When we entered the Oval Office on the evening of February 11, Bush was
flanked by Secretary of State Baker, Defense Secretary Cheney and national
security adviser Brent Scowcroft. Also there was Colin Powell, a general whom
I had got to know well, and to like, over the past few years and who was now
head of the joint chiefs-of-staff. Given the seriousness of our mission, the start
of the meeting was almost surreal. The Americans had obviously been told that
I was born on February 12. Since it was just past midnight in Israel, they began
by wishing me a happy 49 th birthday.
Yet pleasing thought that was, it became clear there was a disconnect
between the tension among Israeli government ministers, and ordinary Israelis,
back home and the relaxed, self-assured, at times even jovial mood of the
President and his inner circle. Their primary focus was clearly not on Israel, but
on the overwhelming success of their air attacks on Iraq and the approach of a
ground offensive that they were confident would finish the job. That didn’t
seem to change even after a truly extraordinary interruption to our meeting,
when one of Misha’s aides passed on the news that a Scud had struck the Tel
Aviv suburb of Savyon, where Misha himself lived. He immediately excused
himself and went to phone his wife, Muriel, to confirm she was fine. When he
returned, despite their pro forma words of empathy, it seemed almost as if the
Americans thought we had cooked up the entire thing for political effect.
Bush did say the right things as the discussion turned to the missile attacks
on Israel. He told us he understood our frustration, and the pain the Scud
launches were inflicting. He appreciated our restraint. I have no doubt that all of
that was true. But the message we’d been sent to deliver clearly wasn’t hitting
home. As politely but as clearly as I could, I told President Bush that while we
didn’t want to do anything to undermine the coalition, unless someone else took
care of the Scuds, we would have no choice but to act.
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The President responded by suggesting we go to the Pentagon and talk in
greater detail about how, for both our countries’ benefit, that could be avoided.
When we convened in Secretary Cheney’s office, I delivered the same message,
but more forcefully. I felt it was essential not only to make it clear we serious
about taking action, but that we had the military capability to do so. So I told
Secretary Cheney and Colin what we were planning. I said we intended to
launch a combined air and ground assault by an air-mobile force and our best
paratroop units. At that point, Colin, who was clearly worried, suggested the
two of us withdraw to speak “soldier to soldier.” We retreated to his office.
Spreading out a map of western Iraq, I went into greater detail, explaining how
we would remain in the Iraqi desert on a search-and-destroy mission against the
mobile launchers. Colin stressed the efforts the Americans were making from
the air, and the commitment they’d shown to Israel. Not only had they delivered
the Patriots. They had allocated their best fighter jets, F-15E’s, to the task of
taking out the Scuds. It helped that he and I had got to know and respect each
other, so it wasn’t an all-out argument. But I reiterated that if the Scud attacks
kept up, we would have to act. “We will act,” I said. For a few seconds, he said
nothing. But as we headed back to join the others, he told me that only a few
hours ago, he had briefed American commanders on an anti-Scud operation by
“allied forces” like the one we were planning. “It will happen,” he assured me.
“Within 48 hours.”
That task fell to Britain’s SAS. The operation was almost exactly the same as
the one we’d planned. A force of nearly 700 commandos was helicoptered in to
Iraq’s western desert, equipped with Jeeps and Land Rovers, and anti-tank
missiles and laser targeting capability. They were also able to call on attack
helicopters and F-15 jets if necessary. The operation did not prove easy, quick,
or entirely successful. The British troops blocked the main roads and patrolled
them. But they did not find or destroy a single mobile launcher. They ended up
in gun battles with Iraqi troops. The SAS lost something like two dozen men.
Five were part of a group that got separated from the others and ended up
freezing to death in the February cold. All of the men risked their lives, with
incredible determination and bravery, in an operation to secure the safety of
Israel’s civilian population. And I have no doubt that the outcome, like the plan,
would have been almost identical if we had done it ourselves.
And it did have an effect. As I’d told Prime Minister Shamir when briefing
him on our attack plan, the very fact of a military presence on the ground made
a dramatic difference. The number, accuracy and impact of the Scuds dropped
off steeply. A few missiles kept coming, however. Since we did not yet have a
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fully detailed picture of the progress of the SAS action, skeptics and hawks in
the cabinet were inclined to see a glass half-empty. They continued to press for
Israeli military action.
In a rare public statement, I tried to reassure the country we did have a
military option, but also to urge restraint. I pointed out that the number of Scuds
had begun decreasing. Though the threat had not been eliminated altogether, we
had “very good operational plans” that would be “carried out when and if the
Israeli government instructs us to implement them.” Yet I added a caveat. “On
the political level, fingers are itching to carry out operations which, in our
opinion, can remove the threat. But in the complex situation created by this war,
neither anger, hurt, nor itchy fingers can replace rational thinking.”
The American ground invasion did turn out to be swift and decisive. In
Israel, Scud attacks continued for a few more days. But the last two missiles fell
in the Negev before dawn on February 25, among the very few to cause neither
casualties nor damage. We turned out to have been right in our pre-war
assessment about the number of missiles: around 40. Fortunately, the casualties
were far fewer than we’d anticipated. Not 120 dead, but fifteen, only one of
whom died directly because of a missile blast. The other deaths were the result
of understandable panic: the misuse of gas masks or the gas antidote drug
atropine, or from respiratory and cardiac failure. The physical damage,
however, was far greater than I’d anticipated. Buildings were destroyed. Cars
were crushed. Glass and debris flew everywhere. In financial terms, the cost ran
to hundreds of millions of dollars. The true impact was greater: on families who
saw the destruction not only their homes, but a lifetime of prized possessions.
For Holocaust survivors in particular, there was the almost unimaginable terror
of having to huddle in sealed rooms for fear of gas. And all Israelis had
experienced a new sense of vulnerability to a faraway enemy whom they
couldn’t see nor, apparently, stop.
* * *
I was due to become Israel’s 14 th chief-of-staff at the start of April, barely a
month after the last Scud attack. As the handover drew nearer, I felt fortunate,
in a way, to have missed out on the job four years earlier. Not only had Dan
excelled as ramatkal. I’d benefited from his range of experience, his judgment,
and his trust as well. We had worked together truly as a team.
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I was grateful not only to Shamir for naming me chief-of-staff, but to Rabin
and Misha. Both had honored the assurance Yitzhak had given me that I’d be
Dan’s successor. I also discovered Misha had played an even greater role than
I’d assumed. I knew there would be other candidates for the job. The strongest
turned out to be Yossi Peled, who was the head of the northern command and
possessed the undoubted credentials to be an excellent chief-of-staff. What I
hadn’t been aware of was the sentiment among some in the Likud that I was the
wrong choice politically. Not only had been born on a Labor kibbutz. There was
the small matter of the article in Hadashot several years earlier, imagining me
as a Labor leader going head-to-head in a future election against Bibi
Netanyahu for the Likud.
Yossi was assumed to be more of a Likudnik, and a few weeks before Dan
left office, I learned how Misha had rebutted the suggestion I was politically
unfit to lead the armed forces. He was visiting the north and was taken aside by
a group of Likud activists who asked how he could possibly be thinking of
supporting Barak – a Labor guy – for chief-of-staff. At first, Misha didn’t reply.
But one woman kept pressing him.
“Do you have children in the army?” he asked.
“Yes. I have a son in the Golani Brigade,” she replied proudly.
“So let’s assume your son is going on a raid across the border. Would you
want his company to be led by the best commander in the battalion? Or by a
commander who’s Likud?”
“The best commander, of course,” she said.
To which Misha said: “Well we do, too.”
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Chapter Fifteen
On the morning of April 1, 1991. I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the
graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur
War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from
his desk in the kirya to join the Sayeret Matkal attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then
Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Israel’s national military cemetery on Mount
Herzl, we stood before the resting place of Nechemia Cohen, Yoni Netanyahu,
Dado, and Avraham Arnan. From there, we went to the Prime Minister’s office.
With Dan Shomron and his wife looking on, Shamir presented me with my third
star and formally made me chief of staff.
For years, I’d developed the habit of carrying around a notebook in which
I’d jot down thoughts on things I thought that the Israeli military, and I as an
officer, could have done better: errors, oversights, and how we might fix them.
In the weeks before becoming ramatkal, I’d filled dozens of pages on issues
large and small I hoped to address as the commander of the armed forces. A lot
of them dealt with what I sensed was an erosion of cohesiveness in the army,
and, since ours was a citizen military, a fraying of the relationship between the
army and Israeli society. To some degree, this was inevitable in a country now
nearly 45 years old: developed economically and free of the kind of existential
threat we’d faced in the early years of the state. But the political divisions over
the war in Lebanon, and morale-sapping need to quell the violence on the West
Bank and in Gaza had further strained our unity of purpose.
Militarily, we were now indisputably strong enough to defeat any of the
Arab armies, even if they launched a joint attack as in 1973. Our most important
overseas ally, the United States, was committed to helping us retain that
position – what both we and they called Israel’s “qualitative edge” – in the
interest of our security and their own. But we were facing a series of new,
unconventional challenges. One of them, which had come on to Dan Shomron’s
and my radar over the past year, was Iran. Though geographically distant, it was
potentially the most serious in the longer run, as Dan himself warned Israelis in
his final interview as chief of staff. Iran was likely to become even more
assertive regionally now that the Gulf War had weakened its neighbor and rival,
Iraq. We also knew, from our intelligence sources, that the Iranians were
making preliminary efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.
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Yet the most immediate security concerns were right next door. In Lebanon,
Hizbollah fighters were being armed and financed by the Iranians and by Syria
as well. They were mounting increasingly effective operations against the
Israeli troops we’d left in the security zone. Even closer to home, Palestinian
attacks on both troops and civilians, though on nowhere near the scale of the
first months of the intifada, showed no sign of ending. I had my own views on
both. In Lebanon, I still believed we should pull out all our troops and focus our
security arrangements on what really mattered: protecting the citizens of
northern Israel. As for the lessons to be learned from the intifada, my view that
we needed a political dialogue had inadvertently become public, from remarks I
made in Moshe Dayan’s honor at a memorial event a few months before
becoming chief of staff. “We are currently in a struggle with the Palestinians – a
long, bitter and continuing struggle,” I said. “A people cannot choose its
neighbors. But we will have to talk to the Palestinians about matters, especially
about issues that are vital to them.”
