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Night Flight
They say that you can read a person’s feelings on his face. But if so, either
I’m a very good actor — the opposite of what anyone who has worked closely
with me would tell you — or the journalists clustered in front of me weren’t very
good face-readers. They said that I looked defeated. Distressed. Depressed.
Yet as I delivered my brief final statement outside an olive-green cabin at
Camp David, the American presidential retreat in the forested Catoctin hills
north of Washington, I felt none of those things.
Yes, I was disappointed. I realised that what had happened over the last 14
days, or more crucially what had not happened, was bound to have serious
consequences, both for me personally, as Prime Minister of Israel, and for my
country.
But I had been a politician, at that point, for all of five years. By far most of
my life, I had spent in uniform. As a teenager, small and slight and not even
shaving yet, I was one of the founding core of a unit called Sayveret Matkal,
Israel’s equivalent of America’s Delta Force, or Britain’s SAS. It may be that
the way I thought and acted, the way I dealt with danger or with crises, came
from someplace inside me. Even as a young kid, I was always quiet, serious,
contemplative. But my 13 years as a part of Israel’s main special-forces unit,
especially once I became its commander, etched those qualities more deeply.
And they added new ones: a sense that you could never plan a mission too
carefully or prepare too assiduously; an understanding that what you thought,
and certainly what you said, mattered a lot less than what you did. And above
all the realisation that, when one of our nighttime commando operations was
over, whether it had succeeded or failed, you had to take a step back. Evaluate
things accurately, coolly, without illusions. Then, in the light of how the
situation had changed, you had to decide how best to move forward.
That approach, to the occasional frustration of the politicians and diplomats
working alongside me during this critical stage of Israel’s history, had guided
me from the moment I became Prime Minister. In my very first discussions with
President Clinton a year earlier — a long weekend, beginning at the White House
and moving on to Camp David — I had mapped out at great length, in great
detail, every one of the steps I knew we would have to take to confront the
central issue facing Israel: the need for peace.
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