If you’d visited Tel Aviv in July 1967, you would have sensed a new spirit of confidence: not cockiness exactly, but a sort of spring in the collective step. This was not just due to the Six-Day War. It was because the city, if not yet the rest of the country, had shed the economic austerity of Israel’s first two decades and was beginning to experience at least some of the consumer comforts that Western Europe, or America, took for granted. But we were still a decade away from the first shopping malls, or the upscale cafés and restaurants that today give places like Dizengoff Street, a few blocks back from the seafront, the feel of London or Paris on a summer’s day. Television had been introduced only a year after the war. Color TV was still nearly a decade away. I can’t say I was surprised to learn, when the archives were opened a few years ago, that a committee of moral arbiters in our Ministry of Education vetoed plans for the Beatles to perform in the city. “No intrinsic artistic value,” they pronounced. “And their concerts provoke mass hysteria.”
Even in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rest of Israel, a kind of cultural austerity still prevailed. A legacy of 1948, it reflected the years of shared sacrifice, physical labor, and the life-and-death struggles that I, like most Israelis at the time, had experienced within our own lifetimes. That may help explain why elements of my character that would later attract frequent comment, and sometimes criticism, never came up: the fact that I seemed so self-contained, reluctant to engage emotionally with people beyond a circle of close friends or confidants. To the extent those around me would have taken note—family, university classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the kirya—my slight emotional aloofness, and the way I internalized even tragedies like the death of Nechemia Cohen, were not exceptional. They were, in many ways, simply Israeli.
Yet as Israel, Israeli society, and my place in them changed, it would be suggested to me more than once—and not always kindly, when it was from critics or rivals—that I had a “touch of Asperger’s,” a reference to those on the more benign reaches of the autism spectrum, marked by both this aloofness and a special facility for math, music, and abstract ideas. I would always smile in response, suggesting that such diagnoses were probably best left to the professionals. I couldn’t pretend, however, that emotional engagement with new acquaintances, even with people I knew and liked but were not close friends, came easily. And it’s true that from my first experience of the world of numbers as a child on the kibbutz, and as I tackled ever more elaborate pieces on the piano, I did become conscious of the ease with which my brain translated the complexities into pictures in my mind. And the joy, at times, with which it allowed me to play around with, and develop, what I saw.
By the summer of 1967, I had experienced that feeling again, in my first real encounter with theoretical physics at Hebrew University. After the Six-Day War, I seriously contemplated a future as a research scientist, or perhaps eventually a professor of physics. Two months after the war, I enrolled in a summer program at the Weizmann Institute, Israel’s preeminent postgraduate research facility. Being surrounded by some of the country’s, even the world’s, leading scientists, and by postdoctoral students determined to follow in their footsteps, was intellectually enthralling. But it also exposed me to the way in which pure science sometimes got submerged in simple routine or, more discouragingly, in the politics and positioning and backbiting of the academic world.
I think what finally deterred me from taking a path into academia or research was a feeling, nurtured on the kibbutz and solidified by those many nights leading sayeret operations across our borders, that I would find my true purpose in life trying to make some special contribution to the future course of Israel. I didn’t remotely consider politics at that point. Instead, I thought of going back into the military. I realized that in order to make a significant mark, if indeed I could, I would need to serve in the regular army, not just an extraordinary unit like Sayeret Matkal. But I did hope that at some stage I’d have the opportunity to finish my time in the sayeret as its commander, carrying on Avraham’s vision and, ideally, building and expanding on it as well. If that part proved possible, I felt that, by comparison, a career in academia would be somehow blinkered, and surely less fulfilling personally. My sayeret experience had also taught me something else: that protecting Israel’s security was not just a matter of muscle, or firepower, indispensable though they sometimes were. It also called for mental application, an ability to assess risks, to find answers, sometimes within the space of seconds when, inevitably, things went wrong. It required not just brawn, but brains.
