Rabin had inherited a peace process, put in motion by the Bush administration after the Gulf War. But since both Prime Minister Shamir and Arab leaders had reasons of procedure, politics, or principle to resist the talks, merely getting them off the ground had required the same combination of deftness and determination President Bush had brought to assembling his wartime coalition against Saddam. After a formal opening session in Madrid at the end of October 1991, the “bilateral tracks”—between Israel and negotiators from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the Palestinians—had stalemated and stalled.
Yitzhak came to my office saying he was not interested in a peace process, which seemed to him a license for endless talk with no set endpoint, but in peacemaking. Since I had the good fortune to be part of the informal inner circle with which he discussed the potential opportunities, pitfalls, and frustrations along the way, I know that he didn’t assume we would succeed in achieving a peace agreement with any of our neighbors. But after the twin shocks of the Lebanon War and the Scud missiles, he was concerned that Israel would retreat into a mix of inward-looking political caution and military deterrence that he believed was understandable, important as far as it went, but shortsighted. He was convinced that we needed at least to try to seize a “window of opportunity” with those enemies who were at least open to compromise, if only because we were facing new threats from enemies for whom talk was not even an option. An increasingly assertive Iran, with nuclear ambitions, was one. But the intifada had also thrown up new Palestinian groups grounded not in nationalism, but fundamentalist Islam: Hamas in Gaza, which opposed Israel’s presence on any part of “Muslim Palestine,” and Islamic Jihad on the West Bank. And in Lebanon, we were confronting the Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia fighters of Hizbollah.
Each of us in the small group on whom Rabin relied for input on the peace talks brought something different to the mix. In addition to me, there were four other generals: Uri Saguy, the head of military intelligence; Gadi Zohar, in charge of civil administration for the West Bank; my deputy chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin; and my former sayeret deputy, Danny Yatom, who was now head of the central command. Also included were longtime political and media aide Eitan Haber, and another trusted political adviser thousands of miles away: Itamar Rabinovich, our ambassador in Washington and Israel’s leading Syria expert. But I’m sure we weren’t chosen just for our insights. It was because we were people with whom Rabin felt comfortable—a counterpoint, I suspect, to the old Labor Party rival whom he had made foreign minister, Shimon Peres. Though the two men had grown to respect each other over the years, Rabin neither trusted, nor much liked, Shimon. In fact, though Peres’s support inside Labor had secured him the Foreign Ministry, Rabin had stipulated that all peace talks would remain under his control.
As I would discover nearly a decade later, even the most carefully planned negotiating strategies were subject to setbacks, diversions, or simply what former British prime minister Harold Macmillan once called “events, dear boy, events.” Rabin’s initial plan was to start not with the Palestinians, but with Syria. President Assad was obstinate, and publicly opposed to the idea of making peace with Israel. But he had been in power for more than two decades and, crucially for Rabin, had lived up to the few, indirect agreements Israel had made with him. The substance in any agreement, though politically difficult, was also more straightforward. We knew what Assad wanted: the recovery of the Golan Heights, in return for the absolute minimum level of political normalization with Israel. We knew what we needed in such an agreement: security guarantees and assurances regarding water resources, and a full and final peace treaty. For Rabin, there was an additional attraction in beginning with Syria: if we did reach a deal with our main Arab enemy, the pressure would intensify on the Palestinians to follow suit. It might well also open the way to peace with Lebanon.
In one respect, the prospects for a deal with the Palestinians looked slightly better than before. Yasir Arafat’s political position had been weakened: first by an intifada, which was driven as much by local insurgents as by the PLO in faraway Tunis; then by his ill-judged decision to break with his longtime Arab Gulf financial supporters and side with Saddam Hussein in the Gulf War. In 1988, as the entry price for a formal dialogue with the Bush administration, he had also agreed to a statement in which he renounced terrorism and accepted the principle of a two-state peace agreement with Israel. Still, there remained a yawning gap between the “self-rule” envisaged in the Camp David accords of 1978 and the Madrid conference on one hand, and the independent state the Palestinians wanted. Rabin’s inclination to focus first on Syria was because he assumed that negotiations with the Palestinians were likely to be fraught and long.