Still, I was the commander of the armed forces, not a politician. Though all
chiefs of staff had political influence, if only as part of the decision-making
process on all major security questions, making policy was for our elected
government. My main focus was on how to improve the military’s fitness to
respond. I’d lived through, and more recently fought in, all of Israel’s wars. I
felt that we had yet to apply some of the critical lessons from those conflicts.
Leading tanks into battle against the Egyptians’ deadly Sagger missiles in 1973,
and a decade later watching whole Israeli armored columns stalled and attacked
by small bands of PLO fighters or Syrian commandos in Lebanon, had hardened
my conviction that Israel needed a leaner, more mobile army, with more
specialised strike units, as well as more easily targeted, less vulnerable weapons
systems. I wanted to shift the emphasis to weaponry that relied on Israel’s
strengths in new technology, invention and engineering. In a sense, this was the
macroscopic equivalent of one of the guiding principles of Sayeret Matkal:
brains, not just brawn.
While cost-saving wasn’t the catalyst, I did realize that a change in strategy
would mean a change in how we allocated our resources. When Israel bought its
first Mirage jets from France in the 1960s, they cost about a million dollars
apiece. The price tag of an F-16 was now closer to fifty million dollars. The cost
of a tank had increased tenfold. I wasn’t going to deprive the air force of stateof-the-art
aircraft, key to our ability to fight and win a war. But while we still
needed a strong armored corps, it was important to realize that units like the
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new air mobile division we’d planned to use against Saddam’s Scud launchers
were likely to be a lot more important than tank formations in future conflicts.
Six days into the job, I called together every officer in the army, from the
rank of lieutenant-colonel up. I said we needed to remind ourselves of the
army’s purpose: to protect Israel’s security and, if a war came, to win it. My
budgetary rule of thumb over the next four years would be simple: anything that
didn’t directly contribute to that mission was expendable. In fact, I put it a bit
more bluntly: “We need to cut anything that doesn’t shoot.”
My first attempt failed utterly. I proposed to close, or sell off, the army’s
radio station, Galei Tzahal. Running it cost serious money. If we were going to
cut everything that didn’t shoot, it was an obvious candidate. But what I failed
to take into account was its popularity with the listening public. Although other
radio stations had opened recently, for many years it had been the only major
alternative to the state-funded Kol Yisrael. It also provided a training ground
and employment feeder for future journalists. Galei Tzahal’s alumni included
some of the country’s top media figures, and more than a few members of the
Knesset. Within weeks, a lobbying effort was underway to “save” the station. I
went to see Misha. He agreed that, from a military and budgetary standpoint,
closing it was the right thing to do. But in an early lesson in how different
politics were from the army, he told me that politically, it simply wasn’t going
to fly. “Drop it, Ehud,” he said. So I did.
Still, I did end up fundamentally retooling the armed forces during my time
as chief of staff. We developed agile new strike forces and high-precision, hightech
weapons systems with “stand-off” munitions designed to be fired from
many miles away. In the 1973 war, and for the decade or two that followed,
Saggers, and the US-made TOW missiles that Israel acquired after the war, had
the capability to transform a battlefield. Now, Israeli developers came up with
small, ground-launched missiles that could take out a tank from five to 10 miles
away, even without a direct line of sight to the target. Of even more long-term
military significance, I pushed ahead with developing pilotless drones – socalled
UAVs – making us the first army in the world to produce and deploy
them.
Yet for a security challenge like the intifada, even the most advanced standoff
munitions or UAVs offered no practical answer. The latest stage in the
violence involved knife attacks by Palestinians against Israeli civilians, both on
West Bank settlers and inside Israel. Days after I took over, a 26-year-old from
Gaza, wielding a butcher’s knife and shouting Alahu Akhbar, killed four people,
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including a kindergarten teacher, in Jerusalem. On the morning of May 24,
1992, a 15-year-old Israeli schoolgirl named Helena Rapp was on her way to
catch the bus to school south of Tel Aviv, when another Gazan stabbed her to
death. To the extent Israelis were looking for someone to blame, there were
obvious candidates. The army, the primary defense against the intifada, was
one. The police even more so, since many of the attacks were now taking place
inside Israel. And in ugly rioting after Helena Rapp’s murder, bands of Israelis
took to the streets, some of them yelling: “Death to the Arabs”. Still, most
people understood that criticizing the army or the police, or going on a rampage
against “the Arabs” – hundreds of thousands of whom were Israeli citizens and
had lived among us since the birth of the state – would not help. Most, in fact,
placed the blame, and lodged their hopes, with the government.
By the time of the next election, in June 1992, the combination of Palestinian
violence and the still-traumatic memories of Saddam’s Scuds, left Israelis
doubtful that Shamir could fulfil the most basic responsibility of government:
ensuring their day-to-day security. Labor had once again placed its electoral
fortunes in the hands of Yitzhak Rabin, following Peres’s several failed
attempts to lead the party back into power. Knowing that Rabin had a record of
military command unmatched in Israeli politics, Labor strategists did not so
much need to convince voters as to reinforce their fears and frustrations. One of
the campaign slogans, a direct appeal to the anger over the stabbing of Helena
Rapp, was “Get Gaza out of Tel Aviv!” Labor ended up gaining five Knesset
seats, and now had 44. The Likud lost eight and was left with only 32.
That meant that my last three years as chief of staff would be with Rabin
back as Prime Minister – and, like Ben-Gurion before him, as Defense Minister
as well. He and I had been in touch only occasionally since his departure from
the unity-coalition government two years earlier. But I had, of course, spoken
with him after my appointment as ramatkal, in which he’d played an important
part. Though he was 20 years older than me, our relationship had become
steadily closer over the years, especially when I’d worked with him as Defense
Minister. In some ways, we were alike. We’d both been forged by Labor
Zionism. We were career military officers, uncomfortable with flights of
political rhetoric and convinced that Israel’s security and its future depended
less on words than on action. In large groups especially, both of us tended to be
men of a few words. Over the next few years, we would become even closer,
speaking not only in the kirya or at Yitzhak’s office in Jerusalem, but also, with
Nava and Leah, around the dinner table at Rabin’s apartment in Tel Aviv.
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* * *
But there were times of crisis, and high tension, as well. Only five months
after the election, Rabin and I faced one of the most painful periods during my
entire time as chief of staff. It began with the gruesome death of five Sayeret
Matkal soldiers during a training exercise in the Negev desert. I’d made
preventing such accidents a top priority. By the end of the 1980s, they were
claiming as many as 80 lives a year. During Dan’s tenure, we’d brought the
number down to about 35. But I knew we had to do more. When I’d addressed
the officers after becoming chief of staff, I told them: “Parents are giving us
their children in order to allow us to protect the country. They know there is risk
involved. But they expect their children not to be brought home in coffins
because of our own negligence, or stupidity.” What happened at the military
base of Tze’elim in the Negev on November 5, 1992 was not only a reminder of
how far we still had to go, however. It occurred during a dry run for an
operation unlike any that Israel had ever considered. For that and other reasons,
it would erupt into a major political controversy.
Though the reason for the exercise was meant to have remained a closely
guarded secret, foreign newspaper reports in the weeks after the training
accident made secrecy impossible. We were planning to infiltrate a Sayeret
Matkal unit into Iraq, and to kill Saddam Hussein.
The Gulf War had blunted any immediate threat from Iraq. But Saddam had
proven he could launch missiles into the heart of Israel. We knew from our
intelligence reports that, in addition to his unabated desire to acquire nuclear
arms, he retained facilities to produce chemical weapons. He was trying to
acquire and develop new biological weapons. In fact, the Iraqis had actually
acknowledged a biological weapons program to UN inspectors, claiming it was
for “defensive purposes.”
The idea for an attack on Saddam had first been raised a year earlier, when
my former Sayeret Matkal comrade, Amiram Levin, asked to see me. He was
between military postings, but had come up with the outline of a plan he felt
would allow us to isolate Saddam during a public appearance and kill him. With
my approval, he and a small group of officers in the sayeret began working
further on the idea, with the initial aim of seeing whether it was really workable.
Since Misha was still Defense Minister, I briefed him on what we were doing. I
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also briefed Rabin after the election. At that stage, there was no discussion of
whether we actually would, or should, target Saddam. I asked Misha, and then
Yitzhak, only whether such an operation might seriously be considered by the
government. If not, I said, we’d drop it. Both replied that we should go ahead
with the planning and preparation. The November 1992 exercise was intended
as a final test of its viability – before deciding whether actually to do it.
A few weeks earlier, Rabin and I had talked through the arguments for and
against. The arguments against it were obvious. Yes, in the past we had
abducted, or even killed, leaders of groups involved in terror attacks. But we’d
never contemplated targeting a head of state. Crossing that line risked being
seen not just as attacking a dictator with a record of ruthlessness and murder at
home, and aggression towards Israel, but long-accepted norms of international
relations. The arguments in favour began with the fact that Saddam was a
meglomaniacally ambitious dictator. He had also fired missiles on our towns
and cities. He retained the capability to arm them with chemical warheads,
possibly biological agents, and conceivably a nuclear warhead in the future.
Both Rabin and I agreed there were two key tests of whether an attack would be
justified: was it was the only realistic way of confronting the threat from Iraq,
and would killing him end, or at least exponentially reduce, that threat.
Though there was no final decision at our meeting, Rabin was clearly
inclined to go ahead. An Israeli TV program two decades later unearthed a
summary of the discussion, written by his military aide. “The Prime Minister
approves the target... This is an operation we should go for when the probability
of success is very high,” it said. “Thus, we have to build the operational
capability in the best possible way, and continue preparations.” In another part
of the record, Rabin is quoted as having defined the elimination of Saddam as a
“meaningful objective” with implications for “the very security of Israel.” He
added: “I do not see anyone similar to him in the Arab world.”
I, too, was on balance persuaded we should do it. In the years since, I’ve
sometime reflected on what happened with Saddam still in place: the 2003
invasion of Iraq, led by the younger President Bush, the tens of thousands of
lives lost, the trillions of dollars spent on a war without any clear end, and the
near-disintegration of Iraq. But with the complexities of Iraq then and now,
there can be no simple answer to how the situation would have changed if we’d
killed Saddam. Our view, based on detailed intelligence analyses, was that the
likely result would have been a fairly rapid takeover by a few top security and
Baath Party figures and that, while the new Iraqi leadership might try to retaliate
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with terror attacks, a major military response was highly unlikely. Saddam’s
successors were never going to be Zionists. But we were persuaded that his
uniquely central role meant the threat to Israel would be dramatically reduced.