A week before I began my final year at Hebrew University, I went to see Eli Zeira, the senior intelligence officer who’d so brashly predicted the course of the Six-Day War, in hopes of sounding out my prospects. Despite a yawning gap in rank and age—Eli was nearly fifteen years older—I felt I could be open with him. I knew him from Sayeret Matkal, which came under his purview in the kirya. He was also a scientist manqué and was eager, as soon as I arrived in his office, to hear about my physics studies. When I did manage to turn the conversation to the army, I told him I was thinking of returning, but that I wanted his honest opinion about my chances of eventually being given command of the sayeret. He began with a series of caveats. The choice of future leaders of the sayeret was not his to make. When the current commander, Uzi Yairi, ended his term in roughly eighteen months’ time, I’d still be too young to have a realistic chance. “Maybe even next time around,” he said. And in any case, I would first need to get some experience in the regular army. “But then,” he concluded, “my opinion is that you have a very good chance of becoming commander of the unit.” That was more than enough. Whether it actually happened would now ultimately be down to me.
My last year at university was the closest thing I would have to a normal student existence. I was called away only once, for a battle that ultimately had a lasting impact on the course of our conflict with the Arabs, and on the prospects of eventually finding a way to make peace. It was Israel’s largest military action since the war, across our new de facto border with Jordan. It was directed at a new enemy: a fledgling army of Palestinian guerrillas called Fatah. It was led by a man few Israelis had heard of at the time: Yasir Arafat. Although Fatah had nominally existed for nearly a decade, it was only now emerging as a political force, in large part because of the Arab armies’ humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War. A Palestinian political leadership already existed, in the shape of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). But it was based in Cairo. Its chairman was, for all practical purposes, an adjunct of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s leadership role in the Arab world. Though Arafat had not yet explicitly challenged this state of affairs, his, and Fatah’s, rise after the war carried a powerful message for the existing Arab presidents and prime ministers: after their hollow promises of victory before the 1967 war, it was time for a new generation, and a new, more direct form of confrontation with the “Zionist enemy.”
Arafat had set up camp with nearly a thousand men just across the Jordan River, in a town called Karameh. From early 1968, they had been launching hit-and-run raids, not just on the West Bank but into the Negev in southern Israel. Eshkol’s cabinet was initially divided on whether to attack his base in Jordan, both as an act of retaliation and a signal to King Hussein that if his army didn’t rein in Arafat’s men, Israel would take whatever action necessary. But the decisive moment came on the eighteenth of March. A school bus not far from Eilat, in the far south, hit a Fatah land mine, killing a teacher and a school doctor and injuring ten children.
I was called up the night before Israel’s retaliation strike, as part of a small Sayeret Matkal contingent that was supposed to play a support role. The main Israeli forces—including a full paratroop brigade, the Seventh Armored Brigade, and the paratroopers’ sayeret—mounted a pincer operation around the Fatah camp and Karameh itself. But the resistance they met, both from Fatah and Jordanian troops, was much fiercer than expected. One of the paratrooper commandos, Mookie Betzer, who later joined Sayeret Matkal, told me how they landed by helicopter and immediately came under a hail of AK-47 fire. Within minutes, several of his men had been killed. Mookie was wounded. The tanks of the Seventh Brigade advanced from the south. Battling the Jordanian army, they took losses as well. Amnon Lipkin, who would also later become a friend and colleague in both the army and Israeli politics, was in command of a unit of lightly armored French tanks called AMLs. They, too, were hopelessly outgunned.
Our sayeret assignment was to block the southern entrance to Karameh as the Israeli armored force advanced. But we got bogged down in mud as we made our way from the Jordan River. By the time we arrived, hundreds of Arafat’s men had already fled the area. Arafat, too, had escaped, on the back of a motorcycle.
By the time the fighting was over, some 200 Fatah fighters had been killed. But nearly thirty Israeli soldiers lost their lives as well, and more than twice that number were wounded. Politically, the outcome was even murkier. Most of Israel was still basking in our victory in the Six-Day War. Now, we had deployed many of the same units, only to fight to what looked like a costly draw. Arafat and Fatah could claim—and soon did—that they had stood and fought, and inflicted losses on the victors of 1967.
* * *
In retrospect, given all the interruptions, I’m a little surprised I managed to finish my university studies. My classmates helped me, going over what I’d missed and sharing their notes, whenever I returned from an extended stint of reserve duty. Working hard in the final year, I even managed to finish in the upper 15 percent of the class, and several of my math and science professors strongly urged me to go to graduate school.
