It was getting late, and Dr. Yehuda Melamed was expecting me in Ein Hod, the artists’ village on the other side of the low-slung hills from Kerem Maharal, so I pulled my Prius out of the gravel driveway and drove for twenty minutes as the sun set along the coastal highway. There was still enough natural light for me to maneuver without headlights past a life-sized brass nude of a dancer and through the village entrance into Ein Hod. Somewhere close to the old mosque, now a martini bar modeled after Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, I turned onto Yehuda’s narrow lane.
Parked in front of his house, I admired the view as I stepped out of the car. In 1948 commandos from the Palmach conquered Ein Hod, Hebrew for “spring of splendor.” The Arab inhabitants fled to land half a mile up a hill and founded the town of Ein Jud, a village that only a few years ago received state recognition and gained access to a regular supply of electricity. In Ein Hod the state settled Jewish refugees from Algeria, and in the 1950s a group of Israeli artists moved into the Arab homes and wouldn’t budge.
Yehuda, big-chested behind his I♥NY T-shirt, came bounding down a set of stone stairs, arms stretched wide for a bear hug. These days he is the director of the Institute of Hyperbaric Medicine at Elisha Hospital in Haifa. He’s also a classical music aficionado who’s conducted the Army Symphony in Johann Strauss’s Unter Donner und Blitz. He’s given public lectures on one of my favorite childhood books, Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea; other hobbies of his include gardening, winemaking, and, as I was about to experience, storytelling.
We sat on high-end leather sofas, French doors flung wide open to the outdoors, the scent of cypress pines — planted by the Jewish National Fund — wafting in from the valley below. It was hard to reconcile my memories of Yehuda as a doctor in a wet suit wielding an AK-47 with the man in front of me, sitting in a home that could have graced the pages of Architectural Digest — he might say the same of me if he saw me splashing in the pool with my grandchildren.
On a long mahogany table, obviously handcrafted, he laid out a bottle of his own vineyard’s Cabernet Franc and a bowl of olives harvested from his nearby grove.
There is something almost Homerian about my friend, a man deep into his seventies who runs about like an athlete, roars with laughter, and pounds his fist on his knee to make a point.
I gave him my standard riff about his being a part of my life story and of the story of Israel. In particular, our years fighting together in Lebanon with Flotilla 13 made him the best candidate to help me tell aspects of my life story I might have forgotten. We polished off a bottle of wine as he gave me the backstory that preceded his joining the special forces in the summer of 1974.
Before medical school he had served as an officer in a commando unit in the south and received a citation for an intelligence operation in which he participated. By the time the Yom Kippur War erupted he was just finishing his residency and was sent to serve as a doctor with Ariel Sharon’s unit in the Sinai. Their base took the brunt of Egyptian rocket fire because the Egyptians knew that defeating the IDF hinged on eliminating his unit. It had been a slaughterhouse, and he’d had to treat hundreds of wounded. Rockets rained down day and night. “It was like that scene in Apocalypse Now,” he said, “when the Vietnamese village gets blasted by helicopter gunships to the accompaniment of ‘Ride of the Valkyries.’ It was a miracle anyone survived.”
After the war he returned to civilian life. He did six months at a regular hospital but couldn’t hack it. “I told the head of my department, ‘This isn’t working for me. I don’t want to work in a hospital.’ Convinced I had PTSD, he gave me a long holiday. What did I do? I returned to the Sinai, to the same base where I had served during the war. There in the desert, I had a lot of time to think. I decided to go back to the military as a doctor in an active combat unit. I asked around, and when people told me Flotilla 13 was the most dangerous place to serve, I knew that was what I needed.”
And that was where we met. After the War of Attrition and the Yom Kippur War, it was clear that changes were needed in the structure of the naval commandos. To help carry out these changes, I returned to the unit from my position in Sharm-el-Sheikh. With the fight against the PLO heating up, I quickly realized that we needed a fresh approach to recruitment, training, equipment, and armament. Though war had nearly bankrupted the country, funds were made available because the stakes were high.
The reason for our sense of urgency was Yasser Arafat, the guerrilla leader with a thick black mustache and checkered keffiyeh. Arafat and his Fatah faction within the PLO were putting a new wrinkle on what had until that point been a traditional conflict among states. His band of terrorists took advantage of the failing state of Lebanon to turn UN-administered refugee camps into an armed fiefdom. Arafat’s men, calling themselves freedom fighters, smuggled weapons into refugee camps from wherever they could get them, often by sea from Cyprus. Arafat’s Fatah, along with competing terror groups, began to carry out attacks on Israel by sea.
