Middle East Affairs, and four years later the United Nations envoy, Count Folke

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 ’'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 213 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011684