Most of the books that line our shelves at home are Biba’s. Books of psychology and social work butt up against her father David’s works of scholarship and literary criticism. Works of fiction, mainly in Hebrew, occupy the bulk of the shelf space. My books on military history and strategy are in the dining room, easy to reach from my workplace at the long wooden table. The morning following the visit to Khalil, I pulled out a couple of books that I’d brought back from my time at Harvard’s Kennedy School in the early 1990s. One book I find myself thumbing through more often than I should because of what it does to my blood pressure is Barbara Tuchman’s magisterial The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. Back in the 1990s I highlighted the line “Chief among the forces affecting political folly is lust for power, the most flagrant of all passions.”16
Another volume I pulled from the shelf that morning, also on the syllabus at the Kennedy School, was Neil Sheehan’s classic study of the Vietnam War, A Bright Shining Lie. Notes scribbled in the margins, and the texts I highlighted in yellow and blue, capture my state of mind during that 1992–1993 academic year. “The truth,” I wrote on the inside of the back flap, “is often only perceptible to ‘outsiders.’ ” I think reading Sheehan’s book was the first time I became aware that outsiders to the military hierarchy, such as journalists and academics, are equipped with different “sensors” than military officers or politicians that enable them to see through the lies and other stories we tell ourselves when tangled up in war.
I don’t mention the Palestinians once in my notes, even though I now realize that one could have called Israel’s attitude toward them “a bright shining lie,” too.
My stint in Cambridge, with Biba and our three sons along for the adventure, came at a thrilling time to be alive: The Iron Curtain had fallen, apartheid in South Africa had ended, and opinion polls had Bill Clinton, a young, liberal, visionary politician, poised to win the upcoming presidential election. The atmosphere was intoxicating.
Some of the smartest political scientists on earth were puzzling out the post–Cold War world on Harvard’s campus. Samuel Huntington was putting the final touches on “The Clash of Civilizations,” his monumental essay, which would appear in Foreign Affairs in 1993. The article was written largely in answer to the publication of The End of History and the Last Man by Huntington’s star student, Francis Fukuyama, that had inspired impassioned debates over Turkish coffee at Cafe Algiers on Brattle Street. “Just don’t hold your breath,” I told people when they quoted from the book that “the universalization of Western liberal democracy is the final form of human government.”
Just as I was finishing up my master’s degree, my colleague Ehud Barak, who was serving as chief of the General Staff, called me up in the middle of the night with an offer to head up Israel’s navy. To be the admiral of the navy was the culmination of thirty years of service, and I felt a sense of honor and responsibility I struggled to capture in words.
My swearing-in ceremony back in Israel provided another opportunity for my parents to pose for the camera with me. This time even Imma showed her pride and, I suspect, relief. The office job at naval headquarters next to an old Templer settlement in Tel Aviv would keep me out of harm’s way.
Yitzhak Rabin, who replaced Shamir as prime minister, had promised Israeli voters during his campaign that he would never talk to the “liars and bastards” in the PLO. A year into the job, however, he surprised us all by calling a meeting of members of the IDF General Staff to tell us the former archenemy had become his partner, and he was going to make peace with Arafat. The State of Israel and the PLO would recognize each other as the legitimate representatives of their respective peoples. Arafat and his Fatah men would be permitted to return to what they would surely call “liberated Palestine.”
Their government, called the Palestinian Authority, would administer a part of Gaza and the city of Jericho, and in time they would extend their rule over more territory. We would eventually clear out of every place except for military installations and settlements. But what did “security zone” mean? As they say, God, and the devil, are always lurking in such details. Within five years, we were told, final status talks would settle the thorniest issues, such as Jerusalem, security, borders, Palestinian refugees, and Jewish settlements.
We members of the General Staff looked at one another, too stunned to respond. How the hell was this supposed to work? Did the prime minister really expect us to implement and enforce the terms of a back-channel peace deal that had been cooked up in a Norwegian forest without any input from security experts?
At the heart of our unease, even if no one dared say anything out loud, was the basic human difficulty of imagining an enemy to be a partner. How could we roll out the red carpet to Arafat, the man who turned Jordan and Lebanon into terrorist hotbeds? The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci once said about Arafat that he “always plays the double-cross, lies even if you ask him what time it is.” And now we were supposed to trust him as a partner?
The Oslo Accords were just as mind-boggling for me as for thousands of others in the military because I had waded through fedayeen terror swamps to fight Fatah close up. Yes, during the Intifada, I had come to recognize the futility of trying to control Palestinian populations in Judea, Samaria, and Gaza. I knew politicians would have to square the circle of the Jewish people returning to their ancient land with the cruelty of our rule. What I had never considered was that Arafat and his band of terrorists would even be considered as part of the solution. For years I had sailed almost all over the region — the Adriatic Sea, the Western Mediterranean, Tunisia, Libya, and pretty much every other Arab country — to kill these very men. Just five years earlier, following Rabin’s order, I had joined a hit against Abu Jihad, Arafat’s deputy and cofounder of Fatah.
