was the luck of the draw.

I reported to the same jumble of buildings on the same base where I’d arrived a decade earlier as an eighteen-year-old fresh from basic training, when Sayeret Matkal was still a gleam in Avraham Arnan’s eye. Now, I would be the first sayeret commander to have served in the unit as a soldier and young officer. Avraham’s initial ambitions had been

The frustration we felt on the first morning of the war was not because we were itching to fight, for the hell of it. But even on the first day of the war, it was clear this would be by far the most consequential conflict in our country’s history. There was no mission for Sayeret Matkal, nor, it seemed, any prospect of our playing any significant

Operation Cinnamon

win. Rather, I felt I’d reached a natural punctuation mark in my military career. I’d led Sayeret Matkal. I’d commanded a tank company, a battalion in 1973, and, more briefly than I’d hoped, the 401st Brigade after the war. I’d spent the last two years in the kirya. The next step up the command chain would be to lead a full armored division. But at

That task fell to Britain’s SAS, and its operation was almost exactly what we’d planned. A force of nearly 700 commandos was helicoptered in to Iraq’s western desert. They were equipped with Land Rovers, and armed with anti-tank missiles and laser targeting capability. They could also call in attack helicopters and F-15 jets if necessary. Still,

Within days, I replaced him as defense minister as well. The main item in my in-box would not be Lebanon, however. The Mossad had uncovered a threat hundreds of miles farther away: a construction site in northeast Syria along the Euphrates River, where the Syrians, with technical help from North Korea and funding from Iran, were building a nuclear

At the time of the Camp David summit in July 2000, however, I’d been a politician for all of five years. Most of my life by far had been spent in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even shaving yet, I was part of the founding core of a unit called Sayeret Matkal, Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force or Britain’s Special Air

I called Danny Yatom and told him to get whoever was at the sayeret base to Lod as soon as possible. But most of the men were on training exercises, including one team with Yoni deep in the Negev Desert.