Results for “Ben-Gurion”

… I went met Peres around 8:30am. Shimon had no first-hand military experience, having played a political role alongside Ben-Gurion from Israel’s early years. So he was not really interested in the details. But he was keen to hear our assurances that a military option did exist. H...

… was only “approval in principle”. It’s impossible to overstate the trepidation with which Israel’s military brass, and Ben-Gurion himself, approached the decision finally to send Sayeret Matkal into action. It was not just the fact that we were a unit uttterly untested in the fi...

… Tiberias. Her parents were from old Sephardi families, with a centuries-long history in Palestine, and were also solid Ben-Gurion Labor supporters. Her father had fought in the British army in the Second World War. He now ran the branch of Bank Leumi in Tiberias. Her mother ran...

…f staff, I have seen, close-up, what it takes to be a Prime Minister. It is not a game. We’ve had good Prime Ministers: Ben-Gurion, Peres, Rabin, Begin... Bibi, we know each other well, from the days when you were an officer under my command. A young officer, and a good one. Prim...

This interlude instantly conferred on us the desert equivalent of street cred. The next morning, Talik agreed we could accompany the Seventh Brigade as it moved deeper into the Sinai, and peel off when we got closer to Gebel Libni to complete our “sayeret mission.” Given the earl...

political (and often personal) price — to help us achieve a breakthrough with the Palestinians, though the effort did not succeed. Nor did we succeed (Rabin and Peres, myself, Olmert and Bibi as well). They shouldn't be ridiculed and debased for this. They should be appreciated....

This interlude instantly conferred on us the desert equivalent of street cred. The next morning, Talik agreed we could accompany the Seventh Brigade as it moved deeper into the Sinai, and peel off when we got closer to Gebel Libni to complete our “sayeret mission.” Given the earl...

… a revolution.” For the first time since the state was declared, Israel’s government would 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 h...

…osed to the summit got more votes than we did: 54 to 52. There were several consolations as I prepared to fly out from Ben-Gurion airport. Shas leader Eli Yishai passed me an envelope on the tarmac. Inside was a note from Rabbi Ovadia Yossef, the Shas spiritual leader whom I’d m...

…th, developing it and modernizng it, are obviously critically important. But as Israel’s founding Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, used to say, the success of Zionism, and of the Israeli state, required two things: strength and “righteousness.” He didn’t mean the word in purely...

…oth the political right and the left, wanted a Jewish state in all of Palestine, with Jerusalem as its centerpiece. But Ben-Gurion and the pragmatic mainstream argued that UN endorsement of a Jewish state — no matter what its borders, even with a new Palestinian Arab state alongs...

…he summit. If we cou/d find common ground, he said, Israel would have achieved what had eluded it under Rabin, and even Ben-Gurion: “end of conflict, and Jerusalem recognized internationally as your capital.” I told him that the discussion with my negotiators had been moving and...

a sort of "autonomy" for the Palestinians — is an illusion at best, and the first step of an upcoming blame game at worst. It will be brutally rejected by our closest friends — not to mention by each of the potential partners for the regional agreement — and by all of them togeth...

… life in our country’s politics, and in Labor, stretching back to before the state, when he’d been a favored protégé of Ben-Gurion. Walking away was going to be hard. I was 295 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011766

Tension began building in the north in the spring of 1967, initially set off by Syrian efforts to divert water from the upper reaches of the Jordan River, an important water source for Israel was well. In a series of exchanges, Syrian troops on the Golan fired on Israeli tractors...