My role changed, too. Not everyone emerged from the war with his
reputation diminished. The lion’s share of the credit for Israel’s eventual victory
went to the rank and file of our citizen army. But in the officers’ corps, there
were also examples of coolheadedness in crisis, and leadership. One was
Moussa Peled, who was now made head of the armored corps. My overall
wartime commander, Bren, replaced Gorodish as head of the southern
command. And Dan Shomron, whose 401 st armored brigade played a critical
part in defeating the Egyptians, was another. Dan and I had first got to know
each other well at Karameh, then during my period as sayeret commander. We
would go on in the years ahead to work more closely together than almost any
senior officers in the military. He was now promoted as well. He became
katzhar, overall head of infantry and paratroop forces, and he recommended me
as his successor in Brigade 401.
Still, I knew that the Motta would have the final word, with input from the
two senior officers most directly affected: Peled and Bren. I don’t think either of
them had anything against me personally. But both were tank officers through
and through. There were other candidates to succeed Dan who, unlike me, had
spent their whole careers in the armored corps.
I heard formally I was being considered as I was about to return to my
battalion from Ramat Hasharon one Sunday morning. I was ordered to report to
Motta’s office. When I got there, he gestured toward the small table at the side.
He already had two other visitors: Moussa Peled and Bren. “You probably
know you’re a candidate for taking over 401,” he said. “These two gentlemen
think you’re not yet ready. What do you say?”
If I’d had more time to prepare, I might have answered more subtly. But I
did very much want to be given command of the 401st, and had no doubt I
would be a worthy and dedicated commander. “I don’t know exactly what the
two gentlemen mean by whether I’m ready,” I replied. “So I have a proposal.
Find a battle-tested officer whom you trust. Have him check who among the
three of us, me or these gentlemen, is more familiar with the tank and its
systems. Who of us knows better the terrain, in Syria or Egypt, day or night,
where we have to fight? Who knows the operational requirements for an
armored force, and the armored doctrine these gentlemen signed off on. Finally,
which one of us has spent more time in a turret of a tank, on the battlefield,
shooting at enemy forces and being shot at by the enemy?”
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There was silence, a grave look from Peled and Bren, the hint of a smile on
Motta’s face, and the meeting was over. Several days later, I was notified of his
verdict. I would indeed be named the commander of the 401st Armored Brigade
in the Sinai, and promoted to full colonel.
Our base was a 15 miles from the canal. It was a huge expanse of sand
ringed by metal fencing. We spent three months at a time in this forward
deployment and three months in our rear base, 50 miles from the canal. During
one of our forward deployments, Motta came on an inspection visit. He wanted
to discuss how we planned defend the area near the canal in the event of a
repeat of the 1973 war. I told him everything we were doing in the brigade was
aimed at ensuring flexibility. I had also been thinking about some of the broader
issues relating to our defenses in the south. “No matter how good our tactics or
plans,” I said, “what worries me is that we’re still not looking at our overall
approach to defense against Egypt. It’s as if we’ve forgotten that in 1967, when
we captured Sinai, it was in order to have a buffer zone. We had 150 miles of
sand between southern Israel and the canal. But when the Egyptians attacked in
1973, we defended the desert as if it was the walls of Jerusalem!”
Since the 401st was one of two regular brigades on the Egyptian front, it was
not easy to make the four-hour drive home to Ramat Hasharon. When I got
word Nava was going into labor with our second child, I was leading a training
exercise five or six miles from our base. As she was on her way to the hospital,
I grabbed my car and headed north. Unlike Michal’s birth, this one was not
easy. When the baby emerged, she was struggling to breathe. The immediate
danger passed, but she was placed in an incubator. When I got to the hospital,
Nava was asleep. I was taken to see our tiny daughter, Yael. When the nurse
left, I noticed the baby’s pinkie trapped in the plastic cover of the incubator. I
started banging on the window of the room. The nurse rushed back. With a look
of sympathy mixed with world-weary experience of other fathers in similar
panic, she raised the cover, folded Yael’s tiny hands onto her stomach, and all
was well.
It was another health crisis which hastened the end of my period as brigade
commander. But this time, I was the one in the hospital. I nearly collapsed from
high fever and exhaustion. The initial suspicion was some kind of
contamination linked to the rudimentary sanitation in the Sinai. When the
symptoms persisted, the doctors suggested I probably had hepatitis B. Years
later, better diagnostic tools ruled all that out. I’ve never discovered what the
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illness was. But for nearly six months, getting through the day, sometimes a
single task, remained a struggle.
I did not want to leave my command. I was still barely 18 months into the
role, and anxious to get further command experience. But just as I was feeling at
my weakest, there was another belated casualty from the 1973 war. This time, it
was Uzi Yairi. No one could reasonably have held him responsible for the
losses suffered by Battalion 890 at the Chinese Farm. I’m sure that if he’d
known what happened to the Israeli forces that had already tried to take it over,
he would never have allowed Yitzhik to go in without adequate armor and
artillery support. Still, he blamed himself. In obvious distress after the war, he
was reassigned as an operational officer in military intelligence in the kirya.
He was still at his desk when Fatah terrorists landed on Tel Aviv’s seafront a
little before midnight on March 4, 1975. They were spotted by a police patrol,
which opened fire. The Fatah men ran from the beach, firing Kalashnikovs and
tossing grenades. A block in from the sea, they burst into a modest, three-story
building: the old Savoy Hotel. They shot and killed three people in the lobby
and took the rest of the staff and guests hostage.
Sayeret Matkal was called in. As the unit went through final preparations for
their assault, Uzi showed up. He had a rifle. He was in his everyday officer’s
uniform, unlike the sayeret team, which was weighted down by special-forces
gear. As a former commander of the sayeret, he persuaded them he could help
take out the terrorists and locate the hostages. Shortly before dawn, led by
Amiram Levin, they attacked. They killed three of the Fatah men within
seconds. But another terrorist set off an explosion, collapsing most of the top
floor. Uzi joined a couple of the other sayeret men in search of the hostages. He
was shot in the head and neck. Seven of the eight terrorists were killed, the
other captured. Though five hostages were freed, five lost their lives. Uzi died
on the operating table of Ichilov Hospital, a few hundred yards from the kirya.
* * *
Though I doubt Uzi’s family and friends would agree, my gut feeling was
always that his death was one more result, however indirect, of the shambolic
way in which we’d organized our attacks on the Chinese Farm. That was part of
the reason for my reluctance when Motta told me he wanted me to take Uzi’s
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place in the kirya. I realized I was the only available replacement with a similar
background, and sayeret experience. But I was still gaining brigade command
experience. And I couldn’t help feeling the role was intended as a kind of restand-recovery
cure because of my illness, not too different from the reason Uzi
had been given the job. Still, I did need rest and recovery. Even if fully healthy,
I’m not sure I could have convinced Motta to change his mind. In my weakened
state, I had no chance.
Skeptical though I was about the job, it opened up a new world to me. The
kirya itself was not new territory. But now, I became exposed to how how the
huge range of intelligence information we gathered was collated, evaluated,
assessed and ultimately applied. Helping with this process was my new
assignment. There were, in fact, two of us. We were both colonels and together
we provided the intelligence background for military operations. I had the post
on inside the military intelligence department. My opposite number was in the
operations department – the more senior role, in a way, because he had a more
direct link to the people actually doing the operations. He was a friend from
officers’ school: Dovik Tamari’s younger brother, Shai. Once a week, Shai and
I put together an assessment report. Then, we’d join Motta’s operations meeting
with the general staff, often attended by the man who’d followed Dayan as
defense minister, Shimon Peres.
The analysis of military intelligence included separate teams for Egypt and
Syria, Jordan and Lebanon, Iraq and other neighboring states, as well as other
countries and superpower relations. It relied on all our raw intelligence material,
from both military intelligence and Mossad, as well as academic and specialist
literature. Each desk dealt not just with military issues, but political and
economic developments. I was responsible, along with Shai and a few others,
for bringing all this together. This meant frequent meetings with members of the
analysis teams. For the first six months or so, I barely uttered a word in these
sessions. I listened, not just absorbing the information but getting to understand
the way the analysts worked and thought.
Our whole intelligence department was responsible for drafting an annual
strategic assessment for the army and the government. The final report was
written by Shlomo Gazit, who had succeeded Eli Zeira as head of military
intelligence. Before we sent it to print, he held a long meeting, inviting the
views of all the military intelligence officers. The focus in 1976, just three years
after the war, was on the risks of a new surprise attack. At the end of the
discussion, however, he said: “We know we run a real danger for the country if
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we fail to spot the signs of a war. But has any of you asked yourselves
something I find myself wondering from time to time? Is there not a similar risk
if we miss the signs of an opportunity for peace?”
His words stuck with me for the rest of my time in public life. They also had
a strong impact on me at the time. One of the benefits of my job was that I
could read the full inquiry report from the 1973 war, including the portions that
had been kept classified. Some dealt with the political situation before the war.
Golda had relied heavily on a “kitchen cabinet” of trusted ministers and a few
close advisers. The inquiry material described how Sadat had been extending
negotiating feelers before the war. And how Golda, Eli Zeira, Dado and Dayan
had responded. It was like an exercise in collective reinforcement. They agreed
the Arab countries would not simply go on living with the humiliation of their
defeat in 1967. At some stage, they would try to regain the initiative, on the
battlefield. But none appeared to think through the implications of this for our
political approach. Perhaps, like Eli Zeira in 1967, they assumed a kind of
historical inevitability of Israeli triumph. Though we’d ending up prevailing in
1973, it was impossible not to wonder whether, as Shlomo suggested, we had
missed the signs of a possible peace beforehand.
Now, however, we were facing an escalating challenge from an enemy with
no interest in peace: the armed Palestinian groups. The Democratic Front took
over a school in northern Israel a half-year after the war. In March 1975, Fatah
had seized the Savoy. And about a year into my posting in the kirya, the Popular
Front for the Liberation of Palestine launched an even more audacious
operation.
It became known by the name of the airport where the ordeal ended.
Entebbe. And when it began I, like Uzi Yairi, was sitting at my desk.
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Chapter Ten
Sunday is an ordinary working day in Israel, and the first sign that June 27,
1976 would be any different came shortly after noon. It was an urgent message
from Lod Airport, now renamed in honor of David Ben-Gurion, who passed
away after the 1973 war. Radio contact had been lost with Air France Flight 139
from Tel Aviv to Paris, shortly after a stopover in Athens.
