There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root.
— Henry David Thoreau
When I came up with a list of people to interview for my memoirs, I included a man who had been a senior officer under my command. We met at an Irish pub on the ground floor of a Tel Aviv skyscraper housing tech companies and lawyers’ offices. Antlers hung from the walls, and a big green carnation decorated the side of the bar. With our voices barely audible above the din of people talking, clanging plates, and blaring pop music, it was a good place for a conversation about secrecy and intrigue. We ordered burgers and two pints of microbrewed pale ale.
“So how have you been, Ami?” the man started.
“Personally, things have never been better. Family’s fine. Just finished remodeling the upstairs. Lots of time to read. Doing laps every day in the pool in the backyard keeps me fit. Politically, though, I’m more depressed than ever.”
“I know the feeling,” he said, raising his pint in commiseration. The old colleague nodded along at most of what I said about how the diverging national narratives had triggered the Second Intifada. He raised no objections to my analysis that most Israelis continued to believe we had wanted security and got terror, while Palestinians, who wanted independence, felt they had only gotten more settlements, more military occupation, and more humiliation at checkpoints. That we’d screwed them.
It was good to catch up, but I left the pub frustrated, mostly with myself. If Shikaki had done an impromptu poll of those in the pub, members of Israel’s business and entrepreneurial elite, I’m sure that most would have agreed with our grim assessment — and then returned to their offices to cut the next big deal. Ideology isn’t the problem with career-oriented, taxpaying, liberal, open-minded Israelis such as the ex-agent and me. Our problem is that we never get angry enough to rock the boat. Maybe life is too good. We’ll march in the Pride parade or get worked up over animal rights, say, but we can’t be bothered with the plight of Palestinians on the other side of the Separation Wall. Perhaps we’re also afraid. Though our democracy may seem to outsiders as solid as a Merkava tank, in reality it is fragile and could easily tip into fratricide. And though we’ll moan about politics, we are too much a part of a system that serves us well to take risks that might damage our reputations. Lines I read somewhere from Henry David Thoreau remind me of what we Israeli liberals almost never do: “If the machine of government is such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter-friction to stop the machine.”
The only reason I can look myself in the mirror is that, in my better moments, since leaving the Shabak I’ve aimed a few wrenches at the machine.
From the pub I drove to pick up Biba at her sister’s in the Tel Aviv suburb of Givatayim, then headed to Habima, Israel’s premier stage, for a benefit production of the play Shakespeare in Love for AKIM, a national nongovernmental organization for people with intellectual disabilities and their families that I chair.
During the performance, my mind turned to the convoluted path that led me from fighting terror to watching men in tights cavort on stage. My niece Zohara has special needs, and during my time at the Shin Bet, she lived at an AKIM-run group home. During our visits to Zohara, Biba made sure that I learned about the organization’s good work. One thing led to another, and now twenty years later I’m its volunteer chairman. The benefit performance that evening was particularly poignant because, from the stage, AKIM honored an extraordinary Arab Israeli woman whose bravery in the face of life’s challenges goes beyond anything I ever did on the battlefield. If we Israelis want to preserve and strengthen our democracy, we’ll have to harness the values of inclusion, justice, and humanism that AKIM embodies. To quote Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, a man I greatly admire, we “honor God by honoring His image” in people frequently ignored or shunned.
Supporting AKIM isn’t about throwing a wrench in the machine. Where Biba and I headed the following evening is. We drove to Jaffa for a party to welcome the new director of Breaking the Silence, an organization, much reviled in most quarters, that was founded by combat soldiers distressed by what they’d seen and done while serving in the West Bank and Gaza.37 Their public testimony creates counter-friction by revealing to Israeli society the crimes being committed in their name.
It took us half an hour of driving through Jaffa’s dark side streets to find the building. A guy with a tattoo on his arm, maybe a former commando, was checking bags outside the entrance. We took the stairs because the elevator was out of order, dodging feral cats and stepping over broken car seats and dead car batteries. On the sixth floor, like in old gangster movies, someone peered through a crack in the door to make sure we belonged. At last we entered a room filled with revelers shouting over throbbing Israeli pop music.