* * *
The dramatic turn of events that ultimately forced him to change tack got under way in January 1993 in the sitting room of a villa outside Oslo, at an ostensible “academic seminar” convened by the Norwegian diplomat Terje Rød-Larsen. It included two Israeli academics: Yair Hirschfeld and the historian and former Haaretz journalist Ron Pundak. Three PLO officials were there, led by Arafat’s closest economic and political aide, Abu Ala’a. Though both of the Israelis were friends of Yossi Beilin, a protégé of Peres and our deputy foreign minister, even Peres didn’t know about the meeting until Yossi told him the following day. Rabin knew an hour later. I first learned of it from Uri Saguy. At first, even Peres was skeptical that the paper agreed on at the “seminar”—calling for international aid to the West Bank and Gaza along the lines of the Marshall Plan, and an initial Israeli withdrawal limited to Gaza—would lead to serious negotiations. But Rabin authorized follow-up sessions in mid-February, late March, and again in April. Our intelligence teams continued to provide detail and occasional color. The burly, bearded Yair Hirschfeld was “the Bear.” The slighter Ron Pundak was “the Mouse.” Yet the main political impetus in driving the process forward came from two men who were not there: on our side, Yossi Beilin, and for the Palestinians, Arafat’s trusted diplomatic adviser and eventual successor, Mahmoud Abbas, also known as Abu Mazen.
Since Rabin knew I was following the ostensibly secret talks, we discussed them often. For quite a while, he remained dismissive. He believed the chances of a breakthrough were remote. He was also suspicious of the involvement of Peres and Beilin, whom he called “Shimon’s poodle.” And he deeply distrusted Arafat. The PLO had been founded with the aim of “liberating” every inch of Palestine. The fact that Arafat had agreed to the Bush administration’s demand to accept the principle of land for peace struck Rabin as mere sleight of hand.
By the third Oslo meeting, it was clear that the Palestinians were in fact open to an agreement that would fall well short of “liberating Palestine.” Still, Rabin was leery. He tried briefly to return the focus to the stalemated Madrid-track talks with the Palestinians. Yet when, with obvious PLO encouragement, the Palestinian negotiators stood their ground there, he seemed almost resigned to supporting Oslo. When we discussed it, he used a battlefield metaphor. “When you have to break through, you don’t necessarily know where you’ll succeed. You try several places along the enemy’s lines. In the sector of the front where you do succeed, you send in your other forces.” It was a matter of “reinforcing success.”
“It’s the opposite in this case,” I replied. “In a battle, the enemy is doing everything it can to stop you. When you break through, it’s against their resistance. Here, the other side will choose to make it easiest for us in the place it prefers. If Arafat thinks he’ll get more from the Bear and the Mouse than from the other talks, it’s hardly a surprise we’re finding that only Oslo seems to offer a way forward.”
Rabin made one more move, not so much in a bid to end the talks in Oslo as to slow them down and create a context more favorable for the kind of agreement he wanted. He reverted to his original peacemaking priority: the Syrians. In an effort to remove a roadblock to even beginning serious talks, he offered the Americans what they would later call his “pocket deposit.” He authorized Secretary of State Warren Christopher to tell Assad that Washington’s understanding of our position was that, assuming all our own negotiating concerns were met, we accepted that peace with Syria would include withdrawing from the Golan. Rabin didn’t tell Peres or other ministers about it, though Itamar Rabinovich knew. I did as well. Since acceptance of the need for a withdrawal had security implications, Rabin and I discussed the issues in detail, and formulated the “deposit” together. We used an English acronym: IAMNAM, “if all my needs are met.” The point was to convey to the Syrian president that if he addressed our requirements for a demilitarized zone and early-warning facilities; noninterference with our critically important water sources; and a full peace including embassies, open borders, and joint economic projects, we knew the trade-off would be to return the Golan.
