was possible was to try. So on the final day of May 2000, with the Lebanon pullout
complete, I flew to Portugal – the site of a US-European summit – to see President
Clinton.
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Chapter Twenty-One
President Clinton and I met the next morning. My aim was to persuade him that
the time had come for a make-or-break summit with Yasir Arafat.
I suspected it would not be easy to convince him, and it wasn’t. But I made the
argument that if we were to have any hope of moving Oslo forward, we now faced
a stark choice. We were three years behind the timeline for starting work on a
“permanent status” agreement, and only six months from an American election that
would choose President Clinton’s successor. We could, of course, pursue the Oslo
process along its current, meandering path. But even though Bibi had slowed it
down, that would inevitably mean Israel handing back yet more West Bank land to
Arafat – in return for familiar, but still unfulfilled and untested, verbal assurances
that he wanted peace. Each successive Israeli withdrawal reduced his incentive to
engage of the core issues like final borders, refugees, or Jerusalem. I could not in
good conscience justify that, either to myself or my country. The second option
was the summit. I realized there was no guarantee it would succeed. But it would
finally force Arafat to negotiate on the core issues – before the departure of an
American President who had a grasp of the all issues and characters involved, and
a personal commitment to converting the promise of Oslo into a genuine peace.
The obvious political risk, for both Clinton and me, was that after convening a
summit – with all the heightened expectations and pressures it would bring – we’d
fail to get an agreement. Though I’d be more directly affected, however, it was a
more straightforward choice for me. In part because I’d been in front-line politics
so briefly, but mostly because of what I’d done for the three-and-a-half decades
before then, I viewed the political risk as just one of many, and by no means the
most important. That was an obvious weakness in me as a traditional politician. I
would indeed pay a political price later on for having given too little heed, and
perhaps underestimated, the reaction in Israel to the summit and what came after it.
Yet as I tried to impress on President Clinton, there were risks in not holding a
summit as well, along with the obvious reward of a full and final peace if it
succeeded. If it failed? At least we would know a peace agreement with Arafat was
impossible. In fact, amid the diplomatic drift since Oslo, it was clear there was no
other way that we could know.
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Walking with the President in Lisbon’s spring sunshine, I tried to summon up
an image that would bring both of us back to the starkly different reality of our
conflict with the Palestinians. Only two weeks earlier, Arafat’s own police force,
with weapons we had given them, had opened fire as I was trying to get Knesset
approval for returning three villages that he wanted. After I took office, I’d ordered
a full-scale intelligence review of the security situation with the Palestinians. The
sobering conclusion had been delivered to me six months earlier: plans were well
underway by cells in the West Bank and Gaza for armed attacks against Israeli
soldiers and terror strikes inside Israel. “It’s like two families living in the same
house, and it’s on fire,” I said. “All of us are rushing to put it out. But there’s this
veteran firefighter who arrives on the scene – a firefighter with a Nobel Peace
Prize – and we have no way of knowing whether he’s got matches and gasoline in
his pocket.” We had to find that out, I said. We had to establish whether we were
all firefighters, and could put out the flames.
Clinton and I had got to know each other well. In one-on-one conversations like
this, we called each other by our first names, though I was careful to address him
as “Mr President” when others were there. We’d been through a lot together. I had
no doubt that he wanted to put out the fire every bit as much as I did. But I also
realized he had emerged frustrated, and bruised, from our last joint effort at
peacemaking: with Hafez al-Assad. I was the one who had been pushing the
hardest for him to meet Assad in Geneva, over the objections of some of his closest
aides that it was likely to go wrong. Not only were the aides right. Assad had
ended up delivering an extraordinary personal rebuff to the President of the United
States. Now, I was again asking President Clinton for a summit, and I knew
Madeleine Albright, Dennis Ross and others would be highly sceptical. “I
understand they’ll have doubts. I understand their reading of the risks,” I told
President Clinton. “But I’m convinced crucial issues are at stake, which justify the
risks. Let’s move forward.”
But Clinton was skeptical, too. He said that without some sign of diplomatic
progress between us and the Palestinians, he could see no way of holding a
summit. With Arafat due to see him in Washington in a couple of weeks, he said
that I first had to give the Palestinian leader something: the three villages, a
prisoner release, or perhaps unfreeze tax revenues which we’d been holding back
as leverage for at least some progress on the core issues. Otherwise, Clinton said
he was certain Arafat would refuse to attend a summit. And even if he said yes,
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Clinton felt we would need a draft document with broad areas of agreement before
a diplomatic “endgame” could begin. I disagreed on that. I argued that if we tried
to produce such a document, there would never be a summit. In fact, we’d never
get a draft document worth anything. “Neither side is going to commit itself on
issues like borders, refugees, or Jerusalem,” I said, pointing out that even in our
back-channel talks, the only forum in which there had been a hint of progress,
those issues had barely been touched.
He did accept that “pre-negotiation” would never crack the main issues. But he
still said that before he could contemplate a summit, he would need Madeleine
Albright and Dennis Ross to talk in detail with us and the Palestinians. “There had
to be a firm basis to work on,” he said. Even then,m he said, he was almost sure
Arafat would resist the idea of a summit. And on that last point, he proved right. I
spoke to the President by phone after Arafat’s trip to Washington. “He thinks
you’re trying to trap him into a summit, and that when it fails, I’ll blame him,” he
told me.
The very next day, the stakes increased dramatically. For months, military
intelligence had been warning of the potential for violence if we couldn’t find a
long-term political resolution of the Palestinian conflict. But the report which
landed on my desk on June 16, 2000 was more specific. It said Arafat had called in
his security people and said: “My strategic understanding is that Israel is not
interested in reaching a deal. Therefore, we are preparing ourselves for a violent
and prolonged confrontation.” A few days later, we got an even more worrying
report, saying the security officers had been told to begin “intensive training.”
Arafat was quoted as saying: “The Palestinian Authority is confronted by a strong
and dangerous Israel, headed by a Prime Minister who is not interested in real
peace. The proof of that is that when he was Chief of Staff, he was the only senior
officer to oppose the Oslo Agreement.” I summoned my security team: Mofaz as
chief of staff; the heads of military intelligence, Mossad and the Shin Bet. I told
them that Arafat was wrong. My inalterable “red line” would always be Israel’s
national and security interests. But as long as those were protected, I wasn’t just
interested in reaching an agreement with the Palestinians. I was determined to do
everything possible to try to get one. But I also said that we had to make sure we
were fully prepared for responding to “Palestinian violence and, at some stage,
full-blown terror.”
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* * *
A few days later, the “pre-endgame” around the summit began. Not in
Washington or Jerusalem or Ramallah or Gaza, but in Kochav Yair. Nava and I
still spent almost all our weekends there. We valued the quiet, or at least the
slightly quieter, time away from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. Some of my oldest army
friends lived there as well: Danny Yatom, as well as Shaul Mofaz and Uzi Dayan,
who was now deputy chief of staff. Newer colleagues, too, like Yossi Ginossar, a
Shin Bet veteran who spoke fluent Arabic and, after working in the West Bank and
Gaza in the late 1960s became one of the first Israelis to hold secret talks with
Arafat, building up a personal relationship with him. Under both Rabin and Peres,
he had been a valuable liaison with the Palestinian leader. Nowm under my
Premiership as well.
The summit seemed to me more important than ever, but I knew that only
President Clinton could make it happen. Short of giving the Palestinians the whole
list of short-term rewards they wanted, including the three villages, I knew Arafat
was never going to be enthusiastic. But if Clinton was persuaded that a peace
agreement was within reach, I had confidence he would make the effort. I had
allowed Gili Sher and Shlomo Ben-Ami to go to Washington the week before for
exploratory talks with Dennis Ross. Shlomo, as I knew he’d done in the backchannel
talks with the Palestinians, had gone beyond anything that I would or
could say at this stage in order to probe the edges of where an eventual
compromise might be possible. Now Clinton had sent Dennis to Israel, with
Madeleine Albright to follow at the end of the month, and I had to assume that
their impressions would be critical to his decision on whether to bring me and
Arafat to Camp David.
We agreed to meet Dennis and his team at Danny’s house in Kochav Yair. By
the time I’d made the pleasant Shabbat-afternoon stroll from our house, a few
streets away, they were in the back garden sipping lemonade and munching on
popcorn. I’d met often with Dennis during my year as Prime Minister, and I liked
him. He was smart, knowledgeable and experienced. He’d worked under three US
Presidents: Carter, Bush Senior and now Clinton. No American diplomat had been
more indefatigably involved in the search for Middle East peace. And whatever his
occasional frustrations, he also recognized I was ready to go further than any
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previous Israeli leader in trying to get that peace.
I knew that he would press me to tell him how far that actually was. He didn’t
ask directly. But each of his ostensibly theoretical questions was aimed at
establishing whether I could give him enough for a summit to bridge the gaps on
key issues. Could I accept a “trade-off between sovereignty and time?”
Translation: could I give the Palestinians sovereignty over a larger part of the West
Bank if we signed an agreement that would phase in their control? Could I accept
the principle of land swaps? This meant giving Arafat land in areas bordering the
West Bank, or in the Negev near Gaza, to compensate, at least partially, for the
area we would keep for the major settlement blocs. What about applying my
principle of “disengagement” between Israel and the Palestinians to Jerusalem?
Meaning Arafat getting control of the predominantly Arab neighborhoods in the
east of the city.
Dennis knew my long-standing reluctance to commit to concessions until we
got to real, final negotiations with Arafat. “We’ll not reveal anything you tell us,”
he assured me. “We won’t turn what you say into opening negotiating positions for
Arafat. But if there is going to be a summit, the President wanted some answers.”
To Dennis’s frustration, however, I could give him no specifics, beyond telling
him: “You know me, Dennis. You know I’m serious about this. Of course, we will
protect our vital security and national interests. But the problem in making peace
won’t be us, on the Israeli side, as long as Arafat shows a capacity and a will for
decision.” The translation of that, as I hoped and trusted he understood was that if
and when Arafat demonstrated that he wanted a comprehensive peace between a
new Palestinian state and the State of Israel – a definitive “end of conflict” as the
international lawyers would describe it – I would place nothing, except our security
and core national interests, in the way of getting an agreement.
Madeleine Albright visited at the end of June. When she came to see me a day
after meeting Arafat, she carried a request from the Palestinian leader: two weeks
of “preparatory” talks before a summit. Again, I knew her mission was to bring
back enough progress for the President to feel a summit was worth it. But again, I
couldn’t give her what she wanted. “I know what will happen in preparatory talks,”
I said. “We’ll raise new ideas, which the Palestinians will reject, and ask for
more.” I don’t know what she told Clinton, or Arafat. But Dennis called me the
following day. He said that Arafat had agreed to attend a summit, and would leave
the date up to the President.
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When Clinton phoned me at the beginning of July, however, he still hadn’t
finally decided to hold the summit. I needed him to know that, on my side, he’d
have a truly willing partner, aware of the political risk he’d be taking. Like Dennis,
the President tried to probe my position on land swaps, and Palestinian sovereignty
for at least some Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem. Finally, he asked if I would
rule out those possibilities if they represented the difference between success or
failure at a summit. I did not give him a definitive “yes.” I said we could think
through those issues together. But when he phoned again, on July 4 from Camp
David, I felt I had to go further. I said that, for his ears only, I was willing to give
him the assurance that, assuming that Arafat was willing to move toward us on
core issues, I would consider limited, symbolic moves on both land swaps and
Palestinian sovereignty in part of East Jerusalem.
Clinton replied: the summit was on. It would begin at Camp David in one
week’s time, on July 11.
* * *
Two days before leaving for the US, I brought my ministers together. “We can’t
know what will happen at a summit,” I said. “But we have a responsibility to give
it a chance, and recognize the situation in which we find ourselves. If we sit idle
and don’t even try, we’ll face an eruption of violence, and never know whether we
could have avoided it. If, God forbid, we fail to reach an agreement, there will also
be violence. We will face a new reality more difficult than you can imagine. But if
we do manage the strike a deal, we are going to change the map and history of the
Middle East.” I reminded them it would be up to Israelis to say yes or no, in a
referendum, to the terms of any agreement we negotiated. “If we achieve a
breakthrough, I’m confident they will do so, by a landslide.”
I said I would hold fast to a number of principles. There would be “no return to
the 1967 lines,” meaning that we would draw a new border with the West Bank to
accommodate the largest settlement blocs. They were mostly around Jerusalem, or
just beyond the 1967 border. In practical terms, over the years they had become
part of Israel. Tens of thousands of people lived there. As the Americans and even
the Palestinian negotiators recognized, no Israeli government, Labor or Likud,
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would agree to make them part of a Palestinian state. The second principle was that
“Jerusalem will remain united.” It would not be cut into Jewish and Arab halves as
had happened between 1948 and 1967. That, I knew, might prove tougher to carry
through on. But even if I had to concede a degree of Palestinian control in parts of
east Jerusalem, I expected to be able to retain Israeli sovereignty over the city. The
third principle was that there would be “no foreign army west of the Jordan River.”
In other words, if we did hand back at least the major part of the West Bank, it
would be demilitarized and we would have security control over the Jordan Valley.
Finally, we would not “accept responsibility for the birth of the refugee problem
and its solution.” Though there could be a “right of return” into a new Palestinian
state, we would not agree to rewrite the history of the 1948 war by sanctioning the
resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians inside the State of Israel.
I think it was the very fact we were talking about a comprehensive peace
agreement that made it so hard for my Orthodox and right-of-center coalition
partners. They didn’t see the attraction of coming to final terms of peace. They
knew it would mean concessions. There would be a Palestinian state. We would
give up the great majority of Biblical Judaea and Samaria. While most of the
settlers would remain, since they lived in the major blocs, those in more isolated
settlements around the West Bank would have to be moved. They saw the prospect
of a final peace only in terms of what we were giving up. They didn’t see what we
would gain: not just peace, and international recognition and endorsement for it.
But normalcy: the central aim of Zionism. Jews living in a state like any other.
Ever since 1967, we had been in control of the daily lives of hundreds of thousands
of Palestinians on the West Bank and in Gaza. That was bad for them. But it had
been bad for us too. Fifty-two years after the birth of our state, we still didn’t have
a permanent, internationally recognized border. Rather than dealing with our
economic and social issues like other states, we were beset by internal divisions
that were in no small part a result of our unresolved conflict with the Palestinians.
Shas, the National Religious Party and Sharansky’s Yisrael ba’Aliyah were all
threatening to pull out of the government because of the summit. Nothing I said
could change their minds. Sharansky was the first to declare he was leaving. A few
hours later, Shas and the NRP followed suit. If the Likud mustered the required 61
votes for the no-confidence motion it was introducing before I got on the plane to
the US, the government would fall. If the parties that had left the coalition, with a
total of 28 seats, went along with Arik Sharon, it wouldn’t be close. As if that
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wasn’t enough, David Levy, my Foreign Minister, told me he would not be joining
me at Camp David. He wasn’t resigning, at least not yet. But he knew that the final
decisions at the summit would be mine, he feared it would fail, and didn’t want to
share in the consequences.
None of this meant I wasn’t going. Even if the no-confidence vote succeeded,
the new Israeli electoral system, with its separate vote for Prime Minister, meant I
would remain in office, at least until the summit was over. In a nationally televised
message, I reminded the country that I’d been elected with nearly two million
votes. I felt I had a responsibility, and a mandate, that went beyond party politics.
“I must rise above the political arguments, and seek out all possibilities on the way
to a peace agreement that will end the conflict, and the blood, between us and our
neighbors.” I made the same points before the Knesset. I did, of course, want
parliamentary support. But I was acting on a mandate from the people of Israel. It
was they, in a referendum, who would ultimately decide on anything we might
agree. When the Knesset votes were counted, thanks to the fact two dozen MKs
abstained, both sides lost. Arik fell seven votes short of a majority. So the
government survived. But those opposed to the summit got more votes than we
did: 54 to 52.
There were several consolations as I prepared to fly out from Ben-Gurion
airport. Shas leader Eli Yishai passed me an envelope on the tarmac. Inside was a
note from Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the Shas spiritual leader whom I’d met with
privately after the election and a number of times since. He wanted to wish me
good luck. Nearly 30 reserve generals also issued a public message of support.
Perhaps most encouragingly, a newspaper poll found a majority of Israelis – 55
percent to 45 – believed I was right to go to Camp David and that I had a mandate
to make concessions in return for peace.
David Levy came over to talk before I boarded. “I doubt we’ll get an
agreement,” he said. I told him what I was telling other ministers, what I’d told
reporters and, in fact what I had told Nava. “The odds are fifty-fifty.” The reporters
took this as coy, or deliberately deceptive. So I added that it was not because I
knew something they didn’t. “It’s because there are two possible outcomes, and I
don’t know which one will happen.” The gaps of substance were bridgeable. The
question was whether both sides wanted peace, and whether each had made a
serious, strategic decision to go for it. I’d made that choice. But I had no way of
knowing whether Yasir Arafat had.
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I was confident of finally answering that question at the summit. Camp David
was different from Shepherdstown. No reporters would be there. Mobile phones
were banned. Each delegation had one landline. We’d also be operating under a
time constraint. President Clinton was due to leave for a G8 summit in Japan on
July 19. The gave us barely a week. I did wonder whether that would be enough,
even if both sides were committed to reaching a peace agreement. Yet I hoped it
would at least provide the possibility, as it had for Begin and Sadat twenty-two
years earlier, to reach a framework agreement that open the door to a final peace
treaty.
Not just the time, but the numbers were limited. We and the Palestinians could
have only a dozen members in our negotiating teams. Some of my choices were
automatic: Danny Yatom; Shlomo Ben-Ami, whom I’d made acting Foreign
Minister in Levy’s absence; Amnon Lipkin and Attorney-General Elyakim
Rubinstein; Gilead Sher and his chief negotiating aide, Gidi Grinstein. I also took
along a strong security team, including Shlomo Yanai, head of strategic planning
the kirya, and Israel Hason, a former deputy-head of Shin Bet. There was another
important, if less obvious, inclusion: Dan Meridor. A leading member of the Likud
before he’d formed the Center Party at the last election, Dan was not just a friend.
He was a man of rock-solid integrity, with a strong moral and ethical compass,
who put principle over party. He was also a lawyer, and had been Minister of
Justice under Bibi. Along with Attorney-General Rubinstein, I knew I’d have a
gifted legal team if we got to the point of considering the specifics of a peace
agreement. There was another consideration as well. Both Dan and Elyakim were
right-of-center politically. I felt I needed their voices as a kind of litmus for the
tough decisions, and concessions, I might have to consider if an agreement did
prove possible.
I was not nervous as we crossed the Atlantic, though even those who knew me
best assumed I would be. Nava had sent me off with a list of dietary instructions,
almost like a surgeon general’s warning that Camp David might prove hazardous
to my health. But I felt prepared. I’d gone to every source I could find about the
Begin-Sadat summit. I knew there would be periods of crisis and that at certain
points I’d have to allow leeway for my own team to explore possible compromises
beyond our set negotiating limits. Yet none of this altered my belief that holding
the summit was the right thing to do, nor my confidence in being able to play my
part. I did feel a huge responsibility. Decades after our conflict with the
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Palestinians had begun, seven years after Oslo, I was making an attempt, with the
participation of the President of the United States, to shape the final terms of
peace. I knew I carried the conflicting hopes and fears of Israelis with me.
And the odds really were 50-50. Either we’d come home with an agreement, to
be placed before the country in a referendum. Or we would know that, at least for
now, it was beyond reach.
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Chapter Twenty-Two
If I believed in omens, I might have turned back as soon as we got to the
summit. We reached Camp David a little before ten at night on July 10, after
helicoptering from Andrews Air Force base near Washington. When we arrived, it
was pouring with rain. The cabin assignments were also a surprise. I was given the
one that Anwar Sadat had at the first Camp David summit in 1978. Arafat got
Menachem Begin’s. Still, the cabins themselves, each named for a tree, were large
and pleasant. Mine was called Dogwood. It had a bedroom, two large sitting rooms
and a terrace. I took it as a good omen that it was the same one where Nava and I
had stayed during our visit with the President Clinton and Hillary right after I’d
become Prime Minister.
With just eight days to address the core issues of decades of conflict, we got
down to work the next morning. Clinton began by meeting Arafat, as I went
through the Americans’ strategy for the negotiations with Madeleine Albright,
Dennis Ross and Martin Indyk. Then I met the President in his cabin, which was
called Aspen. He told me that while Arafat still thought I was trying to “trick him”
into an agreement, and didn’t think we’d necessarily get a deal, he did accept I was
serious about trying. My fear was still the opposite, that Arafat was not serious.
Yet my hope was that the isolated environment of Camp David, and the wide
public expectation that we would accomplish what Sadat and Begin had done there
before, would deliver the breakthrough that I believed ought to be possible. For
that to happen, I told the President, I believed it was essential that Arafat truly
understood the importance of what was at stake. Not just the cost of failure, but
what was potentially on offer: the creation of the Palestinian state he sought, with
the full acceptance of Israel and the support of the world.
I wish I could say I was optimistic when Clinton led the two of us into Laurel
Lodge, the larger cabin a few hundreds downhill from Aspen, for the opening
session of the summit. The scene at the front door – with me bustling Arafat ahead,
with the intention of allowing him to enter before me – yielded the best-known
image from the summit. Captured by the television crews allowed into the
compound for the ceremonial opening, it spawned a cottage industry of political
speculation and armchair psychoanalysis purporting to decipher what it meant.
Some said it was an encouraging sign of “chemistry” between me and Arafat, a not
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unreasonable guess, since both of us were grinning throughout. Others concluded
that because each of us was trying to nudge the other to go in first, it was a sign of
underlying conflict: neither of us wanted to allow the other the privilege of
appearing to be polite. Still others, bizarrely, said that it was an ornate Middle
Eastern power play, with the aim of demonstrating that I was ultimately in control
of proceedings. In fact, it would turn out to be a singularly apt image of what
happened in the days that followed: a reluctant Arafat, an engaged and expectant
Prime Minister of Israel, a smiling and hopeful Clinton.
We did begin on a note of optimism. In my opening statement, I said: “Now is
the time for us to make a peace of the brave, to find a way to live together side by
side with mutual respect, and to create a better future for our children.” Arafat said
he hoped that the peace Begin and Sadat had made at Camp David would prove an
auspicious example. “With the help of President Clinton, we could reach a deal
that is good for both sides.”
But it was going to take more than noble words. The details of a peace treaty, or
even a framework agreement, were going to require negotiation. Both Arafat and I
arrived fully aware of the shape of the “hard decisions” I’d referred to months
earlier when we met in Oslo. On his side, it would come down to whether he was
prepared for a comprehensive, final peace. A true “end of conflict,” with no get-out
clauses, no strings left untied, no further claims on either side. In concrete terms,
this would mean abandoning his claim for a notional hundreds of thousands of
Palestinian refugees to resettle inside the pre-1967 borders of the State of Israel.
And what were Israel’s difficult decisions? In return for the end of conflict, I
would have to deal away the maximum possible part of the West Bank, certainly
well above the 80 percent I’d quoted Shimon Peres as suggesting when I’d first
met with President Clinton. I would have to accept the idea of land swaps, if
necessary, in order to bring the overall percentage as near as possible to the
equivalent of the whole of the West Bank. I would have to be flexible on the
arrangements to ensure Israeli security oversight over the Jordan Valley. And if a
true peace was really on the table, both Arafat and I would have to consider some
form of compromise on the most emotionally and symbolically difficult issue of
all: the future governance of Jerusalem.
On the first evening, we met as an Israeli delegation to discuss our position for
the days ahead. Gili Sher and Danny Yatom helped me keep a clear overall picture
of proceedings throughout the summit. Our secure landline was operated by a Shin
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Bet technician. I assumed that, one way or another, the Americans could listen in,
but was fairly confident we were beyond the electronic earshot of the Palestinians.
