Sublime

One of the most highly decorated soldiers in Israel’s history, Barak had campaigned on a platform built on three fundamental promises. He pledged to get Israeli troops out of southern Lebanon, from which Israel had never figured out how to extract itself. He committed himself to making peace with Syria. And finally, despite increasing doubts about

Operation Cinnamon

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 Se

Having lost his support in the Knesset, Barak called for elections to be held in February 2001. Israeli Arabs boycotted the elections as a reaction to the events of October 2000, which further weakened the Left. Barak lost, and Ariel Sharon, heading the right-wing Likud party, was elected to replace him. Once again, Palestinian violence had returne

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

Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, the former mayor of Jerusalem, declared his intention to hand over the majority of Palestinian territories in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority. Unlike some of his predecessors, Olmert was asserting that a Palestinian state could be established before many of the thorniest issues in the negotiations would b

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.

Peres subsequently served in a number of significant roles beyond his being a member of the Knesset, including minister of foreign affairs, minister of defense, minister of finance, and prime minister from 1984 to 1986. Now, committed to Rabin’s vision of peace, he pushed on with Oslo. In November and December 1995, Israel redeployed out of all the

was the luck of the draw.