We couldn’t know for sure what had gone wrong. Maybe a mechanical
malfunction, a glitch in the electronics, a crash. Or a hijack. But we did know
there were roughly 300 passengers and a dozen crew on board. Many of the
passengers were Israelis, and others were Jews from abroad. Ever since the
Sabena hijacking four years earlier, whenever a civilian airliner was thought to
be under attack within three hours of Israel, step-one in our response had been
automatic. Sayeret Matkal was ordered to the airport.
Because I’d commanded the Sabena operation – the first, and still the only,
time we had attacked and freed a hijacked plane – it was probably inevitable I
would take some part in figuring out how, or whether, to intervene if the Air
France plane turned out to have been hijacked. But my pivotal role, as the crisis
intensified, was down to a combination of factors: my broader experience as
sayeret commander, the fact that I now worked in the kirya, just one floor up
from the chief of staff, and, as so often, pure chance.
As the sayeret assembled at the airport, its current commander –Yoni
Netanyahu, my former deputy – was hundreds of miles away in the Sinai,
preparing for an operation across the canal. So it was Mookie Betzer, now
Yoni’s deputy, who began briefing the men for a possible hostage rescue in case
the jet returned to Israel. At the kirya, we were also without our commander:
Motta was in the Negev observing a major military exercise. So it was his
deputy – the head of the operations branch, Kuti Adam – who buzzed me on the
intercom at two in the afternoon and summoned me to his office.
By now, we knew the plane had been hijacked, but that it wasn’t heading
back to Israel. The terrorists had renamed it “Arafat” and it was on its way to
Libya. I took the stairs down to Kuti’s office, two floors below mine, and he
immediately handed me a large, black-and-white aerial photo. It showed the
international airport in Benina, just outside Benghazi on the eastern edge of
Libya. “Can we do anything, Ehud?” he asked me. I didn’t say no outright. But
I told him that even if we had a treasure trove of intelligence about Benina –
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which, I soon verified, we didn’t – the obstacles would be enormous. Unlike the
Sabena jet, this one was a wide-bodied Airbus, and El Al had none of those in
its fleet. Even we could find a way to make sure a sayeret team got briefed on
the airliner, we’d be mounting an attack-and-rescue operation a thousand miles
away. And even if we could take out the terrorists, we were almost certain to
face opposition from the former army colonel who ruled Libya, Mummer
Ghaddafy. The chance of success seemed slim, the risks enormous.
Soon, however, Kuti’s question ceased to matter. Later Sunday night, Flight
139 took off again. Before leaving Libya, the hijackers freed a passenger: an
Israeli dual national, with a British passport as well, who managed to convince
them she was going into labor. We learned through her that there were four
hijackers: two Arabs and two Europeans. It was a PFLP operation, but included
members of the far-left West German Baader-Meinhof terror group. They
forced the pilot to head for the east African state of Uganda. On Monday
evening, it landed at Entebbe Airport, 20 miles outside the Ugandan capital of
Kampala and just a couple of hundred yards from the shore of Lake Victoria. It
was five times further away than Benghazi.
Yet with each passing hour, increasingly alarming radio and television
reports focused on the obvious agony of the hundreds of captive passengers. To
this day, I’ve never been able to establish why it was a further 24 hours before
we started seriously to work out if there might be some way for us to free them.
Prime Minister Rabin was clearly asking himself the same question, however,
because on Tuesday afternoon, he called Motta in the Negev. It was now a full
53 hours after the hijacking, he said. What the hell we were doing to try to come
up with a plan? Motta was immediately summoned back to Jerusalem for an
emergency meeting of the government. As he was on his way back from there
to the kirya, Kuti called me back down to his office. “Motta just told them that
there is a military option,” he said, with a wry smile. Kuti had been a Haganah
officer in 1948, in charge of the Golani brigade, head of both the northern and
the southern command, and had known Motta for years. “That means we now
have to find one.”
I had just begun briefing a few of the analysts in my office when Motta
returned. When I got to his office, Kuti waved both of us across the hallway to
the big, rectangular conference room where general staff meetings were held.
On the side of the room was a globe. Giving it a spin, he said: “Nu, Motta. Tell
me, when you told the government we had a military option, did you even know
where Entebbe is?” Motta didn’t so much as crack a smile. “We have to find a
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response,” he said. “I’ve committed us. Ehud, I want you to check what can be
done. Take whatever you need, from wherever you want. Bring me suggestions
by seven tomorrow morning.” Then, he said, we would go brief the Defense
Minister, Shimon Peres.
I assembled a team the same way we’d prepared for special-operations
missions in the sayeret: looking for information, intelligence and above all
experience and insight from whoever I thought was likely to make that alwaysnarrow
difference between failure and success. My first calls went to Mookie
Betzer and another of my most trusted and experienced sayeret comrades,
Amiram Levin. Then I brought in Ido Ambar, the personal aide to air force
commander Benny Peled, and Gadi Shefi, the commander of the Shayetet 13
SEALs. Finally, two officers from Dan Shomron’s office. Since Dan was
katzhar, in overall command of paratroop and infantry forces, it was critical to
keep him in the picture. I told them all that we’d be working through the night,
and that I had to be able to tell Motta and Shimon by the morning whether we
really could mount a rescue mission.
I still thought I’d end up having to tell them no. However difficult the
obstacles we’d faced with Sabena, they were almost child’s play compared to
getting a sayeret assault team 5,000 miles across the continent of Africa,
surprising the terrorists, freeing the hostages unharmed and getting them out.
That was even assuming, as I did at that point, that we wouldn’t face armed
opposition from the troops of Uganda’s increasingly tyrannical president, Idi
Amin. Amin had begun to align himself politically with the Palestinians in the
past few years – one reason, no doubt, the terrorists had landed there. But he
had actually been on a paratroop course in Israel before taking power in 1971.
We had sent officers to help train his army in the early 1970s.
Now, I discovered, Mookie himself had been on one of the training missions.
“Their men aren’t great fighters, at least at night,” he said, an insight of obvious
relevance to planning a commando attack, if we could get that far. When
Ambar, the air force aide, spoke up, I finally began to feel we might at least be
able to put together the outline of a plan. He’d brought with him a copy of the
standard reference book on world airports, which gave us at least a general idea
of the layout of Entebbe. He also said that the air force had run a training
program for the Ugandans. In Entebbe. He’d contacted one of the reserve pilots
who had been on the training mission, and he was on his way to join us.
Still, time was short we were nowhere near being able to recommend a
specific plan of action. The hijackers had set a deadline – noon on Thursday,
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July 1, now less than 36 hours away. Having moved the passengers off the plane
to one of the terminal buildings, they were threatening to start killing them
unless we freed a list of 53 Palestinians and PLO supporters, forty of them held
in Israel and the rest in a number of European countries, and paid a ransom of
five million dollars.
Well past midnight, we started looking at our options. One which seemed –
briefly – to hold promise drew on suggestions from Ido Ambar and Mookie.
Ido’s almost rhapsodic description of the capabilities of our C-130 Hercules
transport planes convinced us we could parachute in a Sayeret Matkal team, as
well as vehicles for them to use on the ground. Mookie and I agreed that to
ensure surprise, we would disguise the commandos as Ugandan troops, in
“Ugandan” Jeeps. The final twist came with the arrival of the reserve air force
officer who had been on training duty in Entebbe. He brought a reel of 8mm
film from an official ceremony at the airport. At the start, a Ugandan army
general could be seen arriving in a black Mercedes. “That’s it!” Mookie said.
“The Mercedes. Every top Ugandan military officer has one.” We decided to
swap one of our Jeeps for a jet-black limousine.
Yet by daybreak on Wednesday, when I went up to brief Motto, we’d set
aside the option of a parachute drop. Any initial surprise would be outweighed
by the risk of exposure from the very start of the assault. We’d also gone cold
on a second option, to infiltrate sayeret teams along the shore of Lake Victoria
from across the nearby border in Kenya. I doubted we had enough time to
navigate all the operational and diplomatic obstacles before the deadline
expired. That left option three: having the SEALs, along with a core team from
the sayeret, parachute onto Lake Victoria with rubber dinghies and attack the
airport from on foot. We arranged to do a test parachute assault off the Israeli
coast in Haifa later in the day, but if that went well, it seemed the only practical
alternative.
Motta and I went met Peres around 8:30am. Shimon had no first-hand
military experience, having played a political role alongside Ben-Gurion from
Israel’s early years. So he was not really interested in the details. But he was
keen to hear our assurances that a military option did exist. He was even more
intrigued when we were joined by the head of the air force, Benny Peled.
Unaware of the airborne parachute drop we had been discussing overnight,
Peled suggested something far more ambitious. Rather than using a single
Hercules, he proposed using four of the giant transport planes to ferry in a larger
force, some 200 men in all, land them on one of the runways and take over the
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entire airport. Though I didn’t say so, I had my doubts it would work. It was a
bit like the initial option for the Rue Verdun raid Dado had rejected: a classic
ground assault which, in addition to eliminating any chance of surprise,
obviously ran the risk of igniting a small ground war. But I did think that some
combination of Peled’s idea and the surprise commando strike we’d been
looking at might provide an answer.
A few hours later, the hostages’ ordeal took a chilling turn, which soon also
provided us with our first real detailed picture of the scale of the challenge we
faced. In a haunting echo of the Nazis’ “selection” process in the Holocaust, the
terrorists separated all the passengers with Israeli passports or Jewish names.
They let the rest of them go, and allowed them to board a special Air France
flight back to Paris. We immediately dispatched Amiram Levin to debrief the
freed passengers. On a scrambled teleprinter line Wednesday night, Amiram
came up with far more than we could have hoped for. One of released
passengers was a French woman who had managed to hide the fact she was
Jewish. She confirmed reports we had been getting that the hostages were being
held in the airport’s former terminal building, about a mile from its newer
terminal and the main runways. Other passengers revealed that the hijackers had
placed explosives around the old terminal building. And that, despite my hope
that Idi Amin would stand aside if we did decide to go in and rescue the
hostages, his troops were helping to guard the area.
So in addition to taking on the hijackers, we’d have to find a way to deal
with Ugandan soldiers. In another round of discussions in my office through the
late hours of Wednesday night, we finally settled on our plan: Peled’s major
airborne operation, but with a Sayeret Matkal strike force, with its “Ugandan”
motorcade, spearheading it. Minutes later, three other C-130s would fly in
additional troops to secure the rest of the airport, deal with any Ugandan army
resistance, and fly out the Israeli soldiers and the hostages.