I kept myself fully informed of, but at a distance from, the specific work of our
five negotiating teams. Though I could not have stayed engaged with all of them at
the same time, I also hoped the arrangement would give them an opportunity to
explore any realistic opportunity for a breakthrough and any sign of flexibility on
Arafat’s side – without committing me until there was such flexibility.
Yet for the first couple of days of the summit, there was not only no sign of
flexibility. There was little meaningful engagement. Dennis Ross and his team
drew up a paper setting out the main issues. For those on which we differed, our
positions were marked with “I” and “P”. It wasn’t until around midnight on daytwo
that the we got a first look at the American draft. The main, unhappy, surprise
was Jerusalem. This crucial issue was not marked with “I” or “P”. It said outright
that there could be two capitals, one Israeli and one Palestinian, within the city of
Jerusalem. I was not opposed to the Palestinians calling Jerusalem the capital of
their state. But even in follow-up talks after Oslo, when Yossi Beilin and Abu
Mazen had explored avenues toward a possible resolution of the Jerusalem
question, the maximum understanding was that Israel might expand the existing
city limits to accommodate the “two capital” solution. The Palestinians’ capital
would be in Abu Dis, one of the villages Arafat had asked me to hand back in May.
The way the American document was worded suggested dividing Jerusalem as it
now was: something ruled out by all Israeli politicians, of all parties, ever since
1967.
When I phoned President Clinton, he asked me to come talk. We sat on the back
terrace of his cabin, looking out incongruously on a beautifully tended golf hole
installed by Dwight Eisenhower. I told the President that after all the hours we had
spent together, I’d felt blindsided by the inclusion of a proposal on Jerusalem that
went beyond anything we’d talked about. “It was my mistake,” he replied,
obviously already aware through his negotiators of the error. He said that he’d put
pressure on his negotiators to get the document finished, and that Dennis hadn’t
had time to read it through. But it was already being fixed: the word “expanded”
would be added to the Jerusalem section. I was grateful for that, but told Clinton I
was concerned that even this “I and P” paper might have the unintended effect of
delaying any real progress. “Since it’s an American document, it gives the
Palestinians no incentive to compromise,” I said, suggesting that it might be better
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simply to withdraw the paper. Clinton’s answer encouraged, and surprised, me.
“We agree,” he said. “The paper no longer exists.” It soon turned out the
Palestinians were unhappy with it too, but for another reason. On the lookout for
validation of Arafat’s insistence that Camp David was an Israeli “trap”, they were
convinced that the paper had Israel’s fingerprints all over it. That wasn’t true. The
one change we’d insisted on was because it misrepresented our position on
Jerusalem. Still, since Dennis had added the word “expanded” to the Jerusalem
section in longhand, the Palestinians were convinced of Israel co-authorship.
In fact, three days into the summit, the mood among the Palestinians seemed
increasingly aggrieved. Not just the Americans, but some members of my own
team, were urging me to show more “personal warmth” towards Arafat. I did
always exchange greetings and pleasantries with him at mealtimes in Laurel
Lodge, but even there, I admit, that I didn’t exactly show enthusiasm, much less
ebullience. After one dinner, when I’d been placed between the Palestinian leader
and Chelsea Clinton, the President’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger,
asked me why, rather than talking to Arafat, I’d spent almost the entire time
chatting with Chelsea. My response was only half-joking: “Given the choice, who
wouldn’t?”
It wasn’t only that I believed a charm initiative would come over as contrived. I
didn’t want to risk misleading Arafat, the other Palestinians and possibly the
Americans as well, by giving them the impression I was satisfied with the progress
of the summit, or felt that we were heading towards any serious engagement and
compromise on the core issues. I had met Arafat many times before Camp David. I
had made it clear in all of those meeting that, despite differences on a range of
difficult issues, I did want a final peace agreement and that I was ready to consider
the tough decisions necessary to make it possible. At Camp David, I was not
against meeting Arafat as a matter of principle. I simply felt the time for such a
meeting, if it came, would be at the moment that we saw at least some signal of a
readiness on his part to negotiate seriously.
Still, given the strength of feeling among some of my own negotiators, I felt a
responsibility to give it a try. I told Yossi Ginossar, the former Shin Bet officer
who was closest to the Palestinian leader among the Israelis, to set up an informal
meeting. I added, to Yossi’s obvious satisfaction and surprise, that I’d be willing to
have the meeting in Arafat’s cabin if that’s what he preferred. The next afternoon, I
went there for tea and baklava. Abu Mazen, his top political adviser and the main
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Palestinian architect of Oslo, was with him, along with a more junior aide who
served the tea and sweets. At least this time, Arafat didn’t take notes as we spoke.
The mood was friendly. We talked about a whole range of issues. With ony one
exception: what was really happening, or what should happen, in the summit talks.
I found the exercise disappointing as a result. But Yossi Ginossar assured me it
would help the atmosphere, and would eventually translate into negotiating
progress. “I hope so,” I said.
It wasn’t until day-four that real talks began. The Americans arranged for
negotiating teams from both sides on borders, the refugee issue, and Jerusalem to
meet with President Clinton. The Palestinians participated, but showed no sign at
all of a readiness to compromise. Borders should have been the most
straightforward. Assuming we wanted a deal, it was about sitting down with a map
and working out how to address both sides’ arguments. But Arafat’s representative
in the meeting – the Oslo negotiator Abu Ala’a – said he wouldn’t even discuss
borders without a prior agreement to land swaps ensuring Palestinian control over
an area equivalent to 100 percent of the West Bank. Shlomo Ben-Ami did try to
find a way around this. He suggested the Palestinians assume that to be the case for
the purposes of the meeting, so that at least there could be meaningful discussion
of the border, including the provisions Israel wanted in order to retain the major
settlement blocks. President Clinton agreed that made sense. He said that without
talking about the substance of such issues, there wasn’t going to be a deal. Even
Abu Ala’a seemed receptive, according to Shlomo. But he insisted that he would
have to ask Arafat first whether it was okay.
On refugees, pretty much the same thing happened. The Americans, and I
assumed at that point even the Palestinians, knew that a peace deal would be
impossible if we agreed to hundreds of thousands of refugees entering Israel – in
effect leaving the state created in 1948 with a Jewish minority. But when President
Clinton began trying to narrow down details of a compromise resettlement package
– how many refugees would return, where they would go, and how to arrange
international financial support for them – Abu Mazen insisted that nothing could
be discussed until without a prior Israeli acceptance of the “principle of the right of
return.” On Jerusalem, according to Gilead Sher, the President didn’t even try to
find common ground on the core issue: sovereignty. Instead he used the formula
Shlomo Ben-Ami had suggested, telling each side to proceed on the assumption
sovereignty was decided in its favour, and to concentrate instead on how everyday
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municipal functions and daily life would be divided between Israel and the
Palestinians under a peace agreement.
When I convened our negotiators in my cabin to take stock of the logjam, I was
getting more and more skeptical of finding a way to get to actual negotiation on the
“hard decisions” I assumed both sides knew we’d have to make. I told our team we
could not play that game. Until there was at least some movement from Arafat, I
didn’t want them suggesting any Israeli concessions. We’d obviously get nothing
in return. The summit would fail. Despite my repeated insistence both to the
Americans and Palestinians that, without an agreement, any Israeli suggestions
would be null and void, that didn’t mean they would simply be forgotten. The
result is that we’d actually be in a worse situation than before Camp David.
Politically, I’d find myself in much the same position as President Assad, after the
leak of the American draft from Shepherdstown: apparently ready to consider
giving Arafat the great majority of the West Bank, without the slightest sign Arafat
was ready for a full and final peace. But that wasn’t my main concern. It was that
anything that we put on the table here would handcuff future Israeli governments if
and when an “end of conflict” agreement became possible.
Still, when Dennis Ross learned from my negotiators what I’d decided, he was
frustrated and upset. He came to see me on Saturday morning – day-five of what
was looking increasingly like a stillborn summit. “This summit was your idea,” he
said, reminding me that the President had agreed to it over the reservations of a lot
his own aides. He told me that at a minimum, I had to help give it a chance: by
giving him my true negotiating “red lines.” Either that, or give my negotiators
more leeway to explore compromises. I did not want to make Dennis’s job any
more difficult than it already was. And I told him I was still ready to engage fully
if we ever got to the real substance of a possible deal. “But I can’t do what you’ve
asked me,” I replied. “Not when Arafat is simply holding firm and not showing a
willingness even to look for compromises.”
Fortunately for my relationship with the President – though not for the
prospects of an agreement – Clinton had considerably more sympathy with my
position after his next meeting with both sets of negotiators that afternoon. It was a
return encounter with Abu Ala’a on territory and borders. Shlomo Ben-Ami now
produced a map of the West Bank with our proposed breakdown into the areas that
would be controlled by a Palestinian state, the part Israel would retain to
accommodate the major settlements, and territory which we suggested would go to
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the Palestinians after a transitional period. The part we had earmarked for
Palestinian control was now a bit over 85 percent of the West Bank, more than I’d
indicated to the President in our first meeting a year earlier. But while Abu Ala’a
had told Clinton he would ask for Arafat’s permission at least to negotiate, he
clearly hadn’t received it. He refused to talk about the map, or even respond to
Clinton’s suggestion that the Palestinians present a map of their own, until we did
two things: accept the principle of land swaps and reduce the size of the territory
we were suggesting for the settlement blocs. To Shlomo’s, and I’m sure even more
so to Abu Ala’a’s, astonishment, the President exploded. He told Abu Ala’a that to
refuse to provide any input or ideas was the very opposite of negotiation. It was an
“outrageous” approach. He stormed out.
It was late that evening when the first move toward the “make-or-break”
situation I had hoped for seemed to occur, though still with much more likelihood
of break than make. The President decided the only way to make progress was to
sequester a pair of negotiators from each side overnight. Their task would be to
search honesty for the outlines of a possible peace agreement. They were to update
Arafat and myself and then report to Clinton the next day. Then, we’d see where
we were. I agreed to send Shlomo and Gili Sher, my former “back-channel”
negotiators. I knew that whatever guidelines I gave them, they would probe beyond
them, just as they’d done in the back-channel talks. They were negotiators. They
were also smart, creative, badly wanted an agreement and, like me, believed it
ought to be possible. Though I would retain the final word to approve or reject
what they suggested, I knew that only in a legal sense could it be null and void. I
also recognized, however, that we had to be willing to push further, both to find
out for certain where the Palestinians stood and to convince the Americans we
genuinely wanted an agreement.
Shlomo and Gili left a little after midnight for Laurel Lodge. Marine guards
were posted at the doors, with orders that neither negotiating team was to leave
until morning without notifying the President’s staff. Mother Nature provided a
further incentive to stay inside, since it was again bucketing down with rain. The
negotiators talked not just through the night, but the next morning as well. It
wasn’t until early afternoon that Shlomo and Gili came to my cabin to report on
how they’d gone. As I’d anticipated, both of them had ventured beyond
concessions that I was ready to consider, at least at a time when we weren’t even
near to a final peace deal. Taking the President’s instructions to heart, they’d said
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they were willing to consider full Palestinian sovereignty over two Arab
neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and even some form of Palestinian authority and
control in the Christian and Muslim quarters inside the walls of the Old City. They
had dropped our insistence on Israeli control over the Jordan Valley, suggesting
that we hold on to only a small segment of the border with Jordan. They had gone
beyond the share of the West Bank allocated to a Palestinian state on the map that
Abu Ala’a wouldn’t even look at. Now, they suggested around 90 percent. But
when I asked what the Palestinian negotiators, Saeb Erekat and Mohammed
Dahlan, had proposed in return, the answer was almost nothing. They had taken
notes. They had asked questions. The one Palestinian proposal, from Saeb Erekat,
was on Jerusalem: Palestinian sovereignty over all the city’s predominantly Arab
areas, and Israeli sovereignty over Jewish neighborhoods. In other words, a
division of the city.
Even though I was concerned that Gili and Shlomo had gone so far, especially
on Jerusalem, I’d reached the point where I doubted that even that would matter.
We were now in day-six of the summit, barely 48 hours from President Clinton’s
departure for the G-8 summit, and we were negotiating only with ourselves.
Knowing that the President planned to go see Arafat, I sat down and wrote him a
note – emotional not just because I did it quickly, but because of how deeply let
down I felt by the Palestinians’ deliberate avoidance of a peace deal which, with
genuine reciprocity, should have been within reach. “I took the report of Shlomo
Ben-Ami and Gilead Sher of last night’s discussion very badly...” it began. “This is
not a negotiation. This is a manipulative attempt to pull us to a position we will
never be able to accept, without the Palestinians moving one inch.” I reminded
President Clinton that just as he was taking political risks, I was too. “Even the
positions presented by our people last night, though they are not my positions,
represent an additional risk,” I said.
I said I doubted there would be another Israeli leader willing to engage in
serious efforts for a final peace agreement with the Palestinians after what had
happened here. Unless things changed dramatically, I was not prepared for us to
throw out further suggestions, or consider painful concessions. “I do not intend to
allow the Israeli state to fall apart, physically or morally. The State of Israel is the
implementation of the dream of the Jewish people, for generation upon generation.
We achieved it after enormous effort, and at the expenditure of a great deal of
blood and sweat. There is no way I will preside at Camp David over the closing of
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this saga.” I told the President that I still believed that we were facing a “moment
of truth.” But only if he could “shake” Arafat, and get him to sense the enormity of
the stakes – an independent Palestinian state, versus more, and undoubtedly
deadlier, violence.
And if it did come to armed conflict? “When the people of Israel will
understand how far we were ready to go, we will have the power to stand together,
unified, in such a struggle, however tough it will become, even if we will be forced
to confront the entire world. There is no power in the world that can force on us
collective national suicide. Peace will be achieved only if there is a willingness to
negotiate on both sides. I am sure the people of Israel, and the American people,
will understand it when the details will be revealed.”
Clinton had already left for Arafat’s cabin by the time Danny Yatom went to
deliver the letter. But the President, too, was in a more sober and downbeat mood
by the time that meeting was over. Late that night when, having now read my note,
he joined me on the balcony of Dogwood. He looked exhausted. “It was the
toughest meeting I’ve ever had with Arafat,” he said. Clinton said he had told the
Palestinian leader that only one side, the Israelis, had so far been negotiating in
good faith. If Arafat was not prepared to make a genuine effort to reach an
agreement, then there was no choice but for all of us to go home. Now, it seemed,
both the President and I were left to wait and see what, if anything, Arafat came up
with in reply.
“I’ve been through battles, and danger, in my life,” I said. “But in terms of my
responsibility, today, for me as well, was probably the toughest. Shlomo and Gili
went beyond what I could live with. If this offer can’t move him, then I believe we
are left to prepare for war.” I told the President he didn’t even need to phone me
after hearing from Arafat if all he offered was some clever half-reply. Only if it
was serious and substantive. I also reminded him that while he’d promised Arafat
that he would not “blame” the Palestinians if the summit failed, that had been on
the basis of negotiating in good faith. I hoped that, if the summit collapsed in these
circumstances, he would keep to that standard.
Finally, I touched on an immediate concern if the summit broke up. For months,
the Palestinians had been talking about simply “declaring” a Palestinian state. The
Americans had insisted neither side should resort to unilateral action in a conflict
whose resolution depended on mutual agreement. The Europeans had been less
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explicit. I told President Clinton I could speak only for how I would respond if a
state was indeed declared without a peace deal. “We will extend Israeli sovereignty
over the major settlement blocs. We will establish a security zone in the Jordan
valley, and let them know that there will be a heavy price should they attack any of
the outlying settlements.” In other words, Palestinian unilateral action would
prompt unilateral Israeli action. “And the confrontation will begin.”
* * *
Clinton seemed, if not completely revived, considerably more upbeat when he
came back to see me an hour later. He told me that he had received the
Palestinians’ answer. The way he described it to me, Arafat had agreed to leave
President Clinton to decide the amount of West Bank land that would go to a
Palestinian state, a figure he now told me that he was assuming would end up at
around 90 to 92 percent. The trade-off, he said, would be a limited, “symbolic”
land swap. Arafat also wanted control of the Jordan Valley, but had agreed to
begin negotiating on Israeli security needs there as soon as possible. Then, came
Arafat’s counter-conditions, which appeared to bother the President much less than
they did me. Everything would be contingent on an unspecified, “acceptable
outcome on Jerusalem.” And despite Clinton’s emphasis that any meaningful
agreement had to include a formal declaration that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
was “over,” Arafat was insisting that could come only after the terms of whatever
we agreed were fully implemented.
Still, it was at least a step forward. Clinton seemed genuinely encouraged, and I
didn’t want to risk closing off this first chink of light. I suggested, for instance, that
we could address Arafat’s reluctance about an “end of conflict” statement by
providing an American guarantee that the terms of the deal would be implemented.
Still, it very soon became clear that any hope of real progress rested on by far
the most difficult issue: Jerusalem. Across party boundaries, even across divisions
between religious and secular, nearly all Israelis viewed the city as not just our
capital, but the centrepiece of the state. It had been divided after 1948. The Old
City, and the site of the ancient Jewish temple, had been under Jordanian rule for
19 years when our forces recaptured it in the Six-Day War. It was under a Labor
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government that the area around the temple’s surviving Western Wall, left uncared
for under the Jordanians, was cleared and a stone plaza put in place for worshipers
– at the expense of parts of the old Moroccan Quarter. It was under Labor, too, that
Israel unilaterally expanded Jerusalem’s city limits to take in more than two dozen
adjacent Arab villages on the West Bank. No Israeli government since then, Labor
or Likud, had deviated from a shared pledge that Jerusalem would remain Israel’s
undivided, sovereign capital under any eventual peace agreement.
Yet when I met Clinton the next morning in Laurel Lodge, he insisted we had to
find some room for flexibility. He said that, of course, Israel would retain
sovereignty over the Temple Mount: the site of the Western Wall and, above it, the
Al-Aqsa mosque complex. “But without damaging your sovereignty,” he argued,
“we have to find a way to draw a picture for Arafat that includes some measure of
Palestinian control in part of the city.”
“Could you agree to Arafat having an office, maybe, inside the walls of the Old
City,” he asked me. What about a form of administrative control in some of the
outlying Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem? I replied that I couldn’t possibly
answer any of his questions until and unless it was clear that Arafat accepted our
sovereignty over – and our national and religious connection with – the Temple
Mount. Yet I said I understood that we would have to reach some compromise
agreement on the city if we were ever going to have a chance of a peace
agreement. “But it’s an issue that is difficult for every Israeli,” I told him. Before I
could even begin to see whether there was a way forward, I would have to take it
through with my entire negotiating team. Then, we could discuss it.
It turned out to be the most open, serious, searching discussion I was a part of
during all my years in public life. It began, on the terrace of my cabin, at two in the
afternoon and went on until sundown. I introduced it by saying what each of us
already knew: Jerusalem was the most emotionally charged and politically
complex issue of all. Our maximum position coming into the summit had been that
we would again expand the municipal boundaries of the city, as we’d done after
the 1967 war, in order to accommodate two separate “city councils.” One would be
in Abu Dis, just to the southeast of the Old City, almost literally in the shadow of
the Temple Mount. The understanding was the Palestinians would be free to
rename the village, referring to it by the Arabic name for Jerusalem: Al Quds. I
said that we should use that position as a starting point, and discuss how, or
whether, we might go further. All I added was the need to be aware of what was at
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stake. I didn’t know whether peace was within reach. I was still deeply skeptical.
But if it was, we had to accept that Jerusalem would be key. And if the summit
failed, for whatever reason, what inevitably awaited us was “confrontation.”
Israel Hasson, the Shin Bet veteran, spoke first. He saw two choices. Either we
could retain Isrsaeli sovereignty over a “united Jerusalem” with functional, day-today
autonomy for the Palestinians in their neighborhoods, or we could in effect
divide the city. “Divide sovereignty.” He didn’t say which he favored, only that it
was essential that we made the decision now if we could, however difficult or
reluctant Arafat was as a negotiating partner. If we waited, we’d end up having to
deal with Islamists: Hamas and Islamic Jihad. Oded Eran, the career diplomat
whom I’d put in charge of frustrating, formal talks with the Palestinians in the
months preceding the summit , said he was convinced that we should give the
Palestinians full sovereignty over at least the “outer” Arab neighborhoods in East
Jerusalem, which had become part of the city only when we’d expanded the city
boundaries after 1967. He said that was in Israel’s own interest. We had no historic
connection to these Arab villages, and something like 130,000 Palestinian lived
there. “Why should we want to annex them,” he asked. It would be like accepting
the “right of return” through the back door.
Dan Meridor’s voice, for me, was especially important. I knew he was as
determined as I was to try to get a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But he
was also a former Likudnik, and a native Jerusalemite. “I’m against any
concessions when it comes to Israeli sovereignty,” he said. “Any attempt to divide
Jerusalem would be a serious blow, and not just for Jews in Israel.” For centuries,
Jewish communities all over the world, had looked to Jerusalem, prayed for
Jerusalem. The yearly Seder meal, on Passover, ends with the Hebrew phrase:
Shanah haba b’Yerushalaim. Next year, in Jerusalem. “What we decided here in
Camp David,” Dan said, “also affects Jews in New York. In Moscow. In
Johannesburg.” He urged us to focus instead on offering Arafat as attractive as
possible a package of concessions on all the other issues. “Then let him decide.
But even if sovereignty over Jerusalem means that the deal collapses, I’m not
willing the pay that price.”
No voices were raised. It was the rarest of political discussions. People offered
their views, and listened to others’. Amnon Lipkin pointed out that a large area of
what was now came inside the boundaries of Jerusalem was not part of the city
he’d known before 1967. Echoing Oded Eran, he said: “It’s in our interest for as
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many as possible of the Arab inhabitants to come under the authority of the
Palestinians, and as few as possible under our rule.” Amnon’s bottom line was that
we could not give up Israeli sovereignty over the Temple Mount, which, although
he was a non-observant Jew, he called “the cradle of Jewish history.” But equally,
we couldn’t and shouldn’t “run the Al-Aqsa mosque.” He was also in favor of
agreeing to what Clinton had asked of me: giving Arafat a base in the Muslim
Quarter of the Old City. His one caveat was that we should not do any of this
unless it was part of a genuine, final, peace agreement with the Palestinians.
Danny Yatom urged us to move beyond our emotions and look for a practical
solution. “We all know how the boundaries of Jerusalem were drawn,” he said,
referring to the post-1967 expansion of the city. “They’re not holy. It is important
to get down to our real red lines.” Eli Rubinstein, the attorney general, agreed.
Even though he was an observant, Orthodox Jew, and more sympathetic politically
to Likud than Labor, he concluded that we needed to include “as few Arabs as
possible” under Israeli sovereignty, and to cede the outer villages to the
Palestinians, adding: “This is a moment of truth.”
It was nearly five hours before I brought the discussion to a close. “This is as
grave a decision as when Ben-Gurion accepted the partition plan in 1947; the
declaration of the state; or the most tense moments of the Yom Kippur War,” I
said. “Or the decisions which Begin took in this same place.” Of course, Begin
hadn’t even been willing to enter into discussion on Jerusalem. But we were in a
different situation. If we were going to get a true end to our conflict, the question
of Jerusalem had to be addressed. “We can’t delay the decision. We can’t avoid it.
We will have to decide.” My own red line was the same as Amnon Lipkin’s:
“sovereignty over the site of our First and Second Temples.” Even shared
sovereignty elsewhere within the Old City seemed to me a step too far at this stage,
but I didn’t rule it out as part of a full peace. “Without disengagement from the
Palestinians, without an end of conflict,” I reminded our negotiating team, “we’re
heading toward further tragedy. We can’t pretend we don’t see the iceberg.”
