I was suddenly in charge of an intelligence apparatus ranging from Unit 8200, our sophisticated signals collection and decryption unit, to the operational unit: Sayeret Matkal. At stake was success or failure in war, and the life or death of thousands of men on the battlefield. We’d paid the price of intelligence failures painfully in 1973, and again in Lebanon.
Conveniently placed on my new office wall were the photographs of my nine predecessors since 1948 as head of the intelligence directorate, or Rosh Aman in Hebrew. All had come to the role with talent and dedication. All but three had either left under a shadow or been fired. Sometimes this was because of ultimately nonfatal lapses, like a botched mobilization of our reserves in 1959, or the Rotem crisis a few months later. Sometimes, it was lethal failures, like the Yom Kippur War and Lebanon.
I went to see all seven former directors who were still alive. “You know, I used to read the newspapers and listen to the BBC in the car to work,” Shlomo Gazit told me. He was the director I’d worked for in operational intelligence, the one who’d so memorably made the point that we might endanger Israeli security by missing not only the signs of a war, but an opportunity for peace. He was also one of the few to have left office without a blemish. “By the time I got to the kirya, I already knew 80 percent of what I could about what was going on,” he said. “Then I’d spend six or seven hours reading intelligence material, to fill in at least part of the remaining 20 percent.” His message, echoed by my other predecessors, was that the job wasn’t mainly about the raw information. It was what you concluded from the information, what you did with it. It was about judgment.
The intelligence did matter, of course. For all of Israel’s strengths in that area, I knew from my own experience at Sultan Yacoub that there was room to get more, better, and timelier information about our enemies, and make sure it got to the commanders and field units that needed it. While the details of many operations I approved as military intelligence chief remain classified, we did succeed in doing that.
Above all, I set out to apply the lessons of the 1973 and 1982 wars. The intelligence failings had been different in each. In the Yom Kippur War, the problem was not only Eli Zeira’s failure to activate the “special sources” in Egypt, deeply damaging though that had been. It was, indeed, also judgment. Inside Aman, a kind of groupthink had taken hold, rooted in a confident, costly misconception that went unchallenged. It was that Egypt would never risk another war without an air force capable of breaching our defenses and striking towns and cities deep inside Israel. No one pressed the alternative scenario: that Sadat might strike with the full force of his military to achieve more limited territorial objectives and, under cover of his SAM batteries on the other side of the Suez Canal, advance into the Sinai.
In the Lebanon War, the inquiry suggested, Yehoshua Saguy did try to warn the generals, and the government, about major risks. But individual ministers testified that they hadn’t heard, hadn’t been there, or hadn’t understood, leading the inquiry to stress the responsibility of a Rosh Aman to ensure not just that his message was conveyed, but that it was received as well.
I set out to address both problems. I insisted on making all preconceptions within the department open to challenge. I strengthened the role of a unit whose sole function was to play devil’s advocate when a consensus was reached. It began with the opposite conclusion and, through a competing analysis of the data and logical argument, tried to prove it. I also wanted to be challenged on my preconceptions. I assigned a bright young major as my personal intelligence-and-analysis aide. He read everything that crossed my desk and could access any material in the department. “You have no responsibility to agree with any of the analysts, or with me,” I said. “Part of your job is to disagree.”
In the Lebanon War, Saguy had been excluded from some government meetings at which crucial decisions were made. That was out of his control. I didn’t want it to be out of mine. I raised the issue with Begin in our first meeting. “If you want to get the maximum value from your head of intelligence,” I said, “you should make sure he’s there not just after, but when decisions are made.” But he was now only months from leaving office, exhausted by the war and its aftermath. He waved his hand weakly in response, as if to say none of it mattered. His successor, in October 1983, was Foreign Minister Yitzhak Shamir. Ideologically, he was cut from the same cloth: an advocate from the 1940s of securing a Jewish state in all of Palestine, by whatever force necessary. He’d broken with Begin’s pre-state Irgun militia to set up a group called Lehi, which went further and carried out political assassinations: the 1944 killing of Lord Moyne, Britain’s minister for Middle East affairs, and four years later the United Nations envoy, Count Folke Bernadotte.
