1. The organizer of the discussion was Professor Mary Kaldor from the London School of Economics, an expert on cosmopolitan democracy.
2. Moshe Dayan later described the deadly cat-and-mouse game this way: “We would send a tractor to plow some area where it wasn’t possible to do anything, in the demilitarized area, and knew in advance that the Syrians would start to shoot. If they didn’t shoot, we would tell the tractor to advance farther, until in the end the Syrians would get annoyed and shoot. And then we would use artillery and later the air force also, and that’s how it was.”
3. Illustrated Dictionary of the Muslim World (New York: Marshall Cavendish 2011), 46.
4. Shachiv Shinan.
5. Other luminaries in the cemetery include Ber Borochov, who used dialectical materialism to justify socialist Zionism; and Berl Katznelson, the intellectual of the labor movement and classic proponent of Syrkin’s secular religion of Zionism as the liberation of our people and our land. His nephew, named after him, was in my class.
6. The monument jolted my memory back to the tragic event my father organized for the tenth anniversary of the parachute mission in 1954.
Abba’s idea was for the four surviving parachutists from the Palmach operation to jump from the plane in a reenactment of their fateful mission. Thousands of people — one newspaper described the gathering as “nearly the whole local aristocracy” — turned up for the event, and the prime minister brought a convoy of senior government officials. Busloads arrived from the archipelago of kibbutzim. Ideological rivals — there were those who considered Ben-Gurion a traitor for disbanding the Palmach, our revolutionary strike force, following the establishment of the state — came together to honor the martyrs. Minutes after we sang the Hatikvah, our national anthem, a two-seater Piper plane carrying the parachutists crashed into the crowd, killing everyone on board and a dozen people on the ground.
7. Ben-Zion Dinur, the official Labor Party historian and the minister of education when I was a boy, summed up the prevailing narrative perfectly: “The Jews were never in the condition of a nation without a land, of a nation lacking a homeland. Even during their period of exile, they were always a robbed and dispossessed nation whose land was plundered and stolen and never ceased to plead and complain about its dispossession and to demand the return of the plundered property.”
8. Our Passover Haggadah celebrated the way Jews, inflamed by the vision of freedom and the vitality of youth, liberated our land: “And we shall cross the stormy seas until we reach you and cling to you. In our blood and toil we shall redeem you until you are entirely ours.”
9. Srulik, sadly, left our kibbutz in the early 1950s because of a squabble pitting his parents and their ideological fellows, Moscow-true communists, against the majority, which included my family, who supported Ben-Gurion’s pro-Western line. Anti-Stalinists like Abba shrugged when some of the communists broke out in a chorus of “The “Internationale” or “The Song of the Hammer,” or when they prayed to “Our Father Stalin Who Art in Moscow.” This mutual toleration of the two camps ended after the Soviet Union cut diplomatic ties with Israel in 1954, and back in Russia the government launched a wave of anti-Zionist show trials, vilifying Israel as a bastion of imperialism. In some kibbutzim this rivalry exploded into fistfights.
10. An operation against military installations at the outpost south of the port in Adabiya.
11. The leaders of the settlement movement were able to exploit an internal struggle in the Labor Party between those who believed in “open borders” (Dayan and Peres) and those who believed in a clear political border (Rabin and Alon). The labor movement invented the “proprietary narrative,” and its attitude toward the settlements was therefore ambivalent.
12. Six died in total: three from the Shayetet and three from Unit 269 (Sayeret Matkal), who arrived in boats in the second wave.
13. This attitude was best captured in the Arab League’s Khartoum conference following the 1967 war. The conference came out with the “The Three Nos”: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel.
14. Rafi Milo was my instructor in a commando course. He left the Flotilla unit. But since most of our fighters were wounded during Green Island, Milo returned to command the operation. Major Shlomo Eshel also returned to service before the operation.
15. Shapira is referring here to the seven laws that, according to some Jewish teaching, even non-Jews are supposed to follow: Establish a legal system and refrain from murder, blasphemy, idolatry, adultery, theft, and eating the flesh of living animals.