I’m much less sure whether the elder President Bush, whose election defeat
to Bill Clinton came just two days before our final exercise in the Negev, would
have agreed with the attack. After the victory in the Gulf War, Bush had
deliberately stopped short of sending American forces on to Baghdad. He was
also vice-president, under Reagan, when Israel had bombed Saddam’s nuclear
reactor – an attack publicly condemned by Washington. I did ask him some
years ago whether the Gulf War might have been handled differently if Israel
hadn’t taken out Saddam’s nuclear program a decade earlier. “What if he’d had
a couple of crude nuclear devices,” I said. President Bush smiled in response.
He said he didn’t deal with “hypotheticals.”
Yet any idea of an Israeli attack on Saddam became instantly irrelevant once
foreign media reports had disclosed the reason for our ill-fated military exercise
in the Negev. Inside Israel, the focus, and the controversy, shifted to the
accident itself.
The foreign media reports of the operation we were planning proved
remarkably accurate. Some of the details still remain classified, but we were
going to use one of our new “stand-off” weapons systems: a camera-guided
missile that could be fired from a considerable distance away and, in
coordination with one of the Sayeret Matkal soldiers nearer in, maneuvered in
for the strike. After months of planning and intelligence work, we were
confident that we’d found a way to get the sayeret unit into Iraq, target Saddam
at an event we knew he would be attending, isolate and kill him with minimal
danger of any other casualties, and get our unit out safely again. The Negev
exercise was a run-through of the entire operation. It lasted nearly 48 hours. And
it culminated in a simulation of the missile attack on Saddam.
I was there as an observer along with Amnon Lipkin, my deputy chief-ofstaff;
as well as the head of military intelligence, the head of operations and
Amiram Levin. We assembled at dawn for the simulation of the missile attack.
We watched from a few hundred yards away as a group of young Israeli soldiers
walked into a wide area in front of us: posing as Saddam” and his entourage.
We – and they – knew that this was just the first part of the exercise. In a Land
Rover more than five miles away, a member of the sayeret strike unit would be
confirming coordinates and, in rapid succession, “firing” two of the precision
missiles. But this was just to confirm that the targeting system had worked
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perfectly. No missiles would actually be shot. This stage was for the telemetry.
Once that was done, the soldier-actors would be replaced with wooden targets
and the real munitions would be tested.
The young soldiers stated chatting to one another, and milling about,
simulating as best we could the circumstances in which we expected to target
Saddam if the operation got final approval. In theory, within a minute, two
minutes at most, we would get word that the preliminary mock-firing sequence
had gone perfectly – at which point the artillery-range targets would be brought
in for the live test. But suddenly, there was an explosion. A split second of
silence. Then pandemonium. There was no need to know, and no time to
wonder, what exactly had gone wrong, or how it had been allowed to happen. It
was obvious to all of us that the live missiles had been fired. We sprinted
forward. When we got to the group of soldiers, we could see that four of the
young men were dead. Another was fighting for his life. Several others were
also wounded.
A sayeret medic and several senior officers were trying to save the most
badly injured man, but I knew I needed to get military doctors and medical
evacuation helicopters in immediately if we were to save the lives of the injured
soldiers. I had a mobile phone, but couldn’t get a signal. I ran toward a slightly
higher area a few dozen yards away and managed to get through to the kirya. I
issued orders for the nearby training base in Tze’elim and an air force near
Beersheva to dispatch helicopters to treat and evacuate the wounded.
We heard the first chopper about 25 minutes later, but it seemed initially
unable to see us, because it flew on before returning and landing two minutes
later. By that time, a medical team from the base in Tze’elim had arrived. Ten
minutes later, two other medevac choppers landed. But the soldier who had
been worst wounded could not be saved. After the doctors had been there about
20 minutes, I again retreated to the area where I could get a mobile signal, and
phoned Rabin to tell him what had happened. We agreed I should come back to
brief him in detail. It was now about 50 minutes since the missiles had hit. The
wounded were all being treated. One of the helicopters had taken off for
Beersheva Hospital. Another two, including a heavier Sikorsky transport
helicopter, were preparing to leave. I arranged for Amnon, military intelligence
chief Shmuel Arad and me to return to the kirya. I told Amiram to stay until he
had confirmed all the injured had been evacuated, and talk to everyone involved
to get a preliminary idea of why and how the tragedy had happened.
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When I got back, we immediately met with Rabin and agreed on the need to
launch a formal investigation. Rabin then asked me to brief the “editors club”, a
group of about 15 media figures that operated on a gentleman’s agreement that
there would be no publicity or leaks. He believed we should not make public the
fact that I and other generals were there when the accident occurred. At this
stage, we still hoped to hide the purpose of the exercise if possible, something
Rabin knew would be harder if it was known the top military leadership had
observed the exercise. When I briefed the editors’ club, I did tell them in
confidence that I’d been there. Though not specifying the reason for the
exercise, I told them it was for a major operation. The time-honored
understanding was that this information would go no further. But it did,
presumably at first because of leaks by Israeli journalists, then in a series of
detailed reports in the foreign press. Even more frustrating on a personal level,
some of the Israeli reports insinuated that far from giving the editors the full
story of who had been at the Negev exercise, that I’d tried to hide my presence
in order to protect my reputation or shirk responsibility.
Two official inquiries followed: the one we’d agreed with Rabin and a
standard army legal investigation. They found the cause of the tragedy to be a
mix of fatigue after some of the soldiers had spent nearly 48 hours awake,
pressure, confusion and negligence. Astonishingly, it turned out the codeword
for the mock-firing of the missiles in the first stage of the exercise was the same
as for the live missiles. Formal charges were brought against two Sayeret
Matkal officers, and reprimands issued to Amiram Levin and Uri Saguy. I was
also subject to criticism because, due to the unique complexity of the plan, I’d
put Amiram and senior officers within Sayeret Matkal in charge of different
aspects of the preparations. This was viewed as possibly reducing the clarity
over who was ultimately responsible for each aspect of the planning. Neither I,
nor of course Rabin, had played a direct role in what went wrong in the exercise
itself. To the extent I’d been involved, it was to make sure the medical teams
were helicoptered in, and that the injured soldiers were cared for and evacuated
as soon as possible. But politically, the tragedy at Tze’elim would dramatically
resurface for both me and Rabin several years later – after I’d left the military
and was on the verge of joining his government.
I was getting to know Yitzhak much better. The Defense Minister’s office in
the kirya was just down the hall from mine. Almost without fail on Friday
afternoons, he’d ask me in to chat before going home. We would sit around a
low table in the corner of the room, each of us sipping coffee, or sometimes
beer, and Rabin invariably puffing on a cigarette. He never raised questions of
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party politics. But we talked at length about Israel’s immediate security
concerns, as well as the country’s longer-term challenges in finding its place in
more stable, peaceful Middle East. How, over time, we might manage to
extricate ourselves from the escalating violence with Hizbollah; reach a landfor-peace
deal with the enigmatic President Hafez al-Assad in Syria; and find
some form of coexistence with the Palestinians.
He also spoke about international politics. I remember one afternoon in the
summer of 1992 when he mentioned the then US presidential candidate Bill
Clinton. He’d met Clinton for the first time in Washington, after two days of
talks with President Bush at his summer home in Maine. Rabin was naturally
more comfortable dealing with Republicans. Almost all his experience in public
life – as a military officer, ambassador to Washington, Defense Minister and
Prime Minister – had coincided with Republican administrations. The irony was
that he would go on to forge a much closer relationship with President Clinton
than between any previous Israeli and US leader. But his first impression was
more skeptical. “Clearly, Clinton is very intelligent,” he said. “He is
surprisingly sharp politically for someone his age. But also, I fear, a little bit too
slick.”
* * *
We did not have long to focus on the lessons and implications of Tze’elim.
For weeks before the training accident, a crisis had been building in south
Lebanon, with a sharp escalation of the now-familiar mix of clashes inside our
“security zone” and cross-border rocket attacks. Hizbollah was now armed not
just with Katyushas but Saggers, American-made TOW anti-tank missiles and
an increasingly sophisticated array of roadside bombs. A combination of
Hizbollah attacks and “friendly fire” incidents or firearms accidents involving
our troops meant that Israelis were still dying in Lebanon a decade after the
formal end of the war. It was demoralizing for the Israeli public, for the soldiers
who we rotated into the security zone and for the government as well. The
difficulty was that it was also a situation that perfectly suited Hizbollah.
In late October, a Katyusha rocket had claimed the life of a 14-year-old boy
in the northern Israeli town of Kiryat Shmona. Hizbollah escalated its rocket
fire in the days that followed, forcing tens of thousands of residents into their
shelters. Predictably, there was pressure from Likud politicians to hit back hard.
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Raful Eitan, who had founded a small right-wing party called Tsomet, went
further. He called the attacks “an act of war” and said we should “respond in
kind.” We did move troops and tanks to the border. But my view, which Rabin
shared, was that a major ground operation would risk miring ourselves more
deeply without fundamentally improving the situation. Hizbollah was the kind
of nonconventional enemy I had in mind when I’d taken stock of Israel’s
changing security imperatives on becoming chief of staff. It was a small force,
entrenched and well armed, increasingly supported by Iran and Syria. Its tactics
rested on quick-hit attacks on our soldiers in south Lebanon. Far from fearing
military retaliation, Hizbollah knew that short of a 1982-scale war – and maybe
even then – it would survive. It also didn’t care whether Lebanese civilians died
in the crossfire. In fact, like the PLO fighters who had controlled the area before
1982, Hizbollah deliberately fired into Israel from civilian areas.
Neither Rabin nor I had abandoned the idea of a large-scale military
operation at some point, particularly if the cross-border rocket fire didn’t
subside, which for a while it did. But we were determined that, if and when we
did decide to strike, we would avoid anything on the scale of the 1982 war. It
would have to be with a clear, finite and achievable goal.
