Ami Ayalon is a remarkable man. I met him when he was the head of the Shin Bet and I was the lead American negotiator on the Arab-Israeli conflict in the 1990s. I spent a great deal of time shuttling between Israelis and Palestinians, and between the US and the Middle East. On every visit — and during every shuttle — I made a point of going to see Ami at his headquarters. I wanted to compare what I was seeing in my dealings with Yasser Arafat and all of his negotiators and get a feel for how Shin Bet saw Palestinian reality.
I say Shin Bet because Ami would bring in his deputies and his key Palestinian watchers — those who were the operators and dealt daily with the Palestinians on the ground and those who were analysts of the Palestinians and their society. While I was, of course, speaking to Palestinians apart from those with whom I was negotiating, I also came to value what I would hear at the Shin Bet headquarters. In this organization, which is a cross between our FBI and CIA and largely responsible for Israeli internal security and prevention of terror, I quickly discovered there was not a “Shin Bet” view of the Palestinians; there were different views and vantage points.
Ami made sure I heard them all. At this time when there were negotiations and acts of Palestinian terror, he would respond to my questions and observations, and then I would see many of those who worked for him take different positions and offer different explanations for Palestinian behaviors. Some were highly skeptical of Arafat, his underlings, and their purposes. Others were far more sympathetic to the pressures they were under and the searing effect that Israeli actions — settlement construction, checkpoints, arrests, and closures — had on them.
I saw that Ami was not only personally honest but that he was also intellectually honest. He wanted to hear all points of view, including from those who would challenge what he thought — and he did not mind them doing this in front of me.
It is no surprise to me, therefore, that he would write a memoir in which he is introspective and honest with himself. Like others who will read his story, I learned much about his background and his personal evolution. Ami grew up as a kibbutznik in an environment of communal living, egalitarianism, back-breaking work, simple pleasures, and ideological debates. Life was hard and constantly threatening. Living below the Golan Heights, the Syrians constantly shelled the kibbutz and fired on those working the fields. “Settlement and security” were the guiding principles, especially with the rejection of Israel’s existence by its neighbors and their employment of terror against this fledging new state. Israel’s borders were defined by presence and readiness to fight for them and not recognition by its Arab neighbors or even what the international community was prepared to do on Israel’s behalf —which at the time was very little.
Growing up in such an environment, convinced of the Jewish right to reclaim the land of their biblical patrimony, and of ongoing threats to the state’s existence, Ami chooses the most dangerous and demanding of all military paths. He will be a commando in Flotilla 13 — the Israeli equivalent of our navy SEALs. The training is brutal, the missions into enemy territory from the sea extremely dangerous; he would be grievously wounded and yet return to conduct and lead operations. He would be connected with Flotilla 13 for twenty-two years, coming to lead it and later becoming the head of the Israeli navy.
His was a world of kill or be killed. His recruits and friends like Haim Sturman would die — the third generation of his family (like his grandfather and father) to be killed in warfare with the Arabs. While Ami would carry out or participate in missions that killed very senior Palestinian terrorist operatives — as well as those who gave them the orders such as the cofounder of Fatah, Abu Jihad — he had a code that guided him to kill only the target and avoid killing others. His code would lead him to resist orders from those like General Raful Eitan, then head of the Israeli Defense Forces, who seemed to think that “collateral damage” would send a message not only that no Palestinian operative was beyond Israel’s reach but also that the price on Palestinian civilians would be high for acts of terror against Israelis.
But Ami’s code did not lead him to question this seemingly zero-sum world — a world in which perpetual killing of terrorists seemed to be the only answer. He does have a revelatory moment when, in the 1980s, as deputy commander of the navy and regularly speaking to Palestinian fishermen, he goes into a refugee camp in Gaza, his jeep is stoned, and he sees a teenager staring at him with a look of sheer hatred. He somehow relates this stare to his own feeling as a teenager when he faced daily threats on the kibbutz and longed for freedom and an end to that oppressive environment — Was that not, he asks himself, what this Palestinian boy was also feeling, and was he, in his military jeep, not the symbol of oppression?
The real change in his worldview, however, takes place only when he becomes head of the Shin Bet. He is brought in to head the Shin Bet as a complete outsider after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin — and early on confronts a wave of suicide bombings in Israel. He comes to realize that killing terrorists or arresting them before they can strike is absolutely necessary — but not sufficient to stop terrorism. He seeks to understand what drives those who carry out suicide bombings and discovers that often the Israeli killings of their relatives or humiliations of members of their families by Israeli soldiers or settlers have contributed. He also sees that hopelessness, despair, and victimization create a climate that serves to promote the recruitment of new terrorists and suicide bombers by Hamas and Islamic Jihad — two radical Islamist groups that reject Israel’s existence.