I asked several members of the team, under Shlomo Ben-Ami, to draft a paper
based on our discussion. Since I knew that Clinton, and Arafat too, could do
nothing of substance until I’d resolved how far to go on Jerusalem, I went to see
the President. I told him about our session. I said that we were now crystallizing
what had been said into a formal position, and I hoped to be able to return in a few
hours with “the furthest point we can go.” Clinton said that would be a critical
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moment in the summit. If we could find common ground, he said, Israel would
have achieved what had eluded it under Rabin, and even Ben-Gurion: “end of
conflict, and Jerusalem recognized internationally as your capital.” I told him that
the discussion with my negotiators had been moving and illuminating. “I could see
how much it weighed on everyone.” But I added that I still did not feel anything of
a similar nature, or remotely as serious, was happening on the Palestinian side. I
also said that in deciding how to proceed, I couldn’t ignore political realities back
home. I would have to get any major change in our position concerning Jerusalem
through the Knesset, even before putting a peace agreement to a referendum.
“When will you get back to me with your paper?” he asked. I said I’d try by
midnight. I also asked him whether he could delay going to the G8 summit in
Japan, for which he was due to leave Camp David on the morning of the 19 th . That
meant we had just one full day left. I said even if the plan was to resume our talks
afterward, I couldn’t move on Jerusalem right before we recessed. It would mean
“putting my last and best offer on the table” and running the risk of leaks in Israel
while Clinton was gone. He said that he had to go to the G8, but would try to put
off leaving for a further day. Then, he asked me to draw up a list of questions for
him to present to Arafat so that we could solidify our understanding of how far he
was ready to go for peace.
I had Shlomo get busy on the list of questions. But it took time. We reconvened
around eleven at night, to discuss both the questions and the Jerusalem package.
Though it retained Israeli sovereignty over the entirety of the Old City, it did give
the Palestinians a greater measure of control over other areas of East Jerusalem
than any Israeli government had been willing to consider in the past. Still, almost
everyone in the negotiating team could live with it, assuming it became the critical
element in a final peace. Dan Meridor, alone, remained firmly opposed, though
Elyakim Rubinstein also had some reservations. Even Dan said he understood the
importance of getting a peace agreement, if indeed it was possible, and our
readiness to discuss new proposals on Jerusalem.
When I left for Clinton’s cabin at about 1:00 am on Wednesday, I had no idea I
was about to enter the most difficult meeting – and the only real fight – I had with
him during our long effort to achieve a Middle East peace. I brought Shlomo and
Danny with me, which meant that Madeleine Albright, Dennis and Sandy Berger
stayed as well. I sensed tension in all of them, in large part, I soon discovered,
because they took exception to the more than twelve hours we had spent discussing
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and refining our position on Jerusalem. I think Clinton expected a formal offer
from us. Since I’d been guided by his request for a list of questions for Arafat,
however, that is what we came to him with. As we’d discussed, I wanted finally to
elicit some sign of whether Arafat, too, was ready to make difficult decisions.
The questions were specific. “Will you accept an agreement that stipulates the
following...” it began, and proceeded to outline the kind of peace we could accept
and still hoped for. The points included not just Jerusalem, but areas I knew would
also be sensitive for Arafat, such as the “right of return” and formal agreement to
an end of conflict. We went further than before in some areas. One of the outer
East Jerusalem neighborhoods would be under Palestinian sovereignty. The rest of
the city would remain under Israeli sovereignty, but most of the other Arab villages
would be subject to a system of Palestinian administration. The Haram al-Sharif,
the mosque complex above the wall of the Jewish temple, would be under
Palestinian “administrative and religious management.” We also suggested
“special arrangements” implying a Palestinian presence in the Old City, but again
under Israeli sovereignty. The questions envisaged eventual Palestinian control in
the Jordan Valley, with an Israeli security zone for 12 years, rather than our
proposal in pre-summit talks for 30 years. Then, explicitly, we proposed a question
to Arafat to confirm my understanding with Clinton that the “right of return”
would apply not to Israel proper, but to a Palestinian state on the West Bank and
Gaza. Finally, the document said: “I understand that such an agreement constitutes
an end of conflict.”
After he read it, the President blew up. Far from the “bottom lines” he’d
apparently hoped for, but which I’d never thought were expected at this stage, I
seemed to be retreating from ideas Shlomo and Gili had presented in their all-night
session with the Palestinians. Given the ground rules of that exercise, they’d felt
able to go beyond anything we’d actually agreed, and in some areas beyond what
they knew I could support. As a result, the list of questions assumed Israel would
keep a little more than 11 percent of the West Bank, nearly one percent more than
Shlomo had mentioned. Shlomo and Gili had also raised the possibility of up to
three of the outer Jerusalem villages coming under full Palestinian sovereignty.
“You keep us, and Arafat, waiting for 13 hours,” Clinton fumed, his face nearly
scarlet. “And you want me to present something less than you’ve already offered.”
He said he wouldn’t do it. “This is not real. It’s not serious.” He said that he’d
gone to Shepherdstown in search of what was supposed to be an endgame with the
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Syrians. Then to Geneva to see Assad, “where I felt like a wooden Indian, doing
your bidding. I will not let it happen here. I will simply not do it.”
I tried to keep my voice steady when I replied. I explained that the issues we
were addressing went to the heart of Israel’s interests, its future security, its
identity and definition as a nation. I had a responsibility to tread carefully. Then,
my voice rising too, I came back to what I felt was the real problem. Arafat and his
negotiators had been sitting and waiting for me and my team, and probably Clinton
as well, to deliver more and more concessions with no sign that they were willing
to move on anything. “I find that outrageous,” I said. I did not expect Arafat to
respond with equal concessions. After all, Israel had most of the tangible assets.
“But I did expect him at least to take a small step once we had taken ten. We have
not seen even this. This is the kind of behavior parents would not tolerate in their
own children! We don’t expect Arafat to accept this, but I do expect him to present
a counter-position.”
Clinton remained adamant he couldn’t go to Arafat with a retreat from our
earlier ideas. “My negotiating team moved beyond my red lines,” I told him. The
overnight talks were supposed to be non-binding and assumed that both sides
would make a genuine attempt to get an agreement. “I can’t see any change in
Arafat’s pattern. We take all the risks.” I said I doubted that Arafat expected to
hear that we had decided to “give him Jerusalem.” In any case, the Israeli public
hadn’t given me a mandate to do that. But I would still move in Arafat’s direction,
if and when I got any sign he was willing to do the same.
The President’s anger eased. He suggested he caucus with his negotiators and
figure out what to do next. I felt bad about what had happened: not about the list of
questions, or my insistence that we could not offer major concessions with no sign
of reciprocity. But I did regret that it had left the Americans so frustrated, and
Clinton so angry. He had invested not just huge amounts of time and brainpower,
but political capital, in the search for peace.
He phoned me at about 3:30 in the morning and asked me to come back. This
time, I went alone. We sat on the terrace of Aspen. He said again he couldn’t go to
Arafat with the list we’d drawn up. But having met with his negotiators, he
suggested they draft a more forthcoming list of their own – consistent with what
Shlomo and Gili had proposed. I agreed, as long as they kept in mind that it had to
be something I could ultimately live with, and that it be presented to Arafat as an
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American proposal. I suggested the President could tell Arafat that he’d try to get
me to agree to it, providing Arafat first showed a readiness to move.
The American questions did go further than ours. They asked Arafat whether he
would negotiate on the basis of getting Palestinian sovereignty over all the outer
Jerusalem neighborhoods, as well as the Muslim Quarter of the Old City and a
“custodial role” over the holy sites. But Arafat said no. He insisted on Palestinian
sovereignty over all of East Jerusalem, including the Old City and the holy sites.
For a few hours after Clinton’s fruitless meeting with Arafat, Dennis and the
American team engaged in a rescue effort, adding another carrot. They included
the Christian Quarter as well, meaning Palestinian sovereignty over nearly half of
the Old City, including the areas where almost all Arab residents lived. Dennis
gave the proposal to Shlomo and Amnon Lipkin to bring to me, and asked two of
the Palestinian negotiators to take it to Arafat. Even offering sovereignty over the
Muslim Quarter went beyond anything I’d proposed. So did a lot of the other
American questions. Still, I said we’d be ready to consider them in discussions
with the US negotiating team – with the exception of the Christian Quarter. But
that, too, turned out not to matter. Arafat did not even respond.
Clinton called me to say we’d reached the end of the road. There were only two
options: end the summit and announce we’d tried and failed, or defer Jerusalem
and try to get agreement on the rest of the issues. I asked for time to think it over,
and he said he’d come see me when I was ready. I was tempted to put off
Jerusalem. In the admittedly unlikely event we could get a deal on the other issues,
that would undeniably be an achievement. But I couldn’t help thinking that
Arafat’s lack of engagement on Jerusalem was yet another sign that he was not
ready for the almost equally tough compromises required to resolve the other core
issues. And there was no escaping the reality that without a deal on Jerusalem, no
agreement we reached would truly represent an “end of conflict.” Moreover,
Jerusalem wasn’t just a Palestinian issue. It was of fundamental interest to the
whole Muslim world. If we left it unaddressed, we would be putting future Israeli
governments in the position of having to negotiate on Jerusalem after we’d given
back our key negotiating assets and all our leverage.
I accepted now that the search of a full peace treaty, or even a framework
agreement, looked all but impossible. Even Shlomo’s and Gili’s freelancing had
produced only a series of no’s from Arafat. But I felt I couldn’t give up. Much as
I’d been resisting it, I believed I needed to give Clinton my true bottom lines, even
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with Arafat still mute and unresponsive. That was the only way we could know
with certainty whether peace was possible. If it wasn’t, it would also demonstrate
powerfully to the Americans that we were not the party who had prevented an
agreement.
The President came to see me in Dogwood a little before 11 at night on the 18 th ,
less than 12 hours before he was due to take his delayed flight to the G8. I told him
I’d decided to do what Rabin had done with Syria. I was going to give him a
“deposit” to keep in his pocket, which he would be free to use as the basis for a
further, American proposal to Arafat, assuming it was part of an agreement with a
“satisfactory resolution” of the refugee issue and an explicit end-of-conflict. He
could present it as something which he could tell Arafat he was confident of
persuading Israel to accept. It went well beyond what I’d offered before, on all the
major issues. I proposed Palestinian rule over 91 percent of the West Bank. I was
ready for a Palestinian state to have sovereignty over 85 percent of the border in
the Jordan Valley as well, and our security zone there would stay in place for “less
than 12 years.” Seven out of the nine outer Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem
would come under Palestinian sovereignty. The inner neighborhoods would be
under Palestinian civil authority: including planning and zoning, and lawenforcement.
For the mosques on the Temple Mount, I proposed a shared
custodianship to include the new state of Palestine, Morocco and the chair of the
Higher Islamic Commission in Jerusalem. I also agreed to consider Palestinian
sovereignty over both the Muslim and Christian quarters of the Old City.
Clinton, arching his eyebrows and smiling, said what I’d offered was a package
of genuine concessions. It was more than he had expected and, he assumed, more
than the Palestinians could have hoped for. It had the makings of a potential
breakthrough toward a fair and final peace. I told him I hoped so. But given
Arafat’s behavior so far, I had my doubts.
Now, it was our turn to wait. The President invited Arafat to Aspen and, from
what we heard soon afterwards, got no hint of any readiness to reciprocate. He
agreed only to talk to his negotiators and get back with an answer. Overnight, the
Palestinians sent messages to the Americans asking questions on each of the
concessions, though still with no indication from Arafat of a response. Finally, he
sent a suggestion that since Clinton was about to fly off to the G8, we take a twoweek
break to allow Arafat to consult with Arab leaders. To his credit, Clinton
knew an escape act when he saw it. He recognized that only by confronting the
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issues raised by our proposals and showing a willingness to find common ground
would we have any hope of success. No recess, Clinton said. He needed a straight
answer. Again, not full acceptance necessarily, but agreement to treat the proposals
as a basis for negotiating an Israeli-Palestinian peace. Arafat’s answer came shortly
before dawn. It was “no”.
Clinton couldn’t quite believe it. He went back to see Arafat, telling him he was
making an error on the scale of 1948, when the Palestinians had rejected the
partition of Palestine and the creation of an Arab state; or in 1978, when by
negotiating on the basis of Sadat’s Palestinian-rights framework, they would have
ended up with a mere 5,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank instead of nearly
200,000. What most astonished Clinton was that Arafat was saying no even to
using the package as a basis for negotiations. Still, Arafat would not budge.
As Palestinian negotiators tried to salvage things by suggesting another trip by
Madeleine and Dennis to the Middle East, it was clear that even the Americans
were fed up. They knew that one side, at least, had been trying to get an agreement.
They couldn’t understand why Arafat was unwilling even to accept the “pocket”
proposals as a basis for further talks. When Yossi Ginossar, our most reliable
conduit, went to see Arafat, he found him sitting alone and, in Yossi’s description,
“paralyzed.” Clinton finally decided to have one last go. When he did, Arafat not
only remained unwilling. To the President’s astonishment, he insisted that the
ancient Jewish temple hadn’t been in Jerusalem at all, but in the West Bank city of
Nablus.
I was getting a bite to eat in the dining room in Laurel Lodge when Madeleine
showed up. She didn’t bother defending Arafat. She was as frustrated as I was. Her
message was that after the summit, it was important not to make things worse. A
negotiating process had to be kept alive. Then, Clinton sat down with me. He
delivered a similar message, but with even greater feeling. “You’re smarter than I
am,” he joked. “You’re certainly experienced in war, and I’m not. But I’m more
experienced in politics, and there are a few things I’ve learned along the way. The
most important is not to corner your adversaries, and not to corner yourself.
Always leave yourself a way out. Don’t lock yourself into a losing option.” I could
see that he was right. I also believed, as strongly now as before the summit, that
Israel’s own interests and its security were not served by an unresolved conflict
with the Palestinians. The problem was that, in the absence of an equal
commitment on Arafat’s side, any continued negotiating process seemed futile.
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I packed my bags. I told Danny Yatom to inform the Americans we were
leaving and to get our plane ready to take us back to Israel. I let the others in our
team know that we were going. A number of them, and several of the Americans as
well, urged me to reconsider. But I said I saw no point in staying. What I didn’t
know, however, was that one of the Palestinians’ original Oslo negotiators, Hassan
Asfour, had approached Dennis Ross with a new proposal: that we ask Arafat to
accept everything except the proposal on the holy sites as a basis for negotiation.
Sovereignty over the Temple Mount would be addressed in later, international
negotiations. When Dennis brought this to me, my instinct was to say no. Like so
much else at the summit, it was an inherently skewed formula: it would involve
major Israeli concessions on all the other main issues, without securing our
absolute minimum need in Jerusalem: sovereignty over the Temple Mount. I didn’t
say yes. Still, with Clinton’s words of advice still on my mind, I said that I’d think
it over.
When I met the rest of the Israeli team, almost all of them felt we should stay.
The consensus was that especially if violence broke out after the summit’s
collapse, we didn’t want to feel we’d left any stone unturned. At about 11 pm, I
phoned the President and told him that we would stay until he returned from
Okinawa. He was clearly pleased, and asked us to keep working in his absence.
When I resisted that, saying that any substantive talks needed his involvement, we
finally agreed that talks could continue in search of a formula for the holy sites. On
all the other issues, only informal discussions would be held until and unless a way
ahead on the Temple Mount was found. If that happened, and if Arafat finally
accepted the “pocket” proposals as an agreed starting point, formal negotiations
could resume. Clinton accepted this formula. He went to see Arafat and secured –
or thought he had secured – his agreement as well.
One of the President’s great strengths was his genius for blurring the edges of
potential differences in search of common ground. But when edges had to be
sharpened, this could lead to confusion. Before leaving for the G8, the President
neglected to mention to Arafat our explicit understanding that, with the exception
of the talks on the holy sites, nothing would happen until he accepted the
concessions that President Clinton and I had delivered as at least a basis for further
negotiations. As a result, Arafat’s team now set about happily asking questions and
probing my negotiators – pushing us to go further – but with no more inclination
than before to produce any concessions of their own.
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When I learned what was happening, I told my negotiators they were not to
hold any further formal meetings during the four days Clinton would be away.
Dennis’s initial response was frustration. Madeleine Albrights’s was fury. They
both made no secret of their view that I was needlessly stonewalling. It wasn’t until
a few hours later that Madeleine apparently saw the stenographer’s record of my
conversation with the President before he’d left, confirming the condition that
Arafat accept the “pocket” at least as a basis on which to proceed. That evening,
she apologized to me for the misunderstanding, and explained the mix-up to the
full Palestinian and Israeli negotiating teams.
I spent most of the remaining three days in my cabin or, when the rain relented,
walking through the woods. The Americans appeared to think I was sulking. I
wasn’t. I was trying to find the least diplomatically damaging way to navigate the
period until the President’s return. I couldn’t see showing up at Laurel at every
mealtime, mingling and joking with the Americans and Palestinians, but refusing
to enter into any form of negotiations. That would compound the awkwardness of
the situation, and also be a direct affront to Madeleine. I liked and respected her.
But I could not in good conscience help her out in her efforts to find at least some,
informal, way of moving the summit along in Clinton’s absence. If Arafat had
failed to show even a scintilla of movement with the President in the room, I knew
there was no way that he was going to do so with the Secretary of State. For the
Palestinian negotiators, who were predictably in favour of her efforts, the
definition of “new ideas” was whatever further movement they might cajole out of
our negotiators. Still, on day-three of Clinton’s absence, I got a note saying that
Secretary Albright was on her way to my cabin. I didn’t want the needless
diplomatic difficulty involved in again telling her I could not sanction freewheeling,
and decidedly one-sided, negotiations while Arafat hadn’t moved a
single inch. So I made myself scarce. Fortunately, I was wearing sneakers. I told
Danny to inform the Americans I was out jogging around the perimeter of the large
Camp David estate, and went off to do just that.
I told my own delegation I was taking time out to assess where we stood. I did
continue meeting with Gili Sher and Danny Yatom. Yet for much of time, I read. I
also did a lot of thinking. I considered the “pocket” concessions I’d agreed to, the
uncertainties and risks I’d been prepared to run, and the need to decide how to deal
with the fact that Arafat, when he had engaged at all, had said “no”.
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Once it was clear to the Americans there would be no talks until the President
returned, however, Madeline began urging me to go see Arafat personally. The two
members of our team who were the least pessimistic about Camp David’s outcome,
Shlomo Ben-Ami and Yossi Ginossar, also said they thought it was a good idea. It
was they who’d pressed me to go see Arafat for tea and sweets earlier in the
summit. But that meeting had produced not even a glimmer of negotiating
flexibility from the Palestinian leader. Yossi had said at the time that it would help
the atmosphere, and pay dividends later on. But that hadn’t happened either.
“Madam Secretary,” I told Madeleine, “eating more baklava with Arafat isn’t
going to help. The situation is simple: he needs to answer whether he views the
President’s proposal as a basis for going forward.”
When Clinton returned, he promptly got back down to business: making one
last push to see whether a peace deal was possible. He phoned me around midnight
on the 24 th of July, a few hours after he’d arrived. He told me he had sent an even
more far-reaching package to Arafat, expanding on my proposals. Now, all of the
outer Arab neighborhoods in East Jerusalem would come under Palestinian
sovereignty, in addition to the Muslim and Christian quarters in the Old City. And
Arafat would be given “custodial sovereignty” over the Muslim holy sites on the
Temple Mount. I didn’t object. Though it was further than I felt I could go, it was
within the spirit of my “pocket deposit”. The same ground rules still applied: these
were American proposals, which the President was telling Arafat he would try to
deliver if he accepted them as a basis for serious negotiations. But when Clinton
phoned me back, around 3:15 in the morning, it was to tell me that Arafat had
again said no.
The curtain had finally come down. What remained now was to clear up the set.
I did meet Arafat once more, in a joint session with President Clinton, but only for
closing statements. The President and I spoke as much in sorrow and frustration as
anger. Both of us said we thought an historic agreement had been within our grasp,
and that far-reaching proposals had been tabled to make it possible. Arafat
responded with words both of us had heard before: effusive toward Clinton,
rhapsodic about his “old partner” Rabin and fulsome in his ostensible commitment
to keep trying for peace. But it was just words. We knew he was not willing even
to talk about the kind of compromises a real, final peace would require.
The President’s remarks to the media were, by the standards of post-summit
diplomacy, unmistakably clear in making that point. He praised me and the Israeli
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negotiating team for courage and vision. Essentially, he thanked Arafat for
showing up. That was some consolation. But it didn’t alter the weight of the
message we were carrying home. Arafat either would not or could not make peace,
at least on terms any Israel leader could accept or the people of Israel would
endorse.
There were only two potential deal-breakers on our side, as Arafat had known
from the beginning. The first involved the “right of return.” We were never going
to sign a peace agreement accepting the return of hundreds of thousands of
Palestinians within our pre-1967 borders. Demographically, that was a recipe for
the inexorable end of Israel as a majority-Jewish state. It would also imply a
rewriting of the history of how Israel was born: in a war, with an almost equal
number of refugees either fleeing or forced to leave on both sides, after the Arab
world had unanimously, and violently, rejected a UN partition that would have
created a Palestinian Arab state as well. I did accept a “right of return” to the
Palestinian state we had hoped to create, as part of a final peace deal, on the West
Bank and in Gaza. I also supported the idea of a multi-billion-dollar international
fund to compensate or resettle Palestinian refugees, and was ready to commit Israel
as a party to that effort. The other critical issue was Jerusalem. I had stretched our
negotiating position almost to breaking point. The “pocket” ideas Arafat ended up
rejecting challenged a longstanding Israeli political taboo. In practical terms, they
amounted to a breach of the assurances which I and every other Israeli Prime
Minister since 1967 had given: never to re-divide Israel’s capital. Had we actually
got an end-of-conflict deal, I would have had to justify it to Israelis in a
referendum. I think I could have done so. But one thing I could not give up was our
sovereignty over the Temple Mount, the centerpiece of our history as a people and
Israel’s as a state. It was our connection with our past, a focus of what we had gone
through, what we had achieved, and what we had left to accomplish. It was
essential to who we were.
Arafat never even engaged in a discussion on the “right of return”. On the
Temple Mount, however, he was explicit. Any peace, any basis for negotiation
toward peace, had to begin by confirming Palestinian sovereignty. Besides, as he’d
told the President of the United States, he had persuaded himself there never was a
Jewish temple in Jerusalem. When I heard about that remark, I was less shocked
than Clinton. It struck me as just another way Arafat had of conveying his bottom
lines. It was a bit like stories he liked to tell about visiting his aunt in Jerusalem as
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a young boy and seeing religious Jews walking through the streets of the Old City.
I don’t know whether those stories were true. But the point was that while he had
no problem with Jews in their long coats and black hats praying in the holy city,
Jews exercising authority or sovereignty, or a Jewish state, was something else
entirely. Camp David had made it clear it was something he was not prepared to
accept.
The question which I now had to confront was what to do next.
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Chapter Twenty-Three
It didn’t fully hit me how draining our efforts had been until the morning that
the summit collapsed, when President Clinton called me to come talk to him in the
living room at Laurel Lodge. When I arrived, Madeleine was already there, sitting
on the edge of the sofa. She greeted me with a resigned shrug and a valiant but not
altogether successful effort at a smile.
“We tried,” Clinton said quietly as I took a seat in a wooden chair opposite his.
“We gave it everything.” The nominal reason for the meeting was to brief me on
the communiqué the Americans were going to issue: mostly boilerplate assurances
that both sides remained committed to seeking peace, but with an additional
“understanding” that neither would take unilateral actions in the meantime. But
mostly, Clinton wanted to reinforce his message of a few days earlier: don’t “lock
yourself into a losing option.” Don’t close the door. Don’t give up. “I won’t,” I told
him, an assurance I echoed in remarks to reporters a few hours later, when I said
that while the peace process had “suffered a major blow, we should not lose hope.