That point finally arrived in the summer of 1993. In addition to renewed
Katyusha strikes, there was a series of deadly Hizbollah attacks in the first two
weeks of July inside the security zone. Each used what was becoming the tactic
of choice: a remotely detonated bomb by the side of the road on which our
military vehicles were travelling, followed by an ambush of soldiers who
survived the blast. Six Israelis had been killed in all, making it the largest
monthly toll in three years. When I went to see Rabin with our plan for a
military response, I recognized the risks. It would be the largest military
operation in Lebanon since the war. But I believed we could limit civilian
casualties, and that it was the only approach that might lead to a significant
reduction in the missile attacks on northern Israel. I began with the assumption
that, left to its own devices, Hizbollah would have no incentive to stop firing.
Since the two Arab governments with the potential to rein in the attacks –
Lebanon’s and above all Syria’s – were showing no interest in doing so, we had
to find a way to hold them to account.
The operation I proposed was intended to send a message to Beirut and
Damascus. It would not be a ground invasion as in 1982. Most of the attacks
would be from the air, in two stages. The first would target Hizbollah, both in
southern Lebanon and in the Bekaa Valley further north, near the border with
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Syria. We could halt at that stage, in the unlikely event Hizbollah showed signs
of de-escalation. But if it didn’t, the air strikes would intensify. The aim was not
target the nearly 250,000 Lebanese civilians who lived in the immediate border
area. It was to use our attacks, along with leaflet drops and radio messages, to
encourage them to flee north. My assessment was that this would bring pressure
on the Lebanese government and, through the Lebanese, on the real power in
Lebanon, the Syrians. I doubted Damascus would respond directly by telling
Hizbollah to cease fire. I did believe they’d be ready to engage with American
efforts to stop the fighting, and that Rabin and the government could then secure
terms we were prepared to accept.
On July 25, we began our heaviest air strikes since 1982. Far from producing
a sign of a climb-down by Hizbollah, it responded with intensified rocket fire.
We escalated over the following 24 hours, but still with no indication of any
change from Hizbollah. So as planned, we expanded our bombing to wider
areas of south Lebanon. Sadly, some Lebanese civilians were killed, which I’m
sure was a much greater cause of concern to us than to Hizbollah. Thankfully,
however, the majority fled north. In south Lebanon, this meant that our jets and
artillery had much greater freedom of operation against Hizbollah, which had
now lost its human shields. In Beirut, a government suddenly overwhelmed
with the need to provide shelter for the large number of refugees from the
fighting did press Syrian President Assad to help bring it to an end. Critically,
the new Clinton Administration, especially Secretary of State Warren
Christopher, reinforced that message.
Our military operation lasted just a week. It did not end Hizbollah attacks on
Israeli troops in the security zone, something I think even most Israelis were
coming to realize was impossible as long as our soldiers remained in Lebanon.
But the rocket attacks on northern Israel did stop, with very few exceptions, for
a period that lasted nearly two years.
The intifada, however, had not stopped. Nor, as I knew from my increasingly
frequent meetings with Rabin, had the search for a way both to control the
violence, and seek out any realistic prospect of a political path to resolving our
conflict with our Arab neighbors.
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Chapter Sixteen
Rabin had inherited a peace process, put in motion by the Bush
Administration after the Gulf War. But since both Prime Minister Shamir and
our Arab enemies had reasons of procedure, politics or principle to resist the
talks, merely getting them off the ground had required the same combination of
deftness and determination President Bush had brought to assembling his
wartime coalition and defeating Saddam. After a formal opening session in
Madrid, the “bilateral tracks” – between Israel and negotiators from Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and the Palestinians – had quickly stalemated and stalled.
Yitzhak came to office saying he was not interested in a peace process,
which seemed to him a license for endless talk with no set endpoint, but in
peacemaking. Since I had the good fortune to be part of the informal inner circle
with which he discussed the potential opportunities, pitfalls and frustrations
along the way, I know that he wasn’t assuming we could necessarily achieve a
peace agreement with any of our neighbors. But after the twin shocks of the
Lebanon War and the Scud missiles, he was concerned that Israel would retreat
into a mix of political caution and military deterrence which he rightly believed
was short-sighted. He believed we needed at least to try to seize a “window of
opportunity” with those enemies who were at least open to compromise, if only
because we were facing new threats from enemies for whom talk was not even
an option. An increasingly assertive Iran, with nuclear ambitions, was one. But
the intifada had also thrown up new Palestinian groups grounded not in
nationalism, but fundamentalist Islam: Hamas in Gaza, which opposed Israel’s
presence on any part of “Muslim Palestine,” and Islamic Jihad on the West
Bank. And in Lebanon, we were confronting the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia
fighters of Hizbollah.
Each of us in the small group on whom Rabin relied for input on the peace
talks brought something different to the mix. In addition to me, there were four
other generals: Uri Saguy, the head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in
charge of civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza; my own former
sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was head of the central command; and
Rabin’s military aide, Kuti Mor. Also included were longtime political and
media aide Eitan Haber, and another trusted political adviser thousands of miles
away: Itamar Rabinovich, our ambassador in Washington and Israel’s leading
Syria expert. But I’m sure we weren’t chosen just for our insights. It was
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because we were people with whom Rabin felt comfortable – a counterpoint, I
suspect, to the old Labor Party rival whom he had made Foreign Minister,
Shimon Peres. Though the two men had grown to respect each another over the
years, Rabin neither trusted, nor much liked, Shimon. In fact, though Peres’s
support inside Labor had secured him the foreign ministry, Rabin had stipulated
that all peace talks would remain under his control.
Yet as I’d discover nearly a decade later, when I was Prime Minister, even
the most carefully planned negotiating strategies were always subject to
setbacks, diversions, or simply what former British Prime Minister Harold
Macmillan once called “events, dear boy, events.” Rabin’s initial plan was not
to start with the Palestinians. He did feel it was essential to try to reach a
political settlement with them. In one respect, the prospects looked slightly
better than before. Arafat’s political position had been weakened: first by an
intifada driven as much by local insurgents as by the PLO in faraway Tunis, and
then by his decision to break with his longtime Gulf Arab financial supporters
and support Saddam Hussein the Gulf War. In 1988, as the entry price for a
formal dialogue with the Bush Administration, he had also agreed to a statement
in which he renounced terrorism and accepted the principle of a two-state peace
agreement with Israel. Still, there remained a yawning gap between the “selfrule”
envisaged in the Camp David accords of 1978 and the Madrid conference,
and the independent state the Palestinians wanted. Negotiations to bridge it were
likely to be fraught and long.
So he’d decided to begin with Syria. President Assad was obstinate, and
publicly opposed to the idea of making peace with Israel. But he’d been in
power for more than two decades and, crucially for Rabin, had lived up to the
few, indirect agreements Israel had made with him. The substance in any
agreement, though politically difficult, was also more straightforward. We knew
what Assad wanted: the recovery of the Golan Heights, in return for the
absolute minimum level of political normalization with Israel. We knew what
we wanted: security guarantees and assurances regarding water resources, and a
full and final peace treaty. For Rabin, there was an additional attraction in
beginning with Syria: if we did reach a deal with our main Arab enemy, the
pressure would intensify on the Palestinians to follow suit.
The dramatic turn of events that ultimately forced him to change tack began
in January 1993 in the sitting room of a villa outside Oslo, at an ostensible
“academic seminar” convened by the Norwegian diplomat Terje Larsen. It
included two Israeli academics with personal ties to prominent Palestinians:
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Yair Hirschfeld, and the historian and former Haaretz journalist Ron Pundak.
Three PLO officials were there, led by Arafat’s closest economic aide, Abu
Ala’a. Though both of the Israelis were friends of Yossi Beilin, a protégé of
Peres and our deputy foreign minister, even Peres didn’t know about the
meeting until Yossi told him the following day. Rabin knew an hour later. I first
learned of it from Uri Saguy, after Unit 8200 intercepted Arabic-language
traffic concerning a briefing the Norwegians had given their Arab contacts. At
first, even Peres was skeptical that the paper agreed at the “seminar” – calling
for international aid to the West Bank and Gaza on the scale of the Marshall
Plan, and an initial Israeli withdrawal limited to Gaza – would lead to serious
negotiations. But Rabin authorized follow-up sessions in mid-February, late
March and again in April. Our intelligence teams continued to provide detail,
and occasional color. Uri Saguy and I even began to use the Arabic shorthand,
from the intelligence reports, for the two Israeli academics. The burly, bearded
Yair Hirschfeld was “the bear”. The slighter Ron Pundak was “the mouse”. Yet
the main political impetus in driving the process forward came from two men
who were not there: on our side, Yossi Beilin, and for the Palestinians, Arafat’s
trusted diplomatic adviser, and eventual successor, Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu
Mazen.
Since Rabin knew I was following the ostensibly secret talks, we discussed
them often. For quite a while, he remained dismissive. He believed the chances
of a breakthrough were remote. He was also suspicious of the involvement of
Peres and Beilin, whom he called “Shimon’s poodle”. And he deeply distrusted
Arafat. The PLO had been founded with the aim of “liberating” every inch of
Palestine. The fact that Arafat had agreed to the Bush Administration’s demand
to accept the principle of land-for-peace struck Rabin as mere sleight-of-hand.
By the third Oslo meeting, it was clear that the Palestinians were open to an
agreement that would fall well short of “liberating Palestine”. Still, Rabin was
leery. He tried briefly to return the focus to the stalemated Madrid-track talks
with the Palestinians. Yet when, with obvious PLO encouragement, the
Palestinian negotiators stood their ground there, he seemed almost resigned to
supporting Oslo. When we discussed it, he used a battlefield metaphor. “When
you have to break through, you don’t necessarily know where you’ll succeed.
You try several places along the enemy’s lines. In the sector of the front where
you do succeed, you send in your other forces.” It was a matter of “reinforcing
success.”
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“It’s the opposite in this case,” I replied. “In a battle, the enemy is doing
everything it can to stop you. When you break through, it’s against their
resistance. Here, the other side will choose to make it easiest for us in the place
it prefers. If Arafat thinks he’ll get more from the Bear and the Mouse than from
the other talks, it’s hardly a surprise we’re finding that only Oslo seems to offer
a way forward.”