While Ami will wage a relentless fight against them and their operatives, he also sees that only if Arafat and the Palestinian Authority fight and discredit them can terrorism be defeated. From his vantage point, he believes that Rabin, Netanyahu, and Barak made mistakes with Arafat: Rabin because he should have given an ultimatum that the peace process would stop if Arafat did not do more to fight terror, and Netanyahu and Barak because they failed to understand that if Arafat could not show that the occupation would end, his ability to fight Hamas would be undercut. He and his men could not and would not look like they were collaborating with Israel to perpetuate its occupation — and, in Ami’s eyes, the notion of always demanding of the Palestinians but rarely delivering to them actually damaged Israeli security.
In my dealings with Ami during this time, I saw him act on these beliefs and speak truth to power. I saw it with Netanyahu and Barak, and I saw it with Arafat. After a bombing in Jerusalem, I asked then Prime Minister Netanyahu if I could organize a meeting with Arafat and his heads of the security organizations in Gaza with both Amnon Shahak (the head of the Israeli Defense Forces) and Ami — and have them discuss in my presence what needed to be done. Bibi and Arafat agreed, and in the meeting I watched Ami be brutally direct with Arafat on what the Palestinian Authority was not doing and the specific steps that must be taken. Arafat let his commanders answer Ami. Most said the Israelis asked Palestinians to take difficult steps when there was no political progress and little hope of it, to which Ami responded by saying that his role was security not politics, but without security there would be no political progress.
He pulled no punches. He would not mislead Arafat or those around him, but he also learned in the process. And, when he ended his tenure in Shin Bet, he sought to educate the Israeli public on Israeli responsibilities to do their part to end terror by acting to make peace more likely. This led him to work with Sari Nusseibeh on principles for peace that could gain grassroots support among Israelis and Palestinians.
The principles, reduced to one page, are largely consistent with the much more detailed Clinton parameters — parameters that we presented earlier, in December 2000, as a bridging proposal to end the conflict. I know from several of the Palestinian negotiators who received the parameters in the White House on December 22, 2000, that they wanted to accept them, but Arafat did not. One of the former Palestinian negotiators a year ago asked me wistfully, “Can you imagine where we would be today if Arafat had accepted the Clinton parameters?”
The parameters were based on the premise that both sides had needs and no peace was possible without addressing the needs of each side. Peace requires both sides to adjust to reality and to give up their mythologies. Peace does not require either side to surrender their narratives, but it does require them to accept that the other side also has a story that defines its history and identity.
Ami came to understand that. He developed empathy for Palestinians but never lost it for his fellow Israelis, including those who believed he was naive about Palestinian perfidy and who were deeply critical of his efforts to promote peace with the Palestinians after he left the Shin Bet.
The reader will see how, in preparing this book, Ami reaches out to his critics to listen to them and to see if it is possible to build understanding. He speaks to Pinchas Wallerstein, a leader of the settler movement, and makes clear that he believes Israeli settlers have much in common with his parents and the kibbutzim, who also saw themselves as liberating the land of Israel. He feels deeply for the settlers who are forced to leave Gaza as a result of Ariel Sharon’s decision to withdraw and believes that Israelis must welcome them given the trauma they experience in being forced to evacuate their homes, their synagogues, and their cemeteries.
But Ami is not just about promoting peace as a good in and of itself. He is not about trying to do the Palestinians a favor. He is driven by his commitment to Israel and by what he sees as the need to preserve its Zionist ideals of building and preserving a Jewish and democratic state. He sees the drift that is leading Israel to become one state for two people — which will either preserve it as a democracy but not a Jewish state or a Jewish state that is not a democracy. Either way it will lose its character and identity.
He is right about the path Israel is on and its consequences. I may be more willing than he to lay responsibility on Palestinian leadership — first Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas — for failing to build the institutions of statehood and for rejecting peace proposals in 2000 (the Clinton parameters), 2008 (Ehud Olmert’s offer), and 2014 (Obama’s principles). But he is surely right that Israeli leaders after Rabin did much to weaken their Palestinian counterparts and rarely took their needs into account.
Regrettably, with the Trump peace plan, largely shaped by Prime Minister Netanyahu, Israeli needs (practically and psychologically) are met while Palestinian needs (politically and symbolically) are largely ignored. The state offered to Palestinians in the Trump plan does not look like one — and as a result, Palestinians are already giving up on two states and increasingly embracing the principle of one state with a mantra that will resonate internationally: one state, one person, one vote.
Ami wrote this book, this memoir, to try in his words to “reimagine” Israel and its past in the hope that it could yet shape a different future. He wants Israelis to learn the lessons he has; he wants them to see that Palestinians are also a people with an identity and with needs. He wants his fellow Israelis to accept that while the Jewish people have the right to self-determination in a land of their history, it is not an exclusive, absolute right. That is why he believes in two states for two peoples — Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people and Palestine as the nation-state of the Palestinian people.
There are both Israelis and Palestinians who reject that vision. I don’t know how soon Ami’s vision can become a reality — or even whether it will become a reality. But his is a vision, and a book, written by an Israeli patriot who fought with unspeakable courage as a warrior and now continues his fight for the state that he loves.
Dennis Ross
Bethesda, Maryland
May 2020