An operation on that scale naturally meant bringing in Dan Shomron. After
I’d taken the plan to Kuti Adam, he briefed Dan on the full detail and called me
down to see him again. Dan had left to start preparations for the operation. He’d
made just one request, Kuti said: that I be in command of the sayeret force.
* * *
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I could see why Dan had said it. Working with Mookie and the rest of my
team, I’d been in charge of all the initial planning. I was in command of the
Sabena assault, the only remotely similar operation Israel had attempted.
Though an attempt to rescue dozens of terrified hostages in Entebbe, with both
the terrorists and possibly Ugandan soldiers armed and ready, would be much
harder. As Sayeret Matkal commander, I’d conceived and commanded other
missions that requiring us to break new ground. But – and it was a huge but – I
knew from the moment I left Kuti’s office that I would have to find a way to
avoid undermining the current sayeret commander, Yoni. Dan had clearly been
aware of that as well. He’d stressed to Kuti that he meant no disrespect to Yoni.
“But I know Ehud,” he said. “I’ve worked with him. I want him to lead it.”
Yoni was still in the Sinai. I’d phoned him before our first overnight
planning session to tell him I was bringing in Mookie and Amiram. Mookie had
been giving him daily updates. But the clock was ticking. Under the initial
deadline, the hijackers had threatened to begin “executions” on Thursday.
Today. The deadline had now been pushed back, but only until Sunday morning
– and only after Rabin felt he had no option but to drop our public refusal to
consider negotiating with them.
When Dan called our first operational briefing for Thursday night, Mookie
sent a plane to bring Yoni back. Dan set out the plan with his customary
confidence. The four Hercules would take off on Saturday evening from Sharm
el-Sheikh at the southernmost tip of the Sinai, to cut the flying distance at least
slightly. The first plane would land on the runway near the new terminal. Inside
would be a small unit of paratroopers, the sayeret strike force, a pair of Jeeps
and the Mercedes. The next Hercules wouldn’t arrive for another seven minutes:
the most critical minutes of the whole operation. That was when our “Ugandan
motorcade” would make its way to the old terminal, burst in and take care of the
terrorists. The second Hercules would include another Sayeret Matkal team, to
reinforce the attack unit and secure the perimeter of the old terminal. Hercules
Number Three, a minute later, would carry a joint force of sayeret fighters,
paratroopers and a Golani team. Their job would be to take over the new
terminal and the rest of the airport and deal with any Ugandan army resistance.
The final plane was a flying medical unit, to provide treatment for the hostages
and carry them back to Israel.
Yoni arrived just as Dan was finishing his presentation. He looked focused,
energized, and eager to play his part. I realized it was important to explain to
him the decision to place me in command. Despite our close relationship, I
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knew that would be a sensitive task. We spoke only briefly before he and
Mookie drove back to the sayeret base to begin more detailed preparations.
Yoni was insistent that he should be in charge. I told him I understood, and I
did. In his position, I would have felt exactly the same way. But for a variety of
reasons, Dan wanted me in command. Still, I stressed my determination not to
detract from his authority. Yoni would lead in the main assault unit. He and
Mookie would choose the other officers and soldiers, decide their roles and take
charge of training, briefing and logistics. I could tell he was still not satisfied.
But I told him and Mookie I’d join them later that night. We could talk further,
ahead of the next full briefing, which Dan had set for nine o’clock on Friday
morning on the sayeret base.
When they left, I joined Dan, Motta and Kuti to go see Rabin. Shimon Peres
was there too. He would later say that, as Defence Minister, he was a crucial
voice in pressing to go ahead with the rescue mission. He’s right, and had he
been sceptical, or opposed the idea of a recuse, it would have made things much
more difficult. But his position was far easier than the Prime Minister’s. He
lacked Rabin’s hands-on command experience, his grasp of the details of what
we were proposing to do and the obvious risks. All Israelis were aware of this. I
the operation failed, or if we decided in the end not to attempt it, it would be
Rabin who would bear the responsibility and get the blame.
Even under the best of circumstances, Rabin was naturally cautious – the
flipside of the meticulousness with which he ran through the fine detail of every
military mission. As I remembered from when he was chief of staff, in our
slightly surreal conversation about the danger of a booby-trapped
communications intercept exploding as I defused it, he would focus on
everything that might conceivably go wrong with an operation before approving
it. Now, he was also under huge additional pressure. From the start of the hijack
crisis, there had been calls from the hostages’ families to do something to end
the ordeal. But as I later discovered, one of the leading scientific engineers in
Israel, Yosef Tulipman, had a daughter among the passengers. Like Yitzhak, he
had been a Palmachnik. He’d come to see the Prime Minister and implored him
not to attempt an operation that might endager her or the others. “I demand one
thing only,” he said. “Don’t go on any adventures. Do not play with the lives of
these people, with the life of my daughter.”
After Entebbe, there would be suggestions that Rabin’s readiness to
negotiate with the terrorists had been a ploy, designed to buy time. Yet his
message to us that night was that if there was a military option with a
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reasonable chance of success, he would approve it. But otherwise, we could not
let dozens of hostages be murdered if by talking, even deal-making, we could
have saved them. He turned to Dan and asked whether there indeed was a
military option with a reasonable prospect of getting the hostages out. Dan said
yes. Rabin turned to me next. I agreed: we had a plan, and we felt we could
make it work. Motta was a bit more hesitant. He suggested we couldn’t know
for sure until we’d finished testing key parts of the operation. But for Rabin, it
seemed to me Dan’s was the key voice. So he told us that he was approving it.
In principle.
He said he still needed answers to two questions. The first was whether it
was physically possible to cross from the new terminal area, where we’d be
landing, to the old terminal buidling. He was right to press us. If a retaining wall
or a drainage trench had been added druing the modernization work on the
airport, any element of surprise could be lost. Rabin’s second condition was that
we find a way to make absolutely sure, by the time the first Hercules landed,
that the hostages were still in the old terminal building. I knew why that
troubled him, from a remark I’d heard him make a few years earlier when
describing an American hostage-rescue raid behind enemy lines in North
Vietnam. That operation went exactly as planned. Except that the POWs had
been moved.
I drove to see Yoni and Mookie at the sayeret base. We spent most of the
meeting on the opening few minutes of the operation: the rolling out of the
vehicles, the drive to the old terminal, and how to handle the possibility that we
might meet Ugandan resistance. Mookie remained adamant about the
Ugandans, from his time training them a few years earlier. Even if we did run
into a group of Amin’s troops, even if they were armed, even if they were
pointing their guns at us, even if they shout at us to stop, they “wouldn’t dare
open fire on a Mercedes.” I trusted his experience. I kept emphasizing that we
had to go in with the mindset of not engaging Ugandan troops unless there was
no choice. If we did need to do so, we would use only small, silenced Berettas –
since I’d made sure the unit trained on the Berettas after Sabena.
I also raised another critical condition for success. “There will definitely be
an armed presence in the control tower,” I said. We needed to designate a
special unit whose sole job would be to train machine guns, rifles and grenadelaunchers
on the tower as soon as we got off the Hercules. “The moment that we
lose the element of surprise, they open fire.”
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Dan began the next morning’s briefing with a stage-by-stage review of how
the operation would unfold. But just as he was getting to the detail of the
motorcade attack, I felt a young sayeret officer tap me on the shoulder. Kuti had
phoned to say I was to go see him at the kirya. “He said immediately,” the
officer added, “and not to discuss it with anyone. Just to tell Dan Shomron that
you’ve been taken out of the operation.”
* * *
To say I was surprised would be an understatement. But I allowed myself to
believe the decision to “take me out” could still be reversed. Not only was I
ready to command the critical first part of the operation. I believed I was best
placed to ensure it succeeded. I felt that was best for Yoni, too, due to tensions
inside the sayeret of which both of us were aware.
There was no officer to whom I was closer than Yoni. He had extraordinary
strengths as a soldier: in the Six-Day War, in 1973, and afterwards when, with
my encouragement, he’d taken command of a tank battalion in the north left
almost in tatters from the Yom Kippur War. But there was more to him as well.
I used to marvel how at the end of 16 hours of sayeret training, he could spend a
further two or three reading history, or a novel or poetry. He always struggled
between the impulse to devote his life to fighting for the State of Israel, and to
studying, reading and living as a more “normal” family man.
His drive to serve, and to excel, was stronger. Tuti Goodman, the young
woman he’d met as a teenager and married, understood what drew him to a life
in uniform. But that wasn’t what she had signed up for. At one point, Yoni
asked me to speak to Tuti. She asked me to speak to him. I did my best to
explain each to the other. But the gap between what each of them wanted for
their lives was just too wide. Before the 1973 war, they’d separated. After the
war, professionally fulfilled but personally shattered, Yoni heard that I’d found
an apartment in Ramat Hasharon, and he asked me if there were other flats in
the building. It turned out that the owner of the flat below ours was willing to
rent it. Yoni snapped it up.
Over the past year or so, with Yoni leading the sayeret and me in the kirya,
we’d seen more of each another. For the first time in years, he seemed to have
found a sense of peace, and fulfillment, in his personal life. That was in large
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part because of Bruria Shaked, his girlfriend, whom he’d met while
commanding the tank unit after 1973. While he was a thinker and a brooder and
in many ways a loner, Bruria was outgoing, playful, funny and full of life. She
sensed his need for a shoulder to lean on, a hand to hold at the movies or on a
Saturday stroll on the beach. They made their apartment a home. The shelves
creaked under the weight of Yoni’s books. Often on a Saturday, when Nava and
I dropped in to see them, an old 33 rpm record would be playing on the stereo.
Yoni would be sitting puffing on his pipe, reading, and smiling.
But outside this domestic haven, he still struggled. He had looked forward to
commanding Sayeret Matkal. But there was a growing distance between him
and those he led, a kind of dissonance between these more typically Israeli
youngsters and the aloof, reflective, intellectual side of their commander. There
was another tension as well. Sayeret training was notoriously tough. Yoni
earned the admiration of his men by participating personally in the most
difficult of the exercises. But just as he pushed himself to his limits, he insisted
relentlessly on seeing the same drive in them. This was a challenge all sayeret
commanders faced to some extent. I had, too. But a number of the officers had
gone to the kirya to urge that Yoni be replaced. He knew this. Though I tried to
reassure him, telling him that every sayeret commander was different, with his
own strengths and weaknesses, he became only more determined to push
himself and those around him harder.
No we were in the final countdown for Entebbe. It was a life-or-death
mission not just for us, but the hostages, an operation in which even a second’s
hesitation or tension or uncertainty could prove fatal. I was worried that the
rumblings of uneasiness in the unit might prove an additional obstacle that
wasn’t worth the risk.
