Where Begin appears
36 total
…along with Dan, I threw my energy into planning and implementing the terms of the treaty. But especially with Begin soon facing a reelection campaign against Labor, now led by Shimon Peres, he was keen to play to the opponents of any furthe...
…he best choice for the intelligence post. I was determined to remain in the field, especially with signs that Begin, and certainly his more right-wing supports in the Likud, were already having second thoughts about the peace deal we’d stru...
ly learning English and ending up with a perfectly American accent which has never left her. Yael has less vivid memories of our time there. But we’d had the nearest thing to a normal family life since our first, war-truncated, time at Stan...
…ptians had been trying to thrash out a formal deal. Sadat was being denounced as a traitor in the Arab world. Begin was seen by most in the outside world, and many Israelis, as dragging his feet on the negotiations and risking the chance fo...
ey were investigating the effect of human bias and other subjective factors on how we perceive reality, and thus make decisions. Tversky’s work especially fascinated me, because it questioned a basic assumption in the kind of predictive for...
I said the obvious: if that’s what was necessary for peace, there was no other choice. We were now well into our final year at Stanford. Our home was in a leafy “student village” off campus, called Escondito, for married students from abroa...
… came almost exactly 10 months later, in September 1978. American President Jimmy Carter hosted a summit with Begin and Sadat at Camp David, in search of a “framework agreement” for final negotiations on 184 a peace treaty. Again, I was wat...
…“rights of the Palestinian people to self-determination, including their right to establish their own state.” Begin’s reply was more sensitive than I’d expected from a leader who, through my Labor kibbutnzik eyes, I’d always seen as an extr...
…to Jerusalem, the capital of a country which neither Egypt nor any other Arab country even recognized. He met Begin, and he addressed the Knesset with a call for peace. It is impossible to convey to Israelis who did not live through the bir...
ticed eight centuries earlier, in the time of Genghis Khan. I listened for nearly an hour, enjoying his enthusiasm, the history lesson, and the simple weirdness of it all. I did check his facts afterwards. If nothing else, he proved an assi...
etails. Though still just a colonel, I’d risen through Sayeret Matkal. I knew the planning process from the other side as well, having attended the same sort of meetings, from the early 1960s, to present our operations. So I was often asked...
…s with my family. The timing had nothing to do with the election. Like most other Labor Israelis, and many of Begin’s own supporters, I hadn’t expected the Likud to win. It was because I felt I’d reached a natural punctuation mark in my mil...
…ong Israel’s disadvantaged Sephardi majority, with their roots in the Arab world and especially north Africa. Begin not only sensed this. While he’d never lost the formal bearing – or the accent – from his childhood in Poland, his long year...
…not be in the hands of David Ben-Gurion or his Labor Zionist heirs. Our next prime minister would be Menachem Begin, who had inherited the mantle of Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Zionism. He’d headed its youth wing, Betar, in eastern Europe, and...
…al decisions were made. That was out of his control. I didn’t want it to be out mine. I raised the issue with Begin in our first meeting. “If you want to get the maximum value from your head of intelligence,” I said, “you should make sure h...
…al decisions were made. That was out of his control. I didn’t want it to be out mine. I raised the issue with Begin in our first meeting.
