Sephardim resented about the Ashkenazi, Labor Zionist establishment. Begin, at

Sephardim resented about the Ashkenazi, Labor Zionist establishment. Begin, at his rally, played it like a virtuoso. “Did you hear what they called you?” he cried. Chachachim. He slightly mispronounced the word, as if he’d never heard, much less used, it before, and that even having to repeat it made his blood curdle. “Is that what you are?” There was pandemonium. Maybe Begin would have won anyway. But it was close, just one Knesset seat between the two major parties. And win, he did. I became increasingly convinced in the weeks that followed that Begin’s second government, with Arik now moved to defense minister, would further put the brakes on any follow-up negotiations for a deal with the Palestinians. I did not yet know that Arik, in particular, had a far more ambitious, military plan to try to bury the possibility of a Palestinian state once and for all. But I did know he had his eyes on a possible thrust across our northern border into Lebanon, where Arafat and the PLO were based. There was no public mention of any of this. But several times in 1981, I was ordered to move a large part of my division onto the Golan Heights for weeks at a time: two brigades, 200 tanks and dozens of APCs in a massive motorcade from the bottom to the top of the country and back again. We dubbed it Cinerama, from the Hebrew words for Sinai and the Heights, Ramah. If there was an escalation of hostilities, the northern command’s regular division would cross into Lebanon. Our role would be to take their place in defending the Golan, and possibly follow them in. When I returned from my final episode of Cinerama in the late summer of 1981, the Sinai withdrawal was entering its final stage. I organized a full-scale military exercise on the roughly one-third of the Egyptian desert we still held, knowing that we’d no longer have the room to do so after the final withdrawal. It was the largest exercise I'd ever commanded. The advances and tactical retreats, the flanking maneuvers and ambushes and fighter jet attacks were like a very big war in a very small place. But a war game was not a real war. The Sinai was not like the Golan, or the cramped, hilly confines of Lebanon. And it was in Lebanon, the following year, that the war came. It was different from any in Israel’s history. Arik was in charge. And I would become involved in ways which began to change the way I saw not only Arik, but the political and military direction of our country. 190 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028038