When I tried to persuade Kuti to stick with the original plan, however, he
was insistent. He told me to get ready to fly not into Uganda, but to Nairobi. I’d
been re-assigned to accompany a Mossad team to Kenya. Our first task would
be to get the answers to the questions Rabin had asked us. Then, we would be in
charge of arranging for the Kenyans to allow us to refuel the C-130s on the way
out, and to set up a medical facility for any injured soldiers or hostages. During
the attempted rescue, I would also be the channel of communications from the
Nairobi side of the operation to Kuti, tens of thousands of feet above Entebbe in
a command 707. Dan, as overall commander, would be in charge on the ground.
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* * *
The Kenyans were not exactly allies of Israel. But relations between
President Jomo Kenyatta’s security services and Mossad had been close for
some years. I flew in with three leading Mossad men. While one of them called
on the aging President Kenyatta, our main point of contact, was the head of
Kenya’s security services. Since the secrecy of the mission had to be preserved,
we couldn’t make advance preparations for refueling or the additional 707
which we intended to fly in as a field hospital. But he smoothed the way for us
to do both, without anyone asking too many questions.
The Mossad men took the lead in arranging to get Rabin’s questions
answered. They contacted a pilot they knew. The pilot flew to Entebbe early on
Saturday morning, circled, and, after he was cleared to land, claimed
mechanical difficulties and flew out again. I had his telephoto pictures by midmorning
and phoned Rabin’s intelligence officer to let him know we’d
confirmed there was a clear path to the old terminal. We still had to make sure
the captive passengers were there, however. A nurse from Kampala who had
been allowed to visit them made three further visits: late Saturday afternoon,
then shortly after the first Hercules had taken off from Sharm al-Sheikh, and
finally around nine at night. I was able to reassure Rabin that the question to his
second question was also “yes”. Although all of the C-130s were already
airborne, it was only then that he gave the mission the final go-ahead.
As commander of Sayeret Matkal, I’d always found running an operation
from a command post hugely frustrating. This was even worse. Once we got
word the Israeli force was on the way to Uganda, we put in place the
arrangements for refueling. If all went well, the first C-130, with Yoni’s assault
team and at least some of the hostages, was due to reach Entebbe and begin the
assault at midnight Saturday. Assuming there were no major problems, it would
take an hour at most. All I could do now, from 300 miles away, was wait.
Shortly after midnight, Kuti radioed me with a terse message: the first of the
Hercules had left Entebbe for Nairobi, and the command plane was returning to
Israel. About quarter to one in the morning on July 4, the transport planes began
their staggered arrival. When the first Hercules taxied to a halt, I went out to
meet it. As its giant rear door lowered, Dan was the first person I saw. I could
tell from the awkward silence, the lack of any greeting, something must have
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gone wrong. “Ehud,” he said finally, “Yoni’s dead. We got the hostages out.
But Yoni was killed.”
I sought out two other friends: Mookie and Ephraim Sneh, the Battalion 890
doctor, who had been with us at the Chinese Farm. Both were obviously torn
between a sense of accomplishment in having freed the hostages and the blow
of losing Yoni. I asked Ephraim to take me to the front of the plane’s huge belly
to see him. He was on a stretcher, covered with a blanket. I peeled it back.
Yoni’s face had lost all color. But when I touched his forehead, it seemed
slighty warm, almost as if there was still a spark of life inside him.
I couldn’t raise Kuti by radio, so I used the landline in the airport director’s
office to phone Motta.
“Yoni is dead,” I told him.
“Are you sure?” he asked. I said: “Yes. I’ve seen him.”
Before the transport planes began leaving for Israel, I made another call. It
was to Nava. She was asleep. I told her that the operation to free the hostages
had succeeded. “But Yoni has been killed.” I could hear her gasp. “Listen,” I
said, “you have to go downstairs. Tell Bruria. Before some army officer shows
up at her door. Or worse, because they’re not married, no one may come and
she’ll hear it on the radio. Go. Tell her. Stay with her.” At first, she seemed not
so much unwilling as unable to do it. “What can I say?” I said I knew how hard
it would be, but that she needed to make sure Bruria heard the news from a
friend. Later, Nava told me she’d waited until daybreak, not wanting to make
things worse by waking her. Then, she went downstairs. She told Bruria what
had happened, stayed with her, talked with her, and held her, during those first
few awful hours.
I found Yoni’s death even more upsetting when I learned from Mookie and
others how it had happened. As the sayeret motorcade began making its way
from the Hercules to the terminal, with Mookie and Yoni in the Mercedes, two
Ugandan soldiers had seen them. One of the Ugandans raised his rifle. Rather
than relying on Mookie’s assurances the soldier wouldn’t actually fire, Yoni and
another soldier shot him with their silenced Berettas. But they’d only wounded
him. In case he managed to fire back, another soldier in the Jeep behind them
killed him, with his un-silenced machine gun.
Now that all surprise was gone, the commandos abandoned their vehicles
and began sprinting towards the old terminal. Only seconds later, still 80 yards
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or so from the terminal, Yoni was hit. He’d been shot from the control tower. I
realized that unexpected setbacks or slip-ups were inevitable in any operation.
But the crucial first stage of the attack had not only gone wrong. It had gone
wrong in exacrly the way that we had first discussed back at the sayeret base,
and now Yoni was dead because of it.
I had to remain in Kenya for a few more days. Though we’d rescued 102
passengers and crew, three of the hostages had been killed in the crossfire.
While most of the injuries to the others were minor, we arranged to have several
of the more seriously wounded taken to a Nairobi hospital. So I was unable to
join the gathering of hundreds on Mount Herzl in Jerusalem for Yoni’s funeral.
Or to hear Shimon Peres praise him in terms I knew must have filled his parents
and Bibi, too, with enormous pride. Shimon described him as “one of Israel’s
finest sons, one of its most courageous warriors, one of its most promising
commanders.”
The first evening I was back, however, I visited the Netanyahus at their
family home in Jerusalem: Ben-Zion and Tzila, the parents; Ido, the youngest of
the three children, and Bibi, who was still at MIT. It was a few nights in the
shivah, the seven days of mourning, and there were dozens of other wellwishers
there as well. I spoke to Bibi first, outwardly strong but I sensed still
overwhelmed by their loss. Hugging him, I said the weeks ahead would be
tough, not just because of Yoni’s death, but because much of the responsibility
of providing emotional support for his parents, both in their sixties, would fall
on his 26-year-old shoulders. This was the first time I’d met the father, Ben-
Zion, face to face, but I was struck by how this balding, professorial figure
seemed able to keep inside the pain and loss he must have been feeling. He did
clearly know of me, both from Bibi and from the frequent letters always wrote
to him at Cornell. Now, after I’d said what I could to comfort him, he asked
whether we could meet again. When we did, a few days later, he was clearly
conscious of the his late, lost son’s bourgeoning place in Israel’s pantheon of
national heros. He asked me to be one of the speakers at Yoni’s shloshim, a
commemorative event in Jerusalem which, in Jewish religious tradition, would
mark the end of the first month of mourning. “You knew him well,” he said, and
proceeded to stress the importance of using my remarks to explain, and
elaborate on, Yoni’s powerful accomplishments and personal legacy.
I thought about what he wanted, and about Yoni himself, in the days ahead.
About the tragedy of his death, but also the way in which all of us now had to
draw meaning, value, and ideally something of permanence from the feelings of
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loss. As I prepared my notes, I also spent time working out how to square what I
felt I needed to say, with what many in the audience, and certainly Ben-Zion
and Bibi, would expect me to say. Not only was Yoni being mourned across
Israel after Entebbe. He was being elevated – in the spirit of Shimon’s words at
the funeral –to something approaching sainthood. I did not want to detract from
his evolving status as national hero, or his importance as a symbol of a
commando success which had, for the first time since the 1973 war, restored a
measure of Israeli sense of self-confidence. A victory, over all logic and all
odds. But I also wanted to find a way of capturing Yoni as he really was: a
brave man, an extraordinary fighter and officer. But also a man sometimes
feeling torn inside, and alone.
I began with words of ancient rabbinic wisdom about the path which all of us
travel from birth to death, and to whatever comes after. The quotation I chose –
from the 2,000-year-old volume known as Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers
– seemed right to me. “Know where you came from: a putrid drop... Know
where you are going: to a place of dust, maggots and worms... And know before
whom you are destined to give your final account, the King of Kings.” I spoke
of the loss of Yoni, and said it was impossible not to think about the meaning of
what lay between the “putrid drop” where each of us begins our life and our
final reckoning. “I believe that life is not just a sum of the hours and days
between the beginning and the end. It is the content we pour into the space in
between,” I said. I’d known people who were given the gift of a long life but
who, by that definition, had hardly lived at all. There were also people like
Yoni. He’d lived only briefly. But he had learned and loved. Fought and trained
others to fight. Grappled with the most profound puzzles of existence, and yet
remained open “to the wonders of a smile. A journey. A flower. A poem.” If
there was any consolation for a life ended cut off at age 30, I said, that was it.
But I wanted to give a more personal, nuanced picture of the life that he, and
we, and lost. “Our Yoni… We have seen him torn between his passion for
knowledge on the one hand, and the sense of mission and of personal fulfillment
that he found in uniform. There was the Yoni of history and philosophy books:
Plato and Marx. Who saw the history of Israel not just as a compendium of
facts, but a source of inspiration, and a call for action. The Yoni who rebuilt a
tank battalion reduced to ashes and dust on the Golan. And there was the Yoni
at peace. Tranquil. At home. With his pipe and his phonograph records, out of
uniform. We saw him in his hours of supreme achievement and satisfaction. We
saw him, too, sometimes standing alone, with pain in his heart, biting his teeth,
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carrying the heavy, lonely burden of commanding the very fighters who he was
leading when he fell.
“We have seen him on the battlefield, engaging the enemy, heading into a
test of fire with courage and wisdom and his indomitable spirit – the very
essence of the spirit that made possible the operation in which he would lose his
life.” Because, make no mistake, I said: beyond the weapons used, the people
who participated, the training and exercises before the fleet of Hercules had
taken off; beyond the fine balance required in the planning, execution, and
decision-making; it was “this spirit, this essence, that was tested at Entebbe.”