16. I read Tuchman in a class at the Kennedy School taught by Professor Herbert Kelman, a Jewish American and an expert on social and psychological perspectives on the resolution of international conflicts.
17. Gil was the director general of the Foreign Ministry under Shimon Peres.
18. The New York Times picked up the story. The title of the article was “Shhh! That’s a (Not Very) Secret.” https://www.nytimes.com/1996/01/14/weekinreview/the-world-shhh-that-s-a-not-very-secret.html.
19. Quoted in chapter 1 of Michael Karpin and Ina Friedman’s Murder in the Name of God: The Plot to Kill Yitzhak Rabin (see http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/first/k/karpin-murder.html).
20. Dror Moreh, The Gatekeepers: Inside Israel’s Internal Security Agency (New York: Skyhorse, 2015), 41.
21. In a region of the world charmed, or cursed, with producing strange and colorful birds, Yossi stood out. In 1986 he was forced out of the Shin Bet because of his role in whitewashing the execution of two Palestinian bus hijackers by Shabak agents. Another of his reputed misdeeds was to torture a false confession out of a Muslim officer in the Israeli army for passing information to the PLO. See Lawrence Joffe, “Yossi Ginossar: Israel’s Secret Envoy to the Palestinians in the Search for Middle East Peace,” Guardian, January 16, 2004.
22. David Remnick, “The Democracy Game: Hamas Comes to Power in Palestine,” New Yorker, February 2006.
23. At the end of the Six-Day War, Matti was a twenty-year-old conscript in the armored corps in Gaza. Our victories, he told me, “swathed” him in a feeling of “transcendence and accomplishment.” Like so many others, Matti assumed “our troubles were over, and henceforth security and peace would prevail.” Bursts of gunfire coming from local Palestinians, however, interrupted this mood of rapture. “I understood that one period in the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict had ended, but another — no less unsettling and demanding — had begun.”
24. General Ephraim Sneh. Yossi Melman, “Hamas: When a Former Client Becomes an Implacable Enemy,” Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1992.
25. His name was Mosab Hassan Yousef. In Mosab’s case, for hours he sat strapped into a chair bolted to the concrete floor, hooded and shivering in a room as cold as a walk-in freezer, his body contorted into the so-called Banana, a painful, humiliating, exhausting position. Mosab went on to become an important asset for us inside Hamas. His experiences are described in his book Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices.
26. Hagai Meirom is a former Israeli politician who served as a member of the Knesset for the Alignment (Labor) Party and the Centre Party between 1988 and 1999.
27. Jodi Rudoren and Jeremy Ashkenas, “Netanyahu and the Settlements,” New York Times, August 18, 2015.
28. James Ciment, World Terrorism: An Encyclopedia of Political Violence (London and New York: Routledge, 2011), 809.
29. The murdered archaeologist was Dr. Albert Glock.
30. Having studied the notion of din rodef, the “law of the pursuer,” in order to understand the theology brandished by the extremist settlement fringe, to my surprise I read in Maimonides that din rodef sounds like something out of Immanuel Kant. Killing the pursuer is only permissible if there is no other option — a situation in which you can’t stop him or can’t otherwise incapacitate him, and if you don’t act, innocent people will die.
31. See Ronan Bergmann, Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations, p. 476 ff Kindle edition
32. In 1997, Netanyahu ordered the Mossad to assassinate the Hamas political leader Khaled Mashal in Jordan. The botched attempt led to the release of the Hamas founder and spiritual leader Sheikh Yassin, weakening Arafat.
33. He served as chief of the General Staff until 1995, when Rabin appointed him Minister of Internal Affairs.
34. Address by Foreign Minister Ehud Barak to the Annual Plenary Session of the National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council on February 11, 1996.