Rabin did make one more move, not so much in a bid to end the talks in Oslo
as to slow them down and create a context more favorable for the kind of
agreement he wanted. He shifted his attention to his original peacemaking
priority: the Syrians. In an effort to remove a roadblock to even beginning
serious talks, he offered the Americans what they would later call his “pocket
deposit.” He authorized Secretary of State Warren Christopher to tell Assad that
Washington’s understanding of our position was that, assuming all our own
negotiating concerns were addressed, we accepted that peace with Syria would
include withdrawing from the Golan. The formula was agreed in a meeting in
Israel between Rabin and the Clinton Administration’s Middle East negotiator,
Dennis Ross. Rabin didn’t tell Peres or other ministers about it, though Itamar
Rabinovich did know. I did as well. Since acceptance of the need for a
withdrawal had security implications, Rabin and I talked about it in detail
before Ross’s visit. We formulated the “deposit” together. We used an English
acronym: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” The point was to convey to the
Syrian president that if he addressed our requirements for a demilitarized zone
and early warning facilities; non-interference with our critically important water
sources; as well as a full peace including embassies, open borders and joint
economic projects, we knew the trade-off would be to return the Golan.
It was by diplomatic accident that the Syrian overture went nowhere. The
reason even the Americans had called our proposal a “pocket deposit” was that
it was to be kept in the Christopher’s pocket, to be pulled out as an American
understanding of our position if he felt it might lead to a breakthrough. Our
intelligence accounts of the Christopher-Assad talks, however, suggested it had
been presented as a straight message from Rabin to the Syrian president, giving
it the status of Israel’s new, formal opening position in negotiations.
The distinction may seem minor. But for Israel, it mattered greatly. In any
agreement with Syria – or, indeed, the Palestinians – there was bound to an
imbalance. Both parts of a “land-for-peace” exchange were important. But land
was not just the more tangible asset. Once given up, short of resorting to all-out
war, there was no going back. The “peace” part of the equation was more
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difficult. Genuine peace, and trust, would inevitably take years to reach fruition.
That was no mere academic problem in a conflict where, for decades, our
enemies had defined Israel’s mere existence as illegitimate. The reason for
Rabin’s reluctance to have his “deposit” presented as a set negotiating position
was that it meant dealing away our only card – territory – before the hard
questions about peace had been answered. When he phoned Christopher, I don’t
think I’ve ever heard him as angry. That was not what we agreed, he insisted.
He said it had spoiled any prospect of serious negotiations on the peace side of
the balance. Christopher didn’t agree there had been any real damage, nor that
Assad had failed to understand the context.
It might not have changed things anyway, since by this stage, the Oslo talks
had almost completed a draft agreement. In mid-August, Rabin gave Peres the
go-ahead to initial this “Declaration of Principles.” It provided for a period of
interim Palestinian self-government; the start of a phased Israeli withdrawal
from Gaza and the West Bank with the creation of a Palestinian police force to
deal with internal security; and a commitment to reach a full peace agreement
within five years. In early September, ahead of the formal signing of the Oslo
declaration, there was an exchange of “letters of recognition” between Arafat
and Rabin. Arafat’s letter also renounced “terrorism and other acts of violence”
and declared invalid “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny
Israel’s right to exist.” A few days later, the signing ceremony was hosted by
President Clinton in Washington. Thus emerged the famous photo of Rabin and
Arafat shaking hands, on either side of Clinton, who was beaming, arms
outstretched in conciliation. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In
this case, you needed barely a dozen. Rabin’s demeanor, his posture, the look
on his face, all seemed to say: “I would rather be shaking the hand of anyone on
earth than Arafat.” Still, the image was on front pages worldwide. The news
stories spoke of a new spirit of hope. Now that these old enemies had grasped
hands, surely a full peace agreement was within reach.
My feeling, as I watched it on TV in the kirya, was more guarded. I did hope
for peace, of course. I also recognized that the signing on the White House lawn
was just a beginning, and that my role would be to ensure that Israel’s security
needs were met under whatever formal peace agreement might eventually be
reached. And the security omens were hardly encouraging. Despite Oslo,
Palestinian attacks were continuing. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other dissident
factions saw Arafat’s concessions as treachery, and were setting out to drive
home that point with violence.
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* * *
Yet as I approached my final year as chief of staff in early 1994, we were
suddenly confronted by an appalling act of Israeli violence: mass murder,
committed by a West Bank settler. Terrorism, no less than the worst Arab
attacks on Israeli civilians. The settler was named Baruch Goldstein, a
physician, who lived in Kiryat Arba. One of the first post-1967 Jewish
settlements, it sat on a hill outside the West Bank town of Hebron. At the heart
of Hebron lay the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish
faith: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob and Leah. Since Abraham
is also revered as a prophet in Islam and a mosque had stood on the site for
nearly a thousand years, our post-1967 arrangements set out separate times of
worship for Muslims and Jews. Goldstein chose to attack during a holiday
period for both faiths: Purim for the Jews and the Muslim holy month of
Ramadan. He arrived shortly after the Muslims’ Friday prayers began on the
morning on February 25. He was dressed in his reserve army uniform and was
carrying an automatic rifle. He opened fire on a group of nearly 800 Palestinian
worshipers. He had killed 29 and wounded 125 others by the time several of his
intended victims knocked him unconscious and beat him to death.
I rushed to Sde Dov airport in north Tel Aviv, a few minutes from the kirya,
and boarded a helicopter for the old British fort near Hebron, used by the
Jordanians until 1967 and now Israeli headquarters. After visiting the scene of
the killings, I sought out local Palestinian leaders, to voice my condolences and
the sense of outrage I shared over what had happened, and to urge them to do all
they could to maintain calm. I then went to Kiryat Arba and conveyed the same
message.
Our immediate task was to prevent more deaths, on either side. It was a
frustrating, and violent, week. Protests reminiscent of the first days of the
intifada erupted around the West Bank, in Gaza, in east Jerusalem and in several
Arab neighborhoods and towns inside Israel. While I had no trouble
understanding the Palestinians’ anger, I also had a responsibility to prevent the
violence spiraling out of control. We turned to the same tools we’d used at the
beginning of the uprising – though with even greater emphasis on the need for
soldiers to use the only the necessary force to restore order, and to avoid causing
fatalities wherever possible. We closed off the West Bank. We imposed curfews
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on the main West Bank and Gaza towns and refugee camps. We also imposed a
curfew on Kiryat Arba and, for the first time, were given the authority to use
administrative detention orders not just against Palestinians, but specific Jewish
settlers. We arrested about a half-dozen leaders of Kach, the far-right, anti-Arab
political movement founded by the American Rabbi Meir Kahane, of which
Baruch Goldstein had also been a member. Still, there were repeated clashes
anyway – and dozens of deaths as a result – before things finally began to
subside a week or so later.
The massacre had made me feel more strongly than ever that our
responsibility to protect the security of the settlers could not extend to allowing
them to defy the government or the law. The principle would be put to the test
within a few weeks. A settlement near Hebron, called Tel Rumeida, had been
set up without government approval in 1984. As part of the response to
Goldstein killings, Rabin was thinking of closing it down. That prompted a
number of right-wing rabbis to issue a formal religious ruling against any such
action. Rabin called me in to ask whether it would be operationally possible to
dismantle Tel Rumeida and remove the settlers. I said yes, by sending in a
Sayeret Matkal force after midnight, as long as news of the operation did not
leak ahead of time. “We’ll take over the area, close it off and get control.”
Given the tensions in the wake of the massacre, I did add that I couldn’t promise
that our soldiers would hold fire. “There are people in there with weapons,” I
said. “If someone shoots at them, they will shoot back.”
“Should I do it?” he asked me. Maybe I should have given him an answer.
But I didn’t feel it was my place to add to the pressures around what was clearly
a finely balanced call, especially since my inclination would have been to tell
him to go ahead. I said it was something only he could decide. “What I can tell
you is that we can do it.” When I left, my sense was that he was sufficiently
angry over what had happened in Hebron that he felt it essential to draw a line –
the line of law – over what settlers were allowed to do. But the Passover holiday
was now a couple of days away. I think what happened is that he realized the
operation would not be possible until after the holiday period. By then, he was
concerned he would have lost the clear political logic for moving against Tel
Rumeida. The settlement has remained in place, a flashpoint in the conflict
between settlers and Palestinians in the area around Hebron.
The wider repercussions, and the controversy, from the massacre
reverberated widely. Rabin and his cabinet immediately decided to establish an
inquiry, under Supreme Court Chief Justice Meir Shamgar. It would look into
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every aspect of the killings – including any failings by the army, the Shin Bet,
the police or other authorities that might have allowed the tragedy to happen.
The commission interviewed dozens of witnesses, Israeli and Palestinian, in 31
separate sessions. I knew early on that the inquiry would throw up difficult
issues. I was especially upset to learn that two soldiers and three border guards
scheduled for guard duty at the mosque had shown up late on the morning of the
killings. By the time I testified in late March, the inquiry had heard from a range
of senior and local commanders and individual soldiers. A picture had emerged
of a series of security breakdowns, equipment malfunctions, oversights and
confusion around the site where the murders took place.
I did not try to dodge the fact that security lapses around the Cave of the
Patriarchs that day had contributed to what happened. In addition to the fact that
the guard unit was not at full strength until after the murders took place, several
of the security cameras weren’t working. I acknowledged that if the cameras
and the guards had done their job, at the very least some lives might be have
saved. Yet I also made the point that this specific act of mass murder was
something the army could not have anticipated. I told the commissioners to
remember that they were judging things after the fact. They knew how the
tragedy had ended. In the context in which we were operating, the prospect of
an Israeli settler, a reserve soldier, walking into a place of worship and
deliberately killing defenseless Palestinians had come as “a bolt from the blue.”
The commission’s report did not apportion blame to any of the army officers
or commanders. But an inescapable conclusion from the testimony of the many
witnesses was that the way in which we’d become conditioned to viewing the
settlers had blinded us to the kind of crime Goldstein had committed. Even
before I testified, I’d been disturbed to hear soldiers saying that even if they had
seen him shooting a Palestinian, their orders were not to open fire on a settler,
so they wouldn’t have intervened. When asked about this by the commission, I
said it was a fundamental misunderstanding of our rules of engagement. “In no
case is there, nor can there be, an army order that says it is forbidden to shoot at
a settler even if he is shooting at others... A massacre is a massacre. You don’t
need special orders to know what to do.”