When I saw Yoni’s family afterwards, though they thanked me for my
remarks, I could see that they were still bleeding inside. I am sure that affected
they way they related to Bruria. Even before Yoni met her, he had told me how
hard his parents were finding his separation from Tutti. Bruria attended the
funeral and the shloshim. But she didn’t sit with the family. I think that with the
shock of his death, mixed with the pride they felt at his emergence as a national
hero, they found it difficult to include her, a woman they hardly knew, in their
mourning.
A few weeks later, I go a call from the Netanyahu family’s lawyer, Erwin
Shimron. It was an odd, rambling conversation. He seemed to insinuate that, as
her and Yoni’s neighbor and friend, I was encouraging the unwelcome idea that
Bruria was part of the immediate circle of the bereaved, that this mere girlfriend
was somehow his widow. He wanted me to withdraw whatever mantle I might
be providing, and help separate her from Yoni and his legacy. He went so far as
to say that one reason he was calling me was because he didn’t want to have to
take “legal steps” to make that happen. I saw no point in getting into an
argument. I sensed that, while it would take time for the grief felt by those
closest to Yoni to begin to heal, the issue would gradually resolve itself. But I
saw even less point in leading the lawyer to believe I would do what he was
suggesting.
“Mr Shimron,” I told him. “I knew Yoni. I know Bruria. I do not know you.
But I have a musical ear. I don’t like the undertone I hear in what you’ve been
saying. I’ve seen them close up. Bruria gave Yoni, at a critical time in his life,
probably more warmth than he ever received from any other human being.”
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Chapter Eleven
Yet despite Entebbe, the trauma of the Yom Kippur War, and the cracks it
had shaken loose in Israeli society and politics, were yet to play themselves out.
The hostage rescue was like a sugar rush, an intoxicating reminder that the army
still had the capacity for initiative and precision, audacity and quick-fire victory
– like our air strikes in the first hours of the 1967 War. But the real reckoning
over 1973 was about to come. It would change Israel beyond recognition, with
repercussions still being felt today. It would dramatically alter the course of my
life as well.
I still remember the moment it hit home, on the evening of May 17, 1977. As
Nava and I watched in our tiny living room in Ramat Hasharon, Chaim Yavin,
the anchorman on the country’s only TV channel, was handed an exit poll from
Israel’s latest national election. He began with three words: Gvirotai verabotai,
Mahapakh. “Ladies and Gentlemen, a revolution.” For the first time since the
state was declared, Israel’s government would not be in the hands of David
Ben-Gurion or his Labor Zionist heirs. Our next prime minister would be
Menachem Begin, who had inherited the mantle of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist
Zionism. He’d headed its youth wing, Betar, in eastern Europe, and led the
Irgun Zvai Leumi, the main right-wing militia force before 1948. Lacking the
intellectual depth and subtlety of Jabotsinky –a liberal intellectual who, among
other things, translated Dante into Hebrew – Begin drew his political strength
from his powerful oratory, and a refusal to countenance any compromise in
securing what he viewed as the ultimate goal: a Jewish state in all of biblical
Palestine, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, with whatever military
force was necessary to secure and sustain it.
But perhaps Yavin should have used a different metaphor in his dramatic
election-night broadcast: reidat adamah, an earthquake. Begin’s victory, after
the loss of eight straight elections over three decades, was the culmination of
seismic rumblings which had been building for years. The big, decisive, shock
was the 1973 war. Yet this was not just because of the colossal intelligence
failure, or the myriad errors of our military commanders and political leaders. It
was the fundamental loss of trust in the cosy, self-perpetuating establishment
that had dominated all aspects of Israeli politics, society and culture from the
start: Palmachniks like Rabin and Dado; political players like Golda and
Shimon Peres; Haganah veterans like Dayan and Bar-Lev; and, of course, the
kibbutznik pioneers. Almost all were of East European background –
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Ashkenazim – and their prominence and privilege had stoked increasing
resentment among Israel’s disadvantaged Sephardi majority, with their roots in
the Arab world and especially north Africa.
Begin not only sensed this. While he’d never lost the formal bearing – or the
accent – from his childhood in Poland, his long years in Israel’s political
wilderness mirrored the wider exclusion felt by the Sephardim. The last election
he had lost, in December 1973, proved too soon for the earth to part. But he told
his supporters: “Even though Labour has won these elections, after something
like the Yom Kippur War happens to a country, and to a government, they must
lose power. They will lose power.” He was right. Only twice in the four decades
that followed would a Labor leader defeat Begin’s Likud party: Rabin’s election
victory in 1992, and mine over Bibi Netanyahu in 1999.
During the first two years of Begin’s rule, however, I was 7,000 miles away.
Ten days before the election, I’d gone to see Motta, and he’d agreed that I could
return to Stanford, to finish what I’d barely begun when the 1973 war broke out.
I had been in the army, with the one hiatus as a sayeret reservist at Hebrew
University, since the age of seventeen. I did not regret committing myself to a
life in uniform. But Stanford offered an extraordinary opportunity to broaden
my horizons. Even in the few weeks I’d spent there before the war, I’d felt
reinvigorated. It engaged a different kind of intelligence, a different part of who
I was: the books, the professors. A chance to listen to, and at least try to play,
beautiful music. And to spend more than a few stolen evenings or weekends
with my family.
The timing had nothing to do with the election. Like most other Labor
Israelis, and many of Begin’s own supporters, I hadn’t expected the Likud to
win. It was because I felt I’d reached a natural punctuation mark in my military
career. I’d led Sayeret Matkal. I’d commanded a tank company, a battalion in
1973, and, more briefly than I’d hoped, the 401 st Brigade after the war. I’d spent
the last two years in the kirya. The next step up the command chain would be to
lead a full armored division. But at age 35, I was probably too young, and I
figured I’d have a far better chance in two years’ time. I also feared losing the
chance to go to Stanford altogether. Motta’s term as chief of staff would end the
following year. Among those in the frame to succeed him was Raful Eitan.
Recalling Raful’s dismissive, almost sneering, opposition to my making the
Sayeret Matkal into Israel’s SAS, I wasn’t exactly confident I could count on
his support.
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Reluctant though I’d been to leave the 401 st for the kirya, I had particularly
enjoyed the last year. I was promoted to Shai Tamari’s job, in charge of the
intelligence team for our military operations, when Shai left to command a tank
brigade. My office was no longer on the third floor, but in the underground
bunker, the bor. I was part of nearly all high-level planning meetings, often with
Motta, sometimes also including Peres. Almost everyone around the table was
older than me, and outranked me by some distance. Yet with my intelligence
brief, I was often the one with the most thorough command of the details.
Though still just a colonel, I’d risen through Sayeret Matkal. I knew the
planning process from the other side as well, having attended the same sort of
meetings, from the early 1960s, to present our operations. So I was often asked,
and always welcome, to weigh in on what would work, what wouldn’t, and
why.
My final year in the kirya also further cemented my relationship with Motta.
Though as chief of staff, he tended to keep a formal distance from all but his
fellow generals, he did seem to enjoy having me around. He even put me in
charge of a new department of my own. Not officially. The “department” was
strictly ad hoc, as was the name which Motta gave it: Mishugas. The Yiddish
word for craziness.
All army commanders, in all countries, receive their share of unsolicited
advice. But I can’t imagine any of them gets the number, or sheer range, of wild
suggestions which make their way to the kirya. Everything from levitation
machines, to ideas for making tanks fly. Motta didn’t have the time to read all
the letters, much less sit down with the self-styled inventors or sages who
showed up in person. Still, he couldn’t be sure that a jewel of an idea wasn’t
lurking inside one of them. As an insurance policy, he began sending all the
letters, and every supplicant, to me.
I never found the jewel. The most vivid memory I have is of a visit from a
former soldier in Shaked, Israel’s Negev reconnaissance and tracking unit. He
had taken up meditation, and the study of ancient civilizations. Fresh from a
period of contemplation in the desert, he arrived in my office with a pamphlet
he’d written. It was about special-forces strategy and training, as practiced eight
centuries earlier, in the time of Genghis Khan.
I listened for nearly an hour, enjoying his enthusiasm, the history lesson, and
the simple weirdness of it all. I did check his facts afterwards. If nothing else, he
proved an assiduous student of the Mongols. He explained to me that in their
largest battles, involving tens of thousands of troops, they would designate a
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commando unit of a couple of dozen men. Its sole task was to seek out and kill
the enemy force’s leader. The key to their success was mind-training. Over a
period of months, sometimes years, the commandos’ self-perception was
altered. They were taught to believe that they had already died. Since their lives
on earth were done, all that remained was a formal passage through the turnstile
into eternal happiness, and to go out in glory. My visitor not only suggested that
Israel establish exactly this kind of death-cum-suicide unit. He volunteered to
train the men himself, and lead the first mission. With as straight a face as I
could muster, I thanked him for taking the time to see me. But I told him his
idea was probably not for us. Little did I know that a whole new kind of enemy,
epitomized by Al-Qaeda and the self-styled Islamic State, would build a
terrorist death cult around it.
* * *
Nava and I, with three-year-old Yael, and Michal just turning seven, left for
California in the late summer of 1977. The two years that followed were
uplifting and reinvigorating – not just because of Stanford, but a further, utterly
unexpected transformation back home soon after we’d left.
It, too had its roots in the 1973 war, but on the Arab side. Before the war,
Egypt’s Anwar Sadat had extended feelers about the possibility of peace
negotiations, only to see them ignored. Israel won the war in the end. But the
Egyptians’ surprise attack across the canal – and the panic and huge Israeli
losses in the early days of the war – had shattered our aura of invincibility.
Politically, Sadat had gone a long way to erasing the humiliation of 1967. That
freed him to do something which – after decades of Arab-Israeli conflict – was
astonishing. He travelled to Jerusalem, the capital of a country which neither
Egypt nor any other Arab country even recognized. He met Begin, and he
addressed the Knesset with a call for peace.
It is impossible to convey to Israelis who did not live through the birth of the
state, and our tumultuous early decades, the power of the emotions stirred by
Sadat’s visit. It was on November 19, 1977. With my arm around Nava, I
watched the live American television coverage as Sadat’s plane touched down
at Ben-Gurion airport. Begin was at the center of the throng of dignitaries on
hand to greet him: a who’s who of political and military leaders not just from
his administration, but who had led Israel in 1967 and 1973. Golda was there.
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Rabin, too, puffing furiously on his cigarette. When the erect figure of Sadat
emerged, there was spontaneous applause, and a serenade from Israeli army
trumpeters.
