In 1981, I finished my term as commander of Flotilla 13 after more than two and a half years and returned to the navy, which soon sent me, along with Biba and the kids, to the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. It was the first time in years Biba didn’t have to raise our two sons Nir and Guy more or less alone while working full-time as a social worker in Haifa while at the same time I was getting my Master’s at the University of Haifa, and it was a fine career move for me. We got a house close to the base and settled into American life.
Courses at the war college opened up for me a new world of strategy and geopolitics. Ronald Reagan was in the White House, and the Soviet Union, what Reagan dubbed “the Evil Empire,” was mired in Afghanistan. The Berlin Wall still stood, a literal reminder of the figurative Iron Curtain separating communist countries from the free world, and the threat of nuclear war was palpable.
A seminar on submarine warfare taught me just how important it is to have the right sensors to detect threats. A submarine lurking just below the surface of a calm stretch of water could pack enough explosive power to destroy Manhattan a dozen times over. I saw subs as nuclear-tipped versions of sea commandos: silent, stealthy, and deadly. And you can’t do anything to stop them if you don’t see them coming,
The course I remember best was on military strategy, including the institutions tasked with monitoring the ethics of warfare, such as the World Court, the Geneva Convention, and the International Red Cross. Until this point, I’d taken my “ethics of warfare” from classic stories about gallant warriors — the Maccabees and the Samurai masters — not from training in international law. My refusal to intentionally target civilians had been grounded in my education on the kibbutz and a personal moral compass, not theories on human rights.
My classmates included senior naval officers from Muslim, and mostly enemy, states. I met an Egyptian submarine commander, a commander of Sudanese patrol boats, and a Jordanian naval officer who later became commander of the Jordanian navy.
One day a Pakistani colonel came to me and, without preamble, issued a warning: “Don’t permit the Israeli–Palestinian conflict to become a contest between Judaism and Islam.” His voice was a low rumble, the way a torpedo sounds just before it strikes. “Don’t lift the lid off that Pandora’s box. We can live with Israel, and your fight with the Palestinians is of no interest to Pakistan. Just don’t fool around with the Islamic holy sites or use religion to justify your claims. That would tear apart the entire world.”
“Religion has nothing to do with our conflict,” I assured him with a pat on the shoulder. “In Israel religion is a private matter and will never be used by politicians.”
How wrong I was.
I was perhaps most influenced at the war college by the theories of nineteenth-century Prussian thinker Carl von Clausewitz, the father of military-strategic studies, and in particular his dictum that the “original means of strategy is victory — that is, tactical success; its ends…are those objects which will lead directly to peace.” Israel’s treaty with Egypt certainly validated this maxim. Never once, though, did I consider that it might be my job to make peace with terrorists. Their tactic was to target women and children, and my mission remained to eradicate them.
On June 3, 1982, shortly before Biba, the boys, and I planned to pile into our Ford LTD for a cross-country summer vacation, a terrorist sent by Abu Nidal, the head of a Palestinian terror outfit and a hated rival of Arafat and his PLO, approached the Israeli ambassador at the Dorchester Hotel in London and put a bullet through his head. I wasn’t privy to the debates inside the Israeli cabinet about how to respond to the attempted assassination. All I heard about were the results: heavy Israeli strikes against PLO targets in Lebanon, killing two hundred, and the PLO retaliating with rocket fire over the border in the Galilee. The next day, June 4, Prime Minister Menachem Begin issued an order to destroy the terrorist infrastructure in Lebanon, with Minister of Defense Ariel Sharon leading the charge. Begin declared that the purpose of the invasion was to “avoid another Treblinka.” Arafat, in Begin’s words, was the “Hitler of Beirut.”
Sharon, an aggressive tactician, mobilized the country to invade Lebanon and oust nettlesome Arafat and the PLO. Unbeknown to me at the time, Arafat and the PLO actually had nothing to do with London. The assassination was being used as a pretext for a massive operation that leaders like Sharon had long been eager to launch.