It was by diplomatic accident that the Syrian overture went nowhere. The reason even the Americans had called our proposal a “pocket deposit” was that it was to be kept in Christopher’s pocket, to be pulled out as an American understanding of our position if he felt it might lead to a breakthrough. But Christopher ended up presenting it as a straight message from Rabin to the Syrian president, giving it the status of Israel’s new, formal opening position in negotiations.
The distinction may seem minor. But for Israel, it mattered greatly. In any agreement with Syria—or, indeed, the Palestinians—there was bound to be an imbalance. Both parts of a land-for-peace exchange were important. But land was not just the more tangible asset. Once given up, short of resorting to all-out war, there was no claiming it back. The “peace” part of the equation was more difficult. Genuine peace, and trust, would inevitably take years to reach fruition. That was no mere academic problem in a conflict in which, for decades, our enemies had defined Israel’s mere existence as illegitimate. The reason for Rabin’s reluctance to have his “deposit” presented as a set negotiating position was that it meant dealing away our only card—territory—before the hard questions about security and peace had been answered. It was a problem I’d face as prime minister as well, both with Assad and Arafat.
When Rabin phoned Christopher, I don’t think I’d ever heard him as angry. That was not what we agreed, he told the secretary of state. He said it had spoiled any prospect of serious negotiations on the peace side of the balance. Christopher didn’t agree there had been any real damage, nor that Assad had failed to understand the context.
It might not have mattered anyway, since by this stage, the Oslo talks were nearing a draft agreement. In mid-August, Rabin gave Peres the go-ahead to initial this “Declaration of Principles.” It provided for a period of interim Palestinian self-government; the start of a phased Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank with the creation of a Palestinian police force to deal with internal security; and a commitment to reach a full peace agreement within five years. In early September, ahead of the formal signing of the Oslo declaration, there was an exchange of “letters of recognition” between Arafat and Rabin. Arafat’s letter also renounced “terrorism and other acts of violence” and declared invalid “those articles of the Palestinian Covenant which deny Israel’s right to exist.” A few days later, President Clinton hosted a signing ceremony in Washington. Thus emerged the famous photo of Rabin and Arafat shaking hands, on either side of Clinton, who was beaming, arms outstretched in conciliation. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. In this case, you needed barely a dozen. Rabin’s demeanor, his posture, the look on his face, all seemed to say: “I would rather be shaking the hand of anyone on earth than Arafat.” Still, the image was on front pages worldwide. The news stories spoke of a new spirit of hope. Now that these old enemies had grasped hands, surely a full peace agreement was within reach.
My feeling, as I watched it on TV in the kirya, was more guarded. I hoped for peace, of course. I also recognized that the signing on the White House lawn was just a beginning, and that my role would be to ensure that Israel’s security needs were met under whatever formal peace agreement might eventually be reached. The security omens were hardly encouraging. Despite Oslo, Palestinian attacks continued. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other dissident factions saw Arafat’s concessions as treachery, and they drove home that point with violence.
* * *
As I approached my final year as chief of staff in early 1994, we were suddenly confronted by an appalling act of Israeli violence: mass murder, committed by a West Bank settler. It was terrorism, no less so than the worst Arab attacks on Israeli civilians. The settler, a physician named Baruch Goldstein, was a member of the stridently right-wing, anti-Arab Kach movement founded by the Brooklyn-born rabbi Meir Kahane. Goldstein lived in Kiryat Arba, one of the first post-1967 Jewish settlements, located on a hill outside the West Bank town of Hebron. At the heart of Hebron lay the burial place of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish faith: Abraham and Sarah; Isaac and Rebecca; Jacob and Leah. Since Abraham is also revered as a prophet in Islam and a mosque had stood on the site for nearly a thousand years, our post-1967 arrangements set out separate times of worship for Muslims and Jews. Goldstein chose to attack during a holiday period for both faiths: Purim for the Jews and the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. He arrived shortly after the Muslims’ Friday prayers began on the morning of February 25. Dressed in his reserve army uniform and carrying an automatic rifle, he opened fire on a group of nearly 800 Palestinian worshipers. He killed 29 and wounded 125 others before several of his intended victims knocked him unconscious and beat him to death.