With goodwill on all sides, we can recuperate.”
But I told the President that we couldn’t just ignore what had happened at Camp
David. Yes, in the event Arafat suddenly had second thoughts about the potentially
historic achievement he’d passed up, he would know where to find me. But until
and unless that happened, I told Clinton that I assumed my “pocket” concessions
would now be firmly back in his pocket. And while we couldn’t erase them from
memory, I said it was important both of us make it clear that, in legal and
diplomatic terms, they were not going to provide Arafat a new starting point from
which he could make his customary demand for more.
“And I have to tell you that, given what has happened, there’s no way I can
justify handing him control of more land. I am not going to go ahead with the Wye
redeployments in these circumstances.”
“You don’t have to,” Clinton replied. “I’ll back you.”
Though I never discussed internal Israeli politics with any foreign leader, even
the closest of allies, I didn’t doubt that the President’s support was partly a
recognition of what awaited me once I got home. The compromises I’d been
willing to consider had gone further – much further, on the politically combustible
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question of Jerusalem – than any Israeli leader in the search for peace. Even before
I’d left for Camp David, the defections from our coalition meant we’d been left
with only 42 seats in the Knesset, nineteen short of a majority. Amid the first,
sketchy media reports that we were even talking about sharing control of parts of
Jerusalem with the Palestinians, there was a chorus of denunciation from rightwing
politicians back home. Bibi Netanyahu had largely kept out of the public eye
since his resignation after the election. Now, he issued a statement accusing me of
having “broken all the red lines held by all Israeli governments.” During the
President’s final push to save the prospects for a summit agreement, Bibi called a
news conference. He said he was determined to prevent what he called an
impending disintegration of Israeli society. “What we hear from most of the reports
out of Camp David does not answer our hopes,” he said.
It hadn’t answered my hopes either. But I had gone into the summit with my
eyes open. Frustrated though I was by the way the summit had ended, I had no
regrets about going as far as I had in trying to reach, at the minimum, a framework
agreement. In that sense, it is true the summit had failed. But when I’d urged
President Clinton to convene it, I made the argument that if genuine peace was
ever going to be possible, we at least had to know whether Arafat was interested in,
or capable of, playing his part. That question had, for now, been answered. At least
as importantly for Israel, the President of the United States and almost the entire
international community recognized we’d done everything realistically possible to
reach an accommodation. Diplomatically, the ball was in the Palestinians’ court.
There was a final achievement as well – little noticed or remarked upon in the
days immediately after Camp David, but hugely significant. A taboo had been
broken. For the first time, all Israelis recognized what their political leaders, both
Labor and Likud, had long known: a formal, final peace with the Palestinians, if
and when it came, would require us not just to withdraw from the great majority of
the West Bank, but to find a formula for sharing power in Jerusalem. Many Israelis
still believed that was a price too high, and not just Likudniks. A couple of weeks
after the summit, Leah Rabin told an Israeli newspaper that her late husband would
be “turning in his grave” if he’d known the concessions I’d been ready to consider
on Jerusalem. I found the remarks hurtful, but I understood them. In a way, they
drove home the point I’d made to Clinton during the summit: all Israelis had a
deep, emotional attachment to our historic capital. “Yitzhak would never have
agreed to compromise on the Old City and the Temple Mount,” Leah said,
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“because for him, Jerusalem was sacred from a strictly national and historic point
of view.” It was for me as well. In fact, I think its religious significance probably
resonated more strongly. Still, the major change from the summit was that even
those Israelis who found a compromise on Jerusalem unacceptable recognized that,
if they did want to negotiate a definitive end to the conflict, talking about it was
unavoidable.
At least for now, however, there wasn’t going to be a peace deal. As our El Al
707 descended over the Mediterranean for our approach back to Ben-Gurion
Airport, I faced the more immediate issue of ensuring my government survived.
This was partly in case, against all odds, Arafat showed a readiness to revive the
search for peace – but also because of the real prospect he would choose violence
instead.
* * *
Since the Knesset was about to go into recess until late October, I would have a
three-month window to reshape and stabilize my coalition – but only if we could
weather a no-confidence motion introduced by Arik Sharon after Camp David. We
did weather it, barely. Arik needed a majority of the Knesset’s 120 seats to bring
down the government. The vote ended in a 50-50 tie. The other 20 MKs abstained,
or didn’t show up. This was not because of any enthusiasm for my efforts to get an
agreement at Camp David, but because of a lack of enthusiasm for an early
election in which they feared losing seats.
Still, that did allow me to focus on the challenge of the inevitably altered
situation with Arafat after the summit’s collapse. My main concern was the
possibility of violence. Even before returning home, I’d phoned Shaul Mofaz and
Avi Dichter, the former Sayeret Matkal officer who was now head of the Shin Bet.
“Let’s hope the violence doesn’t come,” I told them. “But if it does, make sure we
are ready.” Though there was no sign of violence in the weeks immediately after
the summit, there was equally little sign of diplomatic engagement by Arafat.
Obviously relieved at the way Camp David had ended, he returned to Gaza to a
hero’s welcome, proudly proclaiming that he had refused to “give up” Jerusalem. It
was vintage Arafat: the “general” in his starched uniform and kefiyeh, fresh from
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the diplomatic equivalent of the battlefield, triumphant against the odds. It was the
role he liked and played best. His next move was to take the show on the road: to
Arab, European and world capitals, pleading that he had been the “victim” of
summit chicanery in which President Clinton and I had presented him with a deal
no self-respecting Palestinian could accept. He was also campaigning for
international support for a move, in contravention of the final Camp David
communiqué, to “declare” a Palestinian state unilaterally in mid-September.
I spoke personally to Tony Blair and French President Jacques Chirac, and also
dispatched Shlomo-Ben Ami, Amnon Lipkin, Yossi Beilin and Shimon Peres, who
was Minister of Regional Cooperation in the coalition, on a series of diplomatic
visits to make sure the true story of what had happened at the summit was
understood. As a result, the globetrotting Arafat received an almost unanimous
rebuff for the idea of a unilateral declaration of stateheood. He was told that if he
really wanted a state, he should return to the negotiating table with Israel.
By the time I went to New York in early September – joining the largest
collection of world leaders ever assembled, for the UN’s Millennium Summit –
there seemed little chance of that happening. I met privately with a number of
world leaders before delivering a brief address to the more than 150 presidents and
prime ministers. I was at pains to take the high road. None of the foreign leaders I
met had expressed any doubt that we’d gone much further than they had expected
at Camp David, and that the onus for putting diplomacy back on track rested firmly
with the Palestinians. Looking straight at Arafat from the UN podium, I said: “We
are at the Rubicon, and neither of us can cross it alone.” Jerusalem, “the eternal
capital of Israel,” was calling out for a “peace of honor, of courage and of
brotherhood” – a peace recognizing that the city was also sacred to Muslims and
Christians the world over. When Arafat spoke, it was almost as if the summit had
never happened. “We remain committed to our national rights over East Jerusalem,
capital of our state and shelter of our sacred sites, as well as our rights on the
Christian and Islamic holy sites,” he declared. He didn’t mention Jews, beyond a
bizarre reference to the 2,000 th anniversary of the birth of Christ “in Bethlehem,
Palestine.” I couldn’t resist remarking to one of the American negotiators that I’d
always thought Jesus grew up as a Jewish boy, making thrice-yearly visits at
festival time to the temple in Jerusalem, at a time when there was not a church,
much less a mosque, in sight.
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Still, in my meetings with Clinton, I assured him I was not giving up altogether
on the prospects for peace. Not only did I feel that would be wrong, as long as
there was a scintilla of hope. I believed that our continued diplomatic engagement
might provide a counterweight to any moves by Arafat to revert to violence. It was
also critical for Israel to retain the diplomatic, political and moral high ground we
had earned in the eyes of the international community from the concessions we had
been willing to consider. When the President suggested drafting a final American
paper, based on Camp David though presumably with an even more generous
proposal for the Palestinians, I agreed. I figured even Arafat might realize at some
point that if he did want a negotiated peace, the time for dithering was over.
Clinton would no longer be president in five months’ time. Unless I could find an
alternative way to refortify my coalition over the coming weeks, it was entirely
possible I’d have to form a “unity” coalition with Arik and the Likud. Still, I told
President Clinton I doubted the ticking clock would make a difference to the
Palestinian leader. If it didn’t, I believed at some point all our talk about an “end of
conflict” would give way to conflict. The only question was when.
Tragically, I got the answer only weeks after my return from the UN.
* * *
At the urging of the Americans, I invited Arafat and his negotiating team to a
private dinner in Kochav Yair on the 25th of September. The atmosphere was
surprisingly warm, for which a lot of the credit, as well as culinary praise, has to go
to Nava. “Very cordial, even congenial,” Nabil Shaath told reporters after the
dinner, nearly 45 minutes of which I spent talking alone with Arafat on the stone
terrace out back. Each of us spoke to Clinton for about 10 minutes near the end,
and the President was obviously pleased to hear us sounding upbeat about trying to
narrow any differences on the forthcoming American negotiating paper. On the
substance of our differences, by mutual agreement, Arafat and I didn’t say much to
each other. I did try to impress on him that time was getting short. His
monosyllabic reply – yes – was at least better than the alternative. I chose to
believe we could both now focus on trying again.
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The request that had come across my desk a few days earlier need not have
changed that. Even though Arik had failed, for now, to bring down the
government, he was keen to make political capital from the collapse of Camp
David. He now declared his intention to pay a visit to the Temple Mount. The
Mount – or as it was called in Arabic, Haram al-Sharif – was part of Israel. The
unsubtle point of Arik’s visit was to dramatize his determination to keep it that
way. The target of this political theatre was not Arafat or the Palestinians. It was
the Israeli public, me, and my government. In an all-perfect world, I would have
liked to find a way to block the visit. In a democracy, it wasn’t that easy. The only
way I could do so was on the grounds it was a threat to public order or security, a
judgement in the hands of our police and security services. I duly asked for the
views of Avi Dichter of the Shin Bet, and Shlomo Ben-Ami, who in addition to
being interim Foreign Minister was Minister of Internal Security, in charge of the
police. Both came back with the same answer: though we’d all be happier if Arik
stayed down on his farm in the Negev, there was no reason to expect his visit
would pose a major public-order issue, and no basis for blocking it. When Shlomo
contacted Jibril Rajoub, Arafat’s West Bank security commander, Rajoub asked
only that two conditions be imposed, and Shlomo agreed. The first was that the
visit not occur on a Friday, when the mosques would be full of worshipers; the
second, that Sharon not set foot in either of the mosques on the Haram. Our chief
of police informed Sharon that if he didn’t accept the conditions, we’d deny him
permission to go. But he agreed. When he went, for about half an hour under
police escort on Thursday morning the 28 th , he complied.
At first, we thought it would prove a one-off media stunt. But that evening,
Danny Yatom brought me an intelligence report with evidence that Arafat’s
Palestinian Authority was planning for wide-scale violence after Friday prayers, in
protest over Sharon’s visit. Danny called Dennis Ross. Madeleine Albright called
Arafat, to urge him to ensure this didn’t happen. But as Dennis would remark later,
“Arafat didn’t lift finger to stop it.”
The trouble began the next day, shortly after Friday prayers. It was also the eve
of the Jewish New Year, and the Western Wall area was crowded. As people
poured out of the mosques, a number began hurling stones, some of them the size
of small boulders, onto the Jewish worshippers and police below. One knocked out
the highly experienced, steady-handed commander of the Jerusalem police, which
I’m sure contributed to making the confrontation that followed even worse. By the
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end of the day, dozens of Israelis and Palestinians were injured. Five Palestinians
lay dead. Though the media almost instantly labelled it a new “intifada”, this one
was very different. It was not a burst of anger, however misdirected, by stonethrowing
youths convinced that a road accident in Gaza had been something more
sinister. There had been no serious unrest on the day of Arik’s visit. We would
later learn this was a deliberate campaign, waged with guns and grenades, by
Hamas and Islamic Jihad, the Fatah offshoot Tanzim, and Arafat’s own police
force.
The media had changed, too, in the 13 years since the first intifada, with the rise
of twenty-four-seven news broadcasters, including the Arabic-language Al Jazeera.
Images of pain and suffering and fear stoked anger on both sides. None, in the first
days of the violence, was more powerful, or heart-rending, than the picture of a
terrified 12-year-old Palestinian boy named Mohammed al-Durrah, sheltered by
his father as they took cover from the crossfire in Gaza. The facts of the incident,
as best we could establish immediately afterwards, were that the Palestinian
security forces had opened fire on Israeli troops near the settlement of Netzarim.
Ten Palestinians, including the little boy, lost their lives when the soldiers returned
fire. We later established with near certainty that the boy had in fact been killed by
Palestinian gunfire. But even if we’d been able to prove that at the time, I’m sure
that in the increasingly poisonous atmosphere, it would have made little difference.
Nor would it have changed the next, deeply disturbing escalation: the spread of
the violence into Israel itself, with unprecedentedly serious clashes between our
own Arab citizens and the police in the Galilee, in Wadi Ara, in the main mixed
Arab-Jewish cities, and the Negev. Beyond the political implications, the
demonstrations of solidarity with the Palestinian violence presented a security
challenge of a different order: to the ability of the Israeli police, and by extension
the government, to ensure basic law and order inside our borders. The worst of the
clashes lasted barely a week. But they left thirteen Arab Israeli protestors dead,
sparking demonstrations as far afield as Jaffa, as well as ugly incidents of mob
violence by Israeli Jews against Arabs in some areas.
President Clinton tried his best to help us halt the violence on the West Bank
and in Gaza. I doubted the Americans would succeed, but was fully ready to join in
their efforts to try. About ten days into the new intifada, I attended a crisis meeting
with Arafat, mediated by Madeleine Albright and Dennis Ross, at the US
ambassador’s residence Paris. It was nominally under the aegis of President
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Chirac, but the understanding was that Madeleine would be in charge. Far from
showing any willingness to end the violence, Arafat at first simply lied. He said the
Palestinian violence was in response to an unprovoked assault by Israeli troops,
and demanded an international “protection” force. There was a particularly bizarre
moment when I read out the names of individual Tanzim leaders whom we had
intercepted organizing the attacks. Arafat pretended he’d never heard of any of
them, almost as if I was reading from a zoology textbook about species of polar
bears. This was a man who had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What he
really deserved was an Oscar.
But people were dying. Needlessly. We ended up agreeing to a US-led factfinding
commission, as well as a number of steps to separate the Palestinian
attackers and Israeli units. I reaffirmed our policy of insisting that Israeli soldiers
use live fire only if they felt their lives were under threat. Arafat undertook to order
his security forces and Tanzim not to launch further attacks. He even phoned Gaza
with what we were given to understand were explicit orders. But it was all for
show, as we discovered when we were invited to the Elysée Palace to meet Chirac.
The French President had clearly received advance word from Arafat about his
demand for an international “protection” force, presumably with a role for the
French. To my surprise and frustration, and Secretary Albright’s as well, Chirac
insisted that no agreement was acceptable without that happening. Then, he turned
to me, demanding to know why the violence had left nearly 400 Palestinians dead,
but barely two dozen Israelis, if the Palestinians were the aggressors. “Mr
President,” I said, “just several weeks ago we were prepared to go very far in order
to put this entire conflict behind us. It is Mr Arafat who rejected the proposal, even
as a basis for negotiations. Just a basis to seek peace. He then deliberately turned to
terror. We are protecting ourselves, and our soldiers. Are you really saying that
you’ll be happy for us to sign an agreement to end it only when another 350
Israelis are killed? I’m not playing that game. Arafat started this. He has to stop it.
We know he can, and we hold him responsible if that does not happen.”
It did not happen. We tried all we could to prevent a further deterioration. I
approved moves, in co-ordination with the Palestinian police, to lower our security
profile where possible. We made sure Israeli police were not visible from the
mosques on the Haram al-Sharif. But after the next Friday prayers, a crowd made
its way to a police post at the edge of the Old City and attacked it. In Nablus, the
burial site of Joseph had long been a source of tension. Shlomo Ben-Ami reached
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an agreement with the Palestinians to replace an Israeli troop cordon there with
Palestinian police. But on the morning of Saturday October 7th, hours after the
Palestinian police took over, a mob attacked, burned and ransacked the site. They
destroyed the Torah scrolls. A few hours later, our soldiers found the body of a
rabbi from a nearby settlement. He had gone to survey the damage to the
synagogue.
That evening, I delivered an ultimatum: “If we don’t see a change in the
patterns of violence in the next two days, we will regard this as a cessation by
Arafat of the peace process.” That did, briefly, have an effect. When Clinton
reinforced my message later in the day, Dennis told me that for the first time, he
sensed that Arafat realized he had to act. But again, it was not enough, nor in
anything like a sustained manner. And with an appalling act of murder three days
afterwards, it was too late. That outrage came in Ramallah. Two Israeli reservists
took a wrong turn and ended up driving into the town. They were taken to the
Palestinian police station. Hundreds of people broke in and stabbed them, gouged
their eyes out and disembowled them. In a chilling image broadcast around the
world, one of the murderers brandished the bloodstained palms of his hands in a
gesture of triumph. Since I was Defense Minister as well, I spent the hours that
followed in the kirya. We ordered attack helicopters into action for the first time,
though with advance warning to local Palestinians in the areas we targeted. We
destroyed the Ramallah police station, as well as a militia base near Arafat’s
headquarters in Gaza. But Arafat emerged to tell a cheering crowd: “Our people
don’t care. They don’t hesitate to continue their march to Jerusalem, the capital of
the Palestinian independent state.”
Israelis did care. It is hard to say which emotion was more powerful: disgust or
fury. But if the opinion polls were to be believed, a large majority wanted us to hit
back with the full force of the Israeli army. Still, my overriding aim remained to
end the violence if possible, not make it worse. When Clinton asked me to join
him, Arafat, King Abdullah of Jordan and UN Secretary General Kofi Annan for a
summit in Sharm al-Sheikh, I agreed. We worked out a series of steps to
disengage. Arafat was finally supposed to order the Palestinian Authority security
forces and Tanzim to cease fire, and establish no-go perimeters around our army
positions. We would reopen Gaza airport and, over a period of two weeks, pull
back our forces to where they had been before the violence began. But again, it
didn’t happen. The Palestinian attacks intensified and, as I’d made clear at the
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summit, we responded. The only, brief, lull came when Arafat feared the
Americans would cancel his scheduled visit to Washington to see Clinton on
November 9. I was due to follow him three days later.
I met Clinton and Dennis Ross over dinner in a little kitchen area attached to the
Oval Office, and both seemed surprisingly upbeat. The President said he’d told
Arafat the broad points that would be in the new American negotiating paper. It
was Camp David-plus. Assuming all issues in a final peace were agreed, the
Palestinians would now end up, after a land swap near Gaza, with a “mid-90-
percent” share of the West Bank. On Jerusalem, the guiding principle would be
“what is Arab will be Palestinian, and what is Jewish, Israeli.” On the Temple
Mount, the Haram al-Sharif, each side would have control of its own holy sites.
Finally, though Palestinian refugees would be free to return in unlimited numbers
to a new Palestinian state, there would be no “right of return” to pre-1967 Israel.
The President told me that after he’d run all this by Arafat, he and Dennis had
asked whether “in principle” these were parameters he could accept. Arafat had
said yes.
I assume they expected me to say the same. But I told them I couldn’t give them
an answer. What concerned me now was the violence. Until it was reined in, I
would not be party to rewarding Arafat diplomatically. I urged the Americans to
make ending the violence their focus as well, because if they didn’t get tougher on
Arafat’s noncompliance with anything resembling a de-escalation, Israel would do
so.
* * *
Since the Knesset had returned before my trip to Washington, I’d needed first to
make sure my government would survive. The obvious, or at least the most
mathematically secure, choice would have been a deal with Sharon. Especially
since the lynching in Ramallah, there were calls from politicians on all sides for a
unity coalition between Labor and Likud. Arik definitely wanted in. The main
issue reamined the peace process. I didn’t find Arik’s specific objections to Camp
David hard to deal with. As I’d said from the start, the fact that we’d failed to reach
an agreement at the summit meant that any concessions I’d considered were now,
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in legal and diplomatic terms, null and void. The package Arafat had ultimately
rejected had not even been presented by me. It was an American proposal. Besides,
it was obvious no serious negotiations were going to happen anyway for the
foreseeable future. Arik, however, said he wanted not just a “full divorce” from
Camp David. He insisted we formally declare an end to the entire Oslo process.
I told him that was a price I was not prepared to pay for his support. Despite the
failure of the summit, and the terrible human cost from Arafat’s choice of violence
over diplomacy, there was a wide international recognition that it was the
Palestinians, not Israel, who were responsible. For us to end the Oslo process
meant inviting accusations we’d never intended to reach a peace agreement in the
first place, and that it was Israel that was closing the door. We would also risk
forfeiting the American support we’d secured by our efforts to reach a peace deal,
an asset all Israeli governments would benefit from in other circumstances and
contexts in the future.
Fortunately, I had an alternative to a coalition with the Likud. Alarmed at the
prospect of a having Sharon in the government, the Oslo-era doves in Labor, led by
Yossi Beilin, worked out a new deal with Shas. The Sephardi Orthodox party was
still not prepared to rejoin the cabinet, but it did promise a “safety net” in the
Knesset to ensure we would not have to worry about no-confidence votes while
confronting the Palestinian violence. I knew Shas’s support would waver if there
was a resumption of serious peace negotiations. Still, as Clinton continued to insist
we make one final attempt to get a deal, I felt we had a responsibility to play our
part. I wasn’t prepared to put us in the position of appearing to stoneweall his
efforts, and encourage the false narrative that Israeli “intransigence” was somehow
frustrating Arafat’s readiness to make peace.
The Palestinian campaign of violence was getting worse. An Islamic Jihad car
bomb near Mahaneh Yehudah market in Jerusalem injured nearly a dozen people
and left two dead. Hamas blew up a school bus in one of the Gaza settlements,
killing two more people. In Hadera, halfway up the coast from Tel Aviv to Haifa, a
car bomb on a main street left two people dead and more than 60 injured.
Palestinian snipers from near Bethlehem began opening fire on Gilo, one of the
post-1967 Jewish suburbs of Jerusalem, and home to more than 30,000 people. Yet
despite all this, I authorized Shlomo Ben-Ami, Gili Sher, Amnon Lipkin and Yossi
Ginossar to continue talks with Palestinian negotiators on the terms of the
President’s last-ditch peace proposal.
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By the end of November, I believed that the chances of a peace agreement with
Arafat were so microscopic as to border on non-existent, and that my own
prospects for retaining sufficient support to be an effective Prime Minister much
beyond Clinton’s departure were not much better. It was not just Arik and the
Likud, but other parties on the right that were actively attempting to bring down
the government. I was being squeezed politically: by opposition to the concessions,
especially on Jerusalem, I’d been willing to consider in pursuit of a peace
agreement, and by the ever-worsening Palestinian violence. Shlomo Ben-Ami put
it best, saying that in the view of most Israelis, “Arafat’s response to Camp David
was not peace, it was an intifada.”
By the second part of November, there were five separate motions of noconfidence
working their way through the Knesset. I could have quashed them all
at a single stroke, since Arik, both publicly and privately, was conveying to me his
continuing interest in joining a unity coalition. But I again decided against it, at
this stage not so much because I expected a peace deal, but because I believed
continued Israeli engagement in the peace process was essential to preventing
Arafat from evading his responsibility for making a deal impossible.