But my mind was made up to return to the army. And as I balanced my studies with plans for the future during my final months, I still hadn’t given up hope that Nili would be there with me. When she returned from Paris, we started seeing each other again. Whenever I could, I would take the bus down to Tel Aviv and spend the weekend with her. Everything I’d loved about her since that first meeting in the kirya, everything I valued in our relationship, was still there. Yet so, too, were the doubts: whether she was ready to commit herself to sharing our lives together; whether a kibbutznik like me could ever truly fit into her Tel Avivi world. Shortly before the 1967 war, she’d invited me to a Friday-night party with a group of her friends. It was the first time she was including me as part of a couple in her social circle, and I couldn’t help feeling it was a kind of test. Unfortunately, from the moment we got there, I felt out of place. For her, it was just another party. For me, it was another universe. I didn’t drink at the time. I couldn’t dance. Her smartly dressed friends carried themselves with the blasé indifference of young urbanites, talking about things that, to me, seemed unimportant. And so I dismissed them as self-indulgent and superficial. The unfortunate thing is that I would turn out to be wrong about that: most would go on to play important roles in their chosen fields, in Israel and beyond. But at the time, I couldn’t see past the jarring differences between us.
None of that, however, had changed my feelings for Nili, and I now decided there was no point in just waiting and wondering whether we could make a life together. I figured I would borrow a car from an army friend, with the idea that Nili and I could spend three or four days together in the Galilee: to be alone, to walk, to talk, to see whether we actually had a future. I wrote her a note, took the bus to Tel Aviv while she was at work, and dropped it through the letterbox. “I am going on this trip,” it said. “I’d love it if you could come with me. I think it’s important for us.”
As the days passed, I heard nothing back. I felt crushed. But at least it was better to know where we stood, or so I told myself. Later, she told me the envelope had ended up under a pile of mail. She hadn’t seen it until a week afterward. She said that of course she would have come with me. She felt angry with herself, and with me too, for not simply having phoned. But since I didn’t contact her in the weeks that followed, she figured this was just another one of our times apart. Or another example of my “stupid pride.” A few months later, I heard she was engaged to be married, to a young man she’d known since their high school days at the Alliance.
I had first met Nava Cohen, the woman I would go on to marry, the previous year. It was through another Cohen, though they were not related: Nechemia, my sayeret friend who was killed in the 1967 war. He invited me to Tel Aviv for a party in the spring, on the Jewish holiday of Purim, and introduced us. Nava was just nineteen, five years younger than me. She was attractive, but I was struck also by her poise, warmheartedness, and obvious intelligence. Yet she had her boyfriend with her, and I still hoped that Nili and I would be partners for life. Now, Nava was beginning her studies at Hebrew University as well, and, in a way, it was again Nechemia Cohen who brought us together. Since his death, those of us who knew him from the sayeret had been looking for a fitting way to honor him. We finally decided to set up a living memorial in his name: a Moadon Sayarim, a center to train young people from all over Jerusalem in scouting and navigation. We spent six months getting it up and running, and Nava pitched in.
Several months after I heard of Nili’s engagement, I finally asked Nava on a date. We were in the university library, which had a space where you could listen to tapes through headphones. I would go to hear classical music. Nava was studying English literature, and I’d sometimes see her there engrossed in recordings of Shakespeare with the text of Hamlet or Macbeth in front of her. Since I wasn’t shackled by the need to follow the alacks and alasses, I read the newspaper as the music washed over me. I turned to the movie section. I circled three films, drew a question mark in the margin, and passed it to her. She looked puzzled for a second. Then she smiled and put a checkmark next to one of them.
While we came from different backgrounds, the gap was narrower than it had been with Nili. Her parental home was in Tiberias. Her parents were from old Sephardi families, with a centuries-long history in Palestine, and were also solid Ben-Gurion Labor supporters. Her father fought in the British army in the Second World War. He now ran the branch of Bank Leumi in Tiberias. Her mother ran a shop in what was then the city’s best hotel, the Ginton.
We were married there, in the spring of 1969. My parents and brothers came with two busloads of friends from the kibbutz. Avraham Arnan was there, of course. Ahraleh Yariv and Eli Zeira, two of the military intelligence heroes of the Six-Day War, also drove up for the wedding, which touched both Nava and me, not to mention her family and our guests. Years later, as I rose higher in the ranks of the military, I would sometimes be invited to weddings by officers under my command. Remembering how much we appreciated Ahraleh’s and Eli Zeira’s gesture, I always said yes.