I rushed to Sde Dov Airport in north Tel Aviv, a few minutes from the kirya, and boarded a helicopter for the old British fort near Hebron, used by the Jordanians until 1967 and now Israeli headquarters. After visiting the scene of the killings, I sought out local Palestinian leaders to voice my condolences and the sense of outrage I shared over what had happened, and to urge them to do all they could to maintain calm. I then went to Kiryat Arba and conveyed the same message.
Our immediate task was to prevent more deaths, on either side. It was a frustrating, and violent, week. Protests reminiscent of the first days of the intifada erupted around the West Bank, in Gaza, in east Jerusalem, and in several Arab neighborhoods and towns inside Israel. While I had no trouble understanding the Palestinians’ anger, I also had a responsibility to prevent the violence from spiraling out of control. We turned to the same tools we’d used at the beginning of the uprising—though with even greater emphasis on the need for soldiers to use only the necessary force to restore order, and to avoid causing fatalities wherever possible. We closed off the West Bank. We imposed curfews on the main West Bank and Gaza towns and refugee camps. We also imposed a curfew on Kiryat Arba and for the first time were given the authority to use administrative detention orders not just against Palestinians, but specific Jewish settlers. We arrested about a half dozen Kach leaders. Still, there were repeated clashes—and a number of deaths and injuries as a result—before things finally began to subside a week or so later.
The massacre had made me feel more strongly than ever that our responsibility to protect the security of the settlers could not extend to allowing them to defy the government or the law. The principle would be put to the test within a few weeks. Tel Rumeida, a settlement near Hebron, had been set up without Israeli government approval in 1984. As part of the response to the Goldstein killings, Rabin considered closing it down. That prompted a number of right-wing rabbis to issue a formal religious ruling against any such action. Rabin called me in to ask whether it would be operationally possible to dismantle Tel Rumeida and remove the settlers. I said yes, by sending in a Sayeret Matkal force after midnight, as long as news of the operation did not leak. “We’ll take over the area, close it off, and get control.” Given the tensions in the wake of the massacre, I added that I couldn’t promise that our soldiers would hold fire. “There are people in there with weapons,” I said. “If someone shoots at them, they will shoot back.”
“Should I do it?” he asked me. Maybe I should have given him an answer. But I didn’t feel it was my place to add to the pressures around what was clearly a finely balanced call, especially since my inclination would have been to tell him to go ahead. I said it was something only he could decide. “What I can tell you is that we can do it.” When I left, my sense was that he was sufficiently angry over what had happened in Hebron that he felt it essential to draw a line—the line of law—over what settlers were allowed to do. But the Passover holiday was now a couple of days away. I believe he realized the operation would not be possible until after the holiday period; by then, he was probably concerned he would have lost the clear political logic for moving against Tel Rumeida. The settlement has remained in place, a flashpoint in the conflict between settlers and Palestinians in the area around Hebron.
The repercussions, and the controversy, from the massacre reverberated widely. Rabin and his cabinet immediately decided to establish an inquiry, under Supreme Court chief justice Meir Shamgar. It would look into every aspect of the killings—including any failings by the army, the Shin Bet, the police, or other authorities that might have allowed the tragedy to happen. The commission interviewed dozens of witnesses, Israeli and Palestinian, in thirty-one separate sessions. I knew early on that the inquiry would throw up difficult issues. I was especially upset to learn that two soldiers and three border guards scheduled for guard duty at the mosque had shown up late on the morning of the killings. By the time I testified in late March, the inquiry had heard from a range of senior and local commanders and individual soldiers. A picture had emerged of a series of security breakdowns, equipment malfunctions, oversights, and confusion.
The security lapses around the Cave of the Patriarchs that day had contributed to what happened. In addition to the fact that the guard unit was not at full strength until after the murders took place, several of the security cameras weren’t working. I acknowledged that if the cameras and the guards had done their job, at the very least some lives might have been saved. Yet I also made the point that this specific act of mass murder was something the army could not have anticipated. I reminded the commissioners that they were judging things after the fact. They knew how the tragedy had ended. In the context in which we were operating, the prospect of an Israeli settler, a reserve officer, walking into a place of worship and deliberately killing defenseless Palestinians had come as a bolt from the blue.
