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This book is only in part the story of my life — a life that, from my
beginnings as a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined
with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle
age of the State of Israel.
Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are
inevitably a part of the story.
In setting out to write it, I was also determined to document, from the inside,
the critical setbacks as well. Mistakes. Misjudgements. Missed opportunities.
And the lessons that we can, and must, be prepared to learn from them.
No less so than I when I was planning a hijack rescue or a cross-border
commando operation in Saveret Matkal, | remain convinced that Israel’s
security, Israel’s very identity, can be safeguarded only by evaluating
dispassionately the situation in our country and the world. And by looking
ahead.
Even when I was a soldier, I never stopped thinking this way, especially
when, first as military intelligence chief and especially as Chief of Staff, I knew,
in detail, every one of the security threats that faced Israel and was part of
discussions and decisions to try to confront them. I still vividly remember as
Chief of Staff, every Friday before the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, sitting
with Rabin, who was then Israel’s Defence Minister. Our offices were along the
same hallway of the Airya, the ministry’s headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv.
Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across
from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an
apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics.
Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the wider world.
Many years before I became Prime Minister, I gave a lecture at a memorial
meeting for an Israeli academic. Not many people were there. I doubt even they
remember it. But I do, because what I said has, sadly, become more prophetic
than even I could have imagined. I talked about the imperative for peace as part
of Israel’s security. There was a “window,” I said. We were militarily strong. In
regional terms, we were a superpower. But politically, resolving the conflict
with our Arab enemies would almost certainly become more difficult with time.
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