I could also have wrongfooted my opponents by insisting that any early election
be not just for a new Prime Minister but for a new Knesset, something very few
existing Knesset members were anxious to see happen. I did, in fact, do precisely
that at the end of November, delaying an immediate move to try to topple the
government. But I immediately regretted doing it. The game-playing side of
politics was the part I least understood, and most disliked. I recognized that to
bring down the Knesset along with me would be unfair to the country, not to
mention my own Labor Party, which still had the largest number of parliamentary
seats. In pursuing my peace efforts with Hafez al-Assad, and at Camp David, I’d
insisted I was acting on the mandate I’d received in the Prime Ministerial election.
If the peace efforts had failed, or if a significant part of the country felt I was
wrong to have tried in the way I did, surely the responsibility for that, too, should
fall on me.
I remained confident I had been right to make the efforts with Arafat, with
Assad, and, of course, to have followed through on my pledge to withdraw our
troops from Lebanon. But believing that you are right, even if later events might
bear you out, was not all that mattered in politics. You had to be able to bring the
public with you. It was clear my support was ebbing away. Looking ahead to the
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challenges Israel would face during Clinton’s final period in office and afterwards,
I knew I could not go further without seeking a fresh mandate from the country,
however unlikely the prospects now seemed.
Deciding to do so was a decision that was probably easier for me than for other
politicians. Privileged though I felt as Prime Minister to be able to pursue what I
felt deeply were Israel’s national interests, the trappings of office were not that
important to me. I’d gone into politics to do things, not for the photo opportunities.
I did still believe it was important to see the final diplomatic push by Clinton
through to its end. But I knew an early election for Prime Minister wouldn’t
happen overnight. It would involve a couple of months’ preparation.
* * *
When I called a news conference on December 9, the media, and the country,
assumed that it was about the Palestinian violence and the ups and downs of the
Clinton initiative, and I did talk about both. But at the end, I said: “There are those
who doubt the mandate I received from the citizens of Israel. I have decided to
seek a new mandate – to lead the state of Israel on the road to peace, security and a
proper civic and social agenda.” I said I would go see the Israeli President the
following morning. “I will formally resign, and run for a special election, at the
head of the Labor Party, for the Prime Ministership of Israel.”
The election was set for February 2001. The last act in President Clinton’s
attempt at a breakthrough actually came after the American election, and just a
month before George W. Bush would succeed him. Since, in practical terms, any
final agreement would almost certainly come under President Bush, Clinton’s final
negotiating paper was framed as a set of paramaters which, if agreed to by both
sides, were intended to set the stage for a final deal. On December 23, Clinton
presented the draft to both sides’ representatives at the White House. I wasn’t
there. But the accounts I got from Shlomo, Gili and Dennis Ross afterwards made
me feel as if I was. The president said he would read through the document and
then leave the Israeli and Palestinian teams with Dennis to make sure they’d
recorded each detail. He said this was no longer the starting point for further
argument on the basic shape of a peace deal. This was his considered judgement of
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what would constitute a fair agreement. He was presenting it on a take-it-or-leaveit
basis. If either side said no, he would withdraw it, and it would not be binding on
President Bush.
He proceeded to lay out his proposal. It now envisaged the Palestinians ending
up with between 95 and 97 percent of the West Bank. Israel’s military presence in
the Jordan Valley would be for a maximum of six years, after which our soldiers
would be replaced by an international force. On refugees, the solution Clinton
proposed would “make it clear there is no specific right of return to Israeli itself”
but recognize “the aspiration of the Palestinian people to return to the area.” He
proposed a joint endorsement by Israel and the Palestinians of the right of refugees
to return to a new Palestinian state. In Jerusalem, Arafat would have sovereignty
over the entirety of the Old City except for the Jewish Quarter and, of course, the
Western Wall and the “holy space of which it is a part.” Finally, the President said,
this would be a final peace: an end of conflict and, once implemented, an end to
any further claims. He wanted replies from Israel and the Palestinians within five
days. Dennis added that, while both sides could come back with reservations, if
any of these fell outside the substantive limits of President Clinton’s parameters,
the response would be interpreted as a “no” and our search for an agreement would
be over.
Clinton’s latest proposals went beyond even what I was willing to have him
keep in his pocket at Camp David. Opposition politicians in Israel, and even a few
of our cabinet ministers, promptly objected to the formula for Jerusalem. I told the
critics – as I knew I’d have to argue to the country in a referendum, in the
vanishingly unlikely event we actually reached an agreeement – that making peace
was not like making love. It was something you did with enemies. I, too, would
have preferred to say no to Clinton’s ideas on Jerusalem. But to reject them would
have placed Israel in the position of rejecting the entire Clinton paper, something I
was not prepared to do.
I sent word to the President that we accepted his ideas. We did raise
reservations – twenty-eight in all, about how various parts of the agreement would
work on the ground. But none fell outside his parameters for a peace agreement. At
first Arafat asked the Americans for more time. Then he went to Washington to see
Clinton. There, he presented his “reservations”. They were not just outside the
Clinton parameters. They rejected two key elements. Arafat said there could be no
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Israeli sovereignty over the Western Wall of the ancient temple. Nor would he
agree to any compromise on the “right of return.”
For me, that was the final answer. As one Palestinian leader remarked to me
amid the still-escalating terror attacks a couple of years later, the Palestinians had
“needed a Ben-Gurion, but we got an Arafat.” He didn’t mean Ben-Gurion the
Zionist, but the statesman who at crucial moments like the partition vote in 1947,
could give up his maximalist hopes and dreams in order to secure a better future
for his people. Arafat felt much more comfortable, more secure, when the suicide
bombers were calling the tune. Then he could whip up the crowds with promises of
“marching on Jerusalem” or jet around the world telling everyone that Israel was
denying his right to a state.
* * *
Though I now knew an agreement was impossible, for many on the Israeli left,
my ostensible allies in the forthcoming election campaign against Arik, that was
hard to accept. Particularly for Yossi Sarid of Meretz, and to a certain extent Yossi
Beilin too, the only explanation for our failure to get a deal had to be that we
hadn’t negotiated well or creatively enough. The idea that Arafat simply didn’t
want a two-state peace was anathema to them. So was the political platform I said
that I hoped to implement if I was re-elected as Prime Minister. Maybe, at some
point in the future, a negotiated peace might be possible. We had accomplished
something of importance at Camp David. We’d made clear our red lines. We knew
where Arafat stood. But for now, I believed we had to move on, both in order to
keep the situation on the ground from getting worse and to act in Israel’s own longterm
political and security interests. I said we should unilaterally disengage from
the West Bank and Gaza.
The idea was straightforward. The Palestinians’ unwillingness to accept even
the final Clinton parameters, driven home with murderous ferocity by the
explosion of violence since Camp David, should not be allowed to paralyze Israel
politically. I proposed that we map out the area we required to retain and secure the
major settlement blocs, as well as the outer East Jerusalem suburbs; a further
security strip along the Jordan River; and several other strategically important
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points. It would amount to retaining control over around 20 percent of the West
Bank, but none of the major Arab towns or cities. Though deliberately stopping
well short of share of the West Bank Arafat could have secured through a
negotiated peace, it would remove Israeli troops and settlers from most of the
territory. It would give the Palestinians ample room to set up a state if they so
chose, and conceivably to expand its area if some future leader had more of the
“Ben-Gurion” in him than Arafat. Until then, it would allow both of our peoples to
get on with their lives and focus on their own political and social and economic
challenges.
There was a second, critically important part to what I was proposing: the
construction of a physical security fence along the new “disengagement line” with
the West Bank. It was the suggestion rejected under Rabin, accepted under Peres
amid the Hamas bombings in the 1996 election campaign, but never followed
through on. Even under the new arrangement I envisaged, Israeli troops would
retain the freedom of action to respond to, or pre-empt, terror attacks with targeted
operations inside the West Bank. But the physical barrier would hugely increase
our ability to halt the attackers before they could strike.
Yet even if I’d been able to bring those on the left of Labor behind the plan, this
election campaign was going to be a lot tougher than in 1999. Since Knesset
members weren’t running for their seats, the Labor machine lacked its usual
incentive put up posters, knock on doors, or get out the vote. Arik, however,
benefited from the enthusiasm of Likudniks and other right-wing activists who saw
an opportunity to retake control of Israel’s political agenda.
Long before election day, I realized my time as Prime Minister was up. Before
the campaign began, an old friend of mine, a leading Israeli journalist, tried to talk
me into withdrawing. “You’re going to lose, Ehud,” he said. “Why, after making
all this effort for peace, after doing your best, do you want the last act to be losing
to Arik?” I’d never seen the objective as just staying in office. If that had been the
case, I wouldn’t have put the chances of a peace deal with Syria to their final test. I
wouldn’t have gone to Camp David. I also would have accepted Arik’s serial
offers to join a unity coalition. But never in my life had I walked away from a
challenge. I certainly wasn’t going to retreat in the midst of Palestinian violence,
and when Israel still faced key decisions on how to move on from Arafat’s
unreadiness to negotiate an end to our decades-old conflict.
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I did regret being unable to rely on the support of two key constituencies that
had helped deliver my landslide victory barely 18 months earlier: my own Labor
Party and the Arab citizens of Israel. I had no trouble understanding the reasons
many Israeli Arabs were abandoning me. The clashes in the Galilee at the start of
the new intifada had left more than a dozen of their community dead. As an official
inquiry would later conclude, there was blame on all sides. A number of Arab
members of the Knesset had played a part in inciting the violence. Yet the police
had been unprepared, and they had used excessive force. As I said publicly before
the election, I, as Prime Minister, was ultimately responsible, and I formally
apologized for what had happened. Yet the roots went deeper, to the economic and
social disadvantages still faced by many Arab citizens, and the difficulty in
resolving those problems calmly and collectively as long as Israel remained in a
state of war with its Arab neighbors.
For Labor and the political left, it was as if, despite Arafat’s repeated rejections
of ever more forthcoming terms of peace, they still couldn’t bring themselves to
believe he really meant it. By default, they were inclined to blame me for not
delivering peace. I was accused of relying too much on a close circle of aides and
negotiators I’d known from my time in the army, of not giving a negotiating role to
Labor veterans of the Oslo negotiations like Yossi Beilin, and of being
insufficiently sensitive to Arafat’s needs in the negotiating process. Typical of the
argument was a broadside by the journalist and historian Tom Segev, in Ha’aretz,
which accused me of an “incredible arrogance” which had “led to an historic
mistake. Rather than continue on the Oslo road, Barak put it into his head that he
could reach a final settlement and try and impose it on the Palestinian Authority
President.” I did not try to “impose” anything on Arafat. I did, quite consciously,
abandon the “Oslo road” because it was inexorably leading to a situation where,
after the final Wye redeployments, Arafat would have control over the great
majority of the West Bank without having to commit to any of the assurances that
even most on the Israeli left would define as the minimum required for peace.
Now, of course, we knew that was something the Palestinian leader was not
prepared to do.
When election day came, not that many of my critics on the left actually voted
against me. Nor did the Israeli Arabs. Yet in very large numbers, they simply
didn’t vote. In percentage terms, Arik’s victory was even more decisive than mine
over Bibi. He got more than 62 percent of the vote. I received barely 37 percent.
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Yet the turnout was the lowest in Israeli history. Arik received fewer votes than I
had in 1999. Around half of the 1.8 million people who had supported me stayed at
home.
I conceded defeat after the first exit polls and said I would be stepping down as
head of the Labor Party. Still, since the election had been only for Prime Minister,
Labor remained the largest party in the Knesset. Mathematically, Arik might be
able to cobble together the required 61-seat majority with an assortment of smaller
parties. But without Labor as ballast, his government would be even more
precarious than mine. When I triggered the election, he’d let it be known that if he
won, he hoped to include Labor in his government, with me as his Defense
Minister. Even though I’d announced I was stepping aside, he phoned me the
morning after the election to make that argument again. He said Israel needed a
strong government, especially to confront the escalating violence. Having a person
with my background, whom he knew well and trusted, in the defense portfolio was
important. I didn’t say yes. Unfortunately, I failed to do what I should have done: I
didn’t immediately say no.
When the public learned about Sharon’s interest in a unity government, Labor
descended into bickering. Some of my former ministers, like Yossi Beilin and
Shlomo Ben-Ami, were against the idea of joining any Likud-led government.
They were especially disgusted by the prospect of doing so under Arik, the
architect of the 1982 Lebanon War. Most of the Labor’s central committee did
seem in favor of joining. But given the scale of my election defeat, many wanted
do so without me. For a few days, Arik kept phoning me. I did feel that the
substance of the arrangement he suggested made sense. But over that first week, I
realized that, understandably, he had little interest in addressing my policy
concerns. I decided to focus instead on ensuring a properly organized transition to
a new Labor party leader, and publicly confirmed that I would indeed be resigning.
Several weeks after Arik formed his government – including Labor, with Simon
Peres as one of four deputy prime ministers – he invited me to his office. He
wanted to ask my views on a specific security question. That took barely 15
minutes. But I raised another issue that I argued would have more far-reaching
implications. It was the idea of building the security fence along the West Bank.
I’d tried to make the case for doing so during the election campaign, and I’d lost
the election. “Now I’m turning to you. When I left office, 39 Israelis had been
killed in the terror attacks. Now, there are 70. When the number reaches 700,
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there’s no doubt you’ll decide to build this fence. But to your dying day, you won’t
be able to look yourself in the mirror and explain why you waited for another 630
Israelis to die first.”
He did eventually start building it, but only in the wake of an act of terrorism
which, even by the standards of this new and still-escalating intifada, was truly
obscene. In March 2002, suicide bombers murdered 30 people, mostly elderly, as
they were celebrating the annual Passover Seder in a hotel dining room in Netanya.
Arik hit back two days later with Israel’s largest military operation on the West
Bank since 1967. Israeli forces retook major Palestinian towns, placed Arafat
under de facto siege in his headquarters in Ramallah and imposed curfews and
closures. In June, the government formally approved the security fence. Still,
another year would pass before the major part of the barrier was in place, by which
time some 500 Israelis had been murdered in the terror attacks. Only then did the
number of casualties begin to fall.
I tried to steer clear of public criticism of Arik’s government. One of the lessons
I’d learned as Prime Minister was how easy it was to second-guess from the
outside. No Prime Minister can act exactly as he might plan or want to. The most
you can do is make sure you understand and analyze the issues and follow your
instincts, experience and conscience to come as near as possible to doing what you
believe is right. You will inevitably make mistakes and misjudgements. I certainly
did. At least some of the criticism I received was deserved. I was at times too
inflexible. I tended to limit my focus to a small group of trusted aides and advisors.
I was less good at schmoozing with – or, perhaps more importantly, delegating to –
others in the government or the party. I suspect it’s no coincidence that the man
who brought me into government in the first place was often criticized for the same
things. By character, instinct and experience, Rabin, too, remained less a politician
than a military man. Yet towards the end of his second period as Prime Minister,
he did get better at delegating to people around him, and creating an atmosphere
that encouraged teamwork, even when he knew he could not accept or act on
everything they might suggest. During my term as Prime Minister, I was much less
good at that.
But another thing Yitzhak and I shared was a determination to set ourselves
specific goals and do everything we could to achieve them. I promised to get the
army out of Lebanon. With the Palestinians, I arrived in office convinced that the
process begun in Oslo was both a huge opportunity and a potential dead-end. I was
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determined to focus on the end goal: initially, at least, a framework agreement, and
over time a final political resolution of our conflict. Ever since the outbreak of the
Palestinians’ first intifada, I believed this was as much in Israel’s own interest as
theirs. Yet when I entered office, we had no way of knowing whether Arafat
wanted two states living side-by-side in peace. I felt it was my duty to find out,
and, if the answer was yes, to put a peace agreement in place. I felt the same about
way about Syria and Hafez al-Assad.
When I left office, I believed I had achieved the most important goals of my
premiership. We were out of Lebanon. Though we couldn’t achieve the peace
agreements I had hoped for, it was not for lack of trying. Along the way, Israel had
demonstrated to the world that it was able and willing to consider painful
compromises, and that it was the Arab leaders who, at least for now, were unequal
to the challenge of making peace. If I’d been able to retain the backing of the
voters who made me Prime Minister in 1999, we might even have moved ahead on
unilateral disengagement from the Palestinians, dramatically altering the trajectory
of our relationship. Yet even without that, Camp David did delineate the terms of
any future peace arrangement. When and if conditions allowed a resumption of
serious negotiating efforts, the shape, and indeed most of the details, of a final
peace between our peoples were now clear.
I was on holiday in the summer of 2001 when Clinton phoned me. The New
Times had run a piece on how and why the summit, and the subsequent
negotiations through the end of the year, ended in failure. When I later read the
article, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Deborah Sontag, I found it a
meandering mix of opinions garnered from an assortment of Americans,
Europeans, Israelis and Palestinians, including Arafat himself, with the overall
conclusion that Clinton and I had not offered as generous a deal as was assumed
and that it was somehow unfair to suggest the Palestinians deserved blame for
rejecting it. There had been several other articles in various publications along the
same lines. I didn’t see much point at this stage in setting the record straight. To
the extent the content of the Times piece bothered me, it was a simple, but
important, error of fact. Quoting Arafat himself, Sontag wrote that during the backpatio
discussion I had with him at the dinner in Kochav Yair shortly before the new
intifada, he’d “implored me to block Mr Sharon’s plans” to visit the Temple
Mount. Arafat didn’t raise the issue at all, and presumably knew that we had
consulted his West Bank security chief to ensure it happened quickly, avoided the
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mosques on the Haram, and would not become a catalyst, or in this case a pretext,
for violence.
Yet the revisionist history about our peace efforts left Clinton not just
frustrated, but genuinely puzzled. What the hell were these people talking about, he
asked me. Why were they missing the forest for the trees. “The true story of Camp
David,” he said, “was that for the first time in the history of the conflict, you and I,
the Prime Minister of Israel and the President of the United States, placed on the
table a proposal, based on Resolutions 242 and 338, very close to the Palestinian
demands. And Arafat refused to accept it as a basis of negotiations, walked out of
the room, and deliberately turned to terrorism.” All the rest, President Clinton said,
was gossip.
All of it was now irrelevant, too. His parameters were off the table. Palestinian
violence against Israelis was getting ever deadlier. And I was out of politics. When
I delivered my final remarks to a Labor Party meeting, I was asked whether I was
leaving politics for good. I replied that I would always remain a member of Labor.
But I saw my role as a bit like when I’d left the army. “I’m a reserve officer,” I
said, adding that I hoped I would not be called back to duty any time soon.
I had been Prime Minister for only 21 months. But I’d been in politics for six
years, and in uniform for nearly thirty-six: in public service for more than four
decades. Now, suddenly, I was a private citizen. And for a few years, I actually
stayed that way.
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Chapter Twenty-Four
I had only a general idea of what I would do next. “Something in business”
describes it best. But I sought the advice of a friend who, rather than leaving
politics, had just entered it. Colin Powell was now the second President Bush’s
Secretary of State. “Why don’t you go on the lecture circuit?” he said. The short
answer was that it hadn’t occurred to me that I’d be any good at it. But it proved
energizing and interesting both for me and, it seemed, the audiences I spoke to. It
was also lucrative. I would deliver four lectures over the span of a week and end up
making twice what, until that point in my life, I had earned during a full year. I was
also invited onto a number of company boards. I turned down some, in order to
avoid even the appearance of a conflict of interest. But I did get involved in an area
where I believed my range of experiences might be relevant: investment decisions,
and venture capital.
The result was a dramatic change in lifestyle. Nava and I got to spend more
time with our daughters. We vacationed overseas for the first time. We also
decided to build a new home, and the place that we chose gave me my first
experience of how far I was from being a “private citizen” in the eyes of the Israeli
public. When it became known we were planning to move to Kfar Shmaryahu near
Tel Aviv, one of the wealthiest places in Israel, all hell broke loose. How could
you, I was asked. I couldn’t resist joking that I just wanted to be close to our
voters. Likud supporters were about as rare in Kfar Shmaryahu as panhandlers.
Along with Mishmar Hasharon, it was the only place where I’d polled over 80
percent even in my loss to Sharon.
Israel had changed dramatically from the kibbutz-centered pioneer society of
my youth. Greater Tel Aviv, in particular, was thriving economically, and the
rising crop of millionaires, whether from traditional business or in the bourgeoning
technology sector, included its fair share of former kibbutznikim. Still, socially and
culturally, a puritanical streak remained, a sense that there was something not quite
right about people raised on a socialist ideal becoming personally well off. I
accepted this. I recognized that I was not just a former kibbutznik. I had been head
of the Labor Party. And Prime Minister. Still, I did feel much of the personal
criticism was unfair. I had devoted more than four decades of my life to serving
my country. I’d behaved with scrupulous honesty while in office, and was avoiding
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any business involvement that could present a conflict of interest now that I had
left. Frankly, I saw nothing wrong with earning money through honest endeavor,
and using the proceeds to provide economic security for myself and my family,
and to give our grandchildren a better start in life than Nava’s or my own parents
had been able to do.
In the end, we didn’t move to Kfar Shmaryahu. But that was because of an even
more profound change in my life: I separated from Nava, after more than 30 years
together. When we had begun plans to move, I laughed off a warning from a
psychologist friend of mine that decisions like building a new house could lead to a
deeper reassessment of your life. But that is at least in part what happened. There
were also other changes that caused me to stop and take stock. I was no longer
Prime Minister. My father had passed away soon after I left office. Professionally,
I was exploring new areas and developing new interests. Nava and I had been
happily married since our twenties. We had three wonderful daughters, and a first
grandchild. Yet the more I thought about where we were in our lives, the more I
felt our future paths were pulling us in different directions. For both of us, the
separation was difficult, though it was made a bit less painful because Nava knew
that it had nothing to do with another woman, or another relationship. I did
imagine that I might one day meet someone else. But I was equally prepared for it
not happening. I certainly didn’t expect it any time soon.
When it did, it began by accident. A few weeks after our separation, I was
visiting the Knesset for a discussion about fixing Israel’s broken electoral system.
In the audience was a member of one of the civic associations pressing for reform:
Nili Priell, my first, and only, serious girlfriend before I met Nava. We spoke for a
few minutes afterwards. We agreed to meet again, and catch up with each other’s
lives, a week or so later. Both of us now had grown children. We were both on our
own. There is, I assume for everyone, something impossible to replicate about a
first love. Nili and I were given an unlikely second chance. That seemed to me an
extraordinary gift. It still does.
Yet if my personal life seemed full of new promise, the same could not be said
of the country I’d served for my whole adult life, or of the political party I’d led
into government. The continuing construction of the security fence along the West
Bank finally did begin to reduce the sheer number of Palestinian attacks: from
nearly 50 in 2002, to about half that number in 2003. But the suicide bombers who
did get through – from Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Fatah’s “Al-Aqsa Martyrs’
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Brigade” – struck wherever they could inflict the most terror, and death: at bus
stations, on buses, in shopping centers, restaurants and cafés. Over a 12-month
period, beginning with a bombing of Tel Aviv’s main bus station at the beginning
of January 2003, they murdered 145 men, women and children. It would not be
until two years’ later, with the West Bank fence in place and a range of other
security measures, that the attacks, and the deaths, were finally brought down
dramatically.
The Labor Party had finally left Arik Sharon’s coalition in late 2002. But in
Israel’s 2003 election – reverting to the old rules again, with a single vote for party
and Prime Minister – Arik and the Likud won resoundingly. They doubled their
Knesset seats, to 38. Labor, now with only 19 seats, against turned to Shimon
Peres, as interim party leader.
I didn’t miss the political limelight. But by mid-2004, with the first sign of a
major change in policy toward the Palestinians, I felt I had a contribution to make.