“Why are you so strident,” Shamir asked me, only half-jokingly, after I’d insisted on joining a government discussion and pressing several intelligence matters. “It’s because I’ve read the Lebanon inquiry,” I replied. “I saw what happened when a message isn’t delivered assertively. I’m not going to be in the position of making the same mistakes.” He nodded, and didn’t raise it again.
In fact, it was under Shamir that I began to get more involved with political and policy issues beyond the armed forces. Part of this came with the job of Rosh Aman. There was hardly a major domestic or foreign challenge that did not have some security component, and no security matter in which intelligence was not critical. I also found myself working more closely with leading politicians: mainly Shamir and Misha Arens, who as defense minister was my main point of contact. Since I came from a Labor kibbutz, we made an odd threesome. Arens was also a lifelong Jabotinsky Zionist. He had been in the movement’s Betar youth organization in America before going to Palestine in 1948 and joining the Irgun. It was with Misha’s personal backing that one of my former Sayeret Matkal officers—the son of a Jabotinsky acolyte—had recently taken his first steps into the political limelight: after a two-year stint as Israel’s number two diplomat in Washington, Bibi Netanyahu had become our ambassador to the United Nations.
I built a solid relationship with both Arens and Shamir, and it would deepen further when I moved on to a wider role in the kirya a few years later. They were straight talkers. While resolute about decisions once they’d taken them, they were genuinely open to discussion and debate. I also sometimes found a surprising degree of nuance behind their tough exteriors.
The toughness was there, however. One of the first major security crises we faced after Shamir became prime minister was known as the Kav 300 affair, named for the bus route between the southern port city of Ashdod and Tel Aviv. On the evening of April 12, 1984, four Palestinians from Gaza boarded the bus and hijacked it back toward the border with Egypt. They told the passengers they were armed with knives, as well as a suitcase containing unexploded anti-tank shells. After a high-speed chase, an Israeli army unit managed to shoot out the tires and disable the vehicle about ten miles short of Gaza. One of the passengers had been severely injured at the start. A number of others managed to escape when the bus was stopped. But several dozen remained inside.
I was in Europe at the time, on one of my periodic trips to discuss Middle East issues with a fellow intelligence chief. When an aide called me with the news, I knew there was every possibility Sayeret Matkal might be called in, and my instincts told me we should proceed with caution. The situation we were facing felt nothing like Sabena, much less Entebbe. Here, we had a single bus. Our troops, and in fact everyone from ministers and officials to reporters and photographers, were in a loose cordon a couple of dozen yards away. That said to me there was no sense that the hijackers posed an immediate danger. Nor did they seem to have come equipped for a major confrontation. In place of the AK-47s and grenades we’d seen in previous terror attacks, these guys had knives and, if they were to be believed, a couple of shells with no obvious way to detonate them.
I phoned a friend in the command post set up near the stranded bus. He told me that both Misha Arens and Moshe Vechetzi, the chief of staff, were there. There was a standoff with the terrorists and, for now, it was quiet. The defense minister and the chief of staff, of course, did not need my presence, much less my agreement, to order the sayeret into action. But I said, why not wait? Though the last flights back to Israel had already left, I could be at the command post by midmorning. Beyond wanting to be present if the sayeret was ordered in, I believed the crisis might even be brought to an end without another shot being fired. “I’ll tell them what you said,” my friend replied. “But I doubt it’ll be allowed to drag on much past daybreak.”
He was right. With my Chinese Farm comrade Yitzhik Mordechai in overall command, Sayeret Matkal stormed the bus at about seven in the morning. They shot and killed two of the hijackers immediately, through the vehicle’s windows. Sadly one of the passengers, a young woman soldier, died in the assault, but the rest of the hostages were freed, none with serious injuries.
