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outside the kirya in a facility just north of Tel Aviv, was Rabin’s idea. In
addition to Dan and me, it included key members of the general staff and senior
defense ministry officials. The idea was for us to hear a half-dozen academics
and other specialists speak about the political aspects of the sudden eruption of
Palestinian violence.
Though he spoke for barely 10 minutes, it was the last speaker who left the
deepest impression. Shimon Shamir, a professor at Tel Aviv University, began
by emphasizing he was not an expert in riot control. Finding a response to the
violence was something we were far better equipped to do. But then he paused,
looked intently at Rabin, Dan and me, and said: “What I can do is draw on
history.” One by one, he cited examples of more than a dozen broadly similar
rebellions over the past century, in the Middle East and beyond. “If we were
dealing with simple rioting, things might be different.” But he said the
Palestinians were, fundamentally, acting out of a shared sense of grievance, and
shared national identity. Both were in large part the result of Israel having
controlled their daily lives now for more than two decades. “I’m afraid I can
find no historical precedent for the successful suppression of the national will of
a people,” he said. Even when those in power used unimaginably punitive tools:
like expulsion, or forced starvation. “Even, as we know well as a Jewish people,
extermination.”
I glanced at Yitzhak and at Dan. Both of them looked like I felt: in no doubt
the professor was right, yet also aware that, in the short term, we still had to find
a way of putting a lid on the cauldron and keeping the situation for getting
irretrievably out of control.
It wasn’t as if ’'d been unaware of the sense of the anger building among
many West Bank and Gaza Palestinians, or of their wish to see an end to Israel’s
military administration and the growing number of Jewish settlements. From
my time as head of the central command, I also knew that there was a young,
activist core intensifying efforts to organize attacks on troops and settlers. But
none of us had any inkling that something of the scale, longevity and political
complexity of the intfada lay ahead.
Partly, this was a failure of specific intelligence warnings. But it went deeper
than that. Sobering though it was, I had to accept that — no less so than before
the Yom Kippur War in 1973 — I and many others had for too long been
comforting ourselves with a fundamental misconception about our military
occupation and civilian settlement in the areas captured in 1967. The roots of
the myopia went back to the immediate aftermath of the Six-Day War, to the
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