What first prompted me to dip my toes back into politics were the ever more
obvious signs throughout 2004 that Arik’s coalition, and his hold on the Likud,
were unraveling. Part of his problem was a steady drumbeat of corruption
allegations around what had become a kind of family political operation: Arik and
his two sons, Omri and Gilad. But Arik also seemed to be undergoing a welcome
political conversion, to the need for the more profound political “disengagement”
with the Palestinians which I’d long been advocating. He had endorsed the Bush
Administration’s “road map” for resuming the peace process. Yet with Yasir
Arafat ageing, ailing and even less inclined to consider the difficult decisions he
had shirked at Camp David, Arik went one, dramatic step further. He raised the
idea of unilaterally withdrawing Israeli forces and settlements from Gaza –
ensuring a showdown with the rank and file of the Likud, and other parties on the
right. His main Likud rival, very much back in front-line Israeli politics, was his
Finance Minister: Bibi Netanyahu. Though Bibi remained on board until the last
moment, he dramatically resigned for the cabinet in August 2005, a week before
the Gaza withdrawal, declaring: “I am not prepared to be a partner to a move
which ignores reality, and proceeds blindly toward turning the Gaza Strip into a
base for Islamic terrorism which will threaten the state.”
To this day, Bibi, along with many Israelis across the political spectrum, draws
a direct line between our pullout from Gaza, Hamas’s takeover and its violent
purging of Fatah’s old guard there, and the periodic wars we’ve had to fight since
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then in response to Hamas rocket fire into Israel. The moral: Arik was wrong to
withdraw. But the Islamists’ ascendancy was happening anyway. After all, it was
Hamas attacks that provided the spearhead of the intifada of terror launched in the
wake of Camp David. Arafat’s own influence was also inexorably on the wane by
the time he passed away, in Paris, at the end of 2004, to be succeeded by Abu
Mazen. I do not know of a single senior figure in Israel with any military
experience who believes that we would be more secure today if we still had
thousands of soldiers and settlers inside Gaza. Surprised though I was by Arik’s
decision to leave, I had no doubt that the fundamental security judgment he was
making – that a disengagement was in Israel’s own interest – was the right one. I
was encouraged, too, by his parallel announcement of a small, token withdrawal
from a few small West Bank settlements. My regret at the time was that he did not
go further toward the kind of major West Bank disengagement I’d been arguing
for, and that even in Gaza the pullout seemed insufficiently prepared or thought
out. The model, I believed, should have been our withdrawal from Lebanon –
involving detailed prior consultation with, and political support from, the UN and
key international allies. I also felt it was critically important to ensure that, while
we would obviously need offshore patrols to prevent arms and munitions from
getting in, we allowed and encouraged an environment in which the Gazan
economy could function and grow after we left. None of that happened. Though we
left Gaza, we effectively sealed off and blockaded one of the most densely
populated, economically strapped and politically febrile strips of land on the face
of the earth.
Still, I did see it as an important first step toward the kind of wider
disengagement that would prioritize Israel’s own security interests, and political
and social cohesiveness, until and unless conditions allowed a for a serious new
effort for a final peace deal. I was heartened when Shimon led Labor back into
Arik’s coalition at the start of 2005 to ensure he’d have the support necessary to go
through with the Gaza withdrawal. And while I did make a brief attempt to return
as party leader later in the year, when it was clear I wasn’t going to win, I threw
my support behind Shimon and against the other challenger, the longtime laborunion
leader Amir Peretz, who was running on a platform to take Labor out of
Sharon’s government.
But Peretz won the leadership election. He did leave the cabinet, forcing Arik to
call an early election for March 2006. And that, along with the most ambitious and
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ill-fated Israeli war in Lebanon since 1982, was the reason I ultimately found
myself back in the Israeli government.
* * *
It began on July 12, 2006, when Hizbollah fired rockets from southern Lebanon
as cover for an ambush of two Israeli Humvees on our side of the border. Two
soldiers were killed, and two others abducted. A few hours later, when an Israeli
armored unit crossed to look for the kidnapped soldiers, an explosive charge blew
up one of our tanks, killing four of its crew members.
Arik was no longer Prime Minister by then. With Bibi marshalling opposition
inside the Likud to the Gaza disenagegment, he had formed a new centrist party
called Kadima, along with prominent Likud moderates and buttressed by a Labor
heavyweight: Shimon Peres. But before the election, Arik suffered a pair of
strokes, lapsing into a coma from which he would never emerge. His notional
deputy, the veteran Likud politician and former Jerusalem mayor Ehud Olmert,
found himself as Prime Minister. Kadima did comfortably win the May election. It
ended up with 29 seats, followed by Labor with 19 and leaving the Netanyahu-led
Likud with only 12. Olmert formed a coalition, including Labor, which had
undeniable political ballast: Shimon was one of his deputy Prime Ministers, along
with Haim Ramon. The gifted lawyer, longtime Likudnik and strong backer of the
Gaza plan, Tzipi Livni, was Foreign Minister. Amir Peretz, as head of Labor, was
given the Defense Ministry. But without Sharon himself at the helm, the
government was now about to face a military crisis with virtually no military
experience around the cabinet table.
Olmert called an emergency cabinet meeting on the evening of the Hizbollah
attack, and just before it was due to convene, my phone rang. It was Shimon, who,
though with no first-hand army experience, did at least have the political
experience in war that none of Olmert’s other ministers could offer. He’d been by
Ben-Gurion’s side during the 1956 war, had been in Golda’s government in 1967,
and was Defense Minister after the 1973 war, through Entebbe, until Begin’s
defeated Labor in the 1977 election. Despite our own battles inside Labor, Shimon
and I had become closer again of late, especially after I’d supported him in his last
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Labor leadership contest. “Shalom, Ehud,” he said when I answered the phone and,
without small talk or preliminaries, asked me: “What do you think we should do?”
I said I couldn’t offer specific suggestions. “It’s a detail-related question, and I
don’t know the details.” But I advised him on the process I felt would be needed to
come up with the right answer when the chief-of-staff, the former air force chief
Dan Halutz, briefed the cabinet. “Halutz will propose what to do. Push him,” I
said. “When he presents his recommended action, ask him for his assessment of
what Hizbollah will do in response. When he, or the head of military intelligence,
has given you the range of possibilities and told you which is the most likely, say,
OK, let’s assume that happens. What’s our next step? How is that going to lead us
to our main objectives? And what are the objectives?” Newspaper reports the next
morning said that Shimon, and only Shimon, did indeed press the chief-of-staff
about each further stage of the operation and about the aims that we wanted to
accomplish. But Halutz finally fobbed him off by saying that once they got to the
later phases, they could discuss it.
From the first reports I received through my army contacts, I feared the
operation would go badly. There was no doubt we could inflict damage on
Hizbollah. But there were no clear answers to the questions Shimon had raised.
The initial Israeli air force response had been put in place more than five years
earlier, when I was Prime Minister. Codenamed “Operation Cinnamon Sticks,” it
was designed to take out all of the fixed Hizbollah missile sites we had been able
to identify. We knew its limitations. A lot of the rockets were fired from mobile
launchers. But in one exercise, the known “Hizbollah” sites were replicated in the
Galilee. They were destroyed in 43 minutes. I had no doubt that part of the plan
would succeed. In the early hours of July 13, it took only 34 minutes to destroy the
nearly 60 launchers we had pinpointed over the previous five years.
But Operation Cinnamon Sticks had been intended as a first step in a far wider
assault on Hizbollah and other targets, including a number of infrastructure
installations, deeper inside Lebanon. It was part of a plan for a full-scale war, if the
government decided that was necessary. As the early public statements by Olmert
and other ministers made clear, they did not intend to start a war, at least at the
outset. They certainly didn’t have a coherent plan for one. But they would soon
find themselves in Israel’s longest single armed conflict since 1948. When
Hizbollah fired hundreds of missiles at Israeli towns and cities, our operation
intensified not by plan or military logic, but improvisation. As a former Prime
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Minister, I felt it was not my place to criticize Olmert publicly when Israeli troops
were in action. Two days in, in fact, I told a television interviewer that the
government had every right to respond and was doing so effectively. Olmert
phoned to thank me. When he, like Shimon, asked what I thought the government
should do next, I was straightforward: “Do your best to bring things to an end as
soon as you can.” I said that Halutz and the other generals would be caught up in
the operational details, which made his role and that of the cabinet even more
critical. “In any operation, you’ll have an idea about what represents a satisfactory
exit point. But there will be a temptation, when you get close to that point, to take
just one more step, to keep going until you’re absolutely sure you’ve reached it.”
Resist that temptation, I told him. I said there was a danger that, before they knew
it, he and the other minister would be in way over their heads.
In pure military terms, there were just two realistic choices in responding the
Hibzollah attack: a deliberately limited and fairly brief operation, or a full-scale
war. We ended up doing neither. The result was an operation that lasted 34 days,
nearly twice the length of the Yom Kippur War. Our air force flew 12,000
missions, more than in 1973 and nearly twice as many as in the 1982 Lebanon
War. Hizbollah fired about 4,000 rockets into Israel – from a stockpile we
estimated to number nearly 20,000 – and not just at the border settlements but as
far south as Hadera and Haifa, keeping hundreds of thousands of Israelis under
effective siege. More than 120 Israeli soldiers and 44 civilians were killed. So were
hundreds of Hizbollah fighters and, inevitably, many Lebanese civilians as well,
with a predictable surge of criticism from much of the outside world. Only
President Bush and Britain’s Tony Blair steadfastly reminded the critics of how the
war had actually begun.
The one putative victory for Israel was the UN cease-fire resolution that Tzipi
Livni helped to negotiate in August. At least on paper, it contained a commitment
to a “long-term solution” including the disarmament of Hizbollah and the
“unconditional release of the abducted Israeli soldiers, which has given rise to the
current crisis.” But as Israeli newspapers began speaking to the returning soldiers
and officers, a picture emerged not just of a long and difficult war, but a lack of
clearly communicated military objectives, and an often-chaotic chain of command,
which ended up costing Israeli lives. Our final advance, alone, shortly before the
cease-fire, claimed the lives of some 30 soldiers. And for what, many Israelis were
soon asking themselves. One of the newspapers most supportive of the operation at
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the beginning summed up the feeling of most of the country at the end: “If you
don’t win, you lose... Hizbollah survived. It won the war.”
Without the botched handling of the war, I might well have remained a mere
member of the Labor Party and a private citizen. But when the commission of
inquiry released its report in April 2007, three people were singled out: Olmert,
Amir Peretz and Halutz. Olmert was portrayed as a military novice who’d gone
into battle without understanding the wartime role and responsibilities of a Prime
Minister. Halutz’s “excess of charisma” was held responsible for keeping
ministers, and military officers as well, from questioning his judgement or pressing
him for alternatives. Amir Peretz was found to be the wrong man in the wrong
cabinet post at the wrong time. Of the three, only Halutz seemed ready to take
personal responsibility. Even before the report came out, he resigned. Olmert and
Peretz were determined to stay put, despite calls to quit not just from the
opposition but from Tzipi Livni. Inside Labor as well, the war produced a clamor
for change. When a vote for party chairman was held in June 2007, I was chosen to
return in Peretz’s place.
Within days, I replaced him as Defense Minister as well. Yet the main item in
my in-box would no longer be Lebanon. I had been briefed a few weeks earlier by
Olmert on a threat hundreds of miles further away: a construction site in northeast
Syria, along the Euphrates River, where Mossad had uncovered evidence that the
Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were
building a nuclear reactor.
* * *
I had got to know Olmert fairly well over the years, initially when I was in the
kirya and both he and another rising Likud politician to whom I became closer,
Dan Meridor, were members of the Knesset’s defense committee. But from the day
I returned to the Israeli government in June 2007, there was growing tension
between us over dealing with the Syrian nuclear threat. It was not about whether
we should take military action to destroy the reactor, before the fuel rods arrived
on site and it could begin producing bomb-ready material. Just as under Menachem
Begin in 1981, when we’d launched our preemptive strike on Saddam Hussein’s
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reactor near Baghdad, there was never any question that we would take any and all
possible measures to prevent Syria from getting a nuclear weapon. An immutable,
core assumption in Israel’s security strategy was the need to retain our ability to
deter, and if necessary defeat, our enemies. A nuclear Syria – or Iraq, or Iran –
would dramatically alter the balance of power in the region, at obvious risk to
Israel. Syria posed a particular threat, as part of an increasingly close alliance with
Iran, and with Hizbollah in Lebanon.
The question, however, was how and when to strike the reactor. Olmert wanted
to attack within days. He seemed to assume that, as a former chief of staff, I’d nod
enthusiastically and go along with him. I did understand the reasons for his sense
of urgency. Not only did we have to make sure we attacked before the fuel was on
site. There was always the risk the Syrians would find out that we were aware of
their nuclear facility, putting them on even higher alert. But the operational
challenge was complex. We need a fail-safe plan to destroy the reactor. We had to
do it in such a way as to avoid a full-scale military confrontation with Syria if
possible. And we had to ensure we were ready for that, if it did happen. It took
very little time for me to realize that none of those prerequisites was yet in place.
Not unlike the recent Lebanon war, we were choosing between two off-the-shelf
plans from the kirya. One involved using a large military force, and would almost
certainly draw us into a major conflict with Syria. The other was a smaller,
targeted operation. But it remained untested, and there was no certainty it would
actually destroy the reactor.
Over the next few months, Olmert got more and more frustrated with the fact
we hadn’t yet attacked, and frustrated with me as well. We held dozens of
meetings, sometimes two or three a day, chaired by the Prime Minister, sometimes
by me as Defense Minister, or by the chief of staff or service commanders.
Invariably, I began my remarks by saying: “We have to destroy the reactor.” This
was not because I felt that any of us seriously doubted that. It was because Olmert
was beginning to suggest to the few ministers and senior officers aware of our
planning that I was against attacking the reactor. In fact, I was working with the
military and Mossad to ensure we had a plan that would succeed, with the
minimum possible risk of drawing us into a major clash with the Syrians after the
facility was destroyed. I was also working – with the help of the Americans – to
make sure we could get the forces and munitions in place in the north of Israel to
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deal with a major conflict with the Syrians. All of this, under a tight seal of
secrecy.
Finally, in early September 2007, everything was in place. Olmert briefed the
cabinet, and secured the ministers’ approval to destroy the reactor, with the
understanding that the precise timing of the operation would now be left to the
Prime Minister, the Defense Minister and the Foreign Minister: Olmert, me and
Tzipi Livni. The three of us met immediately after the cabinet discussion. Olmert
argued that the risk of leaks justified attacking that night, and I agreed with him.
Tzipi was reluctant, but Olmert turned to her and said: “Are you sure you’re
comfortable with an attack being ordered by me and Barak, while you chose to
abstain?” She thought it over, and added her approval.
We struck just after midnight, in an intricately coordinated air attack that
evaded not only a Syrian response, but Syrian notice. The reactor was destroyed.
Although even today the exact details remain subject to Israel’s military secrecy
regulations, accounts published abroad in the weeks and months that followed
painted a surprisingly accurate picture, including the pioneering use of electronic
warfare capabilities to deal with risk of radar detection. But in the immediate
aftermath of the attack, Israel deliberately made no public comment. We refused to
say whether we’d had anything to do with an attack. As we he had hoped, this
allowed the Syrian President, Bashar al-Assad, both the space and a good reason to
deny that it had ever happened, deny that he’d been trying to make a nuclear
weapon, and thus feel no compelling reason to retaliate.
* * *
The reactor operation, however, marked the start of an increasingly tough
period in both my and Tzipi’s relationship with Olmert. Policy was not the
problem. There were no major security crises in the months ahead. But in the
spring of 2008, it became known that the Israeli police were investigating Olmert’s
relationship with an American businessman named Moshe Talansky. The
suggestion, initially in a New York paper and then the Israeli press, was that
Olmert was guilty of taking bribes. In his first public response, he didn’t deny
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receiving money from Talansky. But he insisted it was all a part of election
campaign contributions.
Publicly, I reserved judgement. “I hope, for everyone’s sake, and for Prime
Minister Olmert’s sake, that the suspicions now circulating turn out to be
baseless,” I told a reporter. “Let’s be patient.” Privately, I urged him to take a leave
of absence and clear his name. Yet with other ministers convinced that would
make things worse, I held off doing anything else until there seemed to me no
choice, after Talansky gave evidence in Jerusalem’s District Court. Though he
genuinely seemed not to have expected anything specific in return, he said he had
given Olmert something like $150,000 in cash. I called a news conference the next
day. I didn’t say whether or not I thought Olmert was guilty. I did say that I
believed he couldn’t continue leading the country while resolving his “personal
matters”. Things finally came to ahead in September 2008. When Kadima held
fresh leadership elections, Tzipi Livni won. Olmert confirmed he would step aside
for his successor. But under Israeli law, he would remain Prime Minister until she
either succeeded in forming a new government or called early elections. She opted
in the end for Option B, and the election was set for February 2009.
That meant Olmert would still be Prime Minister for another three months.
We’d long been discussing the increasingly worrying situation in Gaza. After Arik
pulled out, an election had placed Hamas in power, after which the Islamists
embarked on a violent purge of Fatah loyalists. Arms smuggling through tunnels
from the Sinai had become rife. Rockets from Gaza were now landing on southern
Israel. Hundreds of thousands of Israelis were living with the reality of a warning
siren and a rapid dash into their shelters. For a while, amid negotiations through
Egypt to end the rocket fire, we limited ourselves to sending small ground units
into Gaza to target the source of specific rocket attacks. But that was always going
to have only a limited effect. It also ran the risk of our soldiers being abducted, or
killed.
Pressure was building for a major military operation. With the election drawing
nearer, Bibi Netanyahu was reminding voters that he’d been against the pullout
from Gaza, and saying that we should now hit Hamas hard. Both Olmert and Tzipi,
along with most of the cabinet, were also in favor of doing so. But my long-held
view, reinforced by the recent war against Hizbollah in Lebanon, was that we had
to begin by deciding what we wanted to accomplish, and what was possible. Only
then could we take action. I told the cabinet that, operationally, we were perfectly
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capable to taking over Gaza. But what then, I asked. Unless we were prepared to
resume open-ended Israeli control, we’d be left with no one to run Gaza
afterwards. The obvious candidate, Egypt, was even less interested than we were in
assuming responsibility for the more than one-and-a-half million Palestinians who
lived there. I doubted that even Arafat would have been ready to do so. But
relations had only worsened, since his death in 2004, between the Fatah old guard
in the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank and the Hamas overlords in Gaza. I
doubted very much that Abu Mazen would want to get involved. I did send an aide
to see him to ask whether, in principle, he was open to reassuming control of Gaza
following an Israeli takeover. His answer was unsurprising and unequivocal: no.
I secured cabinet support for the more limited aim of restoring a period of calm
for Israeli citizens in the south. I said the military operation had to be as sharp and
short as possible, and end with some kind of political understanding that the
rockets would stop for a significant period of time. The final plan was presented to
ministers a few days before the operation. It would begin with surprise air strikes
and a naval bombardment, followed by a limited ground incursion to hit remaining
Hamas targets outside of the major refugee camps, which I was determined to
avoid. The whole operation was intended to last for two weeks at the most.
Hopefully, closer to a week, with diplomatic efforts through Egypt to secure a
lasting cease-fire and, ideally, prevent Hamas from resupplying its rocket
stockpiles through its smuggling tunnels from the Sinai.
When we launched Operation Cast Lead on the morning of December 27,
nearly all the Hamas forces were where we’d expected them to be. Two waves of
air strikes, with over a hundred jets and attack helicopters, killed 350 Hamas
fighters. We destroyed Hamas’s headquarters and dozens of its government and
police installations. The attacks continued in the days that followed. We took a
range of actions designed to minimize civilian casualties. We dropped leaflets
before bombing sorties, phoned residents, and fired light missiles before heavier
ordnance was used. Still, I realized that civilian casualties were unavoidable – if
only because Hamas, like Hizbollah in Lebanon, was deliberately firing its rockets
from civilian areas, sometimes even near schools or hospitals. Civilian casualties
were obviously tragic in themselves. They also made it inevitable that the longer
the operation went on, the more likely we were to face international criticism, and
diplomatic pressure to bring it to an end. That was an additional reason I had
insisted that the operation be well defined and time-limited.
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But both Olmert and Tzipi soon fell prey to the same self-defeating temptation
that had worried me during the meandering war against Hizbollah. Our ground
incursion began a few days into the operation. The intention was to stay for a few
more days and then, responding to inevitable international appeals, call a halt to a
campaign that had already achieved nearly all of its targets. Perhaps wanting to
balance the failures in Lebanon there with “success” in Gaza, Olmert wanted us to
continue, and expand our attacks deeper into Gaza. I reminded him that we’d
agreed the aims beforehand. The longer we stayed, the less clear any gains would
be. Yes, our ground forces had so far faced virtually no resistance or casualties.
“But that’s because we’re outside the main populated areas,” I said. “The deeper
we get in, the better it will be for Hamas. They gain simply by surviving, like
Hizbollah.” Yet Olmert kept insisting that we’d succeeded so far, so let’s not stop.
It wasn’t until January 17, three weeks after the operation began, that we
announced a cease-fire. Militarily, the operation was a success. While Hamas
launched nearly 3,000 rockets into Israel in the year before our attack, there were
only 300 in the year that followed. But politically and diplomatically, the extra
week reduced, rather than helped, the chances of reaching an understanding for a
longer-term reduction of the attacks. To the extent there was any political gain, it
was to burnish Tzipi Livni’s credentials as a tough potential Prime Minister ahead
of the election. That was not her intent. Of all the politicians I’ve known, she is
among the least interested in such games, especially with lives at stake. But it was
one of the effects.
She won the election, in a photo finish, with opinion polls suggesting she’d
been effective in shaping the campaign as a choice “between Tzipi and Bibi.”
Kadima got 28 Knesset seats, to 27 for Bibi and the Likud, which gave her the first
crack at forming a government. There’s no way of disguising the fact that Labor’s
result in my first election back in charge was a disappointment. We went down six
seats, to 13. The big gainer was a far-right, stridently anti-Arab party called Yisrael
Beitenu, led by a former Likudnik named Avigdor Lieberman. Tzipi’s attempt to
form a coalition became less a political process than a contest between rival stalls
in a Middle Eastern bazaar. Bibi was holding parallel talks with the Orthodox
parties critical to assembling a parliamentary majority. He was matching and
raising every assurance of a ministerial seat or budgetary concession that Tzipi was
prepared to offer. In the end, she threw up her hands, saying she refused to draw
out a process which was not so much a negotiation as organized extortion. I am
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sure she won the respect of many Israelis for taking an all-to-rare stand of
principle. She certainly won mine. But I was not alone in wondering whether it
was worth the price that she, Kadima, and the country would pay as a result: Bibi’s
return as Prime Minister in a Likud-led coalition.
Though I was not surprised when he asked me to remain as Defense Minister,
and to keep Labor inside the coalition, that was not an easy argument to make to
my reduced Knesset contingent. They saw joining Bibi, especially in a government
with the right-wing Lieberman as Foreign Minister, as a betrayal of all the efforts
that they and I had made to achieve peace with the Palestinians. Still, the decision
on whether to join the coalition ultimately rested with the party central committee,
almost every one of whose members was on a local government council. For them,
the choice was between a share of power, however limited, and the wilderness of
opposition. So we joined Bibi’s government.
I was personally in favor of our doing so, but for more complicated reasons. I
knew that Bibi’s background, his instincts and his undeniably powerful political
rhetoric were all firmly rooted on the political right. I recognized that he was often
more interested in politics than policy, and perhaps above both of those, in the
tactical maneuvering required to consolidate his political position. But I had known
him long enough to dismiss the suggestions of many of my colleagues that he was
intellectually shallow. I felt he was capable of doing what was best for Israel, and
that he had a basic pragmatism that would guide how he got there. All that,
however, was just a reason for not saying “no” when he asked me and Labor to
stay on. The reason I felt it was right to say yes had to two with specific policy
challenges. The first was to ensure there at least some peace process with the
Palestinians. But that, in turn, was in large part because I believed it would win us
the diplomatic support, especially from the Americans, needed to tackle a more
urgent threat. It again involved an enemy state trying to get nuclear weapons. But
not Syria. The Islamic theocracy of Iran.