A controversy soon erupted over what came next. The sayeret commandos had captured the other two terrorists alive and uninjured. Yet barely a week later, first in an American newspaper and then the Israeli media, reports emerged that the two surviving Palestinians had been killed after the hijacking was over. A year later, Yitzhik Mordechai was—wrongly—put on trial for his alleged part in what had amounted to a summary execution. And, rightly, exonerated. Though the full details never became public, the people responsible turned out to be from the Shin Bet, our equivalent of the FBI.
Weeks later, Misha Arens mentioned Kav 300 in one of our regular meetings. It was not so much a statement of what should or shouldn’t have happened, but a show of genuine puzzlement. “How can it be,” he asked, “when there is a real fight, an operation in which our soldiers are shooting, that terrorists come out alive?” The answer, to me, was simple: the norms that governed Sayeret Matkal. From our earliest days, there was an understanding that you used whatever force necessary in order to make an operation successful, including a readiness to kill without hesitation if you had to. Yet once the aim had been achieved—in this case, eliminating the danger to the passengers—it was over. I am convinced that Misha wouldn’t have contemplated actually ordering the sayeret, or any Israeli army unit, to kill all the terrorists, even at a point when they no longer posed a risk. I’m equally convinced there was a tacit assumption on the ground that Misha’s view, and Shamir’s as well, was that if that happened, it would be no bad thing. Nor were they alone in feeling that way. At least some senior officers seemed similarly minded.
* * *
By the summer of 1984, Shamir and Arens appeared in danger of losing their jobs. Israel’s next election, the first since the Lebanon War, was due in July. Just as the trauma of the 1973 war had helped Begin end Likud’s three decades in opposition, the polls and the pundits were now suggesting that Shimon Peres might bring Labor back to power. There was no prospect he’d win an outright majority in the 120-seat Knesset. Nor would the Likud do so. No one ever had, not even Ben-Gurion in his political heyday. From 1948, Israel’s political landscape had been populated by at least a dozen or so parties, mostly a reflection of the various Zionist and religious groups before the state was established. The dominant party always needed to make deals with some of the smaller ones to get the required sixty-one-vote parliamentary majority and form a government.
But the Likud’s position as the largest Knesset party now looked vulnerable. It was partly domestic concerns that were eroding its support. Under Begin’s turbocharged version of Milton Friedman economics, an economic boom had given way to runaway inflation and a stock market crash. Lebanon, however, was the main issue, and it remained a running political sore. Bashir Gemayel’s brother, Amin Gemayel, had become president. But Israel still had large numbers of troops there. And while most of the PLO fighters had gone, we faced a new and potentially even more intractable enemy in the south of the country. When our invasion began, the area’s historically disadvantaged Shi’ite Muslim majority had been the one group besides the Christians that might benefit. The PLO rocket and artillery bases had disrupted their lives and, worse, placed them in the line of our retaliatory fire. Some of the Shi’ite villages in the south even greeted our invading units with their traditional welcome, showering them with perfumed grains of rice. But for a new Shi’ite militia calling itself Hizbollah—formed after the invasion and inspired by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran—our continuing military presence was anathema. In November 1983, Hizbollah signaled its intentions when a truck bomber drove into a building being used as our military headquarters in the south Lebanese city of Tyre, killing more than sixty people.
In spite of Labor’s seeming advantage, the election ended up as a near tie. Peres did lead Labor back into top spot for the first time since Begin’s victory in 1977. But he got only forty-four seats, to the Likud’s forty-one. After weeks of horse-trading with smaller parties, he could not form a government. Neither could Shamir. The result, for the first time in peacetime, was a national-unity coalition, including both main parties. Peres would be prime minister for the first two years, and Shamir the final two. But the stipulation of most relevance to me was the one man who would be the defense minister throughout the four years: Yitzhak Rabin.
My relationship with Rabin went back much further than with Misha. I’d first met him when I was a sayeret soldier. I’d interacted with him more as a young sayeret officer, and of course during Entebbe. Now, we began to work even more closely, and the main challenge in his early months as defense minister was what to do about our troops in Lebanon. We had been pulling back gradually and were now more or less on the twenty-five-mile line that Sharon had claimed was the point of the invasion. But even this was costing us lives, with no obvious benefit from controlling a large slab of territory on which nearly half a million Lebanese lived. A decision was now reached to shrink our “security zone” further and pull back to a border area ranging from about three to six miles, south of the Litani River.
