Memoir excerpt describing a 707 flight and negotiations involving Israeli officials

the substance of any real peace — could not simply be put off forever. Untangling them was getting harder, not easier. And we realised that only in an environment like Camp David — a “pressure cooker” was how I described it to Clinton, and to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright — would we ever discover whether a peace deal could in fact be done. Now, we knew. Israel’s equivalent of Air Force One, perhaps in a nod to our country’s pioneering early years, was an almost prehistoric Boeing 707. It was waiting on the runway at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington to ferry me and the rest of our negotiating team back home. It contained a low-rent equivalent of the American version’s presidential cabin, and a few 1960s-vintage first-class seats, but consisted mostly of two long lines of coach seats, three abreast, separated by an almost tightrope-narrow aisle. I dare say I was alone in finding an odd sense of comfort in boarding the plane. This museum piece of an aircraft was part of my past. It was the same model of 707 for which I, with a couple of other young soldiers and engineers, had come up with what we dubbed the “submarine door” system outside the cockpit — to protect El Al pilots from future attacks after one of its planes had been hijacked to Algiers in the summer of 1968. It was also the same kind of plane — a Sabena flight, hijacked to Tel Aviv’s Ben-Gurion Airport — which I stormed, before sunrise, four years later with a force of nearly two dozen Matkal commandos. The shooting was over within 90 seconds. One of my men —a junior officer named Bibi Netanyahu — was wounded. By one of our own bullets. But we managed to kill two of the heavily armed hijackers, capture the others, and free all 90 passengers unharmed. Still, even I had to accept, it was no fun to fly on. As we banked eastward after takeoff and headed out over the Atlantic, the mood on board was sober. Huddling with the inner core of my negotiating team — my policy co-ordinator Gilad Sher, security aide Danny Yatom and Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami — I could see that the way the summit ended had hit them hard. It was probably true, as all three often reminded me, that the greatest pressure fell on me. I was the one who ultimately decided what we could, or 3 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011474