I received orders to return to Israel at once. Before I left, my roommate, Sam Hans, the commander of Norway’s fleet of submarines and the future deputy commander of the navy, cornered me. “Why in the devil do you want to conquer Lebanon because of a botched assassination attempt against one man?”
“Hans,” I replied without thinking, “we Israelis count differently than you Europeans: You count your dead on one hand — one, two, three — while we count ours starting with the number six million. Imagine if six million and two Norwegians were killed. You’d be like the Vikings. Of course you’d want to go to war.”
From his baffled gaze, I realized that we had different perceptions of reality. “Ami, your ambassador didn’t die, and the Palestinians aren’t Nazis.”
It was only on the flight back to Israel that I asked myself why had I reflexively dragged the Holocaust into the conversation with Hans. It certainly couldn’t have been because I grew up hearing about it; I didn’t. Had I unconsciously created an equivalency between Nazis hell-bent on liquidating Jews and PLO fighters who refused to acknowledge Israel’s right to exist? Perhaps, but so what? I ordered a drink and tried to get some sleep.
During the fighting, I commanded the naval base in Ashdod and was in charge of landing operations in Beirut and elsewhere. I helped blockade Lebanon’s ancient Phoenician ports. I followed orders, as any officer would, to bomb our targets. How much collateral damage — deaths and injuries to noncombatants — these shells caused was impossible to calculate, and anyway I was there to fight, not philosophize. Had I not just learned from my course on Clausewitz that as an officer seeking tactical victories, I was contributing to the strategic aim of peace? Besides, unlike terrorists, we were not deliberately targeting civilians.
My first insight into the true nature of our conflict with the Palestinians — my first “Fanta man” experience, you could say — came off the coast of Israel, just north of the Green Line separating it from Gaza. When the Lebanon front quieted down, I had been reassigned to the stretch of water from the city of Hadera, located between Haifa and Tel Aviv, to the Egyptian border in the south. From 1982 through 1985 my brief was to prevent smugglers and terrorists from breaching Israel’s borders.
From my base in Ashdod, I prevented such attacks by monitoring the closed military zone off the Gaza Strip. Gaza’s smooth, flat coast offers no natural deep harbor and no protection from winds. This means that fishermen often had to cast their nets far from shore to avoid the waves and currents. One day while on patrol, we came across an old man in a rickety boat floating toward the Israeli city of Ashkelon. I steered my boat toward him to block his path and my men shot warning bullets into the air, but he didn’t change course. We shot again. He continued ignoring us. I banked south so that our boat was on his starboard side, close enough for me to see his sinewy arms and skin blackened by the sun like Santiago in Hemingway’s Old Man and the Sea. Since, shamefully, none of us spoke Arabic, we could only gesture to tell him to turn around.
“La,” he said. No. I didn’t need a translator to understand he wasn’t budging.
One of my men held up a gun to deliver the message that we’d open fire if he didn’t return to Gaza.
The bare-chested old man spread his arms out wide, his charcoal eyes resolute. Be my guest, was the message his gesture conveyed, as if he had nothing to lose.
The consequence for a Palestinian who refused orders in a military zone was often death. But what would opening fire on an old man who just wanted to feed his family do for Israel’s security?
I walked to the bow to think, and when I came back, my men were waiting to see what I would do.
Goddammit, I remember mumbling to myself, just move your boat!
He cast his net as if we weren’t there. Raful Eitan always said that Israeli soldiers stormed enemy positions because they feared their comrades more than their foes, and for an instant I was fearful of showing weakness in front of my men, of losing a battle of wits with a toothless fisherman. But kill a man just to show who’s boss? Would that make me stronger or weaker than the old man?
I turned to my men and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Not long after, in 1987, the First Intifada broke out.