* * *
I’d returned to Sayeret Matkal a few months before our wedding. Both Nava and I were aware of the pressures my military commitments might place on our family life. But she understood why I’d chosen to go back and was supportive. I was, if anything, more certain that I’d made the right decision. Israel faced a whole new set of challenges to its security. Given the decisiveness, and speed, of our victory in 1967, there seemed no immediate danger of Egypt’s risking another full-scale war. In Israel, where Golda Meir had become prime minister after Eshkol’s death from a heart attack, there was also little appetite for returning to the battlefield. Yet the postwar skirmishes with the Egyptians along the Suez Canal had escalated into far more than that: what would become known as the War of Attrition. Nor could there be any doubt, after Karameh, that Fatah’s influence, militancy, and determination would only grow, not least because more-radical factions within the PLO were ready to step into the breach if Arafat faltered. Israel needed an answer for all these threats.
Uzi Yairi’s term as Sayeret Matkal commander had by now ended, but his successor was someone I knew well. Menachem Digli was the officer on whom I’d bestowed my stolen Syrian Mercedes at the end of the war. His leg had recovered from the motorcycle accident, and I returned to the sayeret as his deputy. He delegated full responsibility to me for operational issues. I believed that the new kind of challenges we were confronting, particularly the prospect of intensified attacks from the new generation of Palestinian fedayeen, meant that the sayeret would sooner or later have to broaden its reach and move beyond the kind of intelligence operations we’d done before the 1967 war to become the SAS-like special forces unit Avraham ultimately envisaged. But that was not going to happen soon, if only because the intelligence missions now required were going to be a lot tougher. Israel had control of the entire Sinai and the Golan, meaning that we would have to push deeper inside Egypt and Syria.
Soon after my return, we began to plan the sayeret’s most ambitious mission so far. The aim was familiar: to ensure effective intelligence from inside Egypt. But that would mean crossing the Suez Canal and operating deeper inside Egypt. We’d have to go in by helicopter, and the steady buildup of Egyptian forces along the Suez Canal now included Soviet-made antiaircraft missile batteries.
The mission struck the generals in the kirya as so risky as to border on the insane. But my experience of earlier airborne missions, and my knowledge of physics, made me confident we could find a way to make it work. I talked to the few senior air force officers who seemed more receptive, as well as to officers in the helicopter units. We also called on the help of several soldiers from our units with a background in math, and a gifted engineer from the air force. Together, we developed a plan, using the contours in the desert terrain, to calculate a flight route that would avoid our helicopters being detected by Egyptian radar. Or shot down by Egyptian missiles. As an extra fail-safe, we added a layer of deception: the sayeret team, under my command, would stage a pair of diversionary attacks. We would plant explosive charges on a high-voltage electricity cable, and on the main oil pipeline from Suez City to Cairo.
Still, for weeks, the answer from the kirya was no. The man who had succeeded Rabin as chief of staff after the war, Chaim Bar-Lev, dismissed it as “a plan built on chicken legs.” In the end, what got us the green light was a further escalation, on both sides, in the War of Attrition. In January 1970, Israeli warplanes began a series of deep-penetration bombing raids, for the first time striking targets dozens of miles, in some case hundreds of miles, beyond the canal. The Israeli bombing campaign reduced the chance we’d get shot down and provided cover for our operation. Since we’d been operating on the assumption, or at least the hope, that the generals would eventually approve the mission, when the word did come from the kirya, we were ready to go.
Our helicopters took off after sunset, nearly skimming the water and weaving their way among the dunes and wadis on the far side of the canal. We weren’t spotted, or at least we weren’t shot down. We landed with my team of ten men, unloaded a pair of jeeps, and headed off to plant our diversionary charges. Within an hour, we had placed time-delay explosives on the electricity tower and the oil pipeline. But then came the core intelligence part of the operation, and from the start we ran into difficulty. As with our first operation in the Sinai, before the 1967 war, we found that while we could plan for almost every other eventuality, there was no reliable way of knowing the exact terrain and physical environment in which we’d have to operate. Nor did it help when one of the array of tools we’d brought with us—from the mail-order shop in Pennsylvania—gave up the ghost. We did manage to make headway, but it was painfully slow. We were running nearly three hours behind schedule, and the deadline we were working against—daybeak—was immovable. My instinct was to abort. We’d placed the explosives on the electricity tower and the pipeline. That would at least divert attention from our main mission. Having demonstrated our ability to elude Egyptian detection in crossing the canal, I figured we could always return in a few months and have another attempt.