People set down their drinks to hug us as we made our introductory round through the room. I then navigated through the throng, shaking a dozen or more hands, to reach the bar, grabbing a couple of Maccabee beers before heading back to find Biba standing in a corner deep in conversation with old friends, who for all their criticisms are patriots and Zionists who believe in a democratic Jewish state alongside the State of Palestine. The way I see it, Breaking the Silence follows in the Israeli tradition of biting rhetorical attacks on injustice: During the Knesset debate about Minister Bennett’s proposal to ban Breaking the Silence from schools, a member of the Knesset and supporter of Breaking the Silence read aloud Nathan Alterman’s poem “Al Zot,” the same poem my father had read to me at the age of three.
I began following the organization’s work after the disastrous 2009 war in Gaza. Though it pained me to hear hard-nosed soldiers describe witnessing the pointless destruction of hundreds of houses and mosques, and soldiers shooting at civilians used by Hamas as human shields, I also knew they weren’t flower-tossing pacifists. Their testimonies should be front-page news. Shortly before the party, the organization had made waves — more “counter-friction” — by taking a group of American writers on a tour of Judea and Samaria. One of the writers, the Jewish novelist Michael Chabon, said afterward: “Security is an invention of humanity’s jailers. Anywhere you look, it is and has always been a hand of power drawing the boundaries, putting up the separation barriers and propagandizing hatred and fear of the people on the other side of the wall. Security for some means imprisonment for all.”
Chabon is right. We never struck a balance between identifying security dangers and identifying the opportunities for peace.
Not long ago, during an interview, an Argentinian journalist suggested to me that The Gatekeepers, the documentary I collaborated on, was the Shabak version of Breaking the Silence. I raised no objection to the comparison to Israel’s most hated NGO.
In the past I’ve publicly defended the organization. When our government threatened to shutter a gallery in Jerusalem for hosting one of their events, for instance, I told journalists that we in Israel are experiencing “incremental tyranny.” I took the expression from my friend Brian Jenkins, an adviser to the president of the RAND Corporation and a former officer with the US Army 5th Special Forces. In the realities of a never-ending war, security trumps civil rights, minority protections, and pluralism, and with court approval we hollow out civil society and slip on our own shackles. One day we’ll wake up and remember that once upon a time we lived in democracy.
In early 2000, Barak asked me to stay on at the Shabak until the end of the year even though my tenure was up in May. Since he would soon be signing a new framework agreement with Arafat, he assured me radiating confidence, he wanted me to help guide the agency into the new era. I countered that I would be leaving as planned, and that he should begin looking for my replacement immediately because my successor would have to be prepared for the explosion of violence we in the Shabak saw coming.
Ehud didn’t know what I was talking about, because he had lost contact with reality. He didn’t feel the rising temperatures, the waves forming whitecaps, the black cirrus clouds — the telltale signs of a hurricane coming our way.
In May, I turned in my badge and magnetic card, and Barak appointed my deputy director Avi Dichter to replace me. I was fifty-five and had to figure out what to do with myself. Professionally, you might say I had reached the mountaintop. Private-sector job offers came pouring in, but I was still too much a son of the kibbutz to join other ex-IDF, Shabak, and Mossad experts in peddling arms or advising companies, politicians, and rogue regimes in the dark arts of security. So what was I to do with myself?
Eventually I took a job as chairman of Netafim, the drip irrigation company launched by a kibbutz in the Negev. It was a way to get back to my kibbutz roots while making a contribution well beyond Israel’s borders: Drip technology Netafim invented helps feed hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
I also got to be a full-time husband and father for the first time in my life. Hacking away at weeds and pruning dead branches, sweat coursing down my face in the company of my best friend in life, Biba, reminded me of the honest physical labor I was raised to adore. As a kid I carried loads of bananas on my back. Now I was working a scythe. I even took a scuba diving vacation on the Cocos Islands in the Indian Ocean, swam with sharks, and started reading novels again.