An IDF soldier in Gaza lost control of his truck, careened off the road in the Jabalia refugee camp, plowed into a crowd, and killed four Palestinians. The uprising that erupted in response to the tragic accident struck me a bit like the Yom Kippur War in that it seemed to come from out of the blue. After a brief tenure as a commander of a missile-ships squadron, at the time I was already a brigadier general and the naval commander of the north. While sailing in the Northern Command operation ship, I was stunned to hear General Dan Shomron, the new IDF chief of staff, say that the Intifada was a mass uprising and not something the military could eradicate with bullets. Like firefighters outnumbered by a wildfire, all the army could do was try to contain the flames. It was for the politicians to deal with the root cause.
I wasn’t used to hearing such defeatism. I was less surprised to hear Minister of Defense Rabin order soldiers to beat Palestinians into submission. Another general, Rehavam “Gandhi” Ze’evi, referred to Palestinians as “lice.” I read about broken bones and other heavy-handed acts that only plunged us deeper into conflict. In Haaretz the journalist Ari Shavit described the “Gaza Beach Detention Camp” with its dozen watchtowers and the “horrific screams” he heard at night because Shin Bet agents were trying to “break some youngsters in the interrogation ward.”
Years earlier, when I was commander of the Ashdod base, I spent time on shore in Gaza getting to know the fishermen. We drank coffee at a café near the harbor, and I tried — in Hebrew, which many of them spoke — to explain our orders to men whose ancestors had been fishing those waters since the Iron Age.
With their smiles and their hummus, I thought the Palestinians had come to terms with us. I figured they knew we were doing the best we could in a tough neighborhood. Unlike the French in Algeria, we weren’t colonists; we were liberating land that had belonged to us since antiquity. As for the Palestinians, we were “enlightened conquerors.” We built them universities and roads and introduced modern agriculture.
In a prime example of colonial wishful thinking, I assumed poverty, not patriotism, was driving the Palestinians to violence. If we could just prop up their economy, they’d submit to our rule and would eventually seek peace on our conditions.
One day in early 1988 when I was deputy head of the navy, with a driver, my trusty AK-47, and in a jeep that wasn’t bulletproof, I set out to meet a group of fishermen. We set out around noon. From the naval base at Erez we took a route that straddles the Green Line between Gaza and Israel that would take us through to the harbor. We exited the main settlement road, separated from Palestinians by razor wire and neck-high stacks of sandbags, and turned onto a pitted two-lane track toward the Sha’ati refugee camp.
We entered the camp, and I gave the driver directions to the meeting place at the harbor. Smoke from burning garbage hung in the air. Pirated electrical lines were strung from hovel to hovel, and sewage puddled in front of a crumbling UNRWA school. Suddenly a throng of people surrounded our vehicle from all directions. Some were old men in donkey carts, but most of the mob were women and kids on bicycles.
This human roadblock was the first indication that I’d have to postpone my chat with the fishermen. Then came a much stronger sign, a hail of cinder blocks from buildings on both sides of us. Raining debris bounced off the roof of the jeep. Not too far away, Samson had pulled down the temple of Dagon, and here I was about to get stoned to death by kids and grandmothers. One Molotov cocktail and the jeep would be our funeral pyre.
I’ll never forget the eyes of a boy no older than fifteen glaring at me with hatred. His look, which felt like a declaration of war, struck me harder than the shrapnel had on Green Island. Since we couldn’t back up into the narrow alley, I told the driver to haul ass through the hailstorm of stones.
Only later that night did I have time to reflect on what happened. Twenty years after Meir Shalev had his Fanta man moment in the West Bank, I saw myself through the eyes of this kid. On the kibbutz I was raised to hate the oppressor and to value human dignity and freedom above all else, and according to those values I had to agree with the boy in the camp: I was a hateful occupier and oppressor of millions of Palestinians who aspired to political independence.
Who am I? I began asking. The Maccabees were in my blood, as was Masada and those words in our Declaration of Independence: “The Land of Israel was the birthplace of the Jewish people. Here their spiritual, religious and political identity was shaped.”
But how was I to square this with that look of hatred in the boy’s eyes? I still didn’t know.