35. Deborah Sontag, “Peace. Period,” New York Times, December 19, 1999.
36. On Fridays, I rarely left the office before hearing Matti’s translation of the Mufti of Jerusalem’s weekly sermon. I feared he would incite a religious war. The Jews and Christians were causing even bigger headaches. Informants helped us round up a particularly violent messianic Jewish gang from Yitzhar with plans to kill Muslims on the Temple Mount during Friday prayers; a different group schemed to toss the heads of pigs into Al Aqsa Mosque. We averted another cataclysm when the FBI gave us information on two Christian fanatics, members of a messianic cult, who planned to go to Al Aqsa, denounce Muslims as hell-bound unbelievers, and announce the Second Coming of Christ. It was effectively a suicide pact — they expected irate worshippers to beat them to death. Fortunately, we stopped them at the airport.
37. Dana Golan, the outgoing director regularly labeled a traitor by members of the Knesset, is a friend of ours, and the man replacing her, Avner Gvaryahu, had already become an object of loathing among right-wing social media.
38. The IDF military brass didn’t even discuss the Shin Bet assessment, made in the first hours of what would come to be called the Second Intifada, that Arafat had nothing to do with it.
39. Many people in the army never believed the sides would come to terms and were bracing for a confrontation. “I’m creating all the necessary conditions so that I can apply force,” said one of the IDF’s top strategists two months before Camp David. “I thrust [Palestinians] into a kind of corner where they have no choice but to do what I expect them to do, and then I react with the force I’ve been preparing.” Quoted in Moreh, Gatekeepers.
40. During my four years as director, we took out ten ticking bombs. The decision to kill someone was never made lightly. Playing God in this way led me to rethink the ethics behind preemptive killing.
Ultimately, I concluded that killing is only permissible if there is no other option — a situation in which you can’t stop him or can’t otherwise incapacitate him, and not acting will leave innocent people to die. Translated into the war on terror, I decided that to kill a terrorist preemptively required fulfilling specific criteria, one of which is that the person is a “ticking bomb.” Lethal violence is permissible only against someone posing an imminent danger to innocent lives, or in our case a terrorist who is literally about to plant a bomb on a bus or in the trunk of a car. If there is no other option, taking out a terrorist is legitimate because the life of an Israeli citizen takes precedence over the life of the person trying to kill him.
41. Ephraim Sneh.
42. Matt Rees, “The Work of Assassins,” Time magazine, January 7, 2001.
43. In Matti’s words, the assassination drove Arafat’s supporters, pragmatists who had once supported Oslo, “mad.”
44. Moreh, Gatekeepers, 305.
45. Another important supporter was Maya Liquornik.
46. Ari Shavit, “Lydda, 1948: A City, a Massacre, and the Middle East Today,” New Yorker, October 14, 2013.
47. A journalist would later ask us about this, picking up on our body language. “People who know Sari,” I said, “know that he keeps his feelings to himself.”
48. The program was run by Daoud Kuttab, an adjunct professor of journalism at Princeton.
49. Sari’s crime was collaborating with Saddam Hussein, who had donated some money to Al Quds University. In the eyes of my government that constituted a high crime.
50. Kibbutz Hazorea.
51. And he had very smart people who agreed with his approach: In those days Ehud Barak, with the help of the historian Benny Morris, wrote in the august New York Review of Books that the world should “treat Arafat and his ilk in the Palestinian camp as the vicious, untrustworthy, unacceptable reprobates and recidivists that they are.”
52. We quoted opinion polls by Shikaki’s PCPSR on the Palestinian side and his Israeli counterpart Shai Feldman consistently showing that 70 percent of Palestinians and Israelis wanted a two-state solution.
53. Aviv Lavie, “The Peoples’ Choice,” Ha’aretz, July 11, 2003.
54. “Wolfowitz Backs Peace Petition,” Jewish Telegraphic Agency, November 3, 2003. In the US we presented a stark message to the Washington Institute’s Special Policy Forum: “Israel must withdraw from the territories. It must do so not because of social, economic, or international values, but rather because the consequence of not withdrawing will be a failure to maintain its vision of a safe, democratic haven for the Jewish people…If Israel creates a situation similar to that seen in apartheid-era South Africa, there will be neither a Palestinian state nor a safe home for the Jewish people. Although Israel does have the right to defend itself, the way in which it is building the wall will harm the prospects for a favorable future.”