We’d been aware for a number of years about Iranian efforts to go nuclear. The
Mossad had notched up a series of successes in delaying the Iranians from getting
there. But they were getting inexorably closer. In fact, when I’d taken over as
Defense Minister under Olmert, I formally directed the new chief-of-staff, Gaby
Ashknazi, to get to work on a plan to attack the most important facilities in the
Iranians’ nuclear network, with the aim of pushing back the point at which they
might develop a bomb by five to six years. But it became clear we didn’t have the
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operational capacity to mount such an attack, in part because we lacked the
necessary bunker-busting bombs and the tanker aircraft to get us to Iran and back. I
did seek help from the Americans. I met Defense Secretary Bob Gates, CIA
director Mike Hayden, National Security Adviser Steve Hadley and even President
Bush himself. While not explicitly mentioning that we were planning military
action against Iran, I sounded them out on the prospects of getting more heavy
munitions, and possibly leasing several US tanker aircraft.
Yet in our final meeting with President Bush, during a visit to Israel in June
2008, he made it clear to Olmert and me that he knew what we were up to. Olmert
hosted a private dinner for the President. Afterwards, Bush asked to talk privately.
Olmert poured us each a glass of whiskey and lit a cigar, and we sank into brown
leather armchairs. Smiling, the president looked straight at me, and said to Olmert:
“This guy scares the living shit out of me when he tells me what you want.”
He told Olmert how I’d asked for heavy munitions, tankers and a variety of
other military equipment. “Remember. I’m a former F-16 pilot,” he said. “I know
how to connect the dots.” Then, turning more serious, he added: “I want to tell
both of you now, as President, the formal position of the US government. We are
totally against any action by you to mount an attack on the nuclear plants.” The
effect was all the more dramatic because of his Administration’s support for our
attack on the reactor in Syria the year before. “I repeat,” Bush said, “in order to
avoid any misunderstanding. We expect you not to do it. And we’re not going to
do it, either, as long as I am President. I wanted it to be clear.”
Olmert said nothing, so I replied. “Mr President, we’re in no position to tell you
what the position of the United States should be. But I can tell you what I believe
history will have to say. I’m reminded by what we call, in field artillery,
‘bracketing and halving.’” I said that in the wake of the Al-Qaeda attack on the
Twin Towers, he had fired one shell long, in Afghanistan, and another one short, in
Iraq. “But when the time came to hit the real target – Iran – it ended up you’d
already spent two terms, and all your political capital.” He seemed neither insulted
nor unsettled by my remark. He simply nodded. Perhaps, in part, because he was
pretty sure that we lacked the ability to attack the Iranian facilities anyway.
We still lacked that capacity when I became Defense Minister in Bibi’s
government in May 2009. But the main reason I’d stayed in the job, and my main
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focus from the day Bibi’s government took office, was to do all I could to change
that.
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Chapter Twenty-Five
I had hoped that in facing down the nuclear threat from Iran, I could nudge Bibi
towards a reengagement with the Palestinians – not with great enthusiasm, but as
an act of pure political pragmatism. There were only two ways we could stop the
Iranians from getting a nuclear weapon: for the Americans to make sure that
happened, or not to hinder Israel from doing so. Either was going to be a lot harder
if there was tension with the new American president, Barack Obama, over moves
to revive the peace process with the Palestinians.
I didn’t expect it to be put to the test so soon. Yet within weeks of our taking
office, President Obama launched an effort to restart negotiations, declaring it
“intolerable” that there was still not a Palestinian state. He was explicit about what
Israel needed to do. In an Oval Office meeting with Bibi in May 2009, and in a
speech in Cairo the next month, he called for a total halt to settlement construction
on the West Bank. US opposition to settlements wasn’t new. For years,
Washington’s position had been that they represented “an obstacle to peace.” The
main issue wasn’t even the creation of new settlements, since there had been
almost none in recent years. It was the expansion of existing ones. The Jewish
population on the West Bank had been about 190,000 when I became Prime
Minister. In the decade since then, it had grown to 315,000 – more than half-amillion
if you counted the Jewish neighborhoods built inside the expanded, post-
1967 boundaries of Jerusalem. The expansion – “natural growth” as we
euphemistically described it to the Americans – was what President Obama now
wanted Bibi to end.
I had no illusions about how hard it would be to get him to agree. With each
passing year since Camp David, the pro-settlement right wing in Israel had become
more confident and influential. In a way, the settlers and their supporters –
passionately devoted to a “Greater Israel” and opposed to any Palestinian state –
had become the 21 st -century equivalent of the kibbutz avant-garde of a half-century
earlier. The rise of Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party was the latest sign,
alongside a move rightward within the Likud itself. For Bibi to say yes to a
settlement freeze would mean putting aside his own short-term political interests in
recognition of the importance of our alliance with the Americans. He’d actually
done this, twice, during his first term as Prime Minister. He had agreed to give the
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Palestinians control of most of Hebron, and accepted further withdrawals under the
Wye River agreement. But amid predictable protests from the right, he had
promptly retreated from his Wye commitments. I knew that his default response to
Obama’s call for a settlement freeze would be “no.” And it was, delivered first to
the cabinet and then to the public, as soon as he got back from his talks with the
President.
In my repeated meetings with Bibi in the weeks that followed – both one-onone,
and within the informal group of close ministers and aides known as the
Group of Eight – I tried to persuade him that, if only because of America’s key role
on Iran, we needed to show some sign of engagement with Obama’s efforts. I was
not entirely alone. One ally was an old friend: Dan Meridor, who had rejoined the
Likud before the election. Another was more unexpected: Avigdor Lieberman. He
was never going to accept a settlement freeze. Not only did his heart, and political
interests, lie on the West Bank. He lived there. But like many in the party he led,
he had come to Israel from the former Soviet Union, shaping a worldview that in
many ways remained European, and pro-Western. He was worried about creating
the impression of blanket Israeli intransigence toward a popular new American
President, and isolating ourselves internationally, if we didn’t go some way
towards helping to restart talks with the Palestinians.
Though Bibi showed no signs of retreat on the settlement freeze, he did accept
that broader point. Ten days after Obama’s Cairo speech, he publicly accepted the
idea of a Palestinian state for the first time, having ruled it out as recently as the
month before in his White House talks with the President. The shift was dismissed
as trivial not just by the Palestinians, but by many in my own Labor party and
almost everyone else on the left. I disagreed. I knew how deep, genuine and
longstanding Bibi’s resistance to Palestinian statehood was. But I had another,
serious concern about the “peace plan” he announced: an entirely new precondition
he insisted the Palestinians must meet if peace was ever going to be possible. He
said they must “clearly and unambiguously recognize Israel as the state of the
Jewish people.” On a whole series of levels, that made no sense to me. We hadn’t
asked Egypt or Jordan to grant us explicit recognition as a Jewish state when we
made peace with them. Even when Bibi himself had briefly tried to open
negotiations with Damascus in his first period as Prime Minister, we’d never felt
the need to ask it of the Syrians either. To the extent there was any logic in
demanding it of the Palestinians, Bibi’s reasoning seemed to be that this would
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neutralize any recidivist claims to all of Palestine, especially since we had around
1.5 million Arab citizens living inside our pre-1967 borders. But as I told Bibi, that
was a red herring. There was a more straightforward, legally binding answer: a
peace treaty which, as with Egypt and Jordan, declared an end to our conflict and
to any further claims on either side.
My main concern was more fundamental. Bibi’s new approach contradicted the
central thrust of Zionism: that after centuries of powerlessness and persecution,
Jews would finally take control of their own destiny. We now had our state. It was
more than six decades old. “Why do we need the Palestinians, or anyone, to
validate us as a Jewish state? Why propose something that implies the Palestinians
somehow have a say in what kind of state we choose to be?” Yet the more I
pressed him, the clearer it became that the substance didn’t much matter to Bibi.
His move was political, and tactical, aimed at staking out a position of power in the
diplomatic process. Besides, he didn’t expect any new negotiations to make real
progress anyway.
As Defense Minister, I had scope for taking steps with the Palestinians on my
own. With Bibi’s knowledge and tacit acceptance, I established a particularly
strong relationship with Abu Mazen’s Prime Minister, Salaam Fayyad. A respected
economist, he operated on the assumption that neither violence nor negotiations
seemed likely to lead the Palestinians to statehood as things now stood. He saw his
role as doing an end-run. He would put in place the institutions, the infrastructure,
the economy, the internal security and the stability needed for an eventual state to
succeed. He was trying to do for the Palestinians what Ben-Gurion had done before
1948. He and I met and talked often but discreetly – sometimes in his office in
Ramallah, sometimes in mine, sometimes over dinner in the 31 st -floor flat I was
renting in central Tel Aviv. I remember one dinner in particular. I led him onto the
terrace after we’d eaten. It was a startlingly clear night. You could see as far north
as Lebanon and, since the West Bank was barely a dozen miles away, the
twinkling lights of Ramallah as well. He gazed in that direction, then at the bright
lights of the avenues and restaurants and cafés far below us. Smiling, he said:
“Ehud, why do you need Ramallah when you’ve got Tel Aviv?” I smiled back.
There was no need to reply. He knew my views. Not only didn’t Israel need
Ramallah. I was more convinced than ever that it was in our own interest, by treaty
if possible and unilateral disengagement if not, to remove Israel from all of the
major towns and cities of the West Bank.
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I issued a standing directive in the kirya that we should agree to anything
Fayyad asked for, as long as there no security reason to say no. We ended up
arranging a direct source of fuel supply to Jenin, on the northern edge of the West
Bank, and built new terminals to handle it. We facilitated construction permits for
a new industrial zone. For a conference of international economists and business
people, we set up VIP treatment at Ben-Gurion Airport, and limousine transport to
the conference venue. I believed that if Fayyad succeeded in what he was trying to
accomplish, it would be a benefit not just for the Palestinians, but for Israel too.
Bibi was agnostic on Fayyad’s efforts. Yet he recognized they did no harm. And in
a way, my support for them was politically convenient. To the extent the
international community, especially the Americans, appreciated our efforts to help
the Palestinians, Bibi and others in the government could, and did, claim credit.
When there were complaints from the right, Bibi could and did say: “It wasn’t me.
It was Barak.”
My part in our relations with the Americans was more politically delicate. As I
continued to prod Bibi toward accepting a settlement freeze during the summer and
autumn of 2009, my de facto role became to help smooth over the increasingly
rough edges in our ties with the Obama administration. I knew key figures from
earlier incarnations in their public lives and mine: Secretary of Defense Bob Gates,
who had been President George H. W. Bush’s deputy security adviser in the first
Iraq war and then head of the CIA; and Hillary Clinton, now Secretary of State.
During a series of early trips to the US as Defense Minister, I met Gates, Hillary
and other senior figures in the administration both formally and informally. In part
because they were aware I favored agreeing to a settlement freeze, they clearly
found it a lot easier to talk to me than to Bibi. On one visit, to my regret and Bibi’s
evident frustration once I’d got home, the press highlighted this dramatic
difference in mood. Emerging from talks with me at the State Department, Hillary
told reporters that our talks had gone “wonderfully.” She added: “As longtime
friends do, much was said. And much didn’t need to be said.” Still, I was careful to
avoid any explicit criticism of Bibi in my meetings in the US. I would point out the
domestic political pressures on him in deciding how to proceed. And in any case,
the Americans knew that no matter what I might say to them, it was Bibi’s actions
that ultimately mattered. He, not I, was Prime Minister.
I was as surprised as they were when he finally announced a settlement freeze
in November 2009. As with nearly everything else he did regarding the peace
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process, it was hedged with several conditions. The freeze would not be openended,
but last for 10 months, as a way of boosting the effort to restart
negotiations. It would apply to new construction, not work already underway. And
it would exclude the post-1967 neighborhoods inside the expanded city limits of
Jerusalem. Like his other moves, it was also dismissed as insignificant by the
Palestinians. Though there was a formal restarting of the talks, they went almost
nowhere during the period of the freeze, which Bibi cited as a reason for not
extending it further. From then on, the negotiations produced even less. I didn’t
buy the narrative that this was entirely Bibi’s fault. Abu Mazen remained
steadfastly, deliberately passive. Obviously not inclined to take the risk of further
widening his rift with Hamas in Gaza, he was content to echo the Obama
administration’s argument that nothing could happen until there was a settlement
freeze. Once the freeze was announced, he went through the motions, avoiding all
the difficult issues, in the expectation Washington would ensure the freeze was
renewed. President Obama’s initial Mideast moves had made it much easier for
Abu Mazen to avoid any serious engagement. In contrast to past presidents, Obama
had placed almost all of the onus for progress on Israel. But the end result also
suited Bibi. Though I never entirely gave up hope of persuading him it was in
Israel’s interest to seek a resolution of our conflict with the Palestinians, it became
more evident as the months went on that his aim was simply to keep things ticking
over, and avoid any major new crisis.
He appointed an old personal friend – a corporate lawyer named Yitzhak
Molcho – as our negotiator. I finally realized how pointless the exercise was when,
during a visit to the United States, I found myself in New York at the same time as
Molcho. We met at the Israeli consulate. We spoke in detail about the state of the
negotiations. With Molcho still in the room, I phoned Bibi in Jerusalem on the
secure phone line. I said I’d just been updated on the talks, and it seemed clear
there were a number of suggestions Israel could make, with no domestic political
risk but with every prospect of improving the atmosphere and accelerating
progress. “Yitzhak is one of Israel’s top lawyers,” I said. “He’s struck dozens of
deals in his life. But he strikes a deal when that’s what his client wants. You are the
client. If you tell him: bring me back the best deal you can – not a peace treaty, just
a deal on a specific issue – he’ll do it. But if his brief is simply to negotiate, he can
go on negotiating forever. And it’s pretty clear me that’s his brief.” Bibi insisted I
was wrong. He said that what I saw as time-wasting was simple prudence, to make
sure the negotiations bore fruit. But his approach never changed. Whenever it came
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up in our inner Group of Eight discussions, I could usually count only on Dan
Meridor, and occasionally a handful of others, to argue in favor of any form of
initiative on our side. In private meetings, Bibi did sometimes engage in discussion
about what Israel might do. But he invariably steered the conversation elsewhere,
insisting that the real issue was the Palestinians’ lack of any interest in making
peace.
My main worry wasn’t the immediate future of the negotiations. For now, the
chances of an agreement seemed close to zero. It was the longer-term damage
Bibi’s approach would do in further delaying any serious move by Israel to put our
relations with the Palestinians on a more stable and sustainable footing. The
dithering, delay and deadlock suited him politically. Ironically, my own efforts on
the security front had also made it easier for us to do next to nothing. Intermittent
outbreaks of violence always remained a threat. Yet the West Bank security fence,
along with our military, police and intelligence measures, meant it was very
unlikely we’d see a return to the full-blown terror war of the second intifada. I was
also working to secure US support for our development of increasingly effective
anti-missile weapons to reduce the threat from Hamas in Gaza. The overall result
was that for many, if not most, Israelis, the conflict with the Palestinians didn’t
impact on their day-to-day lives. It was unseen and largely unfelt.
Still, the effect of the stalemate on our relationship with Washington did matter:
both for our security cooperation on things like the anti-missile weapons and,
crucially, the challenge which had led me into Bibi’s government in the first place:
keeping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon.
* * *
It was a race against time. The Iranians were producing more and more
yellowcake, building more advanced centrifuges, accumulating more low-enriched
uranium. They were getting better at hiding and protecting the network of facilities
being used to try to produce a nuclear weapon. And in the early months of Bibi’s
Prime Ministership, the question we faced wasn’t even whether to take military
action against Iran – something I knew, from Bob Gates and others, that the
Obama administration viewed no more favourably than George W. Bush. It was
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whether that would even be possible to strike before the Iranians entered their
“zone of immunity” – the point at which the amount of damage we could do to
their nuclear program would be too negligible to be worth the operational, political
and diplomatic risks from such an attack. In the early months, my priority was to
ensure we at least had a military option. A full year before joining Bibi’s
government, as Defense Minister under Olmert, I’d first tried to put an operational
plan in place, only to find that the lack of heavy munitions and refuelling aircraft
made it impossible. That was especially frustrating because at that point, our
experts calculated that a successful strike could have set back the Iranian nuclear
effort by about six years. Given the Iranians’ knowledge we could attack again,
and their need to restart clandestine efforts to secure key components abroad, that
meant a very real prospect of ending the nuclear program altogether. On joining
Bibi’s government, I began working, both with the kirya and the engineers and
technological experts in our military industries, to make sure we had the weaponry
and equipment, and an operational plan for a surgical strike. It was not until mid-
2010, a year into Bibi’s government, that I was confident we’d reached that point,
in part thanks to Israeli-produced heavy bombs and tanker aircraft. Our experts
estimated we would still be able to set back the Iranian nuclear efforts by up to
four years, almost certainly enough to end them indefinitely.
Yet making military action possible proved to be the easy part. The question
now became whether we should be prepared to launch a strike against Iran’s
nuclear facilities. Answering it was like a contest of three-dimensional chess,
involving both an internal debate among Israel’s political and military leadership
and discussions with an Obama administration whose priority remained to
negotiate an end to Iran’s nuclear program. On major security decisions in Israel,
two ministers always mattered the most: the Prime Minister and Defense Minister.
Neither Bibi nor I doubted we had to ready to strike if that proved necessary. Nor
did Foreign Minister Lieberman. Even for us, it was an option to be considered
only when all other ways to rein in the Iranians were failing. We also agreed on
two other preconditions. We would have to secure international legitimacy, most of
all from the Americans, for what would be a clear act of self-defense. And we’d
need to demonstrate an imperative urgency to act, with the approach of the “zone
of immunity” that would take any military option off the table for good.
Ideally, we hoped the US-led campaign of economic and diplomatic pressure
would get Iran to abandon its nuclear ambitions, as Libya had done in the wake of
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its terror attack on a Pan American airliner in the late 1980s. Or, as in South
Africa, that a change in nuclear policy might come from a change in régime in
Tehran. Yet realistically, we couldn’t count on either. And there was no doubt in
our minds that a nuclear Iran represented a hugely serious threat. If the Shi’ite
Muslim regime in Iran did get a nuclear weapon, Sunni Arab states like Egypt and
Saudi Arabia, and Turkey as well, would try to go nuclear. Neither they nor we
could assume that Iran was developing a bomb as a mere act of deterrence. We
couldn’t exclude the possibility that, especially in a crisis threatening the survival
of the ayatollahs’ rule, Iran would use the weapons it was developing. It could
even send a nuclear device in a container smuggled on board a commercial vessel
docking in one of Israel’s ports.
While few in Israel disputed the seriousness of the threat, a number of top
political and military figures had deep misgivings about military action. Given the
need for secrecy, most of our discussions took place within the so-called Group of
Eight, often also including the chief of staff and other top generals from the kirya.
Both Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, Menachem Begin’s son and a minister
without portfolio, were opposed to an Israeli attack from the start. They were
convinced that the implications for the region, and for our relations with the wider
world, were difficult to predict and potentially dire. Dan raised a further concern.
He feared an Israeli attack might actually intensify Iran’s effort to get a nuclear
bomb, only now with political cover, because it would argue it was acting in selfdefense.
The view of those opposed to an Israeli strike was that we should rely on
American economic and political pressure to deal with the threat. And, if that
failed, on American military action.
In November 2010, the internal debate came to a head, at a meeting involving
the Group of Eight as well as the chief of staff, the head of military intelligence
and the commander of the air force. We convened in a villa that the Mossad kept
for clandestine foreign visitors, near the coastal road north of Tel Aviv. The
meeting began with a presentation by the generals of our attack plan. There was
still a core of ministers opposed: chiefly Dan Meridor and Benny Begin, but also
Boogie Ya’alon, a former Sayeret Matkal commander and chief of staff who
Minister of Strategic Affairs. But the confidence and detail with which the plan
was laid out, and the fact that Bibi, Lieberman and I were in favor of being
prepared to act, gave me the sense that a majority would back military action if it
became necessary. The proviso would be the need for the chief-of-staff, and ideally
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the heads of military intelligence and Mossad, to sign off on the operational
viability of the plan.
That was what now ended any prospect of military action, at least for a few
months. Bibi, Lieberman and I withdrew into a side room to talk with the chief of
staff, Gaby Ashkenazi, as well as the heads of military intelligence, the Mossad
and and Shin Bet. We emphasized that no final decision on whether to attack had
been taken. That would require a further meeting with the Group of Eight, and then
the full cabinet. But we asked each of them for their views on the operation. We
knew they had political reservations, along the lines of those voiced by Dan
Meridor. On an issue of this magnitude, it was accepted practice that military and
intelligence commanders could weigh in on the political implications as well. But
their formal role was operational and professional. Ashkenazi and the other
generals did concede that in every area – planning, materiel, training and
intelligence – our attack plan was far ahead of where it had been a year earlier. Yet
Ashkenazi, in particular, concluded that the preparations had not yet “crossed the
threshold of operational capability”.
I was furious. I respected the considered opposition of ministers like Dan or
Benny Begin. I had no problem with the chief-of-staff or other generals expressing
similar views on the political or geo-strategic implications of an Israeli attack, even
though our intelligence assessments suggested the concerns were almost certainly
unfounded. Yet what I found astonishing was Ashkenazi’s suggestion that the
“operational threshold” had not been crossed. Yes, this would be a demanding
mission. It was not without risks. No operation was. But having followed every
stage and detail of the preparations – and as a former chief of staff and intelligence
chief myself – I believed it was simply wrong on a professional level to say that
we lacked the capacity, and a workable plan, for a military strike if the order was
given.
Ashkenazi’s objection did mean there was no way we were going to attack at
least until well into the new year. Our discussions would continue, as would our
refinement and strengthening of the attack plan. So would Iran’s progress toward
its “zone of immunity,” which we now believed would begin late in 2012, a couple
of years away. As that point drew closer, we’d face an ever-more-pressing need to
decide finally whether military action was necessary.
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Yet the delay in getting to that point had serious implications for my role as
Labor Party leader. Since the negotiations with the Palestinians were stuck in
neutral, I was under increasing pressure from within Labor to pull out of Bibi’s
government. What on earth was the point of staying, they asked. All I was doing,
from their perspective, was giving Bibi political cover for abandoning any serious
effort to get a peace agreement. Their argument was entirely reasonable. My
frustration was that, due to the need for military secrecy, the counter-argument was
impossible for me to make: that I felt I had a responsibility to stay at a time when
there remained a real possibility Israel might need to take military action against
Iran. To a mix of consternation and anger among many Labor colleagues, I ended
up taking what seemed to me the only realistic option. In January 2011, I left the
Labor Party. With three other of our ministers in the government – who were, of
course, aware of the ongoing Iran discussions – I set up a new “centrist, Zionist”
party called Ha’Atzmaut, or Independence. We remained in Bibi’s government.
* * *
My main focus was now on the Americans. In order to secure the “international
legitimacy” any Israeli attack required, we had to win at least their understanding
that we might feel it necessary to act. Fortunately, I had built up a good
relationship with the key figures in the Obama administration. That had not always
been easy, given the tension between the Americans and Bibi. That wasn’t just
because of the deadlock in the peace process, still a priority for President Obama.
There were other complications. Ever since the initial pressure for a settlement
freeze, right-wing politicians and commentators, and Bibi himself, had taken to
portraying President Obama as fundamentally unsympathetic to Israel. After the
Republicans’ victory in the mid-term Congressional elections in November 2010,
Bibi went a step further. He began cozying up to congressmen and senators on the
other side of the aisle. This overt meddling in the internal politics of our closest
ally was not just a breach of longstanding tradition, but of common sense.