Digli and several other sayeret officers were following the mission from their command post in the Sinai, part of the intelligence base our military engineers had built after the 1967 war into a 2,400-foot-high mountain called Gebel Um-Hashiba, twenty miles back from the Suez Canal. When I radioed in to tell him that I recommended abandoning the operation, I could hear the surprise in his voice, and what seemed reluctance as well. “If that’s your judgment…” he said. But before I could reply that, yes, I felt withdrawal was the wisest course, I heard him speaking to someone whose voice I recognized: Avsha Horan. He had been the soldier on guard duty in the command post for our first operation in the Sinai, the one who later told me how Rabin was chain-smoking and biting his nails when it appeared we might be in trouble. Now, he was a sayeret officer. Digli came back on the radio. “We can see more from here,” he said. Then, pausing, he added, “Avsha says he thinks you can still do it.”
I had grown to respect Avsha’s judgment. And while Digli hadn’t explained what “more” they saw from the command post, I didn’t have the time to probe if we were going to have any chance of completing the operation. Both he and I knew it ultimately had to be my call. Whatever happened, I’d be the one responsible. “We’ll do it,” I said, and signed off.
We’d planned for the work to take several hours, time that we now couldn’t afford. With all of us pitching in, sweat drenching our uniforms, we managed to finish it more quickly, but we we were still behind schedule. Dawn was now twenty-five minutes away. I radioed the helicopter pilot with a new pickup point, closer to where we’d installed the equipment though still far enough, I hoped, to avoid giving away what we’d done. It was just after daybreak when our chopper began its sinuous desert flight back into Israel. We could see flames leaping up from the oil pipeline, and then a thick, dark cloud of smoke.
There could be no doubt the prize had been worth it. By the time we returned, for the first time since we’d captured the Sinai, Israel was again receiving relevant information from inside Egypt. With the War of Attrition showing every sign of getting even fiercer, it was an important intelligence achievement. When we landed, Digli and Ahraleh Yariv were there to meet us. Digli, smiling broadly, handed me a small cloth insignia. “You’ve earned it,” he said, adding that Bar-Lev himself had endorsed my promotion from captain to major.
* * *
With the Egypt mission, and a series of other operations I helped run nearer to the canal, there now seemed every possibility I would be chosen to succeed Digli as commander when his term expired. But that was still more than a year away, in the spring of 1971. With his agreement, I decided to use the time to do what Eli Zeira had advised before I made my decision to return: to get experience in the regular army. The War of Attrition created a demand for qualified officers who could command tank units, since they were playing a key role against the Egyptians along the canal. Along with about a dozen other middle-ranking officers who had volunteered to move into the armored corps, most of them friends of mine, I embarked on a course covering every facet of tank warfare: how each system on an individual tank worked, how to pilot one, load in the shells, and then calibrate its main gun, aim, and fire. We studied communications protocols, even tank maintenance. We learned how to command an armored platoon—a group of three tanks—and then an armored company of eleven tanks and APCs. Finally, in July 1970, we were given command of actual companies, with the aim of deploying us against the Egyptians.
My company was part of Brigade 401, in the Sinai. It was one of two armored forces that were rotated every three months into action on the front line. In a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari, Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we awaited our forward deployment, due in September, he included me in his discussions with his senior officers on tactics and planning. This inevitably included the core of our existing strategy: a line of fixed fortifications we had built on our side of the canal after the war. They were known as the Bar-Lev Line, because the chief of staff ultimately had to sign off on them. But the main impetus had come from Avraham Adan. A former Palmachnik, known as Bren, he had commanded forces in the Sinai at the start of the War of Attrition and was now the overall head of the armored corps.
