Results for “Sayeret Tzanhanim”

…old. I was finishing my studies in math, physics and economics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and had joined my Sayeret Matkal comrades the night before the assault. It was a huge operation: ten battalions, including crack infantry units. Our own role was relatively minor...

…paratus ranging from Unit 8200, our sophisticated signals collection and decryption unit, to the operational units like Sayeret Matkal. It was what was at stake if things went wrong: success or failure in war, and the life or death of thousands of men on the battlefield. It was a...

…fight, an operation in which our soldiers are shooting, that terrorists come out alive?” The answer, to me, was simple: Sayeret Matkal. From our earliest days, there was an understanding that you used whatever force necessary in order to make an operation successful. Yet once the...

…ostly wore sandals and shorts. We called each other by our first names, even the officers. In its first few years, the sayeret sometimes felt less like an army unit than a college fraternity. Every spring, we organized a feast in a cavernous hangar on the edge of our compound. I...

…n a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari, Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we waited our forward deployment, due in September, he included me in his discussions with his senior officers on tactics and planning. This inev...

…ears: Yitzhak Rabin. My relationship with Rabin went back much further than with Misha. I'd first met him when I was a sayeret soldier. I’d interacted with him more as sayeret commander, and of course during Entebbe. Now, we began to work even more closely, and the main challeng...

…. He made every one of us feel a part of making this possible. I was one of ten new recruits, bringing the size of the sayeret to twenty. We were almost all teenagers. In fact, the oldest of our officers was 21. Most of the men were Sephardi Jews. For a unit like ours, with the...

…ghts, we began collecting air marshals. One in particular raised my confidence. I knew Mordechai Rachamim well from the sayeret. He was a Yemeni Jew from Elyakhin, the moshav near Mishmar Hasharon where Baddura and the other Yemeni workers lived. He was tall, strong and athletic,...

Nothing happened for several months. By the early spring of 1973, with my two-year term as sayeret commander winding down, I assumed the operation had been vetoed. I could understand why. As we worked on our plan, it had become clear that getting into the heart of the Lebanese ca...

…e time we installed the communications intercept and covered our tracks, it would be daybreak. Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military engineers had built after the war i...

…omplex organizations” at Stanford, or maybe just the fact our paths had first crossed two decades earlier when I was in Sayeret Matkal. But even though it meant leaving my division command, especially tough since the final Sinai withdrawal was approaching, it was an offer I never...

…orthern command. They had set up a rooftop observation post just a few hundred yards in from where I had landed with my Sayeret Matkal team a decade earlier for the Rue Verdun operation. It overlooked a pair of Palestinian refugee camps: Sabra and, a couple of hundred yards close...

…ah’s influence was in its infancy. We exchanged impressions on what had gone wrong, and why? When I became commander of Sayeret Matkal, we remained in touch, and he took a close interest in all of our operations. We also crossed paths in the Sinai in the 1973, 218 HOUSE_OVERSIGH...

…e going to Palestine in 1948 and joining the Irgun. In fact, it was with Misha’s personal backing that one of my former Sayeret Matkal officers — the son of a Jabotinsky acolyte — had recently taken his first steps into the political limelight. After a two-year stint as Israel’s...

… head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in charge of civil administration for the West Bank and Gaza; my own former sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was head of the central command; and Rabin’s military aide, Kuti Mor. Also included were longtime political and media aide Eita...