I argued strongly in favor of getting out altogether. I accepted that the security zone might help impede cross-border raids. But the remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas, with a range of up to twelve miles, and they could fire rockets over the security zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with between 1,000 and 1,500 Israeli troops in open alliance with a local Maronite Christian–led militia called the South Lebanon Army. That was a recipe for conflict with the non-Christian majority in the south. I tried to persuade Rabin we should withdraw all the Israeli soldiers and coordinate security arrangements with the equivalent of a local civil-defense guard. I suggested four separate militias drawn from the local population—Christian, Shi’ite Muslim, Druse, and ethnically mixed—with the aim of reflecting the balance in each part of the south.
Israeli troops might still have to cross into Lebanon, but only for brief, targeted operations to preempt preparations for a terror attack. “We need to remember what we’re there for,” I said. “We have no territorial claims. It’s to protect the north of Israel. But it will end up being about protecting our own troops inside the security zone. It will be like the Bar-Lev Line in 1973, fighting for fortifications we don’t need.” I couldn’t persuade him. When a terrorist unit launched a raid across the border, or Katyushas next fell on northern Israel, he as minister of defense, not I, would be the one in the political firing line.
Far from straining our relations, our frank exchanges on Lebanon seemed to build further trust between us. We worked closely on a range of issues. When Sayeret Matkal planned an operation across our borders, both of us would present the action to the cabinet. During the operations, I’d be either in the kirya or a forward command post. Since nearly all of them happened after nightfall, Yitzhak would usually be back home, asleep, by the time they ended. I would phone him. The trademark voice—slow, gravelly, deep even when he was wide awake—would answer. I’d tell him the mission was over and—with only one exception during my period as head of intelligence—successful. “Todah,” he would say. “Lehitraot.” Thanks. Bye. He was never a man to waste words.
For one of the very few times I can remember, he phoned me one morning in October 1985 to discuss our strategy in response to Palestinian terror. It was a couple of days after an especially gruesome Palestinian terror attack. Even with Arafat now more than a thousand miles away in Tunis, much of Rabin’s focus was taken up in responding to, or trying to preempt, Palestinian terrorism. The issue was especially sensitive politically in the wake of the Lebanon War, which was supposed to have eliminated that threat. For Rabin, moreover, it had become personal. He’d had to sanction an unprecedented exchange of 1,150 Palestinian security prisoners earlier in the year to secure the freedom of three Israeli soldiers, including one of our men from Sultan Yacoub, who had ended up in the hands of the radical Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command after the Lebanon War. Now a group from another of the radical factions, the Palestine Liberation Front, had hijacked an Italian cruise ship called the Achille Lauro en route from Egypt to Israel. They had murdered one of the passengers, a wheelchair-bound, sixty-nine-year-old Jewish American named Leon Klinghoffer, and dumped his body overboard.
Rabin’s closest aide, Eitan Haber, whom I knew well, was aware that Unit 8200 had intercepts that laid bare the details, and left no doubt the murderers were from a PLO group. He called me the next day and asked me to appear on a weekly television interview program called Moked. It was hosted by Nissim Mishal: brash, incisive, and one of Israel’s best-known broadcast journalists. I pointed out to Haber that I’d never done anything like this before, but he insisted it would go well. We talked through the questions I could expect, not just about the Achille Lauro but the wider issue of Palestinian attacks, as well as Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s efforts to reequip his air force after his losses in Lebanon. So I came to the interview well prepared. I brought audio tapes of the hijackers and a large photograph of MiG-25s, which the Syrians were seeking to acquire.
My appearance will not go down in the annals of great moments in television. But at the time, very few Israelis even knew who I was, and I felt I’d done OK. I was surprised, however, when Rabin phoned the next day. “Ehud, I didn’t see it. I was attending some event,” he said. But his wife, Leah, had recorded the program. “I just watched it. I should tell you, I think it was exceptional. You did a great job. It was highly important for us, for the army, and, I dare say, for you.”
