Chapter Fifteen On the morning of April 1, 1991. I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from his desk in the kiryva to j...
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A few weeks later, my term as commander ended. The handover to my successor, Giora Zorea, turned out to be more elaborate than my arrival, though not at my instigation. With both Talik and Avraham in attendance, Dado presented me with my fifth tza/ash. It was not for Beirut. Not...
July 1, now less than 36 hours away. Having moved the passengers off the plane to one of the terminal buildings, they were threatening to start killing them unless we freed a list of 53 Palestinians and PLO supporters, forty of them held in Israel and the rest in a number of Euro...
each, they’d put the name of the military unit to be called up in an emergency. We'd been allocated Lod Airport, because our base was just 15 minutes away. Still, as I accompanied the engineer back to the control tower, I tried to work out in my mind whether we could plan, prepar...
Chapter Four At first, it 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 u...
entire airport. Though I didn’t say so, I had my doubts it would work. It was a bit like the initial option for the Rue Verdun raid Dado had rejected: a classic ground assault which, in addition to eliminating any chance of surprise, obviously ran the risk of igniting a small gro...
operation. Both times, it was an operation that we, the ones who have to do it, knew could succeed. An operation on which the fate of three Israeli pilots depends. One of whom we know personally, and have worked with. Now, again, with no real reason, you’ve stopped us. I see this...
was always the principle of targeted force, the idea that we would take out targets, or defeat enemies, out of military necessity. But even on the first day of the war, it was clear that it would be by far the most consequential conflict in our country’s history. There was no mis...
/ BARAK /5 attempt to help put us on the political offensive, after I was asked to record on of Labor’s TV campaign messages. I knew what I wanted to say. I’d talked it over with the small group of campaign experts Peres had asked me to assemble alongside Ramon’s main team. Rath...
the post of Head of Military Intelligence. He knew the importance of intelligence, and the potential cost of Israel being taken by surprise in a future war, having been part of the top military leadership during Rotem. He was energetic, bright, and exuded an infectious sense of s...
Chapter Nine The phone rang in our apartment in Palo Alto at 4:30 in the morning. We had been in the US for barely six weeks. It was the Sixth of October 1973: Yom Kippur, the holiest date on the Jewish calendar. I was still a bit groggy from the night before. We had been out at...
Iraq, perhaps Iran and other Middle Eastern states, might get nuclear weapons. A violent form of fundamentalist Islam could, over time, erode existing Arab and Muslim states, threatening Israel of course, but also the stability of our neighbourhood and of the world. In those circ...
illness was. But for nearly six months, getting through the day, sometimes a single task, remained a struggle. I did not want to leave my command. I was still barely 18 months into the role, and anxious to get further command experience. But just as I was feeling at my weakest,...
anything but under control. Within days, he bowed to political pressure and brought back Moshe Dayan, now a member of the Knesset, as Defense Minister. I still vividly remember a visitor to the sayeret the day after Eshkol’s address. Colonel Eli Zeira was head of the “collection...
sometime were. It called for mental application, an ability to assess risks, to find answers under enormous pressure when, inevitably, things went wrong. It required not just brawn, but brains. A week before I began my final year at Hebrew University, I went to see Eli Zeira, th...