The commission’s report did not apportion blame to any of the army officers or commanders. But an inescapable conclusion from the testimony of the many witnesses was that the way in which we’d become conditioned to view the settlers had blinded us to the possibility of the kind of crime Goldstein had committed. Even before I testified, I’d been disturbed to hear soldiers saying that even if they had seen him shooting a Palestinian, their orders were not to open fire on a settler, so they wouldn’t have intervened. When asked about this by the commission, I said that this was a fundamental misunderstanding of our rules of engagement. “In no case is there, nor can there be, an army order that says it is forbidden to shoot at a settler even if he is shooting at others. A massacre is a massacre. You don’t need special orders to know what to do.”
I also knew that the soldiers’ “misunderstanding” was all too understandable. As I acknowledged in the inquiry, the army on the West Bank and Gaza was predisposed to see Palestinians who were carrying weapons as potential terrorists, especially since the outbreak of the intifada. The settlers, even overtly anti-Arab Kach militants like Goldstein, were assumed to be carrying arms in self-defense. One lesson I took from the massacre was that the mix of Jewish settlers—particularly those who believed themselves on a messianic mission to resettle all of biblical Israel—and restive Palestinians who wanted sovereignty and control over their own lives was potentially toxic, for both sides. Ideally, the process, which had begun with Oslo, might start to disentangle it, though I remained far from confident that anything resembling full peace would come anytime soon.
* * *
Rabin, and even more acutely Shimon Peres, believed it was important to press ahead with the opening phase of the handover of Israeli authority mapped out by Oslo. In May 1994, a draft of the so-called Gaza and Jericho First agreement was completed. Once it was ratified, the five-year interim period would begin, with further withdrawals and parallel negotiations on the “permanent status” of the territories, addressing core issues like settlements, refugees, final borders, and the status of Jerusalem. During this first stage, Israel would transfer civil authority in the Gaza Strip and the Jordan Valley town of Jericho to the Palestinians, and local security would be in the hands of a newly created Palestinian police force.
My primary concern, and my responsibility, was the security provisions in the agreement, since the Israeli army retained its role in charge of overall security. When I went to see Rabin a few days before the cabinet meeting to approve the Gaza-Jericho agreement, I told him I was worried that it left room for potentially serious misunderstandings, friction, and even clashes. There was no clear definition of how our soldiers would operate alongside the new local police in the event of a terror attack, violence by Hamas or Islamic Jihad, or, for that matter, a car crash involving an Israeli and a Palestinian. He agreed this needed to be addressed, although it was clear he intended to do so with Arafat, via the Americans, not by reopening and delaying the formal agreement.
But I had a deeper concern about the entire Oslo agreement, which I also now raised with Rabin. I did not doubt the importance of reaching a political agreement, and ideally a peace treaty, with the Palestinians. But I’d read the Oslo Declaration in greater detail and discussed it with lawyer friends of mine. I’d also reread the 1978 Camp David framework on which the self-rule provisions were based. The endpoint was pretty clear, just as it had been at Camp David: Palestinian authority over the West Bank and Gaza, defined as a “single territorial unit” under Oslo. In essence, and very probably in name, this meant a Palestinian state. I wasn’t opposed to that in principle, if it was in return for a full and final peace. But the Oslo process meant that we would be handing back land, and control over security, in an ever-larger portion of territory before we’d reached any so-called permanent-status agreement—in fact, before we even knew whether that would prove possible. It wasn’t “land for peace.” It was land for the promise, or maybe only the hope, of peace. It was the same problem Yitzhak had faced over the Americans’ misuse of our “pocket deposit” on the Golan. I realized that, having come this far with Oslo, neither he nor the government was likely to back away from approving the Gaza-Jericho accord. But he did say he thought the points I’d raised were important, which I took as meaning he was comfortable with my raising it with the cabinet.