Yet I also knew that the soldiers’ “misunderstanding” was all too
understandable. As I acknowledged to the inquiry, the army on the West Bank
and Gaza was predisposed to see Palestinians who were carrying weapons as
potential terrorists, especially since the outbreak of the intifada. The settlers, by
contrast, were assumed to be carrying arms in self-defense. One lesson I took
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from the massacre was that the mix of Jewish settlers, some of whom felt they
were on a messianic mission to resettle all of Biblical Israel, and restive
Palestinians who wanted sovereignty and control over their own lives was
potentially toxic, for both sides. Ideally, the process which had begun with Oslo
might start to disentangle it, though I remained far from confident that anything
resembling full peace would come any time soon.
* * *
Rabin, and even more acutely Shimon Peres, believed it was important to
press ahead with the opening phase of the handover of Israeli authority mapped
out by Oslo. In May 1994, a draft of the so-called “Gaza and Jericho First”
agreement was completed. Once it was ratified, the five-year interim period
would begin, with further withdrawals and parallel negotiations on the
“permanent status” of the territories. In this first step, Israel would transfer civil
authority in Gaza Strip and the Jordan Valley town of Jericho to the
Palestinians, and local security would be in the hands of a newly created
Palestinian police force.
My primary concern, and my responsibility, was the security provisions in
the agreement, since the Israeli army retained its role in charge of overall
security. When I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet meeting to
approve the Gaza-Jericho agreement, I told him I was worried that it left room
for potentially serious misunderstandings, friction and even clashes on the
ground. There was no clear definition of how our soldiers would operate
alongside the new local police in the event of a terror attack, violence by Hamas
or Islamic Jihad, or, for that matter, a car crash involving an Israeli and a
Palestinian. He agreed this needed to be addressed, although it was clear he
intended to do so with Arafat, via the Americans, not by reopening and delaying
the formal agreement.
But I had a deeper concern about the entire Oslo Agreement, which I also
now raised with Rabin. I did not doubt the importance of reaching a political
agreement, and ideally a peace treaty, with the Palestinians. But I’d now read
the Oslo Declaration in greater detail, and discussed it with lawyer friends of
mine. I’d also re-read the 1978 Camp David framework on which the self-rule
provisions were based. The endpoint was pretty clear, just as it had been at
Camp David: Palestinian authority over the West Bank and Gaza, defined as a
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“single territorial unit” under Oslo. In essence, and very probably in name, this
meant a Palestinian state. I wasn’t opposed to that in principle, if it was in return
for a full and final peace. But the Oslo process meant that we would be handing
back land, and control over security, in an ever-larger portion of territory before
we’d reached any so-called permanent-status agreement. In fact, before we even
knew whether that would prove possible. It wasn’t “land for peace.” It was land
for the promise, or maybe only the hope, of peace. It was the same problem
Yitzhak had faced over the Americans’ misuse of our “pocket deposit” on the
Golan. I realized that, having come this far with Oslo, neither he nor the
government was likely to back away from approving the Gaza-Jericho accord.
But he did say he thought the points I’d raised were important, which I took as
meaning he was comfortable with my raising it with the cabinet.
I spoke near the end of the four-hour cabinet meeting to ratify the Gaza-
Jericho plan. The ministers seemed attentive as I ran through the security
concerns I’d raised with Rabin, even nodding when I compared the agreement’s
security provisions to “a piece of Swiss cheese, only with more holes.” But then
I said that I wanted to say a few words which I recognized were beyond my
responsibility as chief of staff. “I’m speaking just as an Israeli citizen,” I told
the cabinet, “and as a former head of military intelligence.” Referring to specific
provisions in Oslo, and in the Camp David framework agreed by Begin and
Sadat 15 years earlier, I said it was important for ministers to realize that, even
though permanent-status issues were yet to be resolved, “you will be taking us
nearly the whole way toward creating a Palestinian state, based on the
internationally accepted reading of Camp David.” The reaction to my comments
was a mix of defensiveness and hostility. In the latter camp were ministers from
Rabin’s left-wing coalition partners, Meretz, who seemed especially angry
when I quoted from Camp David. The Prime Minister motioned them for calm.
“Ehud had a responsibility to talk about security questions, and we had a
responsibility to listen. As for his additional remarks, they are not a surprise to
me,” he said. “He made these points to me, and I said he could repeat them here.
It is right that he should raise them.” He said there was no need for ministers to
agree with me, but that it was proper that the points I’d raised should be heard.
Many clearly didn’t agree with me, or simply believed the Gaza-Jericho
agreement still had to be ratified, which it was. But my remarks did lay the
groundwork for my objection to the next, more far-reaching stage in the Oslo
process barely a year later. By then, I was no longer chief of staff. I was a
member of Rabin’s cabinet.
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* * *
It was still my responsibility to ensure that Gaza-Jericho was implemented,
and that the initial withdrawals and redeployments went ahead smoothly. And
they did. But I also was soon playing a part in a renewed effort by Rabin to use
the momentum of Oslo to achieve peace agreements with our other Arab
neighbors: the Syrians, although he knew that would be tough, and first the
Jordanians. I would always have had some role, by virtue of the need for a chief
of staff to weigh in on security issues. But as Yitzhak had done from the start,
he involved me and others in his inner political circle in wider discussions on
the whole range of negotiating issues. Especially after Oslo, he seemed
determined to keep Peres’s role to an absolute minimum.
No peace talks are ever completely straightforward, but the process with
Jordan was very close to that. The main issues on the Jordanian side involved
ensuring a proper share of scarce water supplies; and dealing with Israel’s de
facto control of a fairly large area near the southern end of our border. A
number of kibbutzim and moshavim were farming the land there. But under the
post-1948 armistice, it had been allocated to Jordan. Israel’s priorities were to
put in place a fully open relationship of peace and cooperation, and to get
assurances Jordan would not allow its territory to be used by Palestinian groups
to launch terror attacks.
I was struck by how much more easily compromises can be found if you
truly trust the party on the other side. From my earlier meeting with Hussein in
England, before the Gulf War, I’d been impressed by the king’s thoughtful and
measured, yet warm and open, demeanor. That, in itself, inspired trust. But ever
since 1967, even in times of high tension, Israel and Jordan had kept open secret
lines of communication, and both sides had generally demonstrated a shared
desire, and ability, to steer clear of conflict. The main trade-off in the search for
a formal peace turned out to be not too difficult. We agreed to ensure water
provision, and to accept Jordanian sovereignty over the 1949 armistice area, in
return for which the king allowed the Israelis who had been working the land to
stay in place as lessees. On the final Wednesday of October 1994, near our
border crossing in the Arava desert, I watched as Rabin, King Hussein, and
President Clinton formally seal the full “Treaty of Peace Between the State of
Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.”
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Syria was always going to be harder. But Rabin had moved past his anger
over the “pocket deposit”, and we began a new effort via the Americans. Our
aim was to lay out a comprehensive, staged proposal to trade nearly the entire
Golan for peace. With Rabin, Itamar Rabinovich and the rest of the team, we
put together a framework limiting Syria’s military presence on the Heights. We
envisaged phasing out the restrictions as Syria took steps toward the kind of
peace which had proved possible with Egypt and Jordan. But indirect exchanges
in the autumn of 1994 produced little progress. In December, Rabin proposed to
the Americans that I meet with a Syrian representative, and President Assad
agreed. Later that month, I was sent to Washington for talks with Syria’s
ambassador, Walid Muallem. With the Americans’ Mideast envoy, Dennis
Ross, as host, we met in Blair House across the street from the White House.
I began by explaining the security provisions we envisaged for the Golan,
which included early-warning provisions, force limitations and other means of
safeguarding Israel against any surprise attack. Muallem’s response was
formulaic, almost icy, with no indication he was ready to discuss any of the
specifics, much less offer ideas of his own. But then Dennis led us out into the
garden, where the atmosphere, if sadly not the weather, was a bit warmer. I told
Ambassador Muallem I believed Israel’s issues with Syria ought to be
resolvable. Both sides understood the broad terms of an eventual peace. But we
needed a context of trust in which to negotiate. President Assad, and we as well,
were always going to be reluctant formally to commit ourselves to a position
until each side was be satisfied that the other side understood its core needs.
Politically, both sides also faced constraints. “In formal meetings, a record is
taken and negotiators have to explain and justify every last word back home,” I
said. “I think our negotiators can get further in conversations like the one we’re
having now.” Though Muallem nodded agreement, he did not explicitly say he
believed that informal exchanges were the way forward. Still, he did obviously
pass back a broadly positive message to Damascus. Before the Blair House
discussion, our understanding had been there would probably be a kind of
mirror arrangement for a follow-up meeting: between our ambassador in
Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, and a high-ranking army officer from the
Syrian side. Instead, we received word that Assad wanted me to meet directly
with General Himat Shihabi, who was not only my counterpart as Syrian chiefof-staff
but Assad’s oldest and closest political ally and the effective numbertwo
man in the régime.
General Shihabi and I met over a period of two days at Blair House. He had
greater authority, and thus a greater sense of self-assurance, than the
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ambassador. But not for the last time in negotiations with Syria, any real
progress was blocked by an apparent combination of misunderstanding and
miscommunication. The discussions were lively. Shihabi had served as Syria’s
liaison officer with the UN force set up along the cease-fire line after the 1948
war. “Go check with the UN,” he said at our first meeting. “You’ll see almost
all the exchanges of fire in the late 1950s were provoked by Israel.” I didn’t
respond directly, though I did note it was the Syrians who had tried to divert
water from the Jordan River in the early fifties. “You did it first,” he retorted.
So it continued. Only later did we learn that while Muallem had sent back a
generally encouraging impression from our garden talks, and his conclusion that
Israel was ready for substantive talks, he had neglected to convey our
expectation that any early progress would occur in informal exchanges. The
result was probably to raise General Shihabi’s expectations, which made him
reluctant to show any real engagement. After a phone call with Rabin after our
first day of talks, I became equally cautious. He agreed that we wanted to avoid
a repeat of our experience with the Golan “deposit”. We did not want to put
concessions on the record before we got an indication that the Syrians were
genuinely ready for peace talks.
Still, the fact that we’d established the precedent of a “chief-of-staff
channel” was a step forward. My successor as ramatkal, Amnon Lipkin, would
meet again with Shihabi in early 1995.
* * *
I was confident Amnon was inheriting an army stronger, better prepared and
better equipped than at any time since the Six-Day War. We also had peace
treaties not only with Egypt, but now Jordan, and none of the substantive issues
with the Syrians seemed insurmountable.