* * *
I was not sure what he meant by saying it might be good for me as well. It is true that there was some politics at the upper reaches of the military, especially around the choice of chief of staff, and Moshe Vechetzi’s term had only a year and a half to go. But I didn’t view myself as a serious candidate at this stage. Moshe’s own preference seemed to be Amir Drori, the head of the northern command during the Lebanon War. My own view was that the nod should go to Dan Shomron.
I had first got to know Dan well in the late sixties after Karameh, Israel’s costly standoff with Arafat, when Fatah’s influence was in its infancy. We’d exchanged impressions on what had gone wrong, and why. When I became commander of Sayeret Matkal, we remained in touch, and he took a close interest in all of our operations. We also crossed paths in the Sinai in 1973: Dan’s division was key in stanching the Egyptian advance in the first days of the war, later inflicted heavy losses on one of Sadat’s armored forces, and was part of the final push on the other side of the canal. And, of course, during Entebbe. Dan had sharp tactical instincts, a belief in the importance of using new technology to gain and sustain an edge, and an openness to unconventional approaches. Faced with a challenge in planning or executing an operation, he looked at it from all sides, determined to come up with the right approach, not always the expected one. In a lot of these ways, we were similar, which was no doubt one reason our relationship had grown closer as he and I—six years younger, and a step or two behind—rose up the ranks.
In fact, Dan was the reason I’d made one of my rare forays into kirya politics not long after Moshe Vechetzi took over as chief of staff, when Misha Arens was still defense minister. I acted to derail what seemed to me a blatant attempt by Moshe to advance Drori’s prospects for eventual succession as chief of staff, and to take Dan out of the contest altogether.
I was sitting at my desk on the third floor when the chief of internal army security, a colonel named Ben-Dor, walked into my office. “Listen,” he said, “the chief of staff has a right to give me a direct order in cases where he thinks there is a need for a special investigation. But you’re my commander, so I wanted to let you know.”
“What is it?” I asked.
He replied that he had been ordered to “check out rumors that Dan Shomron is a homosexual.”
I was appalled. The whole thing stank, on every level, and not just because I thought the “rumors” were nonsense. “Look,” I said, “I have no idea whether some sub-clause in army regulations allows the chief of staff to give you orders over my head. But even if it does, I’m ordering you to do nothing until I talk to Moshe.” He nodded in agreement. In fact, he seemed relieved. He also let me know that the source of the rumors was a number of senior officers, including a couple of generals.
I went straight downstairs and into the chief of staff’s office. Moshe was at his desk, smoking a cigarette. One of the advantages he had in being nearly a foot taller than most of us was that I found myself looking not into his eyes, but up at them. “Moshe,” I said, “Ben-Dor told me you’ve ordered him to investigate a rumor that Dan Shomron is a homosexual.” He said nothing, so I went on. “I’ve told him not to do it. And I’ve come here to convince you that it’s improper.” This was more than thirty years ago, at a time when being gay, and certainly being gay in the armed forces, was a much bigger deal than now. But I still believed this amounted to a witch hunt.
Moshe still said nothing. “I have no idea whether Dan is or is not a homosexual. After knowing him for years, I have no reason at all to believe that he is. But let’s assume, for a moment, that he is,” I said. “He’s not some junior lieutenant … This is a man who has risked his life for Israel. Repeatedly. Under fire.” Then, I got to the real issue. “I hesitate to mention this, but if you order this, the very fact of doing so might be interpreted as being a result of some other motives on your part. I’m doing my best to convince you to think again. But I want you to know that if I can’t, I’m going from here to Misha’s office. I’ll try to convince him of the damage from what you’re contemplating to the whole fabric of trust in the general staff and the army.” Still, he said nothing, only nodding occasionally as he puffed on his cigarette, put it out, and lit another one. It was clear he had no intention of rescinding his order.