I spoke near the end of the four-hour cabinet meeting to ratify the Gaza-Jericho plan. The ministers seemed attentive as I ran through my security concerns, even nodding when I compared the agreement’s security provisions to “a piece of Swiss cheese, only with more holes.” But then I said a few words that I recognized were beyond my responsibility as chief of staff. “I’m speaking just as an Israeli citizen,” I told the cabinet, “and as a former head of military intelligence.” Referring to specific provisions in Oslo, and in the Camp David framework agreed to by Begin and Sadat fifteen years earlier, I said it was important for ministers to realize that, even though permanent-status issues were yet to be resolved, “you will be taking us nearly the whole way toward creating a Palestinian state, based on the internationally accepted reading of Camp David.” They reacted with a mix of defensiveness and hostility. In the latter camp were ministers from Rabin’s left-wing coalition partners, Meretz, who seemed especially angry when I quoted from Camp David. The prime minister motioned them for calm. “Ehud had a responsibility to talk about security questions, and we had a responsibility to listen. As for his additional remarks, they are not a surprise to me,” he said. “He made these points to me, and I said he could repeat them here. It is right that he should raise them.” He said there was no need for ministers to agree with me, but that it was proper that the points I’d raised be heard.
Many clearly didn’t agree with me, or simply believed that, whatever the potential complications, the Gaza-Jericho agreement still had to be ratified, which it was. But my remarks did lay the groundwork for my objection to the next, more far-reaching stage in the Oslo process barely a year later. By then, I was no longer chief of staff. I was a member of Rabin’s cabinet.
* * *
It was still my responsibility to ensure Gaza-Jericho’s implementation, and that the initial withdrawals and redeployments went ahead smoothly. And they did. But I also was soon playing a part in Rabin’s renewed effort to use the momentum of Oslo to achieve peace agreements with our other Arab neighbors: the Syrians, although he knew that would be tough, but first the Jordanians. I would always have had some role by virtue of the need for a chief of staff to weigh in on security issues. But as Yitzhak had done from the start, he involved me and others in his inner political circle in wider discussions on the whole range of negotiating issues. He remained determined to keep Peres’s role to an absolute minimum.
No peace talks are ever completely straightforward, but the process with Jordan was very close to that. The main issues on the Jordanian side involved ensuring a proper share of scarce water supplies and dealing with Israel’s de facto control of a fairly large area near the southern end of our border. A number of kibbutzim and moshavim were farming the land there. But under the post-1948 armistice, that area had been allocated to Jordan. Israel’s priorities were to put in place a fully open relationship of peace and cooperation, and to get assurances Jordan would not allow its territory to be used by Palestinian groups to launch terror attacks.
I was struck by how much more easily compromises can be found if you truly trust the other side. At our meeting with Hussein before the Gulf War, I’d been impressed by the king’s thoughtful and measured, yet warm and open, demeanor. That, in itself, inspired trust. Since 1967, even in times of high tension, both Israel and Jordan had generally demonstrated a shared desire, and ability, to steer clear of conflict. The main trade-off in the search for a formal peace turned out to be not too difficult. We agreed to ensure water provision, while the king allowed the Israelis who had been working the land in the 1949 armistice area to stay in place as lessees. On the final Wednesday of October 1994, near our border crossing in the Arava desert, I watched as Rabin, King Hussein, and President Clinton formally sealed the full “Treaty of Peace Between the State of Israel and the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.”
Syria was always going to be harder. But Rabin moved past his anger over the pocket deposit, and we began a new effort via the Americans. Our aim was to lay out a comprehensive, staged proposal to trade nearly the entire Golan for peace. With Rabin, Itamar Rabinovich, and the rest of the team, we put together a framework limiting Syria’s military presence on the Heights. We envisaged phasing out the restrictions as Syria took steps toward the kind of peace that had proved possible with Egypt and Jordan. But indirect exchanges in the autumn of 1994 produced little progress. In December, Rabin proposed to the Americans that I meet with a Syrian representative, and President Assad agreed. Later that month, I went to Washington for talks with Syria’s ambassador, Walid Muallem. With the Americans’ Mideast envoy, Dennis Ross, as host, we met in Blair House across the street from the White House.