Arafat’s stated agenda, modeled on Algeria’s successful campaign to drive the French from their country, was straightforward: “The Palestinian revolution’s basic concern is the uprooting of the Zionist entity from our land and liberating it.”
A month after the cease-fire agreement with Egypt, PLO terrorists hijacked TWA and Pan Am airliners. Not long after that, PLO operatives in Gaza murdered two Israeli children with a grenade. An even more gruesome bloodbath took place when a rival ring of terrorists, from the Marxist-Leninist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), slipped across the border on the road to Moshav Avivim near our frontier with Lebanon and fired bazooka shells at a school bus, killing twelve, including eight children.
One of our missions was to disrupt the smuggling routes to Arafat’s bases. Another job was to sabotage weapons depots inside the camps. Unlike in classic warfare, where armies fight on battlefields, our enemies were nestled in densely populated areas. We were fighting people without uniforms among a population where we couldn’t easily distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. A man could be a pharmacist in the daytime and at night turn into a terrorist holed up in the basement of a UN-run school. Since fleets of aircraft and tank divisions were crude instruments for this sort of fight, top military brass began to see the commando groups as their go-to guys for cloak-and-dagger pinpoint actions. Paratroopers dropped by helicopter fought in the mountainous region of Lebanon. Flotilla 13, on moonless nights, operated against the terrorist bases along the coast.
In the old world of war, you fought knowing full well you might die, and that was the price the individual soldier risked paying for a decisive victory. But in Lebanon there were no surrenders, no decisive military actions, no final victory. After one operation there’d be another, and another, and another. Our mission wasn’t to eliminate all the threats, because the potential supply of enemy fighters was inexhaustible. The idea was to prevent terrorist attacks against Israeli civilians by hitting a target and disappearing before everyone else in the refugee camp began firing at us.
In building my team, I didn’t want Son-of-Sam psychotics itching to mow everyone down. I wanted hard-charging yet sensible men able to exercise restraint — to know who to kill and who to spare — as they emerged from the sea, faces smeared with camouflage paint, and stormed into the terrorists’ backyards, up their stairs, and into their bathrooms if need be. It was just as King Solomon said, “By ruses — tachboulot — shall thou wage war” (Proverbs 24:6).
When Yehuda turned up and asked to join, medical bag in one hand and AK-47 in the other, he was exactly the kind of guy I was looking for.
We went on numerous operations together. The most dangerous missions had us swimming through churning seas and, once ashore, unpacking grenades, Berettas with silencers, and submachine guns with phosphorus bullets from bags. We’d then race to our target.
One time, following intelligence from the Mossad and the Shin Bet, we hit a guerrilla base and killed fifteen terrorists just hours before they planned to slip across the border and kill our civilians.
“You remember the boy?” Yehuda asked, suddenly changing the subject.
“Which boy?”
“That kid at the Al Rashidiya camp. Don’t you remember? After the operation, right before we swam back to the Zodiacs, you asked me if you’d done the right thing.”
He was referring to an incident from 1975 that I hadn’t thought about in years. Orders came to sabotage a building used by a PLO commander in the Al Rashidiya refugee camp south of Tyre, a city founded during the Iron Age that had become home to nearly twenty thousand Palestinian refugees and a militant hotbed.
Missile ships took us as far as Lebanese territorial waters. From there we sailed in rubber boats until we were close enough to swim the rest of the way. We arrived on land late at night. Yehuda joined the larger of the two groups — more men meant more potentially wounded men for him to patch up later. I hurried with my fighters down rutted paths, past concrete shanties, broken-down cars, and closed shops. We set explosive charges outside the building that, according to intelligence, was the terrorist headquarters and raced back toward the beach to take cover before the blast.
The detonation woke up the entire camp. Loud voices rang out of the surrounding buildings, and no doubt guerrillas, machine guns ablaze, were heading in our direction.
It was then that I heard what sounded like a young boy howling. Maybe the blast had blown him out a window. Spotting him on the ground ahead of us paralyzed me. By stopping, I endangered all of us, but I couldn’t let the boy bleed to death.