Within twenty minutes, I was in the minister of defense’s office. I spoke to him for about ten minutes. Misha listened. At the end, he said only, “I understand what you’ve told me.” I never discovered what exactly he said to Moshe Vechetzi. But the investigation never happened. I never spoke a word about any of it to Dan until years later, after both of us had left the army.
The result, however, was that Dan became deputy chief of staff under Moshe, the latest step in what was beginning to look like a steady rise to the top. But Misha did make a few concessions to Moshe’s preferred candidates, and that now turned out to have major implications for me. It was a long-accepted practice that chiefs of staff had more than one deputy during their period in charge. In the homestretch of Moshe’s tenure, he was able to bring in Amir Drori for a spell as his number two. Early in 1986, he also brought Amnon Lipkin back to the kirya. Amnon was given my job, as director of intelligence. But I got the post that Amnon was leaving: head of the central command. This meant that, for the first time, I would be in charge of one of Israel’s three regional military commands, and we were based on the edge of Jerusalem, with security responsibility for the West Bank.
This was my first direct exposure to the combustible mix of restive Palestinians and the growing number of Jewish settlers. Our main brief was to prevent terror attacks, violence, or unrest from the roughly 850,000 West Bank Palestinians toward the 50,000 Israelis who were then living in the settlements. It was now two decades since our capture of the territory in the Six-Day War. By far most of the Palestinians were not involved in any violence. They were mainly interested in getting on with their lives. Yet there were signs of trouble. The PLO leaders’ relocation to Tunis had reduced their direct influence, but the briefings I got from Shin Bet officers made it clear that some young West Bankers had begun trying to organize attacks against police, soldiers, and Israeli civilians. The settlements were also growing in number, and an ideologically driven minority of their residents were not above acts of violence against Palestinians.
Further complicating the situation was the fact that the settlement enterprise enjoyed the support of key Likud members in the cabinet: Shamir, who was about to take his turn as prime minister in October 1986; Misha, now a minister without portfolio; and most of all Arik Sharon. In a demonstration of resilience, Arik had remained as a minister without portfolio when Shamir succeeded Menachem Begin. In the unity government, he had become minister of trade and industry. As agriculture minister under Begin, Sharon had been a major force in plans to expand Jewish settlement on the West Bank. There had been some settlements before then, in the decade of Labor government following the 1967 war, but on a fairly limited scale. Almost all of them were planned for areas away from major Palestinians towns. The two exceptions were Kiryat Arba, near Hebron, and Gush Etzion, not far from Bethlehem. Both were acts with deliberate symbolic significance. Hebron had been the site of a massacre of its Jewish residents in 1929. And nearly 130 of the Jews of Gush Etzion were killed in May 1948. Both were also areas where Jews had lived, owned property, and flourished before 1948. Arik’s settlement vision was the polar opposite of Labor’s. After the peace agreement with Sadat, he, like Begin, was determined to prevent the envisaged “Palestinian autonomy” on the West Bank from ever becoming a Palestinian state. So he proceeded to encircle all of the main Arab towns with new rings of settlements.
I had a responsibility to protect the settlers, and I did my best to fulfill it. Yet it was essential they understood that they were subject to the authority of the State of Israel and, like other Israeli citizens, had to operate within the law. This was no mere theoretical problem. A Jewish underground had been established by members of Gush Emunim, the Orthodox Jewish movement set up in the 1970s to advance what they saw as a divinely mandated mission to settle the West Bank. It had carried out car bombings and other attacks in the early 1980s, leaving two Palestinian mayors crippled for life. The terror campaign had ended only when the Shin Bet caught the cell placing explosives under Arab-owned buses in Jerusalem.
Hopeful of preventing misunderstandings, and ideally building a relationship of trust, I visited many of the settlements during the early weeks in my new post and spoke with their leaders, a few of whom remain friends to this day. But in the spring of 1986, we faced our first major test on the ground. In a pre-Passover event organized by Gush Emunim, some 10,000 settlers streamed into Hebron, a city sacred to both Jews and Muslims, as well as the burial place of Hebrew patriarchs and matriarchs. Peace Now activists had planned a counterprotest, but Rabin denied them permission. Still, antisettlement members of the Knesset and other Israeli peace activists did get clearance to march from Jerusalem to Hebron.