But my mind would not let go of what was happening to my country. The peace talks in July played out just as I had feared. Sure enough, Barak got Clinton to strong-arm Arafat into discussing the core issues at Camp David in the woods of Maryland, and when Ehud presented Arafat with a deal, Arafat walked away. Ehud called me from his cabin and asked me to fly out and join him because he would need support once the international media caught wind of the debacle. What he really needed was a coconspirator in rewriting history. He wanted me to stand by his side nodding as he told the world: “I am hereby revealing Arafat’s true face. Arafat is no partner — the Palestinians aren’t partners.”
I declined his request. Who knows if Arafat is a partner? I was thinking as I hung up the phone. Partnerships evolve out of a process of building mutual trust. Since Rabin’s death and Peres’s electoral defeat, neither Netanyahu nor Barak had lifted a finger to build such a partnership.
Barak flew back to Israel and, with the American administration behind him, blamed the failure of the summit on Arafat alone. The “no partner” line proved the single most catastrophic PR stunt in Israeli political history. I spoke freely to him. “It’s up to us to decide which story we tell ourselves. Arafat in my experience doesn’t have a single face, he’s got a thousand. You can pick out the ‘no partner’ face just as easily as you can a partner face, and the particular face you’ve been selling to the public says more about you than it does Arafat. Let me tell you something, as someone who has accompanied you from the day you became prime minister. Which of Arafat’s faces you choose to present to the world now is the most important issue you have, and you owe it to the citizens of Israel to make the right choice.”
Through the month of August, I felt like a ship captain tracking an oncoming storm. In September I told the magazine Nekuda, a monthly put out by the settler movement, the bitter, inexorable truth: We had lost the First Intifada, just as we’d lose the new intifada heading our way. The journalist gasped, unaccustomed to a military man playing the role of Nostradamus.
A couple of weeks after the interview came out in Nekuda, Ariel Sharon, the Likud opposition leader, strode up to the Temple Mount, the very site I felt in my gut would trigger the apocalypse. By this point Barak was too weak politically to prevent it. Surrounded by dozens of armed policemen, Sharon announced he was there to assert Jewish claims. Israeli police responded to rioting Palestinians by firing rubber bullets and tear gas. From Sharon’s perspective, the visit was no doubt a masterstroke, simultaneously harnessing settler support while dealing a body blow to Barak. The move also crippled Arafat because the masses, including many of his supporters, lost hope in the negotiation table.
Violence at Al Aqsa spread like a virus to Israeli Arab villages in the north, then to Gaza and the West Bank. The Shabak’s position was that loss of hope had led to the uprising. The IDF claimed the whole thing was a premeditated act of war, as if Arafat had decided to stir up mayhem after having failed to achieve his goals at Camp David. They accused his regime of coordinating with Arabs in Israel and directing the armed uprising to destroy Israel.38
Barak accepted the army’s baseless narrative, and the IDF thought they were fighting fire with fire — except that at this stage the rioting mobs were armed mostly with knives, Molotov cocktails, burning tires, and rocks.39 Over the next few days the IDF fired 1.3 million bullets.
At first Arafat had an interest in calming things down, but as the funeral processions multiplied, his instinctual need to survive got him talking about jihad. On Isreal radio I compared Arafat to a man riding on the back of a wild tiger pretending to steer the beast; in fact he had no control whatsoever.
On October 13, I got a call from the producer of a Channel Two news program asking me to be interviewed by Shelly Yachimovich, a top Israeli journalist and news host. The interview, set for that afternoon, was at the main Channel Two studio on the road from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. I hesitated; my entire career in the security business had been behind the scenes. If I stood in front of the camera, which I did only infrequently and with great reluctance, it was to present facts as I saw them as a professional working for our military or government.
I thought about what my friend the politician had told me. “My job is to lie, and your job is to tell the truth.”
It was time for me to break my silence. I agreed.
A few hours later I sat solemnly in front of the blinding lights and beeping cameras. A screen behind me played, over and over, footage from a lynching. A day earlier, Corporal Yossi Avrahami and Sergeant Vadim Nurzhitz took a wrong turn while driving to their base in Beth-El, a West Bank settlement, and ended up surrounded by a seething mob in a squalid neighborhood in Ramallah. Arafat’s cops dragged Nurzhitz and Avrahami, a newly-wed, to the second floor of an old stone police station in el-Bireh, a short distance from Arafat’s presidential headquarters, where a bloodthirsty mob lunged at our soldiers with metal bars and knives.
