screamed in an hour later, the Syrians sent up their Soviet-made MiGs to
intercept them. Forty-one Syrian planes were shot down. Seventeen of the 19
SAM batteries were destroyed by the end of the day. The other two were taken
out the next morning, and another 43 Syrian jets shot down.
There was no longer any pretence about our war aim: to fight our way
through any resistance and reach the Beirut-Damascus road. But after the Bekaa
air battle, and the most serious air losses for an Arab state since 1967, Yanoush
and I knew that international pressure for a cease-fire would quickly escalate.
Aware we were racing against the clock, we began a co-ordinated push
towards the Beirut-Damascus road. The left arm of our “pincer” was ordered to
make its way toward a town called Jobb Janine. It was still some distance from
the Damascus road, but an important way-station: Syrian headquarters on the
western side of the Bekaa Valley. The eastern part of our pincer, the 252 nd
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Division, advanced up the Bekaa, alongside the Syrian border, toward the town
of Yanta, across from Jobb Jannine.
But as it was making its way there, we got word a cease-fire had been
agreed. It was set for noon the next day, Friday, June 11. The main focus of our
advance shifted to a crossroads a few miles east of Jobb Janine. It was a flat,
open area surrounded by hills, codenamed the Tovlano Triangle on our maps.
We knew we would meet some Syrian resistance. On the way up the valley,
we’d seen signs of reinforcements from inside Syria. But we had overwhelming
superiority in tanks, artillery and infantry in the area, as well as full control of
the air. In our command post, about five miles back from our frontline forces,
Yanoush set in motion the plan for a pre-cease-fire advance to take the hills
overlooking the Tovlano Triangle. It was still about eight miles short of the
Beirut-Damascus road. But the idea was to establish a more secure defensive
position by the time the truce took effect, and to put us in position to advance
further if the cease-fire collapsed or was delayed.
Shortly before sunset, Yanoush left by helicopter for a field commanders’
meeting with Raful in northern Israel. That left me in charge, alongside
Yanoush’s de facto chief-of-staff, Amram Mitzna. A decorated veteran of 1967
and 1973 whom I knew well, Amram had the added distinction of being disliked
by Raful almost as much as I was. Our main reserve division had been ordered
to take control over the hills south of the Tovlano Triangle. One of its brigades,
led by a former Sayeret Matkal soldier named Nachman Rifkind, was sent to
take up a position immediately south of the triangle. Soon after nightfall,
Rifkind radioed in that he was there, and that the area seemed clear of enemy
forces. The divisional command post then ordered a second brigade to move
toward the hills dominating the crossroads.
The first sign of trouble came around midnight. From our overall command
post, we were listening in on all radio traffic, and heard the second brigade
report that it had come under fire while moving toward the crossroads. At first,
we assumed it must be from the remnants of a retreating Syrian unit. But
Rifkind, who had reported the area was clear, now said that he could see flashes
of shellfire two or three miles to his north. Only the following morning did it
become clear that he had not deployed immediately south of the triangle as
planned. He had mistakenly halted at a hill about two miles short of there.
By the time Yanoush returned to the command post a little after midnight,
we were facing another problem. The battalion nearest to the south of the
triangle had spotted a dozen large vehicles armed with missiles a few hundred
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yards ahead. The missiles seemed to be pointed north, away from them. But the
battalion commander was asking us for permission to open fire.
“Do not open fire,” I was saying as Yanoush arrived. “I repeat: do not open
fire.” When Yanoush asked me what was going on, I told him the lead unit had
reported unknown vehicles with missiles and wanted to know whether it could
attack. “Tell them yes,” Yanoush said. I looked first at him, then at Mitzna. “We
can’t,” I said. “It’s dark. The situation is confused. We don’t know whose
missiles these are. It doesn’t make sense they’d be Syrian, just sitting there,
pointed north. At least give it a few minutes.” I think Yanoush would have
grabbed the microphone and told the unit to fire had not Amram been there as
well. Together, we convinced him to hold off. I ordered the brigade commander
to get one of the battalion’s APC crews to go out on foot and get as near as
possible to the missiles. It was nearly 15 minutes later when they returned. They
said they’d never seen this kind of missile vehicle, but that the soldiers manning
them seemed to be speaking Hebrew. It turned out to be a new ground-toground
missile, not yet formally in service, which had been sent into Lebanon
without our knowledge by the northern command.
While that trouble was averted, much worse lay ahead. Yanoush asked to be
brought up to date on our progress in taking control of the area around the
Tovlano Triangle. We briefed him on the situation as we understood it: that
Rifkind had reported the triangle was clear, but that the second brigade had still
not reached it. Yanoush tried to radio the divisional commanders. When he
couldn’t raise them, he ordered the brigade and battalion commanders to pick
up their pace and move forward.
With Yanoush back and the advance resumed, I tried to grab at least a few
hours’ sleep. But around 3:45 am, a junior officer shook me awake. When I
rejoined Yanoush and Amram, they told me the lead battalion was now in deep
trouble. It was led by Ira Ephron, one of Dan Shomron’s best company
commanders during the 1973 war. For reasons I’ve never been able to establish,
Ira’s orders were not to take the hills south of the triangle as we’d planned, but
to go through it to a point two miles or so north. Minutes after crossing the
triangle, his tanks came under heavy fire. Hoping to escape, he kept going, only
to find himself surrounded by a Syrian armored force. They were trapped near a
village called Sultan Yacoub, nearly three miles north of Tovlano. Since it was
early June, it would be light soon, and his predicament could only get worse.
At dawn, he reported he was under heavy artillery, anti-tank missile, RPG
and close-range rifle fire. The only realistic hope was to retreat. We were unable
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to get air support, but the commander of our artillery force called in all available
units, and they drew a kind of protective box of shellfire around Ira’s men as
they moved back. We sent our other reserve division towards the crossroads to
provide support, and Amram went with them to co-ordinate the operation. But
Ira still had to fight his way out. It was 15 minutes of hell. By the time he
reached safety at around nine in the morning, he’d lost ten tanks and nearly 20
men, four of them during the final, frantic retreat. Five more were missing. The
reserve division also found itself in a fierce firefight with the Syrians, and lost
eleven men.
We were now just three hours from the cease-fire. We did advance nearer to
the Beirut-Damascus road. An hour before noon, our dedicated anti-tank unit
destroyed 20 of Assad’s top-tier tanks, Soviet-made T-72s. Under different
circumstances, those successes might have been a cause for consolation. Yet it
was hard to dwell on them given what had happened north of Tovlano. After the
war, Sultan Yacoub created fertile ground for conspiracy theories, half-truths
and finger-pointing. That there had been many oversights and errors was clear,
though there was never a full and formal debriefing process to identify in detail
what had gone wrong. I found it deeply frustrating that, unlike in 1973 when I’d
been in a battlefield command role, I was now at several steps removed from
what was happening on the ground. But everyone involved shared responsibility
for the failures – including the overall commanders: Yanoush, and me as well.
That weight felt even heavier because the tragedy occurred only hours before
our own force’s involvement in the Lebanon War was over.
* * *
It was not, however, the end of the war. The cease-fire held only
intermittently in the rest of Lebanon, barely at all in some areas. Freed from
fighting in our sector, Yanoush, Amram and I began spending time with units
elsewhere. A couple of days after the cease-fire, I found myself alongside a pair
of generals, Uri Simchoni and Yossi Ben-Hannan, south of Beirut. In front of
us, troops from the Golani Brigade were completing their takeover of Beirut
airport. “You were right,” I told Uri and Yossi. They had been in charge of the
simulation exercise in the kirya, predicting how Arik’s ostensibly more limited
invasion plan would inevitably develop into Big Pines. Even as we were talking,
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another Israeli unit broke through to the Beirut-Damascus road. On the far side
of Lebanon’s capital city, they linked up with Bashir Gemayel’s Phalangists.
I remember a mix of feelings at the time. Partly, amazement that through
sheer determination and political maneuvering, Arik seemed to have pulled off
his grand plan – or at least the Lebanon part of it. Yes, we’d ended up fighting a
kind of half-war against the Syrians which, though we’d won it, still left 30,000
of Assad’s men in Lebanon. And they showed no signs of leaving. Our main
strategic threat north of the border was not, in fact, the Palestinians. Syria was
in military control of Lebanon and, after the peace with Egypt, our most
powerful adversary. And no matter what Big Pines might have achieved, it
seemed to clear to me that the Syrians would be free simply to replace the
weaponry we’d destroyed and fight another day.
In Arik’s mind, Bashir Gemayel would soon be in a position to fix that. But
beyond my skepticism from having met some of his boy officers in Tel Aviv, I
couldn’t see how that would work. I strained to imagine Gemayel daring to
form what would amount to a formal alliance with Israel and ordering the
Syrian troops to leave. And given what would be at stake for Damascus, I
certainly couldn’t see the Phalangists being able to drive them out by force.
The more immediate, open question involved Arafat and the Palestinians.
Our other two invasion forces had driven almost all the PLO fighters out of
south Lebanon, though not without costs and casualties. Most of the
Palestinians, however, had retreated north to their de facto capital, the
southwestern neighborhoods of Beirut. The idea of a ground assault – street-tostreet
battles in an area packed with fighters, weapons and tens of thousands of
civilians – didn’t bear thinking about. After the war, some of the officers around
Beirut said Arik seemed to hoping that the Phalangist milita would go into the
overwhelmingly Muslim western side of Beirut. At one point, he was even
considering an Israeli attack. Fortunately, given the Phalangists’ record of
violence bordering on savagery during the Lebanese civil war, Bashir Gemayel
wasn’t willing to send them in. As for an Israeli assault, Begin’s ministers
weren’t ready to sign off on it, and the Americans let it be know, repeatedly,
that they were vehemently opposed to the idea.
Arik again turned to a fallback plan. He knew that Begin did share his
determination to get Arafat and the PLO out of Lebanon. Even the Americans
were ready to support such an arrangement, assuming it could be negotiated and
implemented in a way that would bring the fighting to an end. Whether by
intent or political fortune, the mere prospect of Arik further expanding the
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invasion had the effect of persuading Washington to send Philip Habib back
into the diplomatic fray. With no early sign, however, of Arafat agreeing to
leave, Arik now steadily tightened what amounted to a siege on west Beirut. For
seven weeks in July and August, our forces pounded the PLO-controlled
neighborhoods from land, air and sea; intermittently cut water and electricity
supplies; and hoped that the accumulated pressure, and casualties, would force
Arafat and his men to agree to Habib’s terms for a wholesale evacuation.