My job was to ensure the security not just of the Gush Emunim march but of the counterdemonstrators and, of course, the local Palestinian population. As the rival marches by the Israelis proceeded, I personally delivered warnings against any violence, both to the settlement leaders and to a pair of the most prominent counterprotesters, the peace activist Uri Avneri and Knesset member Yossi Sarid. The event went off without major incident. But the next day, Davar, the venerable Labor newspaper I’d first read as a child in Mishmar Hasharon, let rip against me. Under a photo of me with Avneri and Sarid—my arm raised, ostensibly in some kind of threat but actually in the time-honored Jewish practice of talking with my hands—the article accused me of siding with the settlers. If blood was spilled in the weeks and months ahead, the newspaper said, “it will be on Barak’s hands.”
Ordinarily, I would have ignored it. But never in my military career had I been similarly attacked on an issue of any importance. I was especially angry because not only was the insinuation unfounded, it was diametrically opposite to the stance I was determined to take in this, my first regional command. Yes, I was committed to providing security for the settlers. But I was determined to ensure they remained within the boundaries of the law.
A few days later, I called Eitan Haber and asked to see the defense minister. I was told to come see him after Saturday lunch at his home. When I arrived, Rabin got right down to business. “Ehud, you wanted to see me?”
“You’ve probably seen Davar,” I replied. “It was a pretty nasty piece. It distorted things.”
Yet as he asked for details, it seemed he had no idea what I was talking about. “Ehud, I never read it,” he said. “If you hadn’t told me, I’d never have known there was an issue.” I assumed this was a white lie, told to reassure me. But years later, when I was minister of defense, and then prime minister, I sometimes found myself on the other side of such meetings. An officer or official would come see me because of something said about them in the media, or remarks they were quoted as having made. When I told them I’d been unaware of it, I could see the disbelief in their eyes. By then, however, I realized that under the multiple demands of a senior role in government, you really could fail to notice events that others viewed as crucial to their reputations. To reassure them I truly hadn’t noticed, I’d tell them the story of my meeting with Rabin.
* * *
There was another, slightly less noble, reason I wanted to set the record straight with Rabin. Though only gradually did I admit this even to myself, I realized that my experience in a regional command had ticked the one missing box in the CV of our top generals, meaning that I might indeed be a candidate to succeed Moshe Vechetzi as chief of staff. At first, I resisted taking the prospect too seriously. The job of ramatkal carried responsibility for overall command of the armed forces. Since our country still faced multiple security threats, the chief of staff was, along with prime minister and defense minister, among the most important, influential, and visible positions in Israeli public life. As the April 1987 date for the changeover drew nearer, Israeli media reports, and officers’ small talk, suggested that Rabin had whittled down the possibilities to two: Dan Shomron, and me.
It was only when Rabin phoned me early in 1987 that I knew this was true—and that I would not be getting the job. “Ehud,” he said, “I wanted you to know I’ve decided on Dan to be the next ramatkal. I want you to be his deputy.” I can’t say I was surprised. Dan was more experienced. He was also older; missing out on the top job this time would surely mean missing out for good. Yitzhak had always valued Dan’s directness and honesty, his courage and record of service. Above all, I’d long sensed that he felt a special debt to Dan: for Entebbe. At a time when so much could have gone wrong, it was Dan who had taken a firm, confident, successful hold on the operation.
Still, I was now forty-five, and there was no guarantee I’d be chosen as chief of staff the next time around. “I respect your decision,” I told Rabin. “And I have no doubt Dan will be a good—a very good—chief of staff.” But I had to consider my own future. “Even though I’m grateful for the offer of deputy,” I said. “I think it’s better for me to leave. To open up a new chapter, and do something else in life.”