On the screen behind me looped images of Aziz Salha, an unemployed nineteen-year-old Palestinian, pitching Nurzhitz, whose wife was three months’ pregnant, out of the window into the mob that responded like a school of piranhas in a feeding frenzy. Afterward, Salha threw his bloody hands in the air as if he’d scored a winning goal. A member of Arafat’s security forces stood by and did nothing, his finger on the trigger of a Kalashnikov, while the mob battered Nurzhitz’s lifeless body with sticks.
Yachimovich, her eyes shifting between the images of the lynching and me, asked if we Israelis were headed for the shoals. Was our national boat about to capsize? Had the time come to break out the life rafts? Were we doomed?
On the high seas, I responded, a skilled captain and a good crew can manage most tempests, no matter how ferocious. It is only when nature pummels a ship from three sides — the perfect storm — that prayers are in order. That was what was happening to our country. “The storm is fierce,” I said, continuing with the seafaring simile. “And there’s no question that in the Middle East there’s always the risk that our ship could capsize.”
Yachimovich, lowering her voice a few octaves, repeated what everyone in Israel was saying, that human beings are not capable of such barbarity and therefore, by implication, the Palestinians must be some breed of wild beast. Clearly, she hoped that, given my experiences, I might offer privileged insight into the murderous pathologies of our enemies. We offered peace to Arafat and his gang of hooligans and look what we got in return! The cudgel and the whip, not peace treaties, are what such animals understand. “Are Palestinians even capable of being partners in peace?” she wanted to know.
I recall sitting upright in my chair, my pulse quickening, and with a pen in my hand staring directly into the camera. It was as good a time as any to shatter cherished Israeli legends.
For more than four years, I said with eyes locked on Yachimovich, I worked closely with many Palestinians, from Arafat on down, to prevent attacks and apprehend terrorists. I explained in as measured a tone as I could muster that when Palestinians felt that preventing terrorism would lead to the end of our occupation and the establishment of their own state, they cooperated with us. What most Palestinians sought, more than anything, wasn’t our blood — they just wanted to trust that the Israeli government would end the occupation and allow them to be free. “And we’ve given them little reason to trust us.” What I was thinking but couldn’t yet bring myself to say publicly was that our pursuit of peace was a sham. We were still caught in the Zionism of my parents’ generation that saw the entire Land of Israel as our birthright. Since we refused to admit that Palestinians have rights and roots in Judea and Samaria, too, we were always looking for ways to renege on our promises. What we wanted was security, and if we could get it without handing over any more of the Land of Israel, we’d do it.
“But…”
I cut her off. Our instinctive resort to disproportionate force, I barreled on, has created the opposite of what we want to achieve. We jeopardize our own security each time, in the name of security, our soldiers gun down Palestinian stone-throwers, and our actions fuel calls for revenge. Yachimovich finally intervened with the question on everyone’s mind. “So what about these rioters?” she wanted to know, returning the conversation to the lynching. “Who are they?”
“I’ll tell you who they are.” Flashing in my mind was something I had read in one of Dr. Shikaki’s reports: The people behind the Second Intifada were disillusioned supporters of the peace process. “They’re not fanatics. I may not know them personally, but I’ve met lots of people like them, once ardent backers of Oslo.”
I was thinking of the men I’d met who worked for Jibril, guys who risked their necks pursuing Hamas terrorists. If some of these men were now dancing in our blood, it wasn’t because they were beasts, it was because they’d lost hope.
At the end of the interview I used the same sextant metaphor I had tried out on Ehud Barak with so little success. True leadership keeps one eye trained on the realities of the ground, I explained, with the other fixed on where and who we want to be in the future.
Yachimovich must have been impressed because she asked if I would consider politics. “No, never,” I declared calmly, looking straight into the camera.
“Do you really mean that?” she prodded. Ex-generals, after all, fill Israel’s governing ranks.
“I have absolutely no interest in politics,” I breezily assured her. The irony is that in early 2006, four years later, Shelly and I would both be elected to the Knesset.