When Rabin sat us officers down and explained the deal, he addressed many of my concerns. I remained skeptical, but I trusted Rabin, a hawk, not to do anything that would compromise Israel’s security. What I worried about was how we would deal with Palestinian organizations that opposed the agreement, including Hamas, a leading force of terror in the Occupied Territories.
An unrelated question was how on earth we would contend with Jewish settlers who would feel betrayed, and rightfully so, that their own political leaders and every Israeli government since 1967 had lied to them. At a conference where he lectured, I asked Shimon Peres, then foreign minister, how he intended to deal with the inevitable protests. In my question I mentioned the Jewish underground, a terrorist organization that grew up as a response to the peace treaty with Egypt and the withdrawal from Sinai.
“Look,” he said, “I’m a bus driver and I have to take the bus and all its passengers to a safe place. Sure, there might be some passengers in the back of the bus who put up a fuss. But I can’t ask every traveler what he thinks. My job is to keep my eye on the road.”
“But you changed your destination while driving, after they bought a ticket. They chose you as a driver because you promised to take them somewhere. They deserve at least to speak their minds. As far as they’re concerned, you kidnapped them and now they feel like hostages being delivered to a destination they didn’t choose.” Peres shrugged and changed the subject.
Because the navy patrolled the waters off Gaza, Oslo was now partly my problem. Would Arafat get use of the sea off the Gazan coast? How could we prevent his people from smuggling in arms? What would happen if we stopped a ship inside waters Arafat controlled? Soon enough, we would have to sit down with PLO men, experts at smuggling weapons, and plan a common security system.
As many of us feared, terrorism spiked as soon as the ink dried on Oslo. In the 1980s, during the Intifada, terrorist attacks, including a suicide bombing carried out by Islamic Jihad, were sporadic. Hamas, until the late 1980s what seemed to be an Islamic charity, set out to derail Oslo by murdering Israeli civilians. In a 1993 attack near Beit El, Hamas bomb maker Yahya Ayyash packed explosives into a Volkswagen van, wounding eight of our soldiers.
Whatever halfhearted measures Arafat took to keep a lid on Islamic terror disappeared altogether in February 1994 when the American-born settler Dr. Baruch Goldstein, graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, revenged Palestinian terror attacks around Hebron by emptying the magazine of his government-issued Galil rifle into the kneeling bodies of Muslims during Friday prayers in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. Twenty-nine were killed and 125 wounded. The slaughter took place on Purim, the Jewish Halloween celebrating evil Haman’s destruction. Goldstein’s intention was partly revenge for Hamas terror; mainly, he wanted to end Oslo by triggering a religious war.
Hamas at once lashed out at Arafat, burning him in effigy in a dozen refugee camps that were its strongholds. A slew of Hamas suicide revenge attacks followed in the late summer and early fall, culminating in a massacre on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. An unemployed man from Gaza boarded a bus and detonated the suicide belt strapped around his waist, killing twenty-two Israelis and injuring fifty more, the first successful suicide attack in Tel Aviv. In all nearly forty Israelis died at the hands of Hamas in 1994. Not since the War of Independence had so many Israeli civilians died in terror attacks. Like every other Israeli, each time the phone rang I was terrified I’d learn that one of my kids or Biba was a victim.
In late 1994, I was with Ehud Barak in Rabin’s bare upstairs office in the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv, wrapping up a discussion of Israel’s long-term security. I pushed the navy’s position, which was for a modern submarine fleet capable of projecting Israeli power and deterrence regionally. Barak didn’t agree. He thought we needed greater land defenses, while I countered that our main enemies weren’t going to crash through our borders in tanks. In the end Rabin came down on the side of the navy.
After the discussion the prime minister asked to see me alone. Barak nodded before shutting the door behind him. I was standing at attention with my hands behind my back and Rabin, less than a year before his murder, told me to take a seat.
“Coffee?”
I nodded. Rabin poured out two cups, lit up a cigarette, and cut to the chase. “Ami. I’d like you to take over the Shin Bet.”
“Excuse me, sir?” Amazingly, I avoided spitting up my drink.
“Listen, you’ve completed your stint as commander of the navy, and the issue of the submarines has been settled. I need you at the Shin Bet.” He tapped ashes into his empty coffee cup while waiting for my response.
I sat there too stunned to respond. This was nothing like Barak calling me in the middle of the night to offer me a post for which I’d been preparing my entire career. To ask someone like me to command the Shabak made so little sense that I didn’t know what to say.
“Just think about it, Ami,” Rabin said.
Rabin didn’t need to explain why the Shin Bet needed fresh blood. In the year and a half since he had pumped Arafat’s hand in the White House Rose Garden, a legion of demons had descended upon the Land of Israel in the form of Hamas and Islamic Jihad on the Palestinian side, and Baruch Goldstein on ours.
