With the growing threat of terrorism, the kirya had drawn up a list of installations that might be targeted. Next to each, they’d put the name of the military unit to be called up in an emergency. We’d been allocated Lod Airport because our base was closer than other units. As I accompanied the engineer back to the control tower, I tried to work ou

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 include

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.

“It’s Manno,” said the voice on the line. Brigadier General Emanuel “Manno” Shaked was Dado’s chief of operations. “A plane has been hijacked,” he said. “It’s heading for Lod. It will land in about thirty minutes. They’ve got hostages. Get to the airport.” He said Dado and the defense minister, Moshe Dayan, were on their way there.

I was sitting down to dinner with Nava a little before seven on May 8, 1972, when the phone rang.

None of us had trained on them. But many of the air marshals on board all El Al flights were Sayeret

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

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

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 p