Results for “Sayveret Matkal”

Night Flight They say that you can read a person’s feelings on his face. But if so, either I’m a very good actor – the opposite of what anyone who has worked closely with me would tell you – or the journalists clustered in front of me weren’t very good face-readers. They said th...

I was one of the founding core of a unit called Sayveret Matkal

…t in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even shaving yet, I was one of the founding core of a unit called Sayveret Matkal, Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force, or Britain’s SAS. It may be that the way I thought and acted, the way I dealt with danger or with...

But there were times of crisis, and high tension, as well. Only five months after the election, Rabin and I faced one of the most painful periods during my entire time as chief of staff. It began with the gruesome death of five Sayeret Matkal soldiers during a training exercise i...

The day before the end of basic training, I was told to return to Maka Esser. A Jeep was waiting. A soldier was at the wheel. He mumbled hello and drove me to a sprawling military base about 15 minutes away, not too far from the international airport in Lod. It was built by the B...

to adapt on the ground. And obviously pleased that we’d found a way to make the operation work. The Sinai mission marked a transition not just for me, but for others in Sayeret Matkal as well. Avraham Aranan finally left the unit he’d imagined, created and built. He became the h...

I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever truly understanding my mission at Camp David....

The day before the end of basic training, I was told to return to Maka Esser. A Jeep was waiting. A soldier was at the wheel. He mumbled hello and drove me to a sprawling military base about 15 minutes away, not too far from the international airport in Lod. It was built by the B...

to-air missiles to the bank of the Suez Canal after the truce in the War of Attrition, the Egyptians had created an effective no-fly zone a dozen miles into the Sinai. After the failed counter-attack, with the commander of the air force warning that we were nearing our minimum “r...

But there were times of crisis, and high tension, as well. Only five months after the election, Rabin and I faced one of the most painful periods during my entire time as chief of staff. It began with the gruesome death of five Sayeret Matkal soldiers during a training exercise i...

I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever truly understanding my mission at Camp David....

Lod. Two days later, Israeli television received a videotape showing the 19- year-old, hands and feet bound, pleading for his life in return for the release of the founder of Hamas, whom we had arrested and jailed in 1989. “The group from Hamas kidnapped me,” he said. “They are d...

One of the captured Golani soldiers was a 19-year-old named Uri Ilan, the son of a member of the Israeli Knesset whom Ben-Gurion and the whole of the government knew well. The soldiers’ captivity dragged on until they were finally returned to Israel in March 1956. By then, howeve...

Jordan River from the West Bank, from which a fledgling group called Fatah, under the command of Arafat, had been staging a series of raids. In one of their most recent attacks, they’d planted land mines, one of which destroyed an Israeli schoolbus, killing the driver and one of...

Sayeret Matkal stormed the bus at about seven in the morning. They