I began by explaining the security provisions we envisaged for the Golan, which included early-warning provisions, force limitations, and other means of safeguarding Israel against any surprise attack. Muallem’s response was formulaic, almost icy, with no indication he was ready to discuss any of the specifics, much less offer ideas of his own. But then Dennis led us out into the garden, where the atmosphere, if sadly not the weather, was a bit warmer. I told Ambassador Muallem I believed Israel’s issues with Syria ought to be resolvable. Both sides understood the broad terms of an eventual peace, but we needed a context of trust in which to negotiate. President Assad, and we as well, were always going to be reluctant to formally commit to a position until each side was satisfied that the other understood its core needs. Politically, both sides also faced constraints. “In formal meetings, a record is taken and negotiators have to explain and justify every last word back home,” I said. “I think our negotiators can get further in conversations like the one we’re having now.” Though Muallem nodded agreement, he did not explicitly say he believed that informal exchanges were the way forward. Still, he obviously passed on a broadly positive message to Damascus. Before the Blair House discussion, our understanding had been there would probably be a kind of mirror arrangement for a follow-up meeting: between our ambassador in Washington, Itamar Rabinovich, and a high-ranking army officer from the Syrian side. Instead, we received word that Assad wanted me to meet directly with General Hikmat Shihabi, my counterpart as Syrian chief of staff and Assad’s oldest and closest political ally—the effective number-two man in the regime.
General Shihabi and I met over a period of two days at Blair House. He had greater authority, and thus a greater sense of self-assurance, than the ambassador. But not for the last time in negotiations with Syria, any real progress was blocked by an apparent combination of misunderstanding and miscommunication. The discussions were lively. Shihabi had served as Syria’s liaison officer with the UN force set up along the cease-fire line after the 1948 war. “Go check with the UN,” he said at our first meeting. “You’ll see almost all the exchanges of fire in the late 1950s were provoked by Israel.” I didn’t respond directly, though I did note it was the Syrians who had tried to divert water from the Jordan River in the early fifties. “You did it first,” he retorted. So it continued, yet without any real sign that Shihabi was ready to engage on any of the issues of substance. After a phone call with Rabin after our first day of talks, I became equally cautious. He agreed that we wanted to avoid a repeat of our experience with the Golan “deposit.” We did not want to put concessions on the record before we got an indication that the Syrians were genuinely ready for peace talks.
Still, establishing the precedent of a “chief of staff channel” was a step forward. My successor as ramatkal, Amnon Lipkin, would meet again with Shihabi in early 1995.
* * *
I was confident Amnon was inheriting an army stronger, better prepared, and better equipped than at any time since the Six-Day War. We also had peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan, and none of the substantive issues with the Syrians seemed insurmountable.
But the main security challenges continued to be the unconventional ones. In the long term, a resurgent Iraq, and very likely Iran, might make strides toward getting nuclear weapons. There was every sign that Hizbollah in Lebanon—and Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and their supporters in Gaza and the West Bank—would escalate violence and terror. As the negotiations with Jordan were entering their final phase in early October, a further Hamas attack—this one, a kidnapping—had brought home that threat. On Sunday, October 9, men dressed as Orthodox Jews abducted an off-duty soldier named Nahshon Wachsman near Lod. Two days later, Israeli television received a videotape showing the nineteen-year-old, hands and feet bound, pleading for his life in return for the release of the founder of Hamas, whom we had arrested and jailed in 1989. “The group from Hamas kidnapped me,” he said. “They are demanding the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and another two hundred people from Israeli prison. If their demands are not met, they will execute me on Friday at eight p.m.”
As soon as we got word he was missing, I met with Rabin. Since we assumed he was being held in Gaza, I ordered a unit from Sayeret Matkal to head south and coordinate efforts with the Shin Bet and the southern command to locate him. But it gradually became clear he might be much closer to where he’d been seized. The Shin Bet got a description of the kidnappers’ car and found it was a rental that had been picked up and returned in east Jerusalem. They tracked down the man who rented it. A little before dawn the morning of October 14, barely twelve hours before the Hamas deadline, Shin Bet established that Wachsman was being held in a village on the road to Ramallah, north of Jerusalem, in a house owned by a Palestinian living abroad.