Members of the Administration began privately calling Bibi “the Republican
senator from Rechavia” – a reference to the Jerusalem neighborhood where the
Prime Minister’s residence was located.
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Yet especially with my main points of contact in the administration – first Bob
Gates and then his successor, Leon Panetta, as Secretary of Defense –our broadly
shared views, mutual respect, and the strength of the US-Israeli alliance
outweighed any of that. Neither they, nor indeed President Obama, wavered from
their commitment to the principle that Israel needed to retain our “qualitative
military advantage” over any combination of threats we might face, nor to the $3
billion package of annual US aid that underpinned it. We were even able to agree
on additional US backing for our increasingly effective range of anti-missile
systems: the Arrow, against long-range ballistic missiles, developed in
coordination with the US defense contractor Raytheon; “David’s Sling,” to target
enemy forces’ mid-range missiles, cruise missiles and aircraft; and our new Iron
Dome system, integrating sophisticated Israeli radar and guidance technology and
designed to deal with the missile threat from Hizbollah on our northern border and
Hamas in Gaza. It had not yet been used in battle. But from test firings, we were
confident it could destroy incoming rockets with nearly 90-per-cent success.
By late 2011, the issue of Iran had taken on much greater urgency. There was
still no sign the American-led diplomatic efforts were succeeding in removing the
nuclear threat. As for an American military strike, though the President
intermittently declared that “all options” remained on the table, I knew from senior
administration members that it was extremely unlikely to happen. Iran, meanwhile,
had been acquiring thousands more centrifuges, more uranium, and heavier
protection around its key sites. And the “window of vulnerability” was now only
about a year away.
Operationally and politically, at least now a majority of the key players in Israel
agreed that we had to be prepared to take military action if there was no alternative
way to rein in the Iranians. Ashkenazi’s successor as chief-of-staff, Benny Gantz,
had signed off on the attack plan. While the Iranians were getting ever closer to
nuclear-weapons capability, the strike force that we were assembling was also
better equipped, trained and prepared to mount a complex, yet almost certainly
successful, operation. The damage to Iran’s nuclear ambitions would be
considerably less than if we had acted earlier. But our intelligence analysts still
estimated we could set back the Iranians’ program by about two years.
The immediate problem turned out to be timing. A major joint military exercise
with the Americans, agreed on two years earlier, was due to take place in Israel in
April 2012. It would include Patriot missile batteries, naval vessels, and thousands
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of uniformed US personnel. The focus was, of all things, on defense against a
missile attack from Iran. I contacted Leon Panetta to see whether we could delay it.
The official reason cited by the Americans, when they agreed to do it, did have the
merit of being true: that Bibi was coming under pressure to shift our budgetary
priorities away from defense toward social and economic issues. But Panetta
understood that my request for a delay meant we were at least considering military
action. He also realized that if we did launch an attack, it was in the Americans’
own interest for their troops be as far away from Israel as possible. We agreed to
reschedule the exercise for October 2012. That meant that if we did decide to
attack, we’d have until well into September, when significant numbers of US
troops would begin arriving.
As we weighed our final decision, I held a series of high-level meetings in
Washington: with Panetta, national security adviser Tom Donilon, Hillary Clinton,
and President Obama himself. Though not explicitly saying we were ready to
attack, I left no doubt that we were seriously considering it, and explained the
reasons we believed our country’s fundamental security interests might make it
necessary. The message from all of the Americans I met was that the
administration shared our basic goal: to prevent, or at least seriously impair, Iran’s
drive to get a nuclear bomb. But they continued to believe that non-military
pressure was the best way to do it.
The Americans knew we were skeptical that the non-military route would work,
and that we were deeply worried about the implications of not taking military
action if it failed. I discussed our thinking – and, in general terms, our plans – in
my meetings with Panetta. He already had a pretty good idea of the broad contours
of what we were contemplating, since US radar systems and electronic intercepts
had been recording the volume and nature of air force exercises we’d been
conducting over recent months. Leon and I had by now got to know each other
well, having first met when he was in charge of the CIA at the start of the Obama
administration. In one of our early meetings at CIA headquarters in Langley, there
had been a small bunch of grapes on his desk and I plucked a few in my mouth
with obvious enjoyment. Now, at the Pentagon, he had a big bowlful ready
whenever we met. The fact that he opposed an Israeli military operation made him
no less of a pleasure to deal with. He was unfailingly calm and even tempered. He
had an encyclopedic grasp of issues of defense, intelligence, budgets and policy.
He was always rock-solid in America’s commitments to Israel. It’s worth
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remembering that, in spite of Israel’s insistence from 1948 onward that we would
never ask others to do our fighting for us, even as Leon and I were meeting, US
radar operators were working around the clock to provide us with early warning
against any incoming Iranian missiles. Patriot batteries were ready to deploy in
Israel within 72 hours of any attack. AEGIS naval vessels were within 96 hours of
our shores, to reinforce Israel’s Arrow missile defense system with sea-launched
weapons.
Panetta made no secret of the fact he didn’t want us to launch a military strike,
effectively killing off the many months of intensive work the Americans had
devoted to building international political and economic pressure on the Iranians.
He urged me to “think twice, three times,” before going down that road. But he
recognized that Israel would be affected far more dramatically by a nuclear Iran.
“It’s your conflict. It’s your neighborhood,” he said. At one point, he asked me
outright: “If you do decide to attack the Iranian facilities, when will we know?” I
told him we couldn’t give him more than a few hours’ notice. Otherwise, the
Americans would have to alert their bases in the Gulf, and worldwide. That might
well put Iran on guard before our operation was launched. But I did recognize our
responsibility not to leave the Americans in the dark, not only because they were a
key ally but because their own military and naval personnel might be at risk from
any Iranian retaliation. “We know your command-post deployment and the
communications protocols with your forces,” I told him. “We’ll make sure you
have enough time to tell your people,” I said. “We won’t endanger a single
American life, any of your positions or your personnel.”
My most important meeting was with the President. Though I knew him less
well than I did Panetta, we had met on a number of occasions. The first time was
when he was still Senator Obama, on a visit to Israel during the 2008 presidential
campaign. As Defense Minister, I escorted him to Sderot, the town in southern
Israel bearing the brunt of Hamas rocket attacks from Gaza. Back in Jerusalem, we
spent a half-hour talking in my office: about Iran. I argued that a nuclear Iran was a
challenge not only for Israel and the Middle East, but for America, too. I urged
him, if elected, to commission an early study of what the Iranians were seeking to
do and what could be done to stop them either by diplomatic means or, if
necessary, by force. Also, what the Iranians could, or more relevantly could not, do
in response to an American or indeed an Israel attack, since our intelligence
assessments suggested their options for retaliation would be fairly limited. Obama
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struck me from that first meeting as strong, cool-headed, highly intelligent and
intensely cerebral. Though we didn’t go into the details of the Iranian nuclear
threat, he did talk at some length about the implications for the region, and about
broader Middle Eastern security challenges. He displayed a grasp of the cultural
and political nuances of an increasingly diverse and complex world that was more
impressive than many of the other American political or military leaders whom I’d
met.
When he and I now returned to the issue of Iran, in the White House, he had an
undeniable command of the details of Iran’s nuclear program, and of the American
military options, should he choose to use them. He opened by summarizing the US
position. He emphasized that his and our objective was the same: the keep Iran
from developing a nuclear weapon. We were already cooperating to achieve that,
for instance through cyber-attacks to slow down the nuclear program. The
difference, he said, was that Israeli leaders seemed to feel an urgent need to reach a
decision on military action. In Obama’s view, such a move would be both
premature and potentially harmful to the coalition he’d helped assemble to exert
diplomatic and economic pressure on Iran.
Maybe you had to be an Israeli truly to understand our urgency about Iran. In
the early years of the state, the explanation we gave for our preoccupation with
security – our near-obsession, as some non-Israelis saw it – was that we were
surrounded by Arab countries pledged not just to defeat us, but erase us from the
map. Egypt or Syria, Jordan or Iraq, could afford to lose an Arab-Israeli war.
Israel’s first defeat, however, would be its last. That picture had changed
dramatically over the decades. We no longer had to worry about the prospect of
losing a war. The “qualitative edge” we possessed over all enemy armies in the
region ensured that. As Israel’s chief of staff, Prime Minister, and now Defense
Minister, I had made it a major priority to safeguard that advantage, not just
through our alliance with the US but with the remarkable domestic resources we
possessed in military engineering, manufacturing, design, invention and high-tech.
But the new-order challenge represented by Iran was not just theoretical or
academic. Though we had a policy of not commenting on on our own nuclear
status, it was widely assumed in the Arab world and internationally that Israel had,
at the very least, the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons. But whatever
nuclear capability we might possess was for deterrence. Even when threatened
with conventional defeat, however briefly, in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, it is
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worth noting that the conflict remained conventional. Iran was different. Only the
most naïve observer would exclude the possibility that if the Iranians did get a
nuclear weapon, they might use it. And even if they didn’t, the entire strategic
picture would change, with the need to find a response not just to a nuclear Iran,
but potentially a nuclear Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.
I was not about to lecture President Obama on this. While Bibi liked to portray
him variously as weak, naïve or tone-deaf to interests and security of Israel, I knew
from our previous meetings that he was none of these things. Yet I did, in a
deliberately non-didactic way, raise the issue of our different perspectives on the
Iranians’ getting nuclear arms. “You see it in the context of the whole world,” I
told the President. “If Iran, in spite of all our efforts, gets a nuclear weapon, yes, it
will be bad. But for you, it’s just one more nuclear state. It won’t dramatically
change the situation for America. For us, it can turn into a real, existential threat.”
He agreed that we inevitably looked at the situation differently. But after
pausing a few seconds, he said: “Ehud, think of it this way. You get to school in
the morning and there’s this big, nasty bully. You can take him on, maybe give
him a black eye. But you have this bigger, stronger friend, who can knock him out
cold. The only problem is that your friend won’t be there until the afternoon.”
I would have liked nothing more than to wait for our “bigger, stronger” friend,
especially since I knew through my contacts in the American military and
intelligence establishment how much bigger and stronger an American attack
would be. During the first couple of years that Israel was working on acquiring the
capability for a military strike, the Americans had been no more ready than we
were. They did have the tanker aircraft and the heavy bombs. But their plan – a
kind of Iraq-style shock and awe – was so obviously prone to lead to a wider
conflict that it would never have received the go-ahead from President Obama, or
probably any president. I used to joke with colleagues in the Pentagon that while
Israel’s idea of a “surgical operation” was the equivalent of a scalpel, they seemed
to favor a chisel and a ten-pound hammer. By the time I met the President in 2012,
that had changed. Under Gates and then Panetta, an intensive research-anddevelopment
effort and enormously improved planning and training had yielded
results. The Americans now had high-precision heavy munitions we couldn’t
dream of, and stealth air-attack capabilities we also lacked. They had an
operational plan which, within a period of hours, could push the Iranian nuclear
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program back by years. And even if the Iranians knew it was coming, they’d be
able to do nothing to stop it.
“Our problem, Mr, President,” I said, “is that we can’t be sure our friend will
show up. Since Iran is already very nearly in a zone of immunity against an Israeli
attack, we can’t afford to wait until the afternoon. By then, with our capabilities,
we won’t even be able to give the bully a black eye.” I said I trusted what he’d just
told me. “I’m sure it genuinely reflects your intentions now. But there are no
futures contracts in statesmanship. There’s no way that you, or any leader, can
commit yourself to what will happen in a year or two. When the moment of
decision arrives, nothing will be able to free you from the responsibility to look at
the situation as it is then, with American interests in mind.”
He accepted the point. But he reiterated his view that “kinetic action” – US
security-speak for a military strike – would not only remove his ability to exhaust
the non-military alternatives. He said it wouldn’t be in Israel’s interests, either.
“We hear that even people high up in your military, in military intelligence and the
Mossad, are against it.”
That, I couldn’t deny. “We highly respect our top people in the military, and in
intelligence. We make a point of listening to them before taking action,” I said.
“But here’s the difference. When they look up, they see Netanyahu, or me. When
Bibi and I look up, we see heaven. Whoever is up there, we clearly can’t go to
them for advice. We are responsible for Israel’s security.”
The president smiled, but brought the discussion back down to earth. When he
again urged us to consider the American position in any decision, I replied: “Mr
President, I feel compelled to tell you frankly how I see the situation. We highly
appreciate, and are grateful, that America supports Israel in so many ways. I
believe we’re doing our best to support American interests in the Middle East as
well. But when it comes to issues critical for the security and future of Israel, and
in a way for the future of the Jewish people, we can’t afford to delegate
responsibility even to our best friend and ally. When we face such situations, we
have to decide on our own, and act on our decisions. I would expect the United
States, and you as its president, to respect that position.” He did not seem
especially happy with what I’d said. But he showed no anger. Though we differed,
it was clear that he understood and respected our position. In any case, I believed it
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was important to convey to him honestly, face-to-face, where Israel stood on Iran.
Or at least where I stood.
* * *
With our joint exercises pushed back until the fall, the logical time for us to
attack was the summer of 2012, when the atmospheric and weather conditions
were optimal. Operationally, everything was ready. Politically, those ministers who
were against military action had not changed their minds. If anything, they seemed
more strongly opposed. Ironically, they now argued that because we’d waited so
long, the Iranians were too close to their “window of immunity.” Even some senior
members of the military and security establishment, though in agreement over the
technical aspects of the attack plan, retained political reservations. But as I’d told
President Obama, now that we had the operational support of the military and
intelligence professionals, the decision in effect rested with Bibi and me. The fact
we were ready to go ahead in those circumstances was not unprecedented. When
Menachem Begin ordered the bombing of Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor in
1981, he had acted against the advice of the then-heads of both the Mossad and
military intelligence, the chairman of our nuclear energy commission, and of
Shimon Peres, who was head of the Labor opposition.
But as we neared our final, formal decision, we were forced into another delay.
In the summer of 2012, an unrelated flare-up of tensions in the Gulf caused Iran
and several of its neighbors to place their forces on heightened alert. Though the
peak-alert phase passed quickly, Iran’s military was still not back on a fully normal
footing by the start of September, and when small American advance teams began
arriving for the joint exercises, Iran’s alert level went up again. Technically, we
could still have gone ahead with the attack. In all probability, it would still have
succeeded, setting back the Iranians’ program by at least a year and, depending on
how quickly they could rebuild and resupply clandestinely abroad, perhaps for
significantly longer.
But as more and more American soldiers and sailors arrived, I finally decided
against an Israeli strike – not because I doubted the damage it would do to Iran’s
nuclear efforts, but because of the damage it would surely do to our ties with the
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US. No matter how we might explain our attack, with the joint exercises soon to
begin, it would come over as a deliberate attempt to implicate our most important
ally in a potential conflict with Iran, against the explicit wishes of President
Obama. I felt this even more strongly when, a few weeks later, I was contacted by
one of Bibi’s close political allies. He sounded me out on the possibility of
launching our strike against Iran after the joint exercise: barely two weeks before
the 2012 US election. Politically, he argued, Obama would then feel compelled to
support Israel’s action, or at the very least to refrain from criticizing it. In other
words, we would be setting a political trap for the President of the United States. I
couldn’t quite believe he was suggesting it. But my reply to this last-gasp
suggestion of a way for us to attack the Iranian sites required no hesitation, and
only two words: “No way.”
Bibi would have known I would oppose such a ploy. But as with so much else
in the years I spent in his government, I think it was the politics of the scheme,
more than the substance, that enticed him. Almost everything he did seemed
increasingly about creating a kind of grand narrative to secure his position on the
right, solidifying a base which he figured would sustain him in office. At its core,
the narrative presented a picture of vulnerability and victimhood: a kind of
“fortress Israel” threatened by terror, missiles on its northern and southern borders,
and now potential nuclear annihilation from Iran, while our main ally, the United
States, was under the sway of a President who neither understood nor
fundamentally supported us. In day-to-day policy terms, this allowed Bibi to insist
we couldn’t risk serious engagement with the Palestinians. On domestic issues as
well, like the widening gap between those at the top of our high-tech economy and
a painfully squeezed middle class, the sense of crisis he encouraged gave him
license to hunker down, warn of impending doom, and do virtually nothing.
Effective though the narrative was for him politically, it bore no resemblance to
reality. Yes, President Obama disagreed with us on issues of policy, both the peace
process and on how to deal with Iran. But he was unquestionably committed to
America’s alliance with Israel. I had dealt face-to-face with four US presidents:
both of the Bushes, President Clinton and now President Obama. In terms of Israeli
security, none had proved as consistently supportive and helpful as Obama. And
yes, Israel did face an array of security challenges. A nuclear-armed Iran would
undeniably make things worse. But far from being under existential threat, we
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were a regional superpower, with a military as effective as any in the world, and a
high-tech economic sector justifiably compared to Silicon Valley.
Every few weeks, Bibi, Lieberman and I would meet for a wide-ranging
discussion on the patio of the Prime Minister’s residence. Shortly after we’d
abandoned the idea of a military strike, I raised head-on my objections to the
skewed image Bibi was promoting of our country. It wasn’t just inaccurate, I said.
Especially when his rhetoric was in full flight, and he compared the prospect of a
nuclear Iran to a new “Holocaust,” it struck me as a betrayal of the core tenet of
Zionism: an state in which Jews were in control of their own destiny. “We are in
that position now,” I said. It was nonsensical to argue we were so threatened by
everything around us, for instance, that we couldn’t “risk” taking the initiative
required to disentangle ourselves from the Palestinians on the West Bank. “I don’t
get you,” I said, turning to Lieberman as well. “Your rhetoric suggests you have
spines of steel. But your behavior is living proof of the old saying that it’s easier to
take Jews out of the galut, than take the galut out of the Jews.” Galut is Hebrew for
the diaspora. “The whole Zionist project was based on the idea of taking our fate
into our own hands, and actively trying to change the reality around us. But you
behave as if we never left the galut. You’re mired in a mindset of pessimism,
passivity and anxiety, which in terms of policy or action, leads to paralysis. Of
course, there are risks in any action, or any policy initiative. But in the situation
where Israel finds itself, the biggest risk of all is being unable or unwilling to take
risks, as if we somehow on the brink of destruction.”
I was especially upset by Bibi’s increasingly use of Holocaust imagery. “Just
think of what you’re saying,” I told him. “You’re Prime Minister of the State of
Israel, not a rabbi in a shtetl, or a speaker trying to raise funds for Israel abroad.
Think of the implications. We’re not in Europe in 1937. Or 1947. If it is a
‘Holocaust,’ what’s our response: to fold up and go back to the diaspora? If Iran
gets a bomb, it’ll be bad. Very bad. But we’ll still be here. And we’ll find a way of
dealing with the new reality.”
Yet “fortress Israel” was irresistibly comfortable for Bibi politically. I now had
to accept that, while he and I had known each other for more than half-a-century,
nothing I could do or say was going to change that. With the next Israeli election
months away, in January 2013, I confided to Nili, and then to my closest aides, that
I was not going to run for a seat in the Knesset. Israeli military action against Iran
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was off the agenda. The diplomatic process with the Palestinians was stalemated. I
could see no point in remaining in the government.
Like my last period in Olmert’s government, my final few months were
dominated by finding a way to end Hamas attacks from Gaza. During one 24-hour
period in November, Hamas launched more than 100 rockets at towns in the south,
while also attacking two military units across the border. Especially since our
military response would be the last during my time as Defense Minister, I was
determined that, this time, it would have a strictly defined objective and a finite
time frame. The overall objective hadn’t changed since Olmert’s premiership: to
hit Hamas hard, bring down the number of rocket attacks to as near zero as
possible, and reach an agreement, through the Egyptians, which established a
period of calm on our border for as long as we could. Bibi’s “victimhood”
narrative notwithstanding, one aspect of the military balance in the south was now
dramatically different. With my backing as Defense Minister, we now had Iron
Dome, which I was confident would help deal with the inevitable shower of Hamas
rockets that would follow our initial attack. Again, I felt it was essential to start
with a quick, unexpected, damaging first strike. Then, through sustained air
bombardment, to keep up enough pressure to secure the political arrangement we
wanted. And, unlike under Olmert, to end the operation as soon as we’d achieved
its aim.
On the afternoon of November 14, we launched a targeted air strike on Hamas’s
de facto chief of staff, Ahmed Jabari. We’d gone after Jabari in the past but, for
one reason or another, had failed. We also hit nearly two dozen other Hamas
targets, including all of the main missile sites we had identified. The whole
operation lasted a week. Hamas fired nearly 1,500 rockets into Israel, not just
locally manufactured Qassems but longer-range Iranian Fajr-5s and Russian Grads.
For the first time since the 1991 Gulf war, several were targeted at Tel Aviv and
Jerusalem. Fortunately, they were not significantly more accurate than in the past.
More than half landed in fields or orchards. And with Iron Dome deployed around
our major towns and cities, more than 80 per cent were intercepted.
We hit nearly 1,500 targets over the seven-day period, mostly launch-pads,
Hamas government installations and weapons stores, but also a number of
apartment complexes being used by Hamas as bases or firing points. Bibi rightly
pointed out that we were forced to fight a fundamentally asymmetric battle. While
Israel began with the principle of directing our fire away from civilian areas,
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Hamas based its launchers in precisely those places. So it was not easy. At one
point, we announced a call-up of reserves. We hinted at a possible ground
incursion. But both Bibi and I knew we were going to avoid that if at all possible,
and we did. Though there were inevitable civilian casualties, most of the
Palestinians killed were Hamas fighters and leaders, including not just Jabari but
the head of Hamas’s rocket program. By limiting ourselves to air strikes and naval
fire, the Palestinian death toll was around 150, about one-tenth of what it had been
in 2008. Six Israelis, including four civilians, lost their lives. On the 21 st of
November, the cease-fire was announced.
Yet with the election approaching, and my time in public life drawing to a
close, I had no illusion that this latest military operation, or future ones, would
bring us closer to the negotiating peace with the Palestinians that had eluded us
since Oslo. Nor was I confident that, having been unable to mount a military strike
of our own on Iran, Obama’s “bigger, stronger kid” in the schoolyard would take
military action. I did trust him to do all he could to use diplomacy to constrain
Iran’s efforts to get a bomb. I feared he might fail. Even if he succeeded, I figured
the best case would be an agreement that, at least on paper, delayed the Iranians’
development of a weapon. My hope remained that Israel’s relationship with the
Americans would be sufficiently strong for us to reach a formal understanding of
what form of surgical military strike each of our countries might take if Iran didn’t
honor the terms of a negotiated deal.
When I first left political life after my election defeat in 2001, I’d described my
status as the equivalent of a reserve officer. I said, and believed, it was unlikely I’d
return for the foreseeable future. But I knew it wasn’t impossible. This time was
different. When I announced publicly that I was leaving politics, five days after the
Gaza cease-fire, I pointed that I had spent the greater part of my life as a soldier.
I’d never had a burning desire to be a politician. Though I believed that what I’d
attempted, and achieved, in government would prove to have safeguarded and
strengthened Israel, I knew that important challenges and decisions still lay ahead.
So did our unfulfilled dream of being a country that was not just strong, secure and
prosperous, but socially just and at peace. Yet I believed it was right to draw my
time on the front line of politics to an end. Though I didn’t say so, I thought to
myself: this time doesn’t feel like a step back into the reserves, but genuinely like
the end of something. Though my dedication to a secure, strong, just, democratic
and ultimately peaceful Israel would not change, whatever contribution I might
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make to our getting there would no longer be on the battlefield, in the kirya or
around the cabinet table.
As a number of reporters pointed out, when I made the announcement I was
relaxed. I looked content, and I was smiling.
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