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” –
2
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
3
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
5
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.”
6
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.
8
* * *
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.
9
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
11
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