The hostage soldier’s ordeal was made even worse by the fact his mother, Esther, was a Holocaust survivor, born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany at the end of the war. Rabin had been ready to approve a rescue attempt from the outset, assuming we could locate Wachsman and come up with a plan that might work. But as with Entebbe, he said that if we couldn’t be reasonably confident of success, we would negotiate. Now that we knew where Wachsman was being held, I ordered Shaul Mofaz, the commander with responsibility for the West Bank, to prepare for a possible rescue.
Before briefing Rabin, I arranged for another commando unit to begin visible preparations for an operation in Gaza, in the hope of reassuring Hamas that we still believed he was being held there. Assuming we could retain the element of surprise, several things worked in our favor. The house was relatively isolated. It was in an area where Israel, not the incipient Palestinian authorities, still had control. And Sayeret Matkal had expertise and experience in this kind of mission. Still, no plan could be foolproof. I told Rabin that the fact Hamas was holding a single hostage meant that if our assault teams were delayed for any reason at all, the kidnappers might kill him before we got in. But we had to weigh the risks of not acting. We were no longer trying to find a missing soldier. We knew where he was. We had a unit ready. Unless Hamas relented, he was facing death within hours. In those circumstances, the precedent of doing nothing would, in my view, be a serious betrayal of our responsibility to do whatever we could to try to save him. I recommended that he approve the operation, and Rabin agreed.
I attended the final briefing shortly afterward. I was impressed by the determined faces of the men in the two sayeret teams. I remembered one of the officers, a twenty-three-year-old named Nir Poraz, from operational briefings before previous sayeret missions. Wachsman was being held in a room on the first floor. The commandos would simultaneously detonate explosives on three doors: at the front, on the side, and a third one leading through a kitchen to the room where the kidnappers had their hostage. The attack began fifteen minutes before the Hamas deadline. The explosive charges went off, but only the one in the front blew open the door. Poraz and his team rushed in, but one of the kidnappers opened fire, killing him and wounding six others. The other team had by now made it to the first floor. But despite firing at the metal lock, they had trouble getting the door to open. By the time they got in, Wachsman had been killed, shot in the neck and chest.
I was in the command post a few hundred yards away. I called Rabin and then went to see him in the kirya. The head of personnel for the army had gone to see the Wachsman family and break the news. Now, we had to tell the country. Rabin and I appeared on television together. Rabin insisted—wrongly—on saying he bore full responsibility. What had gone wrong, I emphasized to him, was not the decision to attempt the rescue. It was the rescue itself. That was not his responsibility. It was mine.
The next day, I visited Wachsman’s parents and tried to convey how painful the failed rescue was to me, Rabin, and everyone else involved. I was inspired and humbled by their response. His father had told a reporter he wanted to convey his condolences to the parents of Nir Poraz. “This added loss has shaken me terribly,” he said. He told me he also believed that the prime minister had approved the rescue using his best judgment on the information that he had available. I spent time separately speaking to Mrs. Wachsman. I tried to explain that in fighting an enemy like Hamas, people who not just threatened to kill but had proven they had no hesitation in doing so, I’d felt there was no choice but to attempt the rescue. I admitted we’d known the risks. But we’d tried to do the right thing, both for the country and her son. I think she understood, though I knew that nothing could alter the terrible sadness of her loss. The pain would take years to heal. Some part of it never would. Still, I felt it was important she and her husband know that we, too, felt their loss. For years afterward, Nava and I continued to visit them.
By then, however, I was no longer chief of staff. Handing over to Amnon Lipkin, I left the kirya proud of all that I had sought to accomplish during my thirty-six years in uniform. I realized there had been failures and setbacks, none more painfully fresh in my mind than our inability to rescue Nahshon Wachsman. But I was about to find that the area of Israeli life I now chose to enter—national politics—was a battlefield of sorts as well. And that when trouble hit, even your allies sometimes ducked for cover.