outside the kirya in a facility just north of Tel Aviv, was Rabin’s idea. In

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 ’'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 227 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028075