Rabin didn’t blame Arafat for the bus bombing and was determined to pursue peace “as if there is no terror” and to “fight terror as if there is no peace process.” But his approach proved to be a double mistake: he failed to present Arafat with the ultimatum that if he didn’t put up a serious fight against terror, there would be no peace process. At the same time, Rabin’s strategy swelled the ranks of our right wing, especially the settlers, who now numbered a quarter million. A photo montage at an anti-Oslo rally featured Arafat’s keffiyeh wrapped around Rabin’s forehead. A different placard had Rabin wearing a Nazi uniform and a swastika armband. “With blood and fire, we will expel Rabin,” young toughs chanted, their fists lifted in defiance. Settler newspapers likened Rabin’s partnership with Arafat to Marshal Pétain’s collaboration with Hitler. At one rally, the young politician Benjamin Netanyahu, joined by Ariel Sharon, looked on without comment as crowds carried a coffin on their shoulders and chanted for two hours, “Death to Rabin.”
With the Shin Bet failing to stop the worst outbreak of terrorism in Israel’s history, Rabin needed someone new at the helm, an outsider who could shake up the agency.
I sat stone-faced, fidgeting in my chair, my palms clammy. Why me?
We remained silent for God knows how long — maybe a minute. There’s no way, I was thinking. I knew enough about the Shabak to know that as its director you’re deployed not at sea, but down a sewer. I still operated largely in a simple world of friend or foe. Putting a bullet through a hostile adversary in a uniform was a very different thing from hauling a blindfolded shopkeeper, or a kid, into a cell to extract information, either through finesse or under duress. In those days of mass protests against Oslo, the job would also require spying on fellow Jews. I had read Orwell as a kid and had no appetite for playing Big Brother.
“Mr. Prime Minister,” I finally said, looking him directly in the eyes. “Thank you for your confidence. I just don’t think I’m the right man for the job.”
Rabin nodded, stubbing out his cigarette.
One year and a slew of terrorist attacks later, at the US Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, I was so lost in thought, staring out French doors at Narragansett Bay, that I didn’t even notice the approach of the marine attaché at the Israeli embassy, his footsteps pounding the floor with a military cadence.
I was in a cheerful mood that Indian summer afternoon of November 4, 1995. It was the day before the opening of the International Seapower Symposium, the biggest gathering of the heads of the world’s navies. I was proud to represent Israel in this exclusive fraternity of admirals. The American chief of naval operations, Admiral Mike Boorda, the first Jew to reach such heights inside the US Navy, in his double-breasted uniform with gold stripes on the sleeves, had invited me to the symposium. Some years back, when Mike was a US Navy commander, he visited Israel and I was his host. We’d struck up a friendship. Seamen, both fictional and real, from Odysseus and Captain Ahab to Admiral Nelson and the Florentine explorer Giovanni da Verrazzano, who first sailed into Narragansett Bay in 1524, share a certain stoicism that comes from facing the primal elements of nature.
The marine attaché was about to remind me that being an Israeli is like sitting on a ship knowing a torpedo was about to strike, just not from which direction.
“Admiral,” the marine attaché said with uncharacteristic formality for an Israeli. He grabbed my shoulder and I swung around to see him, tall and strapping in his crisp blue suit. With his pale face and shaky voice, there was a grim-reaper air about him. He had once been the captain of a missile ship under my command. I felt my stomach knot up.
“Yes, what is it?”
“The prime minister has been hit in a terrorist attack.”
“Rabin?” Did a Palestinian terrorist get to Rabin? I asked myself.
“Word just came that he has been shot.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“At the peace rally in Tel Aviv.”
“Rabin…shot?”
“Sir, he was pronounced dead a few minutes ago.”
I froze, my jaw agape. In the military you grow so accustomed to the dark art of war that you can stand tearless next to the grave of a friend or light up a cigarette after stepping over the body of an enemy. But the violent death of a prime minister tore me from my moorings. Still today I can feel the way my eyes widened, my skin tingled, and my hand involuntarily moved to my chest.
“Shot!” I stammered, stumbling backward.
I regained my balance. “Hamas?” I asked him. “Islamic Jihad?” A crazed Islamist, camouflaged as a peacenik, must have somehow slipped through Rabin’s security detail. A terrorist penetrating Israeli security would have been a catastrophic failure for the Shin Bet, the agency that, among other things, is responsible for protecting the prime minister.
“Sir,” he said, shaking his head. “The killer wasn’t a Palestinian; he was a Jew.”
“A Jew?”
“An Israeli Jew.”
“What the fuck,” I murmured to myself. The idea that a fellow countryman could pull a trigger on our prime minister had frankly never entered my mind. Of course, I knew Jews were capable of terror: In the early 1980s members of the Jewish underground had tried to assassinate mayors of Palestinian cities, had killed Palestinian students at Hebron University, and had plans to plant bombs on Arab buses. Another of their schemes was to blow up mosques on the Temple Mount. But such terrorists in my mind belonged to a lunatic fringe, and they targeted Arabs, not Jews.
I canceled the meeting I had scheduled with Admiral Boorda for later that afternoon and rushed by embassy car to JFK Airport to catch the next New York–Tel Aviv flight. A sleepless night on the plane gave me plenty of time to ponder the unthinkable.