But the main security challenges were the unconventional ones. In the long
term, a resurgent Iraq, and very likely Iran, might make strides towards getting
nuclear weapons. There was every sign that Hizbollah in Lebanon; and Hamas,
Islamic Jihad and their supporters in Gaza and the West Bank, would escalate
violence and terror. As the negotiations with Jordan were entering their final
phase in early October, a further Hamas attack – this one, a kidnapping – had
brought home that threat. On Sunday, October 9, Hamas men dressed as
Orthodox Jews abducted an off-duty soldier named Nahshon Wachsman near
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Lod. Two days later, Israeli television received a videotape showing the 19-
year-old, hands and feet bound, pleading for his life in return for the release of
the founder of Hamas, whom we had arrested and jailed in 1989. “The group
from Hamas kidnapped me,” he said. “They are demanding the release of
Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and another 200 people from Israeli prison. If their
demands are not met, they will execute me on Friday at 8 pm.”
As soon as we got word he was missing, I spoke to Rabin. Since we assumed
he was being held in Gaza, I ordered a unit from Sayeret Matkal to head south
and co-ordinate efforts to locate him with the Shin Bet and the southern
command. But it gradually became clear he might be much closer to where he’d
been seized. The Shin Bet got a description of the kidnappers’ car, and found it
was a rental that had been picked up and returned in east Jerusalem. They
tracked down the man who rented it. A little before dawn the morning of
October 14, barely 12 hours before the Hamas deadline, Shin Bet established
that Wachsman was being held in a village on the road to Ramallah, north of
Jerusalem, in a house owned by a Palestinian who was living abroad.
The hostage soldier’s ordeal was made even worse by the fact his mother,
Esther, was a Holocaust survivor, born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany
at the end of the war. Rabin had been ready to approve a rescue attempt from
the outset, assuming we could locate Wachsman and come up with a plan that
might work. But as with Entebbe, he said that if we couldn’t be reasonably
confident of success, we would negotiate. Now that we knew where
Waschsman was being held, I ordered Shaul Mofaz, the commander with
responsibility for the West Bank, to prepare for a possible rescue.
Before going to brief Rabin, I arranged for another commando unit to begin
visible preparations for an operation in Gaza, in an effort to reassure Hamas we
still believed he was being held there. Assuming we could retain the element of
surprise, there were several things working in our favor. The house was
relatively isolated. It was in an area where Israel, not the incipient Palestinian
authorities, still had control. And Sayeret Matkal had expertise and experience
in this kind of mission. Still, no plan could be foolproof. I told Rabin that the
fact Hamas was holding a single hostage meant that if our assault teams were
delayed for any reason at all, the kindappers might kill him before we got in.
But I said we had to weigh the risks of not acting. We were no longer trying to
find a missing soldier. We knew where he was. We had a unit ready. Unless
Hamas relented, he was facing death within hours. In those circumstances, the
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precedent of doing nothing would, in my view, be very serious. I recommended
that he approve the operation, and Rabin agreed.
I attended the final briefing shortly afterwards. I was impressed by the
determined faces of the men in the two sayeret teams. One of the officers was
23-year-old Nir Poraz, whom I remembered from operational briefings in the
kirya on previous sayeret missions. Wachsman was being held in a room on the
first floor. The commandos would simultaneously detonate explosives on three
doors: at the front, on the side, and a third one leading through a kitchen to the
room where the kidnappers had their hostage. The attack began fifteen minutes
before the Hamas deadline. The explosive charges went off, but only the one in
the front blew open the door. Poraz and his team rushed in, but one of the
kidnappers opened fire, killing him and wounding six others. The other team
had by now made it to the first floor. But despite firing at the metal lock, they
had trouble getting the door to open. By the time they got in, Wachsman had
been killed, shot in the neck and chest.
I was in the command post a few hundred yards away. I called Rabin and
then went to see him in the kirya. The head of personnel for the army had gone
to see the Wachsman family and break the news to them. Now, we had to tell
the country. Rabin and I appeared on television together. Rabin insisted –
wrongly – on saying he bore full responsibility. What had gone wrong, I had
tried to impress on him, was not the decision to attempt the rescue. It was the
rescue itself. That was not his responsibility. It was mine.
The next day, I visited Wachsman’s parents, and tried to convey how painful
the failed rescue was to me, Rabin and every one else involved. I was inspired
and humbled by their response. His father had told a reporter he wanted to
convey his condolences to the parents of Nir Poraz. “This added loss has shaken
me terribly,” he said. He told me he also believed that the Prime Minister had
approved the rescue using his best judgement on the information that he had
available. I spent time separately speaking to Mrs Wachsman. I tried to explain
that in fighting an enemy like Hamas, people who not just threaten to kill but
had proven they had no hesitation in doing so, I’d felt there was no choice but to
attempt the rescue. I admitted we’d known the risks. But we’d tried to do the
right thing, both for the country and her son. I think she understood, though I
knew that nothing could alter the terrible sadness of her loss. The pain would
take years to heal. Some part of it never would. Still, I felt it was important she
and her husband know that we, too, felt their loss. For years afterwards, Nava
and I continued to visit them.
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By then, however, I was no longer chief of staff. In fact, barely ten weeks
after the kidnapping, I handed over to Amnon Lipkin. I left the kirya proud of
all I had sought to accomplish during my 36 years in uniform. I also realized
there had also been failures and setbacks, none more painfully fresh than our
inability to rescue Nahshon Wachsman. But I was about to find that the area of
Israeli life which I now chose to enter – national politics – could be a battlefield
as well. And that when trouble hit, even your allies sometimes ducked for cover.
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Chapter Seventeen
It was an ambush. It came in July 1995, six months after I’d left the army
and only days before I was expected to named as Interior Minister in Yitzhak
Rabin’s government. The effect, and clearly the intention, was to threaten my
political career before it had even begun – by reviving, and lying about, the
tragic training accident at the Negev army base of Tze’elim, during our
preparations for the operation against Saddam Hussein.
When the “story” broke, I was nearly five thousand miles away. I was
accompanying Nava’s brother, Doron Cohen, on a business trip he was making
to China – and savoring my last few days as a private citizen between my three
decades of military service and my entry into politics. I’d got a hint of the storm
that was about to engulf me a few days before we left for the Far East. It was a
letter from a reporter at Yeidot Achronot, Israel’s largest-selling newspaper,
with a list of questions about Tze’elim. The thrust of the questions made clear
the case Yediot seemed intent on building: that after the live missile strike
which killed the Sayeret Matkal men, I had abandoned the injured and
immediately “fled” to Tel Aviv. I probably should have answered the letter. But
I assumed even rudimentary checks would reveal the story to be false. I’d had
similar questions from a TV journalist a few months earlier. I did phone him
back. I explained the true details of what had happened. I suggested he talk to
others who were there, like Amnon Lipkin, the current chief of staff and my
former deputy, to confirm my account. The story was dropped.
But Yediot evidently decided not to let the facts get in the way of the
“exclusive” it ran in its weekend edition on July 7. Under a banner headline – an
undeniably clever Hebrew pun, Ehud Barakh, “Ehud Ran Away” – it accused
me of having stood by, paralyzed with shock, when the missiles struck and then,
as other officers tended to the wounded, rushed away by helicopter.
Doron and I were having dinner in Beijing when Nava phoned. She’d just
seen the newspaper story, and read it to me. I’d never been angrier. As best I
could work out, it had been concocted from a patchwork of accounts long after
the fact. To the extent the notion of my “fleeing” had been raised, I could only
imagine that Yediot’s “sources” had misunderstood the arrival of the first
medical helicopter, when the pilot was unable to see us and flew on before
returning a couple of minutes later. But in every single detail about my actions
after the tragedy occurred, it was a pure and simple lie.
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I was not just angry, but frustrated at my inability to rebut the story in
person. Doron and I immediately made arrangements to return to Israel early,
which, since there was no direct air connection, meant finding the first flight out
through London. But before we left, Nava phoned again, almost sputtering in
fury. She told me that she’d just received a call from Aliza Goren, Rabin’s
media spokesperson. “Does Ehud know about the Yediot story?” she’d asked.
When Nava said yes, Aliza told her: “It is important that Ehud knows that we
are not going to get involved in getting him out of this.”
Welcome to politics, I thought. Rabin knew that the story was untrue. I’d still
been in Tze’elim when I’d phoned him about what had happened. He knew I’d
remained there to order in the medical helicopters and arrange for the
evacuation of the wounded before returning to brief him. Still, he did not say a
single word in public – nor, for that matter, speak to me – as the controversy
continued to gather force.
During our stopover in London, I sat with Doron and talked through how to
get my voice heard. I telephoned Yoni Koren, the officer who’d been my top
aide in the kirya and whom I’d asked to work for me in the Interior Ministry,
assuming I now actually got there. I told him to phone Amnon Lipkin and say
that I had expected him to answer the fabrications. Not only had he and I been
at the site of tragedy together. We’d left together, on the same helicopter.
Amnon did now issue a statement saying that he knew Yediot’s allegations were
wrong. But the story had been allowed to stand for too long. His rebuttal caused
barely a ripple.
As I read the latest Israeli newspapers before landing in Tel Aviv, I found
that at least I wasn’t totally on my own. Reporters had been phoning politicians
for comment. Most responded like weathervanes, going with the prevailing
wind, which was gusting against me. But three Knesset members dissented. One
was Ori Or, a friend even before we’d both gone into the army, and who had
now joined Labor. The other two were leading members of Likud: Dan Meridor
and Benny Begin, Menachem Begin’s son. All three said they were sure the
allegations were false. Did they know the details about the accident, they were
asked. No, they replied, they didn’t need to. They knew me.
Now all I had to do was convince the rest of the country. It had been nearly a
week since the Yediot’s “exposé”. It was Yoni Koren who passed on a request
from Channel 1 television, our equivalent of the BBC. They were proposing that
I appear with Nissim Mishal, the man who had interviewed me 10 years earlier,
at the urging of Rabin’s political aide, on my first TV appearance. For Mishal,
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the interview would be a journalistic coup. For me, it was a risk. He was a
famously combative questioner, a bit like Sam Donaldson at White House
briefings, or Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys in Britain.