The sounds of gunfire seemed to get closer and closer, as if half the armed men in the camp were up on their feet. In the inky-black night, none of us made a sound. I ordered one of the fighters who trained paramedics to work on the boy, and fast. With voices approaching, we had to get the hell out of there.
When we got back to the beach, we found Yehuda’s group waiting for us.
“We had begun fearing you’d been ambushed,” Yehuda recalled as we sat on his comfortable leather sofas. “Then, just before jumping into the water, you grabbed me by the shoulder like this…”
Yehuda reached over the table and squeezed my shoulders with his big hands. “It was so dark,” he continued, “I couldn’t see your face, but I heard the emotion in your voice. I remember it so well because it was the only time I ever heard you talk that way. You told me how you ordered your paramedic to treat the boy, and you wanted to know if you’d done the right thing to take the risk. Those extra minutes put everyone’s life in danger.”
“Do you remember what you said?” I asked him.
“I think I just gave you a hug.”
I held up my empty glass for a refill and gestured for him to continue with his storytelling.
“Do you remember the briefing we had with Eitan before the operation in Tyre?” Yehuda asked. “The time you told him to screw himself. I still think about it all the time.”
Chief of staff General Rafael “Raful” Eitan was a farmer, carpenter, veteran of the Palmach, and ferocious fighter, with a mind bursting like a hand grenade with operational ideas. He was also a hardened bigot. Once, on a missile boat before an operation in a refugee camp, someone asked him how we were supposed to identify the target. Raful, with a smirk, answered, “If they aren’t holding birthday party balloons, they’re terrorists.” Fire away!
During the briefing just before the 1980 operation in Tyre, Raful ordered us to eliminate one of Arafat’s senior operational commanders. Two years earlier this commander had dispatched a group of terrorists in a Zodiac dinghy to kill Israeli civilians, including children. We had every right to go after him because he was continuing to send terrorists across the Israeli frontier.
Our intelligence for the operation was superb: We knew exactly what he looked like and where he sat each evening in the same café on the dock in the harbor. The plan, slated for August 5, was for us to take dinghies to within half a mile of the beach and use binoculars to make a positive ID. From there we would swim to shore, climb onto the breakwater, and two snipers would take him out.
Raful added a twist to the plan. After ensuring we’d hit the target, he wanted us to mow down everyone else in the café with guns and MAGs and set explosive charges on the breakwater.
“Sir,” I told him, “that’s not happening.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? It’s an order.”
“Sir, this operation is about killing a terrorist, not families in a café or kids running around on the breakwater.” Unlike the terrorists we hunted down, the hit squads I’d led carried out our tasks without transgressing my personal moral strictures, such as they were in those days. My model was the Japanese Samurai, a noble fighter with an internal code of conduct. My Hebrew Samurais did our killing in a targeted, precise, and intelligent manner.
Rolling his eyes, the general doubled down. We had to “secure the retreat.”
“Sir, if we open up with massive fire, everyone in the entire region will know we are there.” It was much better to take out the man with a few bullets from a sniper rifle fitted with a silencer.
Raful continued to insist on an indiscriminate slaughter, and the argument, before dozens of our fighters, turned heated. My jaw agape, I stared at him, with his receding hairline and cheeks red from too much sun. The mocking tone of his words, as if we were exterminators talking about vermin, made his order all the more impossible to carry out. He honestly saw no difference between surgically taking out a terrorist and committing a bloodbath against civilians.
“Sir, if you want everyone dead, you don’t need us. Dispatch the air force. They’ll drop a one-ton bomb on the pier and it’ll all be over.”
Alert to the low value he placed on Arab lives, I laid out my counterarguments with care. It was more effective, I said, to target only the PLO commander, and no one else. Two shots by a sniper, fired from the breakwater at night, would be nearly impossible to trace. A clean operation will produce fear, and our enemies will think we are all-knowing, all-powerful. If you raise your hand against us, someone’s going to find you and make you pay.
In the end we carried out the mission my way, and we put the man temporarily out of action — he was wounded, not killed.
I left Yehuda’s at around midnight, and over the next couple of days working the fields with Biba, I thought a lot about that debate with Raful. Yehuda made it sound as if I were a great humanist staring down a cold-blooded killer, but I knew better. In one essential matter, I was no different from Raful in those days. Both of us were convinced we stood on the side of justice, that our fight was noble, and that our enemies deserved our bullets because they stood in the way of our rightful control over the Land of Israel. It took an experience far from the battlefield to shake me from this belief.