55. To fight the wall, Sari assembled a nonviolent force of three hundred ex-militants and supporters of our People’s Voice / Hashd campaign. In the end the government changed the route of the concrete barrier after US national security adviser Condoleezza Rice chimed in.
56. See “The Spooks Speak,” Forward, November 21, 2003.
57. Gideon Alon, “Lieberman Blasted for Suggesting Drowning Palestinian Prisoners,” Haaretz, July 8, 2003.
58. A third factor was the letter signed by twenty-seven reserve pilots in the Israeli air force stating their refusal to fly missions that could endanger Palestinian civilians.
59. Confronted with dissent from within his own Likud Party, Sharon attempted to bring over the naysayers by revealing the deeper political logic behind the disengagement before the Knesset was scheduled to vote on the plan in October after the Jewish High Holidays. Addressing his Likud faction, the prime minister pointed to the People’s Voice as a factor in his decision to remove the Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip.
60. Arafat even instructed Fayyad, his finance minister, to support Sari’s operation with ten thousand dollars a month. Even more significant was that Arafat stood by while Sari accessed Fatah’s sociopolitical infrastructure in every village, city, camp, and university to marshal support.
61. A top Hamas leader in Gaza said about the disengagement that “the painful and qualitative blows which the Palestinian resistance dealt to the Jews and their soldiers over the past four-and-a-half years led to the decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip. The suicide attacks…have taken their tolls on the Jews.” In an essay I wrote: “I am in favor of leaving Gaza but opposing the way we are going about it. A unilateral withdrawal without creating a political horizon will be interpreted as capitulation.”
62. In June, two months before the final evacuation, Biba and I took Rabin’s daughter Dalia to meet Pinchas Wallerstein and his friend Avi Gisser, the chief rabbi of Ofra. We weren’t military, political, or security functionaries issuing warnings or threats; we were fellow citizens, and fellow Jews, talking about matters that went to the core of our identities. Decisions of national importance, such as uprooting settlements, we all agreed should be subject to a national referendum; using people as pawns only leads to at least one party feeling betrayed.
63. Lawyers claimed that Al-Shami had been tortured by the Shabak: put in a freezing cell, handcuffed, shackled to a chair for hours, and “stretched.”
64. Our walls against the Palestinian population centers might save hundreds of Israeli lives from suicide bombers, I said at the time. But world opinion would never accept our actions as legitimate because of the low-budget film Five Broken Cameras, which depicted the Separation Wall cutting off villagers in the West Bank village of Bil’in from their agricultural land. “I film to heal,” says the amateur Palestinian filmmaker in the film. “I know they [the IDF] may knock at my door at any moment. But I’ll just keep filming. It helps me confront life. And survive.”
65. The Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy described a “feeling of nausea and of deep disgust welling up”;” his fellow journalist Chemi Shalev likened watching the film to a “waterboarding of the soul.”
66. An organization I helped found, Blue White Future, failed to get much traction. Some friends of mine asked me to join a group of retired IDF generals and top Shabak and Mossad leaders they called Commanders for Israel’s Security. Never had so many experts, with nine thousand years of security experience among us, come together to deliver a damning assessment of the status quo and an impassioned call for the two-state solution as the only guarantor for Israel’s survival as the democratic home of the Jewish people. This would be like a who’s who among retired five-star US Army generals, along with former heads of the CIA and FBI, warning that the US faced disaster if the government continued its old policy.
67. Chaim quotes Ben-Zion Dinur, the brains behind the education I got on the kibbutz: “For the past two millennia, we were always a robbed and dispossessed nation whose land was plundered and stolen, and we never ceased to plead and complain about its dispossession and to demand the return of the plundered property.”
68. The sequel to Chaim’s A Political Theory for the Jewish People is titled A Just Zionism.