There were strong critics of the Bar-Lev Line, but few more vocal than Arik Sharon. The very qualities that had made him the perfect choice to lead Unit 101 and its successor commando units—a natural instinct to favor bold, preemptive attacks, allied with an absolute confidence in his own judgment and little patience for those who challenged it—had stalled his rise up the military ladder for a few years. But now he was head of Israel’s southern command. He was convinced that in the event of another full-scale war with Egypt, the Bar-Lev Line would be worse than useless. We’d find ourselves forced to defend a string of fortifications that could serve no real purpose in repelling a concerted Egyptian attempt to retake the Sinai. Arik’s preferred strategy was to let the Egyptian armored divisions cross the canal and then confront them on terms where Israeli forces had a proven advantage: a mobile battle in the open desert.
When the debate came up in our brigade strategy discussions, I said I believed Arik was right. I said there was no way the Bar-Lev fortifications could block a major Egyptian advance. I knew from my sayeret experience that we’d been able to operate unseen between Egyptian positions on the other side of the canal, and they were only a few hundred yards apart. On some parts of the Bar-Lev Line, there were seven or eight miles between outposts, plenty of room for a whole Egyptian brigade to pass through.
Very few in the kirya, however, seemed ready to recalibrate our strategy against the Egyptians. Only later, when the damage had already been done, would it become clear that the navy was alone in acting on lessons learned from the fighting since the 1967 war. Having lost its flagship to a smaller, more agile Egyptian missile boat at the outset of the War of Attrition, it refocused on deploying mobile missile boats of its own. But the air force was showing no sign of dealing with the implications of the Egyptians’ increased antiaircraft capability—even though we’d begun to lose planes and pilots to the new surface-to-air missile batteries Nasser had received from the Soviets. I could see that a similar myopia, or denial, was affecting the armored corps. On patrol along the canal, I would sometimes see the hulk of an Israeli tank destroyed by Soviet-made AT-3s. Known as Saggers, they were portable and allowed a single soldier to fire wire-guided missiles. Their range was nearly a mile and a half, which was farther than the main guns on our tanks could operate with any reliability against such a small target. Yet no one appeared to have addressed the question of what would happen if the Egyptians used Saggers on a much greater scale in a future war.
I remained in the Sinai through early 1971, but by the time my tank company was due for our forward deployment, the War of Attrition was suddenly over. Neither we nor the Egyptians wanted a return to full-scale war, and with Washington taking the lead and pressing the Israeli government to agree, a cease-fire was signed. Both sides claimed victory. But both were exhausted. Certainly, many Israelis had ceased to see a compelling reason for the 1,000 days of fighting. We had lost about 900 dead: more than in the Six-Day War.
In one respect, the Egyptians won. Under the terms of the truce, their antiaircraft missiles were barred from a roughly thirty-mile strip along the canal. Within days of the truce, however, Nasser began moving his SAM batteries forward. Before long, there were nearly one hundred missile sites in the “prohibited” zone, giving the Egyptians control of twenty miles or more of the airspace on our side of the canal. Golda was incensed. So was Bar-Lev. But there was no way, and no will, to reopen the fighting and force Nasser to move the missiles back.
The cease-fire took effect at midnight on August 7, 1970. I’ve never had trouble recalling the date because of a phone call almost exactly twenty-four hours later. It was from my mother-in-law, to tell me Nava had gone into labor with our first child. Since I was due for deployment on the front line, we had agreed weeks earlier that the best thing would be for her to have the baby in Tiberias so her parents could be with her. Now, I got a jeep and raced north. I reached Tiberias the next morning. I opened the door to the hospital room and saw Nava, obviously tired but beaming, cradling our daughter Michal in her arms.
I managed to stay with them for several days before returning to the Sinai. With Nava and Michal soon settled back into our apartment in the north Tel Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv, I made weekend visits home whenever I could. Still, I saw nowhere near as much of our daughter’s first few months as most fathers. As Nava and I would discover even more jarringly over the next few years, that was an inescapable part of being an army officer.
But at least my next posting was closer to home. It was only twenty minutes from our apartment, on a former British base from World War II. On April 1, 1971, I was promoted from major to lieutenant colonel and received the assignment I’d hoped for when I returned to the army.
I became the commander of Sayeret Matkal.