On the night of July 13, I drove to the television studio in Tel Aviv. Mishal
confronted me with Yediot’s version of events. I was angry, and showed it.
“This report was not some night editor’s mishap,” I said. “It was authorized by
the highest levels of a mass-circulation newspaper which is power-drunk,
corrupted by power, and manipulative. The so-called ‘story’ was an amateurish
and distorted depiction of a chief-of-staff who sees wounded soldiers, turns his
back, deserts them and flies away. That is an evil, vain falsehood.” As Mishal
pressed me about the allegation that I had fled, I cited, by name, other officers
who had been there with me and had confirmed precisely the opposite. I had left
Tze’elim, along with Amnon Lipkin, a full 50 minutes after the missiles struck,
I said. And only after the helicopters had arrived, the injuries had been treated
and the choppers were evacuating the wounded. “A chief of staff’s job is not to
treat the wounded, when others are doing that already,” I added. My
responsibility was “to keep my head, and ensure a safe and speedy medical
evacuation.” That was what I’d done. “I’ve given years of my life to serving this
country,” I said. “I have been shot at. I have shot men dead from as close as I
am to you now. How did the hand that wrote these things against me not
tremble?”
It was certainly high drama. But it was not an act. The way that I’d gone
after Yediot prompted some pundits to suggest my skin was too thin. One
commentator even said I was obviously not suited to politics. Yet what mattered
most to me was what the rest of Israel felt: people who were not reporters or
editors, commentators or politicians. Opinion polls the day afterwards showed
that something like 80 percent of Israelis believed what I’d said. I think this was
only partly due to the details of the argument I made. When you’re under such
close, direct scrutiny, I’m sure viewers have an innate sense of whether what
they are hearing is the truth.
Almost as soon as I’d got home from the interview, the phone rang. It was
someone who, of course, already knew it was the truth: Yitzhak Rabin. “Ehud,”
he said, “you did well. Let’s move forward.”
* * *
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I later worked out why he’d wanted to steer clear of the whole thing. Yediot
had been planning the story for months. It had been ready to go with it earlier,
when it was assumed I would be joining the government as early as April. The
editors had held it to coincide with my arrival as a minister. That, I suppose,
was simply what newspapers did. But it turned out that at least two influential
Labor politicians had played a part in steering Yediot toward the story, and
urging the newspaper to run with it: Haim Ramon, a veteran party figure and
cabinet minister, though he’d quit the government the year before over the
party’s failure to follow through on health-policy reform; and Shimon Shevess,
one of Rabin’s top advisers. Ramon would later say that they hadn’t wanted to
“kill Barak” as a new minister. “Just fire some bullets at this legs, so he’ll enter
politics with a limp.” It was a way of cutting me down to size.
I suppose that was understandable. I was by no means the only former
general to enter Israeli politics. Other chiefs-of-staff had gone on to play
prominent roles in government: Dayan, Motta Gur and, of course, Rabin. But
the fact that I was going directly into the cabinet, and so soon after leaving the
army, was seen by the Israeli media – and a number of Labor politicians – as a
reflection of my close relationship with Rabin. Some commentators had even
been speculating I might eventually be a candidate to succeed him as party
leader and Prime Minister.
It was true that Rabin had personally urged me to join the government,
starting with a lighthearted remark only days after I’d ended my term as chief of
staff. It was at a farewell organized by my staff. The event began with film clips
from my years in the army, and a series of entertaining cameos from men I’d
served with and led. Rabin spoke at the end. He said he’d recently been on an
official visit to South Korea. He’d met the president, who told him he was the
first Korean leader not to have been an army general. Rabin said he’d replied
that he was the first Israeli Prime Minister who was a general. Then, smiling
and looking straight at me, he added: “Nu, Ehud?”
I did want to join his government. But I had been in the army since the age
of seventeen and was now in my early fifties. For my family’s sake, as well as
my own, I had figured on taking a year or two to explore other things. Two
options appealed to me especially. One was business. My brother-in-law, in
addition to having a successful law practice, was involved in a number of
business ventures, and we’d discussed areas we might jointly explore. But I had
also received offers from think tanks in the United States.
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Despite Rabin’s quip about ex-generals and Prime Ministers, I was surprised
when, a couple of days later, he asked me to come see him. He smiled as I
entered his office. Then he said: “Ehud, now that you are out of uniform. I
would be glad to see you come into politics, together with us, and be a member
of the government.” He said he’d discussed it with Peres. “It’s a joint
invitation.” Though I did, of course, say yes, I also told him I was planning to
take some time off, probably at first with a think tank in the US. Though I
wasn’t exactly sure about the legal provisions for officers leaving the army, I
reminded him that there was a set period of time during which they could not
enter politics. He replied, a bit enigmatically, that he would be sending an
“operative” to talk to me further about the timing.
The operative was Giora Einy, a uniquely important figure in Labor because
he was trusted both by Rabin and Peres. I liked him immediately. Throughout
my years in politics, I would come to rely on him for his experience, good
humor and good judgement. He did know about the rules for former army
people going into politics: there was a 100-day moratorium. “Rabin wants you
immediately,” he said. “I guess we’ll tell him that ‘immediately’ will have to
mean sometime in April.” In fact, I told Giora that I’d hoped it would be much
longer. So we agreed that in order to give me at least a few months in the US,
he’d tell Rabin he could get in touch at any time from March 1996 with his
invitation to join the cabinet. As soon as he did so, I would formally cut my ties
with the military, meaning I could join the government in the summer.
Nava, the girls and I left for Washington in January. I joined the Center for
Strategic and International Studies and was given the delightfully overwrought
title of Distinguished Visiting Statesman and Senior Associate. The reason the
CSIS had invited me was to write and speak on the Middle East. About two
months in, I presented a paper. I began by welcoming the constellation of
changes which seemed to offer at least an opportunity for stability, security and
peace: the unravelling of the Soviet Union; the Oslo Agreement; the peace
treaty with Jordan and the continuing talks with the Syrians. As long as we had
partners committed to reaching an agreement, I believed Israel would be ready
“to consider major compromise and to take upon ourselves significant
calculated risks.” But with a frankness which seems surprising even to me in
retrospect, I delivered much the same message as I had to ministers on the
potential dangers inherent in the Oslo process as we moved forward.
I pointed out that Arafat had made no move to rein in groups like Hamas,
and that more Israelis had actually been killed by terror since Oslo than in the
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year before. “We signed a three-phase contract with Arafat,” I said. “Try to
imagine one of you selling me three pieces of property. If I fail to pay for the
first one on time, you might not immediately cancel the contract. You might
even be ready to help me collect the necessary money. But you would never
proceed to deliver the second property before I paid for the first one, unless you
were a fool.” I also warned of longer-term dangers: “terrorism, radical Islamic
fundamentalism, the proliferation of surface-to-surface missiles and weapons of
mass destruction, and threats to the long-term stability of the more pragmatic
Arab regimes.” I singled out Iran, because it was determined to export its brand
of fundamentalism Islam, sponsor terror and develop a nuclear weapon.
I also accompanied CSIS colleagues on speaking engagements to other
American cities. I was about to board a flight to Seattle in April when I got a
message saying Rabin wanted to talk to me. After we took off, I used the onboard
phone facility and, with a swipe of a credit card, was soon on the line to
the Prime Minister. Since the exchange was in Hebrew, I’m fairly sure anyone
overhearing me had no idea what we were talking about. “I need you to come
back as soon as possible,” Rabin said. I already knew, from Giora, that he was
anxious to find a long-term replacement as Minister of Interior. The leading
light in the Sephardi religious party Shas, Arye Deri, had had to leave the post
under allegations of bribe-taking. After Rabin had taken on the portfolio himself
four 18 months, he had placed Labor’s Uzi Baram there, but only as a
temporary arrangement. I didn’t feel I could refuse outright. But I reminded him
that under army rules, “as soon as possible” still meant another 100 days. And
ideally, I said I wanted to finish the best part of a year in Washington. I asked
whether it would be possible to join the cabinet in the middle of November
instead. “What difference will a few more months make?”
Rabin said he needed me now, and that mid-November would be too late.
“Ehud, in politics, you can never predict what will happen by then.” Neither of
us could have known how terribly prophetic his words would turn out to be.
* * *
I was not only new to cabinet politics. I wasn’t even a member of the
Knesset. But in addition to naming me as head of a major ministry – in charge
of everything from citizenship and immigration to planning, zoning, and the
funding of local government – Rabin made me a member of his “inner cabinet”
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on security and foreign affairs. Barely three weeks after I joined the
government, we had to decide on the most important agreement with the
Palestinians since Oslo. Dubbed Oslo II, it involved a major transfer of
authority and territory. The process would begin with our pulling out from more
than a quarter of the West Bank, including the major Palestinian towns and
some 450 smaller towns and villages. After that, there would be three further
redeployment phases, at six-month intervals, in so-called “Area C” of the West
Bank – a mix of unpopulated land, settlements and a number of points we’d
designated as strategically important. Under Oslo, and its parent agreement
Camp David, it was all part of ensuring the Palestinians could exercise their
“legitimate rights” in the “single territorial entity” of the West Bank and Gaza –
in other words, a path to statehood. But only by the time the final three phases
of redeployment were complete were we required to begin the “permanentstatus”
talks on issues like land and borders, Israeli settlements, the future of
Jerusalem: the real core of a peace agreement.
By the time I joined the discussions on Oslo II in August 1995, the main
points had already been agreed. Rabin was in favor, as were virtually all the
cabinet ministers. Whatever scant influence I might exercise would have to
come at the decisive cabinet meeting, set for August 13. From the objections I’d
raised to the Gaza-Jericho deal as chief of staff, Rabin knew I’d be concerned
not only to ensure the security provisions avoided potential misunderstandings
on the ground, but about the longer-term implications, especially since the scale
of the Israeli withdrawals was much larger this time. In fact, the agreement
could be interpreted as requiring us to cede Palestinian control over virtually all
of Gaza and West Bank by the end of the third redeployment phase –quite
possibly before talks on the permanent-status questions had even begun.
I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet vote. I explained why I
thought the agreement was flawed. I argued we should either delay some of our
redeployments or bring the permanent-status negotiations forward. He listened
to me. He barely spoke. He knew I’d be against Oslo II, and knew the reasons
why. But we both knew something else: having been brought into government
by Rabin, I would be expected, on a vote of this importance, to be in his corner.