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organize events and contact voters during the campaign. We outfitted our own war room in an open-plan floor of offices on the edge of Tel Aviv. Philip called it “Milbank South.” As organizational head of the campaign, I chose Chagai Shalom. An industrial engineer by training, he was a reserve army general who, when I was chief of staff, had been in charge of the logistics branch of the military. I gave him Sayeret Matkal backup as well, in the person of Danny Yatom, my longtime friend and former sayeret deputy.

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But all that was process. Winning or losