We were married there, in the spring of 1969. My parents and brothers came

We were married there, in the spring of 1969. My parents and brothers came with two busloads of friends from the kibbutz. Avraham Arnan was there, of course. But Ahraleh Yariv and Eli Zeira, two of the military intelligence heroes of the Six-Day War, also drove up for the wedding, which touched both Nava and me, not to mention her family and our guests. Years later, as I rose higher in the ranks of the military, I would sometimes be invited to weddings by officers under my command. Remembering how much we appreciated Ahraleh’s and Eli Zeira’s gesture. I always said yes. It was only weeks after our wedding that I formally returned to Sayeret Matkal. Both Nava and I were aware of the additional pressures my military commitments might place on our family life. But she understood why I’d chosen to go back, and was supportive. As for me, I was, if anything, more certain that I’d made the right decision. Israel was clearly facing a whole new set of challenges to its security. Given the decisiveness, and speed, of our victory in 1967, there seemed no immediate danger of Egypt’s risking another full-scale war. In Israel, where Golda Meir had become Prime Minister after Eshkol’s death from a heart attack, there was also little appetite for returning to the battlefield. Yet the post-war skirmishes with the Egyptians along the Suez Canal had escalated into far more than that: what would become known as the War of Attrition. Nor could there be any doubt, after Karameh, that Fatah’s influence, militancy and determination would only grow, not least because even more radical factions within the PLO were ready to step into the breach if Arafat faltered. Israel needed to find an answer for all these threats. Uzi Yairi’s term as Sayeret Matkal commander had by now ended, but his successor was someone I knew well. Menachem Digli was the officer on whom I’d bestowed my stolen Syrian Mercedes at the end of the war. His leg was now recovered from the motorcycle accident, and I returned to the sayeret at his deputy. He delegated full responsibility to me for operational issues. I believed that the new kind of challenges we were confronting, particularly the prospect of intensified attacks from the new generation of Palestinian fedaveen, meant that the sayeret would sooner or later have to broaden its reach, moving beyond the kind of intelligence operations we’d done before the 1967 war to become the SAS-like special forces unit Avraham ultimately envisaged. But that was not 104 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027952