sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy

/ BARAK / 43 sayeret deputy, my chief of staff. The negotiating team also included Uri Saguy, former head of military intelligence; Gilad Sher, a gifted lawyer I'd known for a quarter of a century and who had been a company commander in my armored brigade in the 1970s; and Amnon Lipkin, the paratroop commander at Chinese Farm and my successor as ramatkal when I left the army. Also, Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Moroccan-born, Oxford-educated historian and diplomat who had run against me for the Labor leadership. Shlomo had a gift for systematic analysis and keen judgement, especially on security issues, which I highly valued. It did not escape the attention of Israeli commentators, or other politicians, that almost all of them were former soldiers whom I’d known from my time in uniform. But that observation missed a more important point: we were all members of the “generation of 1967 and 1973.” We had been soldiers during the Six-Day War. In the years immediately after it, like almost all Israelis, we had allowed ourselves to believe that our victory had been so comprehensive, and so quick, that any threat from the defeated Arab states was gone for good. We assumed that inevitably, inexorably, they would realize they needed to sue for peace, and that there was no particular urgency on our part to do anything more than wait. Then, on Yom Kippur 1973, all of that had been turned on its head. We had not only learned the lessons, of 1973. We had internalized them. Even had we not known of the danger of a new Palestinian campaign of terror, the option of simply watching and waiting — and assuming that our military strength, which was now even greater, could make events around us stand still — would not have made sense to us. Besides, as I remarked to Danny and others, to do so would run against the founding purpose of Zionism: to establish a state where Jews would no longer be victims of events, but would take control of their destiny and try to shape them. Yet making peace, like making war, takes two. Much as I’d wanted to begin with Syria, until well into the autumn of 1999 President Assad was holding firm on his insistence that without our “deposit,” without a prior agreement that he’d get back the Golan, there could be no substantive progress. This was particularly frustrating because I was getting reports from our intelligence services, and 329 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028177