/ 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...
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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...
tension around us and the sense that something momentous was about to happen as the prospect of a state got closer. The memories remain with me to this day, like a series of snapshots. It was on a spring morning in 1947 that I got my first real sense that the Jewish state was so...
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...
/ BARAK /9 seemed to defeat the purpose of going into politics in the first place. Still, I had no appetite for rushing into a challenge to Peres’s leadership, both because it was bound to be difficult for both of us, and frankly because it seemed rash, premature and maybe even...
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...
Chapter Five Almost no one in Israel knew what we had done. But the next morning, a package arrived at the Sayeret Matkal base from one of the few people who did. We opened it in Avraham’s office. It was a nearly full carton of champagne: real, French champagne, since it would b...
commando unit of a couple of dozen men. Its sole task was to seek out and kill the enemy force’s leader. The key to their success was mind-training. Over a period of months, sometimes years, the commandos’ se/f-perception was altered. They were taught to believe that they had alr...
productive workers, they got no share of what we produced or possessed. A few years later, I raised this at one of the separate aseifa meetings held by young people on the kibbutz, only to be told we’d never wanted to employ outsiders in the first place. It was only because of Be...
eyes over all the boys in their late teens and early 20s. I was sure that after something like this there had to be some sign of who had done it. But they looked the same as before, eating and talking as if nothing had happened. The Yemenis also needed jobs. This led to a challe...
Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings. It was not so much a statement of what should or shouldn’t have happened, but a show of genuine puzzlement. “How can it be,” he asked, “when there is a real fight, an operation in which our soldiers are sh...
/ BARAK / 113 ill-fated Israeli war in Lebanon since 1982, was the reason I ultimately found myself back in the Israeli government. It began on July 12, 2006, when Hizbollah fired rockets from southern Lebanon as cover for an ambush of two Israeli Humvees on our side of the bor...
A decade later, the idea would suddenly resurface. In my first meeting, as a newly promoted Major General, with our then Defence Minister Ariel Sharon, Sharon turned to me and the army’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, and said: “Tell me. Why the hell is Arafat still alive?” He loo...