Even before Sadat’s Knesset address the next day, I understood that his visit,
his willingness to make the first, bold move toward a possible peace, marked
just the beginning of a difficult negotiating road. But there was one passage in
his speech that touched me especially. He ran through the history of how Egypt
and other Arab states had not just fought Israel, but denied our right to exist as a
state. “We used to brand you as so-called Israel,” he said. Now, the leader of
our most important Arab enemy declared: “You want to live with us in this part
of the world. In all sincerity, I tell you that we welcome you among us, with full
security and safety.”
The formula he proposed was straightforward. Egypt would agree to a full
peace, accepting and formally recognizing the state of Israel. But Israel would
have to withdraw from all Arab land captured in 1967, including “Arab
Jerusalem.” We would also have to accept the “rights of the Palestinian people
to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.” Begin’s
reply was more sensitive than I’d expected from a leader who, through my
Labor kibbutnzik eyes, I’d always seen as an extremist, unwaveringly
committed to a “greater Israel”. Though he did make it clear his views on the
shape of an eventual peace differed from Sadat’s, he proposed further talks with
the aim of finding an agreement both sides could live with. Still, like all Israelis,
I knew he would never accept at least two of the Egyptian president’s demands:
a retreat from our control of a united Jerusalem or the creation of a Palestinian
state on the West Bank of the Jordan: for Begin, biblical Judaea and Samaria.
On our territorial dispute with Egypt, I did believe a deal was possible. I
didn’t expect us to return all of the Sinai, if only because I couldn’t see Begin
agreeing to it. For security reasons, I also felt we should try to hold on to a pair
of air force bases built after 1967, with American help, just a few miles over the
Negev border. But as for the rest, I saw no reason not to give it back. As I’d told
Motta after the 1973 war, I’d long believed Israel had lost sight of the original
reason we’d held onto the Sinai after 1967. It was supposed to be a huge, sandy
security buffer. If we did manage to make peace with Egypt, there was surely no
reason to hold on to it.
The moment of truth came almost exactly 10 months later, in September
1978. American President Jimmy Carter hosted a summit with Begin and Sadat
at Camp David, in search of a “framework agreement” for final negotiations on
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a peace treaty. Again, I was watching closely, via American TV. But as the
summit was winding down, our phone suddenly rang in Palo Alto.
“Ehud, how’s it going? Are you following what’s happening here? What do
you think?”
I recognized the voice immediately: Ezer Weizman, the former fighter pilot
Begin had chosen as his defense minister. I’d known Ezer since the early 1960s,
when he’d been commander of the air force and Sayeret Matkal was planning
its first operations. Still, even though he had a reputation for batting ideas back
and forth outside the bounds of hierarchy or chain of command, I was startled to
hear from him.
“What do I think about what?” I said.
“The solution we’ve arrived at here. We found there was no way but to give
back everything.” The only exception was Taba, a sliver of land where the
Negev met the eastern edge of the Sinai, across from the Jordanian town of
Aqaba.
“Was there no way to convince them, even with some kind of a land swap, to
keep the two air bases?” I asked.
“Believe me, we wanted to,” Ezer replied. “But no way. Not if we were
going to get a peace treaty.”
So I said the obvious: if that’s what was necessary for peace, there was no
other choice.
We were now well into our final year at Stanford. Our home was in a leafy
“student village” off campus, called Escondito, for married students from
abroad. Our two-storey flat was one of a row of cabin-like structures: a bit like a
kibbutz, only smaller, American-style, a lot more upmarket. It had a fenced-off
play area for the children and, in a common room for all the village residents, an
upright piano.
I found the richness of the academic environment – and the time to explore
and savor it – enthralling. I’d chosen my master’s program at Stanford because
it offered the chance to learn across a range of different schools and disciplines.
The official home for my degree courses was the School of Engineering, in a
department called “Engineering-Economic Systems”. Its focus was on applying
mathematical modelling and analysis to decision-making in “large and complex
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organizations” such as private companies or government departments. Or the
armed forces of Israel. The theorists at Stanford were leaders in the field.
But from the start, I was drawn to other disciplines as well: business,
economics, political science, history, sociology, psychology. I studied game
theory at the business school, and the evolution of political systems under the
sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset. I also went to lectures by James G. March,
on how psychological, social and other factors influenced decision-making. I
particularly enjoyed learning from Professor Amos Tversky. Born in Haifa, he
was half of an academic partnership with the psychologist Daniel Kahneman,
who was also Israeli. They were investigating the effect of human bias and other
subjective factors on how we perceive reality, and thus make decisions.
Tversky’s work especially fascinated me, because it questioned a basic
assumption in the kind of predictive formulas my own department was
advancing: that we make choices rationally, calculating the outcomes of
competing alternatives. Tversky had found that the human brain didn’t always
work that way. For choices with a fairly obvious outcome – 90 percent of cases,
say – the assumption did hold. But at the margins, the brain didn’t, or couldn’t,
always gauge the implications of a decision accurately. A couple of decades
later, he would also show that an individual’s choice could vary significantly
depending on the way the options were presented.
These behavioural and psychological approaches were at odds with what was
being taught in my home faculty. Its prevailing orthodoxy was that by using
specifically designed interview techniques, alongside mathematical modelling
of the predicted outcomes, we could isolate the effect of human agency on how,
and what, decisions were made. Yet the wider my studies had ranged, the more
sceptical I became that the complexities of human decision-making could be
accommodated by such models. I also saw problems in the methodology we
were using. Since it was based partly on interviews with participants in the
decision-making process, it seemed to me that this introduced a subjective
element into our ostensibly objective conclusions.
My department wasn’t enamored with my views on our modeling approach.
But one of the things I most valued about my time in Stanford was that, far from
discouraging my excursions into other departments, my professors combined a
confidence in their own approach with a genuine open-mindedness to other
ideas: the hallmark of true intellectuals, and of great universities.
I got something else from my studies at Stanford, although I didn’t speak
about it at the time, not even to Nava. I became aware that I had a particular
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aptitude for focusing on the minute details of a problem, yet never losing sight
of the larger picture, the wider issues. From my experience as commander of
the sayeret and during the 1973 war, and from watching other officers whom I
respected, it struck me that this was an essential part of effective leadership.
By “leadership”, at that stage in my life, I did not mean political leadership. I
was thinking in terms of the army. But I’d now finished my masters degree, and
it was impossible to be unaware of the political context in which I’d be
returning to uniform. Since Camp David, our negotiators and the Egyptians had
been trying to thrash out a formal deal. Sadat was being denounced as a traitor
in the Arab world. Begin was seen by most in the outside world, and many
Israelis, as dragging his feet on the negotiations and risking the chance for peace
altogether. If we did manabge to sign a peace treaty, however, we would be
withdrawing for the first time from land captured in 1967. That would mean
finding a new approach to security in the south, as well as a new focus on the
majority of our Arab neighbors who were railing against Sadat and seemed less
interested than ever in making peace.
In some ways, it was hard to leave our mini-kibbutz in Palo Alto. Michal,
now nearly nine, had thrived, quickly learning English and ending up with a
perfectly American accent which has never left her. Yael has less vivid
memories of our time there. But we’d had the nearest thing to a normal family
life since our first, war-truncated, time at Stanford. During the university
holidays, we’d also travelled: to Canada. Mexico. Lake Tahoe. Even Las Vegas,
where, thankfully, we lacked the money to chance our luck, but where my years
in the sayeret suddenly came in handy. We spent the day at Circus Circus, a
joint casino-and-theme park tailored for families with kids. At a shooting
gallery in the amusement area, I had no trouble landing dead-center hits on a
passing procession of metal geese, to the consternation of the guy behind the
counter but the delight of my two young daughters. In probably the single
greatest moment of parental accomplishment I’d experienced since their birth, I
bagged a huge fluffy teddy bear for each of them.
* * *
I returned to Israel not just with the hope, but a reasonable expectation, that I
would get command of one of Israel’s two regular armored divisions: the 252 nd ,
which was responsible for defending the south and, at least for now, was based
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in the Sinai. Dan Shomron was now head of the southern command and had told
me, before we headed back from California, that he’d recommended me for the
post. It was an especially exciting prospect because the US-backed negotiations
with Egypt did finally appear to be nearing an agreement. As commander of
Division 252, I’d be coordinating and implementing Israel’s Sinai withdrawal.
But I didn’t get the job, at least not on my return. Raful Eitan had indeed
succeeded Motta as chief of staff, and he had the final say. I’d evidently been
right to assume I would figure no higher in his estimation than I had as sayeret
commander. To be fair, however, he did agree to my becoming commander of
Dan’s reserve division in the south: the same 611 th that Arik Sharon had led
across the canal in 1973. When I took up that post in April 1979 – just days
after the formal Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty was indeed signed – I was also
promoted. I became a one-star general. And eighteen months later, when the
regular division post came open again, I did get the nod to command the 252 nd .
Even then, it was a close-run thing. Raful called me in to see him and said he
wanted me to return to the kirya instead, in the one-star general’s post inside
military intelligence. He said he had more than enough candidates for division
commander, but that my previous experience meant I was the best choice for the
intelligence post. I was determined to remain in the field, especially with signs
that Begin, and certainly his more right-wing supports in the Likud, were
already having second thoughts about the peace deal we’d struck with Egypt. In
part, they feared that a withdrawal from any of the land taken in the 1967 war
might create a precedent, and invite pressure, for more withdrawals. But the real
buyers’ remorse centered on the fact that, as part of the initial agreement at
Camp David, Begin had needed to accept a parallel framework for negotiations
toward a broader peace that would include the West Bank and Gaza
Palestinians.
In any case, with Raful balking a second time at giving me the division
command, I figured I had little to lose by fightinhg my corner, and telling him
exactly what I felt. “Look, I realize that you’re chief of staff,” I said. “But don’t
forget we’re both just temporarily in whatever role we hold. I’m not here as a
draftee. I’m in the army by choice. It’s your decision to tell me what position
you want me to take. But you can’t impose anything. I can always leave. Or I
can bide my time until you leave.” Raful apparently concluded he couldn’t
actually force me to take the intelligence job. With Dan having made his
preference clear, he didn’t press the point.
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My main responsibility as commander of the 252 nd was to implement the
withdrawal from the Sinai. Israel had committed itself to bring all of our forces
behind the 1967 border within next two years, and, along with Dan, I threw my
energy into planning and implementing the terms of the treaty. But especially
with Begin soon facing a reelection campaign against Labor, now led by
Shimon Peres, he was keen to play to the opponents of any further negotiating
concessions. He was positioning himself as the voice of military strength, and
painting Peres as someone who would risk our security by going further than
the separate peace with Sadat.
Begin had no more experience or knowledge of military details than Shimon.
But from his days in the pre-state Irgun, he’d been an unapologetic admirer of
men of military action. After his victory in the 1977 election, he’d formed a
government stocked with some of Israel’s best-known former generals. Not just
Ezer Weizman. He’d brought back Moshe Dayan, as foreign minister. And as
agriculture minister, the country’s most swashbuckingly self-confident, and
controversial, battlefield commander: Arik Sharon. Begin had recently lost both
Ezer and Dayan, who accused him of deliberatedly torpedoing chances of
building on the peace with Egypt. But Arik was still there, four-square behind a
more forceful military posture on Israel’s other fronts. As agriculture minister,
he had also been the driving force in a plan for settlement “blocs” designed to
encircle the main Arab towns and cities on the West Bank and foreclose any
realistic prospect of a Palestinian state.
After Begin’s second election victory, in June 1981, some commentators,
and many in Labor, insisted that he’d won because of a dramatic surprise air
strike, a few weeks before election day, against a French-built nuclear reactor
outside Baghdad. I never believed that, in part because I knew from intelligence
friends that the attack had been set for earlier, and was put back because of fears
the plan might become public. But mostly because of what I witnessed in the
heart of Tel Aviv the night before the election, when I joined one of my top
officers, a Likudnik, at Begin’s final campaign rally.
Shimon still had a narrow lead in the polls. I hadn’t been at his closing rally,
the previous evening. But like the rest of Israel, I’d heard and read about it, in
particular the warm-up act: a popular, solidly pro-Labor comedian and actor
named Dudu Topaz. Greeting the crowd, he’d said what a pleasure it was that it
was not full of chachachim. The word was sneering Israeli slang: for uncouth,
uncultured Sephardim, not far from the equivalent of using the “n” word in
America. In a single sentence, he’d managed to sum up everything the
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Sephardim resented about the Ashkenazi, Labor Zionist establishment. Begin, at
his rally, played it like a virtuoso. “Did you hear what they called you?” he
cried. Chachachim. He slightly mispronounced the word, as if he’d never heard,
much less used, it before, and that even having to repeat it made his blood
curdle. “Is that what you are?” There was pandemonium. Maybe Begin would
have won anyway. But it was close, just one Knesset seat between the two
major parties. And win, he did.
I became increasingly convinced in the weeks that followed that Begin’s
second government, with Arik now moved to defense minister, would further
put the brakes on any follow-up negotiations for a deal with the Palestinians. I
did not yet know that Arik, in particular, had a far more ambitious, military plan
to try to bury the possibility of a Palestinian state once and for all. But I did
know he had his eyes on a possible thrust across our northern border into
Lebanon, where Arafat and the PLO were based.
There was no public mention of any of this. But several times in 1981, I was
ordered to move a large part of my division onto the Golan Heights for weeks at
a time: two brigades, 200 tanks and dozens of APCs in a massive motorcade
from the bottom to the top of the country and back again. We dubbed it
Cinerama, from the Hebrew words for Sinai and the Heights, Ramah. If there
was an escalation of hostilities, the northern command’s regular division would
cross into Lebanon. Our role would be to take their place in defending the
Golan, and possibly follow them in.
When I returned from my final episode of Cinerama in the late summer of
1981, the Sinai withdrawal was entering its final stage. I organized a full-scale
military exercise on the roughly one-third of the Egyptian desert we still held,
knowing that we’d no longer have the room to do so after the final withdrawal.
It was the largest exercise I’d ever commanded. The advances and tactical
retreats, the flanking maneuvers and ambushes and fighter jet attacks were like
a very big war in a very small place.
But a war game was not a real war. The Sinai was not like the Golan, or the
cramped, hilly confines of Lebanon. And it was in Lebanon, the following year,
that the war came. It was different from any in Israel’s history. Arik was in
charge. And I would become involved in ways which began to change the way I
saw not only Arik, but the political and military direction of our country.
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Chapter Twelve
My own part in the Lebanon war would change dramatically as a result of
that last military exercise in the Sinai. Arik Sharon was now Minister of
Defense, and he came for the final afternoon. From his experience as a frontline
commander – in 1956, 1967 and 1973 – he knew the dunes and wadis and
sprawling expanses of sand as well as any general in Israel. Watching our
intricate mini-war draw to its close, he made no effort to hide his enthusiasm for
the kind of quick, assertive battlefield maneuvers he’d long championed. But
more than that, his closest aide soon began sounding me out on my views about
the long-term organization, force balance and funding for the Israeli military. A
few weeks later, Arik offered me a promotion: a return to the kirya, as a twostar
general, to become head of planning for the armed forces.
I don’t know why he chose me: the Sinai exercise perhaps, the fact he knew
I’d studied “large and complex organizations” at Stanford, or maybe just the
fact our paths had first crossed two decades earlier when I was in Sayeret
Matkal. But even though it meant leaving my division command, especially
tough since the final Sinai withdrawal was approaching, it was an offer I never
contemplated turning down. Not just because of the second star on my uniform.
Ever since the 1973 war, along with a few other senior officers including Dan
Shomron, I had been making the case for a shift to more mobile and less
vulnerable forces and weapons systems. I saw the new role as a chance to help
encourage that critically important change.
There was just one hitch: all senior military assignments required the formal
approval of the chief-of-staff, my old friend Raful Eitan. Raful did manage to
delay things for several weeks. At one point, he even brought to bear a quality
I’d never suspected he had: a sense of humor. “OK, I’ll agree to promote
Barak,” he told Arik. The next day, he said he’d meant Eitan Barak – a very
good commander, by the way, who had been one of my instructors in officers’
school. Arik insisted, however. My appointment went through.
And one, unanticipated result was that I didn’t just play the field command
role I’d anticipated, from our Cinerama deployments, in Arik’s toweringly
ambitious, ill-planned and ultimately disastrous war in Lebanon. I became part
of months of planning discussions in the kirya before our tanks finally rumbled
across the northern border on the morning of June 6, 1982.
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My new posting came not just as momentum was building toward an
invasion. It followed on the heels of a major new crisis in our peace with Egypt.
Only weeks before I gave up my Sinai command, President Anwar Sadat was
shot and killed by an extremist Muslim officer at the annual Cairo military
parade to mark the anniversary of the 1973 war.
Like many Israelis, I felt an almost familial sense of bereavement. Sadat was
not just the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel. He seemed to
understand us: people who were ready, willing and able to fight, but wanted
above all to live unmolested and accepted by our neighbors. Yet for Begin and
the Likud, I knew the assassination would cast the whole peace process into
doubt. Sadat’s successor, Vice-President Hosni Mubarak, did make it clear he
would abide by the peace treaty, defusing calls on the Israeli right for us to
cancel our final withdrawal from the Sinai. But after Sadat’s killing, Begin and
those around him seemed more determined than ever to hold the line against the
wider peace negotiations agreed with President Carter and Sadat at Camp
David. At Begin’s insistence, Camp David had not proposed giving the
Palestinians a state, but instead “autonomy” and a locally elected “selfgoverning
authority”. Yet that was defined as a transitional period. The elected
Palestinians were to be included in negotiations for a yet-unspecified “final
status” arrangement for the West Bank and Gaza. That, Begin feared, left the
door ajar for something more than autonomy. Shutting that door, I would soon
discover, was a big part of Arik’s ornate reasoning for invading Lebanon.
Beyond the fact that my new job was a promotion, I had a personal reason
for welcoming the move back to Tel Aviv. Ten days after Sadat’s assassination,
I had endured a frightening few days surrounding the birth of our third daughter,
Anat. The crisis was another reminder that the demands of frontline command
rested not just on my shoulders, but my family’s. We had moved house again
early in Nava’s pregnancy, to the suburb of Ra’anana, about 10 miles north of
Tel Aviv and a few miles in from the coast. We bought one of a newly built row
of small, semi-detached townhouses which, best of all, had a backyard. It was
tiny by American standards, but was still a place for the girls to play. Once
again, however, I wasn’t there when my daughter was born. I was rushing north
as Nava went into labor.
The birth itself went smoothly. By the time I got to the hospital, both baby
and mother seemed happy and healthy. A few days later, however, when they
were back in the townhouse and I’d returned to my division, Nava felt suddenly,
desperately unwell. I shudder to think what might have happened were it not for
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the fact that one of our new neighbors was a friend from my first military
intelligence stint in the kirya. In almost paralyzing pain, Nava phoned him, and
he rushed her to the hospital. It turned out that the doctor who delivered Anat
had left part of the placenta inside. Once the mistake was discovered – as I was
again speeding north – he went back in and rectified it. When I arrived, I was
relieved, to put it mildly, to find Nava smiling bravely, and on her way back to
full health. Still, doctor friends of mine told me that if the problem not been
diagnosed and addressed quickly, she could have suffered shock, serious
infection, even death.
* * *
In my new role, I was nominally responsible to both the defense minister and
the chief of staff, but Arik made it clear to both me and Raful that he was boss.
And though my official brief was longer-term planning, almost from day-one
the issue of Lebanon overshadowed all others. I knew, from Cinerama, that
preparations for a possible military operation in Lebanon were underway. Yet
from my first meeting with Arik and Raful, it became clear it was more than just
a possibility. “Why the hell is Arafat still alive,” Arik snapped at us. He said
that when he’d been commander of Unit 101, he’d never waited for the
government to ask him to plan an operation. He’d plan it himself, and go to
ministers for approval. When I told him that I’d done just that when I was
commander of the sayeret, only to be told Arafat was “not a target,” Arik
replied: well, he is now. The PLO leader’s current residence was on the
southern edge of Beirut, and in the weeks ahead Arik left no doubt that he
meant to go after him there.
To anyone looking from the outside, there was no pressing reason to expect a
war. It is true that the potential for conflict was always there. The PLO had
nearly 20,000 fighters in Lebanon and hundreds of rockets capable of reaching
our northern towns and settlements. The Syrians were there, too. As part of an
Arab League agreement in 1976 to quell two years of terrible civil war between
Lebanon’s traditionally dominant Maronite Christians and an alliance of PLO
and Lebanese Muslim forces, some 30,000 Syrian troops had been brought in as
the core of a peacekeeping force. But in the summer of 1981, new US President
Ronald Reagan’s Mideast envoy, Undersecretary of State Philip Habib, had
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brokered a cease-fire to halt Palestinian Katyusha rocket fire into Israel. It was
generally holding.