Rabin said he couldn’t accept that. “Come see me,” he said. “Now.” When I got to Jerusalem, I emphasized again that I had no doubt Dan would lead the armed forces well. But I said my decision to leave the military wasn’t a mere whim. I had been thinking about my own future and my family’s. We had three young daughters. A few months earlier, we had moved home again, into a wide, one-story rambler with a big yard out back. It was in a new town called Kochav Yair, just inside Israel’s pre-1967 border with the West Bank, and it struck me as a good time to settle down in a way that would be impossible if I stayed on in the upper reaches of the military. Perhaps I’d do something more academic, in a university or a policy think tank, or explore the idea of getting involved in business.
For the first time, politics had some appeal, too, though I didn’t say this to him. At that point, I had no idea how, or even whether, I might get involved. But since my appearance on Moked, others seemed to assume it might happen at some stage. Out of nowhere, a leading political journalist, Hanan Kristal, had written a story in the newspaper Hadashot in 1986 purporting to predict the successors to Israel’s political old guard: Peres and Rabin in Labor, Begin and Shamir in the Likud. The paper ran side-by-side photos of the ostensible future leaders, doctored to look older, who Hanan predicted would go head-to-head in the election of 1996, a decade away. One was Israel’s ambassador to the UN and a protégé of Misha Arens: Bibi Netanyahu. The other was me.
Rabin listened with patience but remained firm that I should stay and become Dan’s deputy. In the end, I agreed I’d think things over and that we’d talk in a week’s time. In the meantime, I went to see two veteran generals who had found themselves in a similar situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer Weizman. I visited Arik on his farm and found him, and his expanding girth, settled on a sofa in the living room. I filled him in on my conversation with Rabin. “I’m considering leaving,” I said. “It just seems like a long time to wait, even if I do get the job after Dan. There’s a lot else I want to do in life.”
Arik was probably the general most experienced in being denied the chief of staff’s office. On at least two occasions, he might reasonably have been considered. But in a career littered with tense encounters with his superiors, it never happened. “You should stay on,” he said. “You’re not that old. It’ll probably be good for you, and the army, to be deputy and then chief.” The only further advice he gave me was to do all I could formally to commit Yitzhak to making me Dan’s successor after his term ended.
I visited Ezer at his home in the seaside town of Caesarea. We sat on the terrace, with Ezer’s gangly frame stretched out in one of the cane chairs. “Ehud, if you stay, do you think you have a good chance of being the next ramatkal?” he asked. I said that while nothing could be certain, I thought there was a good chance. He replied without hesitation: “Then stay.” He’d come close to the top job, he told me. On the eve of the Six-Day War, when Rabin had collapsed physically from the weeks of tension, Yitzhak had asked him to take over. He’d said no. But he said he’d always believed he could and should have been chief of staff—and that if he hadn’t left to go into politics, he still might have got the job. Then, suddenly, he shouted, “Reuma!” When his wife appeared, he said, “Tell Barak the missing piece in my life, the one I’ve never stopped regretting.” She smiled and said, “It’s the fact you did not become ramatkal.”
I saw Rabin a couple of days later. Though I’d pretty much decided to take the deputy’s job, I was still bothered by the prospect of serving as deputy for the next four years only to find someone else being named chief of staff. I knew that no matter what assurances Yitzhak gave me, there was no way of being sure. He did say he viewed me as the natural next-in-line. But I still felt hesitant. “I want you to consider two things,” I said. The first was a formal decision that Dan would have only a single deputy during his time as chief of staff. He said yes to that. Yet the second request was going to be even more difficult. Heartening though it was to hear I was Dan’s “natural successor,” I asked him to put it in writing. It was not that I doubted his word. But if the surprise result of the last election was any indication, there was no way of predicting which party would be in power when Dan’s term ended. I wanted him to keep a record for himself of our understanding in his desk and pass it on if someone else was defense minister by that time. Without a moment’s hesitation, he took out a piece of paper and wrote down exactly what he’d told me about the succession. He shook my hand as I left. “You’ve made the right decision,” he said.
And I had, even though Dan and I—and Rabin too—would soon face by far the most difficult challenge in Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians since our capture of the West Bank and Gaza in the 1967 war.