By this point, I was spending most of my time in the kirya, with periodic
visits north, sometimes with Arik or Raful, to our positions on the eastern,
Phalangist-controlled, side of Beirut. On several occasions, I helicoptered back
with Habib or his deputy, Morris Draper. In one instance, I accompanied Draper
into a meeting with Arik. In what I imagine had become a familiar, and
frustrating, part of the US mediation mission, he pressed Arik to rein in our
bombardments, arguing that we were in danger of ruining the chances of getting
a negotiated deal on Arafat’s leaving. Arik argued straight back. His view was
that unless the PLO felt squeezed into submission, they would stay put.
On that, I thought Arik was probably right. Other Israeli generals with far
more experience, and weight, also seemed to agree. Notably, Yitzhak Rabin. He
was no longer in government, nor even in charge of Labor. But he had always
had a soft spot for Arik, as did Sharon for him. With uneasiness, questions and
outright criticism of the siege building both internationally and inside Israel,
Arik got Rabin to helicopter north with him to Beirut. Yitzhak spent six or
seven hours there. His verdict on the siege, at least as reported in the Israeli
press, was more than Arik could have hoped for. Lehadek, he said. “Tighten it.”
In the end, I’m convinced the siege did have a critical effect on getting the
evacuation deal. But unleashing our single most relentless series of air attacks,
on August 12, when the deal was basically done, seemed both perverse and
excessive, and not just to me. Habib, and President Reagan himself, fumed. So
did a lot of Begin’s own ministers, with the result, unprecedented in Israeli
military annals, that they formally removed Arik’s authority to decide on future
air force missions. That turned out not to matter, however, because August 12
effectively marked the end of the siege.
On the afternoon of Saturday, August 21, the first shipload of an eventual
total of nearly 10,000 Palestinian fighters left Beirut harbor for Cyprus, and then
for a variety of new host countries. On this score at least, Arik’s grand design
had proven beyond him: the Palestinians were not bound for Jordan. By far
most of them headed for the PLO’s new political base, the north African state of
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Tunisia. Arafat himself left on August 30.
Still, as the evacuation proceeded, another one of Arik’s central aims in Big
Pines was also achieved. On August 23, the Lebanese parliament elected Bashir
Gemayel as the country’s new president.
* * *
During the several weeks that followed, there was a confident feeling among
Arik and his inner circle in the kirya. To the extent that Arik and Raful saw any
cloud on the horizon, it was their concern about “several thousand” Palestinian
fighters who they were certain had stayed on in Beirut despite the evacuation.
True, Bashir Gemayel hadn’t been formally inaugurated as president. There had
been reports that he was privately assuring Lebanese Muslim leaders that he
would be conciliatory once he took office, and that he was not about to consider
a formal peace with Israel. He had also been resisting Israeli efforts to make an
early, public show of friendship, such as an official visit to meet Prime Minister
Begin. But there was an undisguised hope that this was just a brief political
hiatus, for appearance’s sake, and that before too long Lebanon would become
the second Arab country to make peace with Israel. Not just peace, but
something more nearly like an alliance.
Though I still looked through the eyes of an army officer, not a politician
and certainly not an experienced diplomat, I had serious doubts this would
happen. Simple logic seemed to suggest that, since Gemayel knew we had no
realistic option of turning our back on him, his political interests were best
served by keeping his distance and trying to build bridges at home. But on the
early evening of September 14, nine days before his scheduled inauguration, not
just that question but the whole new political edifice Arik had envisaged in
launching the invasion, became suddenly, irretrievably, irrelevant.
I was at my desk on the third floor of the kirya, getting ready to go home,
when the news broke: a huge bomb had exploded at the Phalangist Party
headquarters in east Beirut as Gemayel was beginning to address hundreds of
supporters. For a while, the reports from Beirut suggested that Gemayel had
survived the blast, but shortly before eleven at night the confirmation came: the
president-elect was dead.
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Though no one claimed responsibility, there was no shortage of suspects.
During and since the civil war, Gemayel had at various times been at odds with
a whole array of enemies or rivals: Muslim militias, the PLO, other Maronite
factions and, of course, the Syrians. But I think for all of us, even Arik, the issue
of who was behind the bombing was hardly the most urgent concern. The
immediate danger was a revival of the kind of rampant bloodletting Lebanon
had endured in the civil war. The day after the assassination, I joined a halfdozen
other members of the general staff and helicoptered up to the Lebanese
capital. Arik, ignoring weeks of US pressure not to do so, had already ordered
Israeli troops into west Beirut – not to fight, but to take control of key junctions
and vantage points and keep basic order.
But the question obviously on everyone’s mind was how to make sure the
situation remained under control. It was early afternoon when we reached an
Israeli command post in the largely Palestinian southwest part of the city. It was
set up by Amos Yaron, the former paratroop commander whose division had
landed by sea at the start of the invasion and was part of the push north to the
capital. At his side was Amir Drori, the head of the northern command. They
had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I
had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun
operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a
couple of hundred yards closer to us, Shatila.
Raful was with us as well. So was Moshe Levy, the deputy chief-of-staff,
and Uri Saguy, the head of the operations branch in the kirya. I listened rather
than spoke. All I could gather from the other generals’ conversation was that
they were trying to figure out how to handle the Palestinian camps. No one
explicitly mentioned the idea of Israeli troops going in, presumably because
they realized that, far from helping ensure order, that might well inflame things
further. Even Raful, at least in my earshot, made no reference to the “several
thousand” PLO fighters that he and Arik still wanted out of Beirut. The only
note that struck me as odd was a general agreement that the Phalangists had not
been carrying their load of the fighting during the war. One comment in
particular stuck with me, though I didn’t take it as referring to the Palestinian
camps in particular. I can’t remember which general said it, only that everyone
seemed to agree: “Why the hell do we have to do their fighting for them?”
It was not until the next morning, back in Tel Aviv, that the alarm bells rang
for me, and by then it turned out to be too late. It was Friday, the eve of the
Jewish New Year. Yet in the wake of Gemayel’s assassination, the kirya was
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crowded. I heard the first rumors from a staff officer in military intelligence,
though neither he nor anyone else I asked was sure if they were true. But it
seemed that the Phalangists had been sent into Sabra and Shatila. And that they
had begun killing people.
I’d like to think that, in Amos Yaron’s or Amir Dori’s place, I’d have been
sufficiently wise not to have allowed the Phalangists into the camps in the first
place. But the truth is that I’m not sure. If the decision was to send someone in, I
certainly wouldn’t have sent in Israeli troops. But unlike other Israeli generals,
my first-hand knowledge of the Phalangists was limited to a single lunchtime
encounter in Tel Aviv. My impression from that meeting was that they were
overblown, post-adolescent thugs, not murders. I did, of course, know the
milita’s reputation for untrammelled violence in the Lebanese civil war. Still, I
might conceivably agreed to have the Phalangists go in – under strict orders to
limit themselves to keeping order – in the knowledge that our own troops were
stationed in the area immediately around the camps.
Yet from the moment of the first rumors – as soon as I heard even the hint
that killings were underway – I had not a second’s doubt about what had to be
done next: get the Phalangists out. Immediately. I felt a particular urgency
because of the rooftop gripe I’d heard the day before, about our troops having to
do their fighting for them. That made me pretty certain that, at the very least, we
had indeed sent the Phalangists into the camps.
I tried to reach Arik, but couldn’t get through to him. I contacted Oded
Shamir, the former intelligence officer who was his main liaison with the army.
I told him that if the Phalangists were inside the camps, he had to urge Arik to
get them out. Then I called Tsila Drori, Amir’s wife. I asked whether she’d
spoken to him that morning. She said no. He’d called her the day before,
however, and she was sure he’d be in touch before the New Year. “Please,
swear to me, Tsila, you’ll give him a message,” I said. “I was there yesterday.
Tell him please do whatever he can to stop this action. It will end very, very
badly.” I told her he would know what I meant.
It was too late to stop it altogether. The slaughter – the round-ups and the
beatings and the killings of Palestinians in the two camps – had indeed begun
the night before. Amir found out about it late on Friday morning. Not from me,
I believe, but from his staff officers. He ordered the Phalangists to stop. But
they didn’t. No one in command acted, at least successfully, to make sure that
the militiamen got out of the camps. The atrocities went on. It was another 24
hours before the militamen finally withdrew.
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One night’s massacre would have been enough to produce the outcry that
resulted once the first news reports, photos and TV pictures were sent around
the world. That the bloodletting was allowed to continue after we knew what
was going on, beyond the cost in innocent lives, made the fallout even worse. In
Israel, the response was unlike anything in the past. There had been some
opposition to the war: from parts of Labor, from political groups further to the
left and particularly the pressure group Peace Now, formed in 1978 to protest
the Begin government’s obvious desire to use the peace with Egypt as a means
to limit, rather than actively explore, prospects for a wider agreement with the
Palestinians.
After Sabra and Shatila, Peace Now was the driving force behind demands
for an inquiry into the Israeli role into what had happened. But the trauma went
deeper. Israelis of all political stripes jammed shoulder-to-shoulder into the
Kings of Israeli Square in the heart of Tel Aviv a week after the massacre.
There were soldiers, too: 20somethings back from the fighting and reservists a
decade or more older. Some estimates put the size of the crowd at as many as
400,000, almost ten percent of the population of Israel at the time. The protest
was nominally aimed at forcing the government to empower a commission of
inquiry, which it did a couple of days later. But the mood in the square was
more like an outpouring of shock and shame. While the catalyst was the
massacre in the camps, it tapped into a rumble of growing questions, and
doubts, about the war itself, which had been building ever since the prolonged
siege of west Beirut: what the invasion was for, how it had been planned and
prosecuted, and what it said about our country, our government and our armed
forces.
I was at home with Nava, watching the coverage of the demonstration on
television. I shared the protesters’ view that an inquiry was needed. In the days
since my phone call to Tsila Drori, I’d remained troubled not just by our failure
to stop the killings once we knew what was going on, but by the response from
Begin, Arik and some other ministers to the massacre. Determined to shift the
blame and responsibility elsewhere, they kept driving home the point that it was
Phalangists, not Israelis, who had carried out the killings. That was true. But it
could not erase the failures of judgment and control on our part. We were the
ones who had allowed them into the camps. Our forces were deployed around
the perimeter. And the killers were our “Lebanese Christian allies”.
The formal picking-apart of Israel’s share of responsibility would be the job
of the inquiry commission. I did take some heart from the very fact such large
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numbers of Israelis, and ultimately the government, had ensured a truly
independent probe would now go ahead.
But other ways in which the war had gone wrong were already glaringly
apparent. Some were operational. It is true we ended up overcoming Palestinian
and Syrian resistance. Given the numerical balance of forces, that was a
foregone conclusion. But with all the attention paid to the political aims of the
invasion, we’d never sufficiently planned for operating against a wholly
different kind of enemy than in our previous wars, and on a wholly different
kind of terrain. Huge columns of Israeli armor had found themselves stuck on
the winding roads of central Lebanon, running low on gasoline, vulnerable to
relatively small ambush squads. In some instances, a dozen Palestinian fighters
or Syrian commandos had halted the best-armed, best-trained, tank forces in the
Middle East for hours on end. Overall, the pattern of past wars had been broken.
Even in 1973, once the surprise attacks had been turned back, Israeli forces had
advanced, attacked and broken enemy resistance. That hadn’t happened here.
There was a deeper problem as well. At the start of the conflict, Begin had
declared, boastfully almost, that this was Israel’s first “war of choice.” That
wasn’t true. Both 1956 and 1967 were wars of choice. Yet those preemptive
attacks, especially in the Six-Day War, were in response to a sense of strategic
threat that was commonly understood by almost all Israelis. There was a sense
not just of consensus, but national unity. This war was different. It had been
launched in pursuit of a specific political vision: a marriage of Begin’s political
credo and Arik’s determination to use overwhelming force to bulldoze a new
political reality in Lebanon.
The findings of the inquiry commission were published in February 1983.
They were all the more powerful for the forensic language used. The inquiry did
concede Begin’s point: it was Gemayel’s men who had actually done the
killing. But it said that the Israeli commanders’ decision to allow the
Phalangists into the refugee camps “was taken without consideration of the
danger – which the makers and executors of the decision were obligated to
foresee as probable – that the Phalangists would commit massacres.” The
commission added that “when the reports began to arrive about the actions of
the Phalangists in the camps, no proper heed was taken. The correct conclusions
were not drawn. No energetic and immediate action was taken to restrain the
Phalangists and put a stop to their actions.”
Arik bore personal responsibility for this, the report said. So did Raful, and
the head of military intelligence, Yehoshua Saguy. The commission
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recommended that Begin fire Sharon and Saguy. They left Raful in place, but
only because his term as chief-of-staff was due to end in a matter of weeks. Arik
at first refused to go, and Begin refused to fire him. Yet in the end, popular
pressure forced the issue. When another demonstration was called in protest at
Sharon’s continuing as Defense Minister, a right-wing political activist tossed a
grenade into the crowd, killing a young Peace Now member. Even Arik was
evidently shaken by the spectre of one of his presumed political admirers
murdering a fellow Israeli for peacefully protesting. Or at least shaken enough
to step down as Defense Minister. He did remain in the government as a
minister without portfolio. Still, Begin himself would quit as Prime Minister,
retiring into virtual seclusion, about half-a-year later.
Like the rest of the senior officers corps, I tried with difficulty to get on with
my own job. I imagined the contribution I could best make for now would be, as
Head of Planning, to ensure the mix of forces and weaponry deployed in any
future conflict were better suited to the task than in the Lebanon war. But I
didn’t believe that such technical failings or planning lapses, however serious a
contribution to the more than 650 Israeli lives lost, were what had mainly
caused the war to go wrong. The central mistake was what had bothered me all
along: the invasion was not a considered response to a particular security threat.
It was an overreaching exercise in geopolitics, with sleight-of-hand used to
evade the need to make and win support from government ministers and,
critically, the public. Even with questions still to be resolved about when and
how to withdraw the thousands of Israeli troops that were still inside Lebanon, I
remember wondering aloud to a few army friends, and to Nava as well, whether
we would look back in a decade’s time and see the war as “our Vietnam”. In
fact, Israeli troops would still be in south Lebanon nearly two decades later,
when I had left the military and was about to become Israeli Prime Minister.
Even as a two-star general in the kirya, I doubted I would be in a position to
help fix the deeper issues raised by the war. Any real influence would be in
positions like the chief-of-staff and his deputy; the head of operations; the head
of military intelligence. They were the core of the armed forces’ leadership and
had the most regular dealings with senior figures in government.
But I’d failed to factor in the effect of the inquiry recommendations. Within
days of the report, Israel had a new Defense Minister: Moshe Arens, who
returned from his post as ambassador in Washington. Among his first orders of
business was to act on the inquiry’s verdict on Raful and Yehoshua Saguy. As
chief of staff, Arens settled on a choice I suspect most senior officers saw as the
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right man for the moment: Raful’s deputy, Moshe Levy. Well over six feet tall,
he was known as Moshe Vechetzi. “Moshe-and-a-Half.” He was reserved and
soft-spoken, a safe pair of hands after the trauma of the war.
But Arens also had to name a successor to Saguy as head of military
intelligence. And for that job, he nominated me.
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Chapter Thirteen
It was a huge responsibility, and not just because I was suddenly in charge of
an intelligence apparatus ranging from Unit 8200, our sophisticated signals
collection and decryption unit, to the operational units like Sayeret Matkal. It
was what was at stake if things went wrong: success or failure in war, and the
life or death of thousands of men on the battlefield. It was a price we’d paid
painfully in 1973. And now again, just nine years later, in Lebanon.
If I needed any reminder, it was conveniently placed on my new office wall:
the photographs of each of my nine predecessors since 1948 as Head of the
Intelligence Directorate, or Rosh Aman in Hebrew. All had come to the role
with talent and dedication. All but three had either left under a shadow, or been
fired. Sometimes this was because of ultimately non-fatal lapses, like a botched
mobilization of our reserves in 1959, or the Rotem crisis a few months later.
Sometimes, it was due to lethal failures like the Yom Kippur War and Lebanon.
I went to see all eight former directors who were still alive. “You know, I
used to read the newspapers and listen to the BBC in the car to work,” Shlomo
Gazit told me. He was the director I’d worked for in operational intelligence,
the one who’d so memorably made the point that we might endanger Israeli
security not only be missing the signs of a war, but signs of an opportunity for
peace. He was also one of the few to have left office without blemish. “By the
time I got to the kirya, I already knew 80 percent of what I could about what
was going on,” he said. “Then I’d spend six or seven hours reading intelligence
material, to fill in at least part of the remaining 20 percent.” His message,
echoed by my other predecessors, was that the job wasn’t mainly about the raw
information. It was what you concluded from the information, what you did
with it. It was about judgement.
The intelligence did matter, of course. For all of Israel’s strengths in that
area, I knew from my own experience at Sultan Yacoub that there was still
room to get more, better, and more timely information about our enemies, and
make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. And while the
details of many operations I approved for Sayeret Matkal and other units remain
classified, we did succeed in doing that – to take just one example, by finding
an entirely new way to get intelligence from inside Syrian command posts.
Yet above all, I set out to apply the lessons of the 1973 and 1982 wars. In
rereading the official inquiry reports, I saw that the intelligence failings had
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been different in each of them. In the Yom Kippur War, the problem was not
just Eli Zeira’s failure to activate the sayeret’s listening devices in Eygpt,
deeply damaging though that was. It was judgement. Inside Aman, a kind of
groupthink had taken hold. It was rooted in a confident, costly misconception
which went unchallenged: that Egypt would never risk another war without an
air force capable of breaching our defences and striking towns and cities deep
inside Israel. No one pressed the alternative scenario: that Sadat might strike
with more limited territorial objectives and, under cover of his SAM batteries
on the other side of the Suez Canal, advance into the Sinai.
In the Lebanon war, the inquiry suggested, Yehoshua Saguy did try to warn
the generals, and the government, about major risks. But individual ministers
testified that they hadn’t heard, hadn’t been there, or hadn’t understood, leading
the inquiry to stress the responsibility of a Rosh Aman to ensure not just that his
message was conveyed, but that it was received as well.
I set out to address both problems. Inside the department, I insisted on
making all our preconceptions open to challenge. I set up a unit whose sole
function was to play devil’s advocate when a consensus was reached. It began
with the opposite conclusion and, through a competing analysis of the data, and
logical argument, tried to prove it. I also wanted to be challenged on my
preconceptions. I assigned a bright young major as my personal intelligenceand-analysis
aide. He read everything that crossed my desk and could access
any material in the department. “You have no responsibility to agree with any of
the analysts, or with me,” I said. “Part of your job is to disagree.”
In the Lebanon war, Saguy had faced an additional problem. He was
excluded from some government meetings at which crucial decisions were
made. That was out of his control. I didn’t want it to be out mine. I raised the
issue with Begin in our first meeting. “If you want to get the maximum value
from your head of intelligence,” I said, “you should make sure he’s there not
just after, but when decisions are made.” Yet he was now only months from
leaving office, exhausted by the war and its aftermath. He waved his hand
weakly in response, as if to say none of it mattered. His successor, in October
1983, was Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Ideologically, he was cut from the
same cloth: an advocate from the 1940s of securing a Jewish state in all of
Palestine, by whatever force necessary. He’d broken with Begin’s pre-state
Irgun militia to set up a group called Lehi, which went further and carried out
political assassinations: the 1944 killing of Lord Moyne, Britain’s Minister for
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Middle East Affairs, and four years later the United Nations envoy, Count Folke
Bernadotte.
“Why are you so strident,” Shamir asked me, only half-jokingly, after I’d
insisted on joining a government discussion and pressing several intelligence
matters. “It’s because I’ve read the Lebanon inquiry,” I replied. “I saw what
happened when a message isn’t delivered assertively. I’m not going to be in the
position of making the same mistakes.” He nodded, and didn’t raise it again.
In fact, it was under Shamir that I began to get more involved with political
and policy issues beyond the armed forces. Part of this came with the job of
Rosh Aman. There was hardly a major domestic or foreign challenge that did
not have some security component, and no security matter on which intelligence
was not critical. But I also found myself working more closely with leading
politicians: mainly Shamir and Misha Arens, who as defense minister was my
main point of contact. Since I was a Labor kibbutznik, we made an odd
threesome. Arens was also a lifelong Jabotinsky Zionist. He had been in the
Betar youth movement in America, before going to Palestine in 1948 and
joining the Irgun. In fact, it was with Misha’s personal backing that one of my
former Sayeret Matkal officers – the son of a Jabotinsky acolyte – had recently
taken his first steps into the political limelight. After a two-year stint as Israel’s
number-two diplomat in Washington, Bibi Netanyahu had become our
ambassador to the United Nations.
With both Arens and Shamir, I built a solid relationship, based on mutual
respect, and it would deepen further when I moved on to a wider role in the
kirya a few years later. They were straight talkers. While resolute about
decisions once they’d taken them, they were genuinely open to discussion and
debate. I also sometimes found a surprising degree of nuance behind their tough
exterior.
The toughness was there, however. One of the first major security crises we
faced after Shamir became Prime Minister was known as the Kav 300 affair,
named for the bus route between the southern port city of Ashdod and Tel Aviv.
On the evening of April 12, 1984, four Palestinians from Gaza boarded the bus
and hijacked it back toward the border with Egypt. They told the passengers they
were armed with knives, and that a suitcase which one of them was carrying
contained unexploded anti-tank shells. After a high-speed chase, an Israeli army
unit managed to shoot out the tires and disable the vehicle, when it was still
about ten miles short of Gaza. One of the passengers had been severely injured at
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the start. A number of others managed to escape when the bus was stopped. But
several dozen remained inside.
I was in Europe at the time, on one of my periodic trips to discuss Middle
East issues with a fellow intelligence chief. Yet an aide called me with the news.
I was several thousand miles away from what happening. But I knew there was
every possibility Sayeret Matkal might be called in, and my instincts told me we
should proceed with caution. The situation we were facing felt nothing like
Sabena, much less Entebbe. Here, we had a single bus. Our troops, and in fact
everyone from ministers and officials to reporters and photographers, were in a
loose cordon a couple of dozen yards away. That said to me there was no sense
that the hijackers posed an immediate danger. Nor did they seem to have come
equipped for a major confrontation. In place of the AK-47s and grenades we’d
seen in previous terror attacks, these guys had knives, and, if they were to be
believed, a couple of shells with no obvious way to detonate them.
I phoned a friend in the command post set up near the stranded bus. He told
me that Misha and Moshe Vechetzi were there. There was a standoff with the
terrorists and, for now, it was quiet. The defense minister and the chief-of-staff,
of course, did not need my presence, much less my agreement, to order the
sayeret into action. But I said: why not wait? Though the last flights back to
Israel had already left, I could be at the command post by mid-morning. Beyond
wanting to be present if the sayeret was ordered in, I believed the crisis might
even be brought to an end without another shot being fired. “I’ll tell them what
you said,” my friend replied. “But I doubt it’ll be allowed to drag on much past
daybreak.”
He was right. With my Chinese Farm comrade Yitzhik Mordechai in overall
command, Sayeret Matkal stormed the bus at about seven in the morning. They
shot and killed two of the hijackers immediately, through the vehicle’s windows.
Sadly one of the passengers, a young woman soldier, died in the assault, but the
rest of the hostages were freed, none with serious injuries.
A controversy soon erupted over what came next. The sayeret commandos
had captured the other two terrorists alive and uninjured. Yet barely a week later,
first in an American newspaper and then the Israeli media, reports emerged that
the two surviving Palestinians had been killed after the hijacking was over. A
year later, Yitzhik Mordechai was – wrongly – put on trial for his alleged part in
what had amounted to a summary execution. And, rightly, exonerated. Though
the full details never became public, the people responsible turned out to be from
the Shin Bet, our equivalent of the FBI.
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Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings.
It was not so much a statement of what should or shouldn’t have happened, but a
show of genuine puzzlement. “How can it be,” he asked, “when there is a real
fight, an operation in which our soldiers are shooting, that terrorists come out
alive?” The answer, to me, was simple: Sayeret Matkal. From our earliest days,
there was an understanding that you used whatever force necessary in order to
make an operation successful. Yet once the aim had been achieved – in this case,
eliminating the danger to the passengers – it was over. I am convinced, by the
way, that Misha didn’t actually order the sayeret, or anyone else, to kill all the
terrorists. I’m equally convinced there was a tacit assumption on the ground that
Misha’s view, and Shamir’s as well, was that this would be no bad thing.
* * *
Yet by the summer of 1984, Shamir and Arens appeared in danger of losing
their jobs. Israel’s next election, the first since the Lebanon war, was due in
July. Just as the trauma of the 1973 war had helped Begin end Likud’s three
decades in opposition, the polls and the pundits were now suggesting that
Shimon Peres might bring Labor back to power. There was no prospect he’d
win an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset. No one had ever done that, not
even Ben-Gurion in his political heyday. From 1948, Israel’s political landscape
had been populated by at least a dozen-or-so parties, mostly a reflection of the
various Zionist and religious groups before the state was established. The
dominant party always needed to make deals with some of the smaller ones to
get the required 60-vote parliamentary majority and form a government.
The Likud looked vulnerable. Domestic concerns, alone, were eroding its
support. Under Begin’s turbo-charged version of Milton Freedman economics,
an economic boom had given way to runaway inflation and a stock market
crash. Lebanon, however, was the main issue, and it remained a running
political sore. The assassinated Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin Gemayel, had
become president. But Israel still had large numbers of troops there. And while
most of the PLO fighters had gone, we faced a new and potentially even more
intractable enemy in the south of the country. When our invasion began, the
area’s historically disadvantaged Shi’ite Muslim majority had been the one
group besides the Christians with the prospect of benefiting. The PLO rocket
and artillery bases had disrupted their lives and, worse, placed them in the line
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of our retaliatory fire. Some of the Shi’ite villages in the south even greeted our
invading units with their traditional welcome, showering them with rice. But for
a new Shi’ite militia calling itself Hizbollah – formed after the invasion and
inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran – our continuing
military presence was anathema. In November 1983, Hizbollah signalled its
intentions when a truck bomber drove into a building being used as our military
headquarters in the south Lebanese city of Tyre, killing more than 60 people.
Yet the election ended up as a near-tie. Peres did lead Labor back into top
spot for the first time since Begin’s victory in 1977. But he got only 44 seats, to
the Likud’s 41. After weeks of horse-trading with smaller parties, he could not
form a government. Neither could Shamir. The result, for the first time in
peacetime, was a national-unity coalition, including both main parties. Peres
would be Prime Minister for the first two years, and Shamir the final two. But
the stipulation of most relevance to me was that one man would be the Defence
Minister throughout the four years: Yitzhak Rabin.
My relationship with Rabin went back much further than with Misha. I’d
first met him when I was a sayeret soldier. I’d interacted with him more as
sayeret commander, and of course during Entebbe. Now, we began to work
even more closely, and the main challenge in his early months as Defense
Minister was what to do about our troops in Lebanon. We had gradually been
pulling back. We were more or less on the 40-kilometer line which Sharon had
claimed was the point of the invasion. But even this was costing us lives, with
no obvious benefit from controlling a large slab of territory on which nearly
half-a-million Lebanese lived. A decision was now reached to shrink our
“security zone” further, pulling back to the Litani River. It meandered about 25
kilometers north of the border, and in some areas was even closer to Israel.
I argued strongly in favor of getting out altogether. I accepted that the
“Litani line” might help impede cross-border raids. But especially since the
remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas,
with a range of up to 20 kilometers, they could fire rockets over the security
zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with between
1,000 and 1,500 Israeli troops in open alliance with a local Maronite Christian
militia, called the South Lebanon Army. This would rule out any hope of
working out security arrangements with the non-Christian majority in the south.
I tried to persuade Rabin we should withdraw all the Israeli soldiers and
coordinate security arrangements with the equivalent of a local civil-defense
guard. I suggested four separate militias drawn from the local population –
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Christian, Shi’ite Muslim, Druse and ethnically mixed – with the aim of
reflecting the balance in each part of the south.
Israeli troops might still have to cross into Lebanon, but only for brief,
targeted operations to preempt preparations for a terror attack. “We need to
remember what we’re there for,” I said. “We have no territorial claims. It’s to
protect the north of Israel. But it will end up being about protecting our own
troops inside the security zone. It will be like the Bar-Lev line in 1973, fighting
for fortifications we don’t need.” I couldn’t persuade him. I’m sure he
understood the argument, and he may even have agreed. But when Katyushas
next fell on northern Israel, he as Minister of Defense, not I, would be the one in
the political firing line.
Far from straining our relations, our frank exchanges on Lebanon seemed to
build further trust between us. We worked closely on a range of issues. When
Sayeret Matkal or another intelligence unit planned an operation across our
borders, both of us would present the action to the cabinet. During the
operations, I’d be either in the kirya or a forward command post. Since nearly
all of them happened after nightfall, Yitzhak would usually be back home,
asleep, by the time they ended. I would phone him. The trademark voice – slow,
gravelly, deep even when he was wide awake – would answer. I’d tell him the
mission was over and – with only one exception during my period as head of
intelligence – successful. “Todah,” he would say. “Lehitraot.” Thanks. Bye. He
was never a man to waste words.
For one of the very few times I can remember, he phoned me one morning in
October 1985. It came a couple of days after an especially gruesome Palestinian
terror attack. Even with Arafat now more than a thousand miles away in Tunis,
much of Rabin’s focus was taken up in responding to, or trying to preempt,
Palestinian terrorism. The issue was especially sensitive politically in the wake
of a war in Lebanon that was supposed to have eliminated that threat. For Rabin,
moreover, it had become personal. He’d had to sanction an unprecedented
exchange of 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners earlier in the year to secure the
freedom of three Israeli soldiers, including one of our men from Sultan Yacoub,
who had ended up in the hands of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of
Palestine – General Command. Now a group from another of the radical factions,
the Palestine Liberation Front, had hijacked an Italian cruise ship called the
Achille Lauro en route from Egypt to Israel. They murdered one of the
passengers, a wheelchair-bound, 69-year-old Jewish American named Leon
Klinghoffer, and dumped his body overboard.
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Rabin’s closest aide, whom I knew well, was aware that Unit 8200 had
intercepts that laid bare the details, and left no doubt the murderers were from a
PLO group. He called and asked me to appear on a weekly television interview
program called Moked. It was hosted by Nissim Mishal: brash, incisive, and one
of Israel’s best-known broadcast journalists. I pointed out to the Rabin aide that
I’d never done anything like this before. But he insisted it would go well. He
briefed me on the questions I could expect, not just about the Achille Lauro but
the wider issue of Palestinian attacks, as well as Syrian President Hafez al-
Assad’s efforts to re-equip his air force after his losses in Lebanon. So I came to
the interview prepared. I brought audio tapes of the hijackers, and a large
photograph of the MiG-25s which the Syrians were seeking to acquire.
My appearance will not go down in the annals of great moments in
television. But at the time, very few Israelis even knew who I was, and I felt I’d
done OK. I was surprised, however, when Rabin phoned the next day. “Ehud, I
didn’t see it. I was attending some event,” he said. But his wife, Leah, had
recorded the program. “I just watched it. I should tell you, I think it was
exceptional. You did a great job. It was highly important for us, for the army,
and, I dare say, for you.”
* * *
I was not sure what he meant by saying it might be good for me as well,
although a decade later, at the end of my army career, he would play the central
role into my entry into Israeli politics. It is true that there was also some politics
at the upper reaches of the military as well, especially around the choice of chief
of staff, and that Moshe Vechetzi’s term had only a year-and-a-half to go. But I
didn’t view myself as a serious candidate at this stage. Moshe’s own preference
seemed to be either Amir Drori, the head of the northern command during the
Lebanon War, or Amnon Lipkin, the veteran paratroop commander who’d been
with me on the Rue Verdun raid in Beirut. My own hope was that the nod
would go to any even closer friend of mine: Dan Shomron.
I had first got to know Dan well in the late sixties after Karameh, Israel’s
costly standoff with Arafat, when Fatah’s influence was in its infancy. We
exchanged impressions on what had gone wrong, and why? When I became
commander of Sayeret Matkal, we remained in touch, and he took a close
interest in all of our operations. We also crossed paths in the Sinai in the 1973,
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in which Dan’s division was key in staunching the Egyptian advance in the first
days of the war, later inflicted heavy losses on one of Sadat’s armored forces
and was part of the final push on the other side of the canal. And, of course,
during Entebbe. Dan had sharp tactical instincts, a belief in the importance of
using new technology to gain and sustain an edge, and an openness to
unconventional approaches. Faced with a challenge in planning or executing an
operation, he looked at it from all sides, determined to come up with the right
approach, not always the expected one. In a lot of these ways, we were similar,
which was no doubt one reason our relationship had grown closer as he and I –
six years younger, and a step or two behind – rose up the ranks.
In fact, Dan was the reason I’d made one of my rare forays into kirya politics
not long after Moshe Vechetzi took over as chief of staff, when Misha Arens was
still Defense Minister. I acted to derail what seemed to me a blatant attempt by
Moshe to advance Drori’s and Amnon Lipkin’s prospects for eventual
succession as chief-of-staff, and to take Dan out of the contest altogether.
I was sitting at my desk on the third floor when the chief of internal army
security, an officer named Ben-Dor, walked into my office. “Listen,” he said,
“the chief of staff has a right to give me a direct order in cases where he thinks
there is a need for a special investigation. But you’re my commander, so I
wanted to let you know.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He replied that he had been ordered to “check out rumors that Dan Shomron
is a homosexual.”
I was appalled. The whole thing stank, on every level, and not just because I
was confident the “rumors” were nonsense. “Look,” I said, “I have no idea
whether some sub-clause in army regulations allows the chief-of-staff to give
you orders over my head. But even if it does, I’m ordering you to do nothing
until I talk to Moshe.” He nodded in agreement. In fact, he seemed relieved. He
also let me know that the source of the rumors was a number of senior officers,
including a couple of generals.
I went straight downstairs and into the chief-of-staff’s office. Moshe was at
his desk, smoking a cigarette. One of the advantages he had in being nearly a
foot taller than most of us was that I found myself looking not into his eyes, but
up at them. “Moshe,” I said, “Ben-Dor told me you’ve ordered him to investigate
a rumor that Dan Shomron is a homosexual.” He said nothing. So I went on.
“I’ve told him not to do it. And I’ve come here to convince you that it’s
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improper.” This was more than 30 years ago, at a time when being gay, and
certainly being gay in the armed forces, was a much bigger deal than now. But I
still had no doubt at all that this amounted to a witch-hunt.
Moshe still said nothing. “I have no idea whether Dan is or is not a
homosexual. After knowing him for years, I have no reason at all to believe that
he is. But let’s assume, for a moment, that he is,” I said. He’s not some junior
lieutenant… This is a man who has risked his life for Israel. Repeatedly. Under
fire.” Then, I got to the real issue. “I hesitate to mention this,” I said, realizing,
and in a way hoping, that my tone would sound vaguely threatening. “But if you
order this, the very fact of doing so might be interpreted as being a result of
some other motives on your part. I’m doing my best to convince you to think
again. But I want you to know that if I can’t, I’m going from here to Misha’s
office. I’ll try to convince him of the damage from what you’re contemplating to
the whole fabric of trust in the general staff and the army, to the image of the
army.” Still, he said nothing. He nodded occasionally. He puffed on his
cigarette, put it out, lit another one. It was pretty clear he had no intention of
rescinding his order.
Within 20 minutes, was in the Minister of Defense’s office. I spoke to him for
about 10 minutes. Misha listened. At the end, he said: “I understand what you’ve
told me.” I never discovered what exactly he said to Moshe Vechetzi. But the
investigation never happened. I never spoke a word about any of it to Dan until
years later, after both of us had left the army.
The result, however, was that Dan became deputy chief-of-staff under
Moshe, the latest step in what was beginning to look like a steady rise to the top.
But Misha did make a few concessions to Moshe’s preferred candidates, and that
now turned out to have major implications for me. It was a long-accepted
practice that chiefs-of-staff had more than one deputy during their period in
charge. In the homestretch of Moshe’s tenure, he was able to bring in Amir Drori
for a spell as his number-two. And early in 1986, he also brought Amnon Lipkin
back to the kirya. Amnon was given my job, as Director of Intelligence. But I got
the post which Amnon was leaving: head of the central command area. This
meant that, for the first time, I would be in charge of one of Israel’s three regional
military commands, and we were based on the edge of Jerusalem, with security
responsibility for the West Bank.
This was my first direct exposure to the combustible mix of restive
Palestinians and the growing number of Jewish settlers. Our main brief was to
prevent terror attacks, violence or unrest from the roughly 850,000 West Bank
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Palestinians toward the 50,000 Israelis who were then living in the settlements.
At the time, by far most Palestinians were not involved in any violence. They
were mainly interested in getting on with their lives. Yet there were signs of
trouble. The PLO leaders’ relocation to Tunis had reduced their direct influence.
But the briefings I got from Shin Bet officers made it clear that some young
West Bankers had begun trying to organize attacks against police, soldiers and
Israeli civilians. The settlements were also growing in number, and their
residents were not above acts of violence against Palestinians. Further
complicating the situation was the fact the settlers enjoyed the support of key
Likud members in the cabinet: Shamir, who was about to take his turn as Prime
Minister in October 1986; Misha, now a minister without portfolio; and most of
all Arik Sharon. In an astonishing demonstration of resilience and
determination, not only had Arik remained as a minister without portfolio when
Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin. In the coalition government, he had
become Minister of Trade and Labor. Most importantly, when he’d been
Agriculture Minister under Begin, he was the driving force in plans to expand
Jewish settlement on the West Bank, including “blocs” placed around the major
Palestinian towns and cities for the first time since 1967.
I had a responsibility to protect the settlers, and I did my best to fulfil it. Yet
I believed it was essential they understood that they were subject to the
authority of the state of Israel and, like other Israeli citizens, had to operate
within the law. This was no mere theoretical problem. A Jewish underground
had been established by members of Gush Emunim, the Orthodox Jewish
movement set up in the 1970s to advance what they saw as a divinely mandated
mission to settle the West Bank. It had carried out car-bombings and other
attacks in the early 1980s, leaving two Palestinian mayors crippled for life. The
terror campaign had ended only when the Shin Bet caught the cell placing
explosives under Arab-owned buses in Jerusalem.
Hopeful of preventing misunderstandings, and ideally building a relationship
of trust, I visited many of the settlements during the early weeks in my new post
and spoke with their leaders, a few of whom remain friends to this day. But in
the spring of 1986, we faced our first major test on the ground. In a pre-
Passover event organized by Gush Emunim, some 10,000 settlers streamed into
Hebron, a city sacred not only to Jews but Muslims as well as the burial place of
Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs. Peace Now activists had planned a counterprotest,
but Rabin denied them permission. Still, anti-settlement members of the
Knesset and other Israeli peace activists did get clearance to march from
Jerusalem to Hebron.
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My job was to ensure the security not just of the Gush Emunim march but of
the counter-demonstrators, and, of course, the local Palestinian population. As
the rival marches by the Israelis proceeded, I personally delivered warnings
against any violence, both to the settlement leaders and to a pair of the most
prominent counter-protesters, the peace activist Uri Avneri and Knesset member
Yossi Sarid. The event went off without major incident. But the next day,
Davar, the venerable Labor newspaper I’d first read as a child in Mishmar
Hasharon, let rip against me. Under a photo of me with Avneri and Sarid – my
arm raised, ostensibly in some kind of threat but actually in the time-honored
Jewish practice of talking with my hands – the article accused me of siding with
the settlers. If blood was spilled in the weeks and months ahead, the newspaper
said, “it will be on Barak’s hands.”
Ordinarily, I would have ignored it. But never in my military career had I
been similarly attacked on an issue of any importance. I was especially angry
because not only was the insinuation unfounded. It was diametrically opposite to
the stance I was determined to take in this, my first regional command. Yes, I
was committed to providing security for the settlers. But especially in the wake
of the crimes of the Jewish underground, I was determined to ensure they
remained within the boundaries of the law.
A few days later, I called Rabin’s aide and asked to see the Defense
Minister, and was told to come see him after Saturday lunch at his home. When
I arrived, Rabin got right down to business. “Ehud, you wanted to see me?” he
said. “You’ve probably seen Davar,” I replied. “It was a pretty nasty piece. It
distorted things.” Yet as he began asking for details, it seemed he had no idea
what I was talking about. “Ehud, I never read it,” he said. “If you hadn’t told
me, I’d never have known there was an issue.” I assumed this was a white lie,
told to reassure me. But years later, when I was Minister of Defense, and then
Prime Minister, I sometimes found myself on the other side of such meetings.
An officer or official would come see me because of something said about them
in the media, or remarks they were quoted as having made. When I told them
I’d been unaware of it, I could see the disbelief in their eyes. By then, however,
I realized that under the multiple demands of a senior role in government, you
really could fail to notice events that others viewed as crucial to their
reputations or careers. To reassure them I truly hadn’t noticed, I’d tell them the
story of my meeting with Rabin.
* * *
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There was another, slightly less noble, reason I wanted to set the record
straight with Rabin. Though only gradually did I admit this even to myself, I
realized that my experience in a regional command had ticked the one missing
box in the CV of our top generals, meaning that I might indeed be a candidate to
succeed Moshe Vechetzi as chief of staff. At first, I resisted taking the prospect
too seriously. The job of ramatkal not only carried responsibility for overall
command of the armed forces. Since our country still faced multiple security
threats, the chief of staff was, along with Prime Minister and Defence Minister,
among the most important, influential and visible positions in Israeli public life.
Yet as the April 1987 date for the changeover drew nearer, it was difficult not to
think about it. Not only was I apparently under consideration. To judge from
media reports, and officers’ smalltalk, it appeared that Rabin had whittled down
the possibilities to two. One was Dan Shomron, and I was the other.
Still, it was only when Rabin phoned me early in 1987 that I knew it was
true – and that I would not be getting the top job. “Ehud,” he said, “I wanted
you to know I’ve decided on Dan to be the next ramatkal. I want you to be his
deputy.” I can’t say I was surprised he’d chosen Dan. It wasn’t just that he was
more experienced, or even that, since he was older, missing out on the top job
this time would probably mean missing out for good. Yitzhak had always
valued Dan’s directness and honesty, his courage and record of service. Above
all, I’d long sensed that he felt a special debt to Dan: for Entebbe. At a time
when so much could have gone wrong, it was Dan who had taken a firm,
confident, successful hold on the operation.
Still, I was now 45. For me no less than for Dan, I knew that if I was passed
over as chief of staff, there was no guarantee I’d be chosen the next time. “I
respect your decision,” I told Rabin. “And I have no doubt Dan will be a good –
a very good – chief-of-staff.” But I had to consider my own future. “Even
though I’m grateful for the offer of deputy,” I said. “I think it’s better for me to
leave. To open up a new chapter, and do something else in life.”
Rabin said he couldn’t accept that. “Come see me,” he said. “Now.” When I
got to Jerusalem, I emphasized again that I had no doubt Dan would lead the
armed forces well. But I said my decision to leave the military wasn’t a mere
whim. I had been thinking about my own future and my family’s. We had three
young daughters. A few months earlier, we had moved home again, into a wide,
one-story rambler with a big yard out back. It was in a new town called Kochav
Yair, just inside Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank, and it struck me
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as a good time to settle down in a way that would be impossible if I stayed on in
the upper reaches of the military. Perhaps do something more academic, in a
university or a policy think-tank.
For the first time, politics had some appeal, too, though I didn’t say this to
him. At that point, I had no idea how, or even whether, I might get involved.
But since my appearance on Moked, others seemed to assume it might happen at
some stage. Out of nowhere, a leading political journalist, Hanan Kristal, had
written a story in 1986 purporting to predict the successors to Israel’s political
old guard: Peres and Rabin in Labor, Begin and Shamir in the Likud. It
appeared in the newspaper Hadashot. The paper ran side-by-side photos of the
ostensible future leaders, doctored to look older, who Hanan predicted would go
head-to-head in the election of 1996, a decade away. One was Israel’s
ambassador to the UN and a protégé of Misha Arens: Bibi Netanyahu. The other
was me.
Rabin listened with patience to my obviously settled intention to leave, but
remained firm that I should stay and become Dan’s deputy. In the end, I agreed
I’d think things over and that we’d talk in a week’s time. In the meantime, I
went to see two veteran generals who had found themselves in a similar
situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer
Weizman. I saw Arik on his farm in the Negev. He was obviously enjoying his
extraordinary political rehabilitation since the Lebanon war. His expanding girth
was settled into a sofa in the living room. I filled him in on my conversation
with Rabin. “I’m considering leaving,” I said. “It just seems like a long time to
wait, even if I do get the job after Dan. There’s a lot else I want to do in life.”
Arik was probably the general most experienced in being denied the chief-ofstaff’s
office. On at least two occasions, he might reasonably have been
considered. But in a career littered with tense encounters with his superiors, it
never happened. “You should stay on,” he said. You’re not that old. It’ll
probably be good for you, and the army, to be deputy and then chief.” The only
further advice he gave me was to do all I could formally to commit Yitzhak to
making me Dan’s successor after his term ended.
I visited Ezer at his home in the seaside town of Caesarea. We sat on the
terrace, with Ezer’s gangly frame draped over one of the cane chairs. “Ehud, if
you stay, do you think you have a good chance of being the next ramatkal,” he
asked. I said that while nothing could be certain, I thought there was a good
chance. He replied without hesitation: “Then stay.” He’d come close to the top
job, he told me. On the eve of the Six-Day War, when Rabin had collapsed
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physically from the weeks of tension, Yitzhak had asked him to take over. He’d
said no. But he said he’d always believed he could and should have been chiefof-staff
– and that if he hadn’t left to go into politics, he still might have got the
job. Then, suddenly, he shouted: “Reuma!” When his wife appeared, he said:
“Tell Barak the missing piece in my life, the one I’ve never stopped regretting.”
She smiled, and said: “It’s the fact you did not become ramatkal.”
I saw Rabin a couple of days later. Though I’d pretty much decided to take
the deputy’s job, I was still bothered by the prospect of serving as deputy for the
next four years only to find someone else being named chief-of-staff. I knew
that no matter what assurances Yitzhak gave me, there was no way of being
sure. He did say he viewed me as the natural next-in-line. But I still felt hesitant.
“I want you to consider two things,” I said. The first was a formal decision that
Dan would have only a single deputy during his time as chief-of-staff. He said
yes to that. Yet the second request was going to be even more difficult.
Heartening though it was to hear I was Dan’s “natural successor”, I asked him
to put it in writing. It was not that I doubted his word. But if the surprise result
of the last election was any indication, there was no way of predicting which
party would be in power when Dan’s terms ended. I wanted him to keep a
record of our understanding in his desk and pass it on if someone else was
Defense Minister by that time. Without a moment’s hesitation, he took out a
piece of paper and wrote down exactly what he’d told me about the succession.
He shook my hand as I left. “You’ve made the right decision,” he said.
And I had, even though Dan and I – and Rabin too – would soon face by far
the most difficult challenge in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians since our
capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war.
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Chapter Fourteen
It began with an accident. On Tuesday, December 8, 1987, an Israeli tank
transporter crashed into a minibus carrying Palestinians from the Jabalya
refugee camp near the main crossing from Gaza into Israel. Four passengers
were killed.
By the time of the funerals the next day, a rumor had spread, no less
incendiary for being absurd, that the crash had been deliberate – retaliation for
the fatal stabbing of an Israeli man a few days earlier. Crowds of Palestinians
leaving the burials began shouting “Death to Israel!” They hurled rocks and
bottles at Israeli security patrols, and blocked streets with burning tires. By the
next day, the violence started spreading to the West Bank, and then to parts of
east Jerusalem. The headline-writers moved from the word “disturbances” to
“unrest” and finally to the Palesitnians’ own name for the most serious outbreak
of violence since 1967: the “intifada”. The uprising.
At least for the first week or two, we assumed its ferocity and scale would
subside. Our immediate aim was to contain it, and limit the human cost on both
sides. Yet when Dan and I began visiting units on the front line of this new
conflict, we realized that if it kept escalating, we’d have to find new tools and
strategies to bring it under control. We were in charge of an army trained to
equip and fight enemy soldiers. Now, we were asking teenage recruits to
operate as riot police against stone-throwing mobs. Before long, it wasn’t just
stones, or even bottles. In one incident in Gaza, a young soldier was surrounded
by a crowd of Palestinians and stabbed. He opened fire, wounding two of the
attackers. Yitzhik Mordechai, now the head of the southern command, told
reporters that his troops were under “strict orders to open fire only if their lives
are under threat.” That was true. But I couldn’t help wondering how long the
other part of his statement would hold: that we remained “in control of the
situation.”
We did feel in control for the first few days. Defense Minister Rabin was
away in Washington on an official visit. When his office asked us whether he
should fly back, we said there was no need. But on his return, we quickly agreed
that, as a first priority, we needed to find an alternative to live ammunition in
quelling the attacks. Otherwise, we’d be left with two equally bad options:
either simply stand aside, in order to avoid killing or injuring demonstrators; or
intervene with the inevitable casualties. But one of our most important early
discussions was about the broader aspects of the violence. The meeting, held
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outside the kirya in a facility just north of Tel Aviv, was Rabin’s idea. In
addition to Dan and me, it included key members of the general staff and senior
defense ministry officials. The idea was for us to hear a half-dozen academics
and other specialists speak about the political aspects of the sudden eruption of
Palestinian violence.
Though he spoke for barely 10 minutes, it was the last speaker who left the
deepest impression. Shimon Shamir, a professor at Tel Aviv University, began
by emphasizing he was not an expert in riot control. Finding a response to the
violence was something we were far better equipped to do. But then he paused,
looked intently at Rabin, Dan and me, and said: “What I can do is draw on
history.” One by one, he cited examples of more than a dozen broadly similar
rebellions over the past century, in the Middle East and beyond. “If we were
dealing with simple rioting, things might be different.” But he said the
Palestinians were, fundamentally, acting out of a shared sense of grievance, and
shared national identity. Both were in large part the result of Israel having
controlled their daily lives now for more than two decades. “I’m afraid I can
find no historical precedent for the successful suppression of the national will of
a people,” he said. Even when those in power used unimaginably punitive tools:
like expulsion, or forced starvation. “Even, as we know well as a Jewish people,
extermination.”
I glanced at Yitzhak and at Dan. Both of them looked like I felt: in no doubt
the professor was right, yet also aware that, in the short term, we still had to find
a way of putting a lid on the cauldron and keeping the situation for getting
irretrievably out of control.
It wasn’t as if I’d been unaware of the sense of the anger building among
many West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, or of their wish to see an end to Israel’s
military administration and the growing number of Jewish settlements. From
my time as head of the central command, I also knew that there was a young,
activist core intensifying efforts to organize attacks on troops and settlers. But
none of us had any inkling that something of the scale, longevity and political
complexity of the intfada lay ahead.
Partly, this was a failure of specific intelligence warnings. But it went deeper
than that. Sobering though it was, I had to accept that – no less so than before
the Yom Kippur War in 1973 – I and many others had for too long been
comforting ourselves with a fundamental misconception about our military
occupation and civilian settlement in the areas captured in 1967. The roots of
the myopia went back to the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, to the
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generally civil, and often friendly contacts, Israelis had with Palestinians at the
time. The local population had, after all, been under other occupation powers
before 1967: Jordan in the West Bank, and Egypt in Gaza. Assuming our
administration was less onerous, most Israelis believed a way to coexist could
be found. And that sooner or later, there would be a land-for-peace agreement
and we would withdraw from at least most of the territory. But as the years
passed, with no sign of a willingness by the PLO to consider any kind of peace
talks, we made the cardinal error of assuming the occupation was sustainable.
Yes, there might be periods of violence, but nothing that a combination of
political resolve, arrests, detention and, where necessary, military force could
not hold in check. For us, and certainly for me, the Palestinians became
essentially a security issue. As one of Israel’s finest novelists, David Grossman,
would lay bare in a bestselling book of reportage called The Yellow Wind, about
a year into the intifada, we had ceased to see the human effects of 20 years of
occupation, not only on the Palestinians but on Israeli society as well.
Yet the power of Professor Shamir’s presentation lay not so much in its
novelty as its succinctness, clarity and, above all, its timing. The rioting had
already gone on for longer than any of us had expected. It seemed to be
gathering strength. But until our meeting, we were still looking at it essentially
as a civil disturbance. That was what began to change, for all of us.
What didn’t change was the need to try to bring the violence to an end. Dan
immediately put me in charge of looking for alternatives to live ammunition. I
began with our own research and development engineers. We also asked military
attachés in our embassies to talk to law-enforcement agencies, academics, or
anyone else with knowledge of non-lethal methods of crowd control overseas.
Some of the more far-flung examples seemed promising, at least until further
investigation. South Korea had years of experience in confronting student
protests – generally, though not always, managing to avoid fatalities. But it
turned out this typically involved sending in serried rows of up to 25,000 riot
police against a few thousand campus protesters. Besides the fact we’d have
needed an army the size of the Americans’ to field enough soldiers, it was absurd
to imagine dealing with dozens of far-flung confrontations on any given day with
parade-ground formations of troops.
We looked at anything that seemed it might work. In the early stages, most
of the attacks involved rocks and bottles. Our R&D engineers developed a Jeepmounted
“gravel gun” that fired stones at a distance of up to 250 feet. They
could cause injuries, but weren’t lethal. We acquired launchers for pepper spray
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and tear gas. We even looked at the possibility of dropping nets over crowds of
attackers. Very early on, we shifted to using plastic bullets. But even that
presented problems. At a distance of a hundred feet or so, they could drastically
reduce deaths. But when a young recruit saw hundreds of Palestinians closing in
on him, he wasn’t about to take out a tape measure. Over time, we began relying
wherever possible on rubber bullets and, in extreme cases, snipers to target the
legs of the organizers or ring-leaders.
If all of this sounds soul-destroying, that’s because it was. Especially with
daily television coverage of the clashes amplifying overseas support for the
Palestinians, morale among our soldiers also took a battering. In visits to units
on the West Bank and in Gaza, Dan and I, and Rabin too, heard two opposite
responses. Some of the young soldiers wanted us to use maximum force. We are
the army, they argued. We have the weapons. Why the hell don’t we use them?
But we also heard another view, if less often: why are we here at all?
We imposed closures and curfews. We made thousands of arrests. Still,
hundreds of soldiers and settlers were being injured, a number of them
disfigured or disabled. By the end of 1998, the Palestinian death toll was above
300. In February 1989, an Israeli officer was killed by a cement block tossed
from a rooftop in Nablus. A month later, a Palestinian knifed several people in
Tel Aviv, killing one of them. And in July, in the first attempt inside Israel at a
suicide attack, a Palestinian passenger grabbed the wheel of a bus on its way
from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and drove it off the road, killing 16 people.
* * *
By the summer of 1990, although the violence had begun to flag slightly, I
was feeling more drained and exhausted than at any time since my bout of
illness in the Sinai after the 1973 war. I even briefly thought of leaving the army
after Dan’s term ended the following year. I’m not sure whether I would have
done that if the situation had not begun to change. But it did, dramatically. The
intifada gradually began to subside, and an entirely new crisis suddenly
intervened.
On August 2, against a background of longstanding financial and territorial
disputes, Iraq’s Sadam Hussein sent in tens of thousands of his troops and
occupied the neighboring state of Kuwait. Though the immediate crisis was
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nearly a thousand miles away from us, he tried to divert attention from US-led
international condemnation of his invasion by threatening Israel. He said “all
issues of occupation” were on the table – the West Bank and Gaza, the Golan
Heights, and Lebanon – and vowed to “let our fire eat half of Israel” in a future
war. And we could not assume this was mere rhetoric. Iraq had an arsenal of
Soviet-made ballistic missiles. Called Scuds, they were not always accurate at
long range. But they could reach Israeli towns and cities, and could carry not
just conventional explosives but chemical warheads. Moreover, Saddam had
used chemical weapons: during the Iran-Iraq war, and to kill thousands of his
own restive Kurdish population in the town of Halabja in the spring of 1988.
Even the prospect of American military action seemed not to faze him.
Hours into the invasion, he moved an armored force toward Kuwait’s border
with Saudi Arabia, a key US regional ally, immediately prompting the President
George Bush’s administration to go beyond mere verbal condemnation. With
Saudi agreement, Washington dispatched a squadron of F-15s to the kingdom –
the first step in what would become a huge American land, sea and air force to
face down Saddam and force him out of Kuwait.
Given the credible threat of Scud missile attacks on Israel, Dan immediately
assigned me to coordinate our assessment and evaluation of what Saddam was
likely to do in the event of a US-led attack, and what defense arrangements or
Israeli military response would be necessary. We knew we’d be under strong
pressure from the Americans to stay out of any war. Israeli involvement would
be a political gift to Saddam, allowing him to convert a conflict over his
aggression against an Arab neighbor into a “defense” against “Israeli
occupation.” But we had a primary responsibility to protect our citizens.
I was now working with a new Israeli government. After Shimon Peres tried
and failed to topple the unity coalition in the spring of 1990, Shamir had formed
a Likud-led government shorn of both Peres and Rabin. Misha Arens was again
Minister of Defense. I began preparing regular, fortnightly reports for him, Dan
and Prime Minister Shamir. Within days of the invasion, I produced my initial
assessment. The bottom line was that we had to assume there would be a war. It
was impossible to imagine the Americans would commit hundreds of thousands
of troops and simply bring them home again, unless Saddam succumbed and
retreated. I was equally certain Saddam would use his Scuds against us. He’d
figure the benefits of trying to bring Israel into the conflict far outweighed the
risk of retaliation. But I was “nearly 100 per-cent sure” he wouldn’t use
chemical warheads, since that would almost guarantee an Israeli military
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response, or an American one, on an incomparably greater scale. It would also
totally isolate Saddam internationally and end any chance of peeling off Arab
support for the Americans.
It was my nearly 100-per-cent caveat that prompted a tense debate within the
cabinet. Even if the probability of a chemical attack was microscopic, any risk
of civilians being subjected to terror, panic and very possibly agonizing death
meant that the government had to take precautions. The obvious first step would
be to distribute gas masks. But in a series of meetings with Misha and Dan, I
emphasized this was not a decision that could be taken in isolation. By handing
out gas masks, we might actually raise the probability of a chemical attack. We
also had to make sure as a matter of urgency that we had a workable military
option to attack Iraq’s Scud launchers.
By early November, I was dealing both with plans for distributing the gas
masks and preparations for a possible military operation. So when I got a call
asking me to report to Shamir’s office in Jerusalem, I assumed he wanted to talk
about Iraq. “How are things?” he asked. But when I began by filling him in on
the plans to distribute the gas-masks, he interrupted me. “I called you here,” he
said, “because I wanted you to know that we’ve decided that when Dan leaves
next April, we want you to replace him as chief-of-staff.” Briefly and unusually
tongue-tied, I said: “Thank you, Prime Minister”. The news was made public
the next morning. A few days later, it was ratified by the government. There
was only one vote against, from a former chief of staff who was now Shamir’s
Agriculture Minister: Raful Eitan.
I was one of rare instances in all my years in the army when I took a step
back, appreciating a moment which felt special. It was not only, or even mainly,
a matter of a personal ambition fulfilled. More a sense that I was being given
the opportunity to apply everything I’d experienced and learned in the army,
from the day I first joined Sayeret Matkal as an 18-year-old, to improve the
security and safeguard the future of Israel. I know that sounds corny. But, while
the momentum toward war in Iraq almost immediately crowded out everything
else again, that was truly how I felt.
* * *
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By mid-December 1990, war was virtually certain. Misha and I had been to
Washington in September and agreed with the Americans that, unless we were
attacked by Saddam, we would stay out of it. To do otherwise was clearly not
just against the US-led coalition’s interests. Given the importance of our
alliance with Washington, it was against our inrerests as well. Yet with
hostilities obviously getting closer, Misha phoned Defense Secretary Dick
Cheney a few days later to remind him of the quid pro quo: we would be kept
fully in the loop about the details and timing of the initial American air strikes.
At around five o’clock on the afternoon on January 16, 1991, Misha got a call
from Cheney. He said “h-hour” would be at seven that evening Washington
time. Three a.m. in Israel.
Though we hoped to stay out, I’d now spent months coordinating and
overseeing preparations to ensure we could attack Saddam’s Scuds if necessary.
By far most of the missiles were mounted on mobile launching vehicles, and
Saddam was almost certainly going to be firing them from the vastness of Iraq’s
western desert. That meant an Israeli air strike alone wouldn’t work. We
decided on a joint air and ground operation, built around a newly created airmobile
division and other special units. A force of 500 to 600 soldiers would
take control of key areas and road junctions in western Iraq and start hunting
and destroying, or at least impeding, the Scud launchers.
We also engaged in secret diplomacy in the hopes of reducing one of the
obvious risks in such an attack: a conflict with Jordan, which we’d have to
overfly to reach Iraq. The Mossad had a unit called Tevel, a kind of shadow
foreign ministry for states with which we had no formal relations but with
which, in both side’s interests, we had a channel of backdoor communications.
It was headed by Ephraim Halevy, a London-born Israeli who had come to
Palestine in 1948 as a teenager. He had built up a personal relationship with
King Hussein, and now arranged for us to meet him at a country residence
which the king had in Britain.
A few weeks before the war, I boarded a private jet to London along with
Halevy and Prime Minister Shamir. Shamir had never met the king before and
nor, of course, had I. But we didn’t talk about the forthcoming meeting on the
five-hour flight. Instead, Shamir opened up in a way I’d never seen: about his
childhood as part of a relatively well-off family in Poland; his love of literature,
and of the Bible. In a way, it reminded me of how my father had spoken to me
when I was growing up – minus the “well-off family” part.
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When we got to Hussein’s country home, we were greeted by an
impressively self-assured man in his late 20s who, like Hussein, had studied at
Britain’s military academy in Sandhurst and then gone on to Oxford. It was
Abdullah, the king’s son and later his successor, and he explained that he would
be in charge of handling security for the talks. For a few hours in the afternoon,
we held preliminary discussions, and I presented our assessment of the
challenges and options facing all the different players in the crisis. Then we
retired to a dinner at which – despite the royal china, crystal and silverware –
the atmosphere was also surprisingly informal.
The main meeting came the next morning. Both sides recognized the
seriousness of the issues we had to discuss. Shamir began with the one we
assumed would be the least difficult. Israel was on a heightened state of military
alert, prompted by Iraqi reconnaissance flights over Jordan, and the likelihood
the Iraqis were also hoping to get a look at our main nuclear research and
development facility in the nearby Negev. It was important to ensure this didn’t
lead to an unintended conflict between us and the Jordanians. While the king
was careful to steer clear of any detailed comment on the Iraqi moves, he made
it clear that he understood our concern about stumbling into an Israeli-Jordanian
conflict and agreed that we had to avoid doing so.
Yet the issue of our overflights, if we needed to attack the Scuds, was more
sensitive. We said that if we did have to cross into Jordanian air space, we
would find whatever way the king suggested to make it as unobtrusive as
possible. We raised the possibility of using a narrow air corridor. His response
was not hostile, but it was firm. This was an issue of Jordanian sovereignty, he
told us. He could not, and would not, collaborate in any way with an Israeli
attack on another Arab state. It was Ephraim who tried to find a way around the
apparent stalemate. He suggested Shamir and the king withdraw to speak alone,
ad they met for nearly an hour. When Shamir emerged, clasping the king’s hand
and thanking him for his hospitality, he turned to us and said: “OK. We’re going
home.”
He didn’t tell us exactly what Hussein said. In the few sentences with which
he described the talks on the flight back, he said that, as a sovereign, Hussein
could not order his forces to ignore Israeli planes. But he added: “I assume there
will be no war with Jordan.” I took that to mean there might well be an attempt
to intercept our jets, with the risk that either we or they might end up with one
of our planes shot down, but that the king would use his authority and
experience to ensure this didn’t lead to a wider confrontation.
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* * *
The Israeli public’s concern over a possible Iraqi attack was growing by the
day, in part because of the precautionary measures we’d taken. We had handed
out gas masks to the whole country. Though I’d been concerned that might raise
the prospect of a chemical attack, I still thought a chemical strike was highly
unlikely. The government rightly decided that not distributing the masks would
betray a fundamental responsibility to the safety of our citizens. We’d also
issued instructions about how to equip a room, usually the shelter included in
nearly every Israeli home, as a cheder atum, or “sealed room” to keep gas from
getting in. The Israeli media was full of speculation about the likely effects of a
chemical attack. Many families had begun panic buying of food and other
necessities to prepare for the possibility of days and nights in their sealed
shelters.
In my report for Dan, Misha and Shamir a few weeks before the war, I drew
on systematic analysis by a team of experts in the Israeli air force and made my
most specific estimate yet of the damage conventionally armed Scuds might
cause. We had gone back into historical accounts of the closest equivalent: the
Nazis’ use of V-1 and V-2 rockets against London in the Second World War.
Given Saddam’s primary need to fight Americans, and the likelihood either they
or we would take military action against the launchers, we concluded we’d be
hit by roughly 40 missiles, and that, based on Britain’s wartime experience, up
to 120 Israelis might lose their lives as a result.
The first air-raid sirens wailed in Israel at about 2 a.m. on January 18, 1991,
almost exactly 24 hours after the Americans began their bombing raids over
Baghdad. I was home in Kochav Yair. Like other Israelis, we’d set up a sealed
shelter. Though I felt a bit silly doing it, having assured the government Saddam
was vanishingly unlikely to use chemical warheads, we woke up the kids and
Nava took them inside. I put on my own gas mask. But when I ran out to my
car, I removed my mask and put it on the passenger’s seat before heading in to
the kirya. I wanted to get there quickly enough so that the bor, the underground
command bunker, wouldn’t have to reopened when I arrived. I took a short-cut,
through the West Bank town of Qalqilya. That was, to put it mildly, stupid.
Although the intifada had become steadily less intense during the build-up to
the war, it wasn’t completely over. Within seconds, my black sedan was being
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pelted with stones by a half-dozen Palestinian youths. I thought to myself: this
is nuts. One of Saddam’s Scuds might well be about to hit Israel, and I’ve got
myself stuck in the middle of a West Bank town. To the obvious shock of the
Palestinians, I floored the accelerator and raced toward Tel Aviv. It still took
half-an-hour. Misha and Dan, who lived closer to the kirya, were already in the
bunker.
Ten Scuds hit near Tel Aviv and Haifa that night. It was not until shortly
before dawn that our tracker units got back to us with formal confirmation that
there had been no chemical warheads. The rockets caused a half-dozen injuries,
though thankfully none was serious. Still, the very fact Saddam had proven he
could hit Israel with ballistic missiles provoked widespread alarm. Well into the
next morning, the streets were almost empty. Misha phoned Cheney and
strongly implied we were going to have to attack the Scud sites. I know that was
Misha’s own view, and it only hardened after another four missiles hit the Tel
Aviv area the next morning. Again, no one was killed, but several dozen people
were injured from debris, shards of glass and blast concussion. I visited several
of the areas that had been hit and was shocked by the scale of the damage. One
four-story apartment building had been virtually destroyed, and there was blast
damage to other buildings hundreds of yards away.
The Americans were clearly determined, in both word and deed, to persuade
us not to take military action. They rushed an anti-missile system called Patriot
to Israel. Cheney was also giving us frequent updates on American air strikes
against suspected Scud launch sites. And the Israeli public did seem to grasp the
serious implications for the US-led coalition of our taking unilateral military
action. Opinion polls suggested most Israelis were giving Shamir credit for the
way he was handling the crisis.
Still, it wasn’t easy for Shamir to hold the line. This was the first time since
1948 that enemy munitions had landed on Israeli homes, provoking not just
fear, but a feeling of helplessness. That inevitably led to calls for the army and
the government to do something. I saw his dilemma first-hand at an emergency
cabinet meeting after the first two Scud attacks. For Arik and Raful, the political
effects on the US coalition were irrelevant. The issue, for them, was simple:
Israeli cities had been attacked, and we should respond with any and all force
necessary. Our air force commander, Avihu Ben-Nun, favored going ahead with
the joint and-and-ground attack we’d prepared, and Misha agreed with him. So
did Dan Shomron. The key voices of caution were Foreign Minister David
Levy; Ariye Deri, the leader of the Sephardi Orthodox party Shas; and two
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young Likud politicians, Dan Meridor and Ehud Olmert, with whom I had
become friendly. They, like me, were concerned about undermining the
Americans’ military and diplomatic coalition.
Shamir mostly listened, until very near the end. He then asked Dan Meridor,
Misha and me to join him in a separate room. He asked each of us for our
views. Misha, even more strongly then in front of the full cabinet, argued that
we could not allow night after night of missile attacks without responding.
Meridor reiterated his opposition, stressing the damage we’d risk doing to the
Americans’ war effort by possibly weakening Arab support for their attack on
Saddam. When Shamir turned to me, I said that if the government did decide on
military action, we were ready. From a purely military and security point-ofview,
I said, an attack made absolute sense. Even if we didn’t succeed in
destroying, or even finding, the mobile launch sites, putting a military force on
the ground would almost surely lead to a dramatic reduction in the number of
Scud launches. But, echoing Meridor, I added that a military response would
carry a price in our relationship with the Americans. My view was that, at least
for now, we should hold off.
When we rejoined the meeting, Shamir rapped his hand on the table. In the
startled silence that followed, he said he shared many ministers’ urge to hit back
against the Scuds. But he said: “At this stage, we’re not going to do anything.
We bite our lips and wait.”
Three nights later, his resolve was stretched almost to breaking point.
Missiles landed in the Tel Aviv suburb of Ramat Gan, and nearly 40 homes
were damaged. A three-story house was flattened. In all, nearly 100 people were
injured, and three elderly residents died of heart attacks. On the night of January
25, another seven Scuds hit. Nearly 150 apartments were badly damaged, and a
51-year-old man was killed. The pressure on Shamir was all the greater because
the Ramat Gan attack had come within range of one of the Americans’ Patriot
batteries. The Patriots had been originally designed not as anti-missile weapons,
but to attack aircraft, and they seemed to have been ineffective. Nor were
American air strikes in Iraq stopping the Scuds. Though American jets had
taken out a few fixed launch sites, they were having no luck with finding and
destroying mobile launch vehicles.
Even Shamir now felt that unless the Americans got the mobile launchers,
we would have to attack military action. I was sent to Washington along with
Misha and David Ivri, a former air force commander, to deliver that message to
the Bush administration. From the first days after Saddam’s attack on Kuwait,
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I’d been impressed by President Bush’s political acumen in assembling an
international coalition including the key Arab states. Through Unit 8200 in
military intelligence, we would only very occasionally get verbatim transcripts
of his conversations as he brought first the Saudis and other Gulf states on
board, then Morocco, and eventually even Syria. More often, I’d see the
President’s deft diplomacy second-hand, through intercepts of Arab leaders’
communications with one another. But the picture which emerged was of an
American president deftly able to stake out common ground, and common
interests, with each of the Americans’ growing number of anti-Saddam allies.