But fundamentally, Arik’s war plan was not a response to the Katyushas. It
was a way of using military force to achieve Prime Minister Begin’s political
aim: stopping the Camp David peace process in its tracks, and ensuring it did
not go beyond the peace treaty with Egypt. And even that message was not
principally intended for the Palestinians, I suspect, but for the Americans.
Israel’s Labor-led governments had always calculated that we needed at least
some measure of support from foreign allies, especially the US. Under Begin,
we’d already bombed Saddam Hussein’s nuclear reactor without telling the
Americans beforehand. Shortly after I returned to the kirya, he provoked further
anger in Washington by announcing the de facto annexation of the Golan – in
effect “balancing” our Sinai withdrawal with a dramatic reassertion of Israeli
control over other land captured in the 1967 war. Part of Arik’s plan in Lebanon
was to deliver an even more forceful riposte to any suggestion that we would
give up control of the West Bank and Gaza.
Yet these political aims, which I was gradually beginning to grasp in their
full form through my discussions with Arik, were only part of the reason I was
deeply uneasy about the plans for our Lebanon invasion. Having now spent
nearly two decades in the military, I recognized that the security challenge north
of the border was real. I did not believe it was inherently wrong for Begin’s
government to order a pre-emptive military operation with the aim of ending it.
My view, as an army officer, was that the decision on how, when and whether
to go to war was for our elected government. But for that principle to work, I
also believed that government ministers had to know what they were deciding.
The more we geared up for an invasion, the less certain I became that Begin’s
cabinet understood what we were planning to do.
Arik’s original plan was codenamed Oranim: Hebrew for “pine trees”. It
involved pushing deep into Lebanon, all the way up to the strategically critical
road that ran between Beirut and Damascus. We would link up in Beirut with
the main Maronite Christian force, the Phalangists, whom we had been
supporting and training for several years. When that plan was presented to
Begin’s cabinet at the end of 1981, however, most ministers opposed it. Thus
was born Arik’s Plan B, so-called “Little Pines”. Its stated aim was a lot more
modest. We would create a “security zone” – a 40-kilometer, or 25-mile, strip
running north of the border with Lebanon.
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I could see that Little Pines was a kind of fiction. All you had to do was take
a map and draw in the 40-kilometer line. In the areas nearer the Mediterranean,
in the western and central parts of the border area, it indeed covered territory
controlled by armed PLO groups. But in the eastern sector, there were Syrian
positions a mere 10 to 12 kilometers up from the border, well inside the
“security zone”. Not much further north were two full Syrian divisions. That
meant we’d be fighting not just the Palestinians, which was the ostensible aim
of Little Pines. We would have to take on Syria. As soon as those hostilities
began, we would have to destroy radar and SAM sites in the Syrian-controlled
Beka’a Valley further north into Lebanon. After the first costly days of the 1973
war in the Sinai, we were not about to enter a major conflict without ensuring
air superiority. Unless the Syrians retreated or surrendered, the inevitable result
would be a wider conflict, not limited to dealing with Palestinian fighters in
south Lebanon but paving the way for Arik to go ahead with his original plan
and push all the way to Beirut.
This wasn’t mere supposition on my part. In February 1982, we ran a
simulation exercise in the kirya based on Plan B. The result: Little Pines became
Big Pines. A clash with the Syrians proved inevitable, if only because one target
even under Little Pines was the main road between Beirut and Damascus. It lay
well beyond the 40-kilometer line. As the main supply route for their forces in
the interior of Lebanon, it was also of critical importance for the Syrians. So any
idea of a quick, limited strike to establish a security zone was fantasy. A few
days later, Raful chaired a wide-ranging discussion on Lebanon. Near the end of
the session, I asked him directly whether government ministers were aware that
our war plan “will inevitably lead to a clash with the Syrians”. Raful hesitated
for a second, but then answered briskly: “Yes.”
That assurance would turn out to be untrue. But my wider concern, as the
weeks passed, was Arik’s political plan, of which I was getting an ever clearer
idea from him. It struck me as not just grand, but grandiose. Part of it was to
obliterate Arafat as a political force, if not by killing him then by forcing him
and every one of his fighters from Lebanon, a country Arik wanted to place
under the unchallenged control of the most prominent of the younger generation
of Christian Phalangist politicians, Bashir Gemayel. I felt all that would be
challenging enough. But in Arik’s eyes, this was only part of a complete
reordering of our conflict with the Arabs. He expected Gemayel’s Lebanon to
openly align itself with Israel and expel all Syrian troops. As for the expelled
Palestinians, they would go back to Jordan where they would resume – and, this
time, win – their civil war with King Hussein. The result, with Hussein deposed,
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would be a “Palestinian state” in Jordan, which would free Israel to retain openended,
unchallenged, control of the West Bank.
Even the Labor party, fifteen years into Israel’s occupation of the West
Bank, was still speaking about a “Jordanian option” for an eventual political
settlement with the Palestinians who lived there – though this meant a kind of
confederation with Jordan under Hussein’s rule. Very few Israelis began
seriously to engage with the Palestinians own separate identity or national
aspirations until later in the 1980s – when I, too, would do so, amid the
widespread Palestinian unrest known as the intifada. But even without a fully
thought-out view on these issues, I was taken aback by Arik’s almost godlike
supposition that he could use fire and brimstone, or the modern military
equivalent, to remake the Middle East as he and Begin wished to see it. If only
because of the tacit assumption that the outside world, and especially the
Americans, would sit by and let the whole drama play out as scripted, it struck
me as an exercise in self-delusion.
There was also the matter of Arik’s vision of a “new” Lebanon under Bashir
Gemayel’s Phalangists. Unlike the other generals in the kirya, I’d never actually
met any of our “Lebanese Christian allies”. Yet a few weeks after taking up my
new post, I was invited to a lunchtime discussion with a group of Phalangist
officers on a training course in Israel. I emerged both unsettled and
underwhelmed. They were obviously politically astute. They bandied around
military vocabulary proficiently enough. But they were a bit like teenagers
playing with guns: full of macho, and too much after-shave. Hardly the kind of
“army” I could see as a lynchpin in Arik’s plan to redraw the geopolitical map
of the Middle East.
* * *
By June 1982, Arik’s invasion was a war simply waiting for a credible
trigger. On the evening of June 3, Palestinian terrorists shot and critically
wounded Israel’s ambassador in London, Shlomo Argov. Appalling though the
attack was, as a catalyst for a full-scale invasion, it seemed unlikely to be
enough for the Reagan Administration. Habib’s cease-fire terms did not include
terror attacks like the one in London. It was meant to keep the PLO from firing
across our northern border. Even to some Israelis, the attack on Ambassador
Argov seemed more a rationale than a reason for war. But Begin summoned an
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emergency cabinet meeting the next day. His adviser on terrorism, Gideon
Machanaimi, was someone I knew well. When the cabinet convened, he pointed
out to the ministers that the London terrorists were from a fringe Palestinian
group led by Abu Nidal. Far from being an ally of Arafat, he had been
sentenced to death by Fatah. According to Gideon, Begin wasn’t interested in
the distinction. Even less so were the two leading military figures in attendance:
Arik and Raful. They said all Palestinian terror was the responsibility of Arafat,
and that now was the time to hit back hard. The cabinet was informed that our
initial response would be limited: aerial and artillery bombardment of PLO
targets throughout Lebanon. Yet Raful told the cabinet that the Palestinians
would almost certainly respond with shell and rocket fire into Israel. Then, he
said, we could strike more forcefully. In other words, the invasion would begin.
It did. Dubbed “Operation Peace for Galilee” to convey the aim of protecting
northern Israel from shell and rocket fire, it got underway at around 11 a.m. on
Sunday June 6. The publicly declared aim was Little Pines: the establishment of
our 40-kilometer security zone. Both Israelis and the Americans were led to
believe it would be a relatively short operation aimed at destroying the PLO’s
military capacity in the border area. We also said that we wouldn’t attack Syrian
forces as long as they didn’t attack us.
That last public pledge had particular relevance to my role on the ground. I
was deputy commander of the largest of Israel’s three invasion forces, under
Yanoush Ben-Gal, head of the northern command until shortly before the war.
We had 30,000 troops and 600 tanks and were responsible for the “eastern
sector” – from the edge of the Golan Heights, north through the Bekaa Valley
along Lebanon’s border with Syria. At first, we deliberately stopped short of
Syrian forces. We deployed our main reserve division just 10 kilometers across
the border, below the first Syrian positions at the bottom of the Bekaa. But
despite the public assurances we were in Lebanon to establish our security zone,
we had no orders to halt at the 40-kilometer line. From day one, our part of the
invasion force began a pincer movement around the area of eastern Lebanon
where large numbers of Syrian soldiers were based. My former Sinai division,
the 252 nd , came down from the Golan and started making its way up alongside
the Syrian border. Our other units, further inland, also began pushing
northward.
For the first couple of days, we did avoid a confrontation with the Syrians.
Yet on June 8, day three of the war, the morphing of Little Pines into Big Pines
began.
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The two other Israeli invasion forces had crossed the border parallel to us,
one pushing up through the steep hills and twisting valleys of central Lebanon,
and the other along the Mediterranean coast. The central force was now ordered
to mount an attack that would bring them within striking distance of the Beirut-
Damasus road. The first skirmish came in the hilltop town of Jezzin, still barely
within the 40-kilometer zone. The Syrians had a commando force and tanks in
the town. An Israeli battalion was ordered in, and it took Jezzin by the evening
of June 8. But it came under assault from Syrian units with grenades, RPGs and
Saggers, as well as shellfire from a nearby ridge. Shortly before midnight,
another unit of Israeli tanks and infantry passed through the central Lebanese
village of Ayn Zhalta, to the north of Jezzin and beyond the 40-kilometer line,
and began winding its way through a valley toward the Beirut-Damascus road.
They waded into a Syrian ambush, and for hours found themselves in a fierce
battle with Syrian units.
I don’t believe Arik specifically planned to confront the Syrians in Jezzin
and Ayn Zhalta. But he could not have doubted that, given the enormous scale
and range of our invasion, a clash with Syrian forces would happen at some
point. Now that it had, all that remained was for him to tell the cabinet that
Israeli forces had come under Syrian fire and insist, as defense minister, that the
imperative for our forces on the ground was to strike back.
On the afternoon of June 9, the fourth day of the war, we got the order to go
on the offensive against the Syrians in the Bekaa. As our artillery pounded the
southernmost SAM sites, nearly 100 Israeli jets swarmed into the Bekaa Valley
and attacked Syria’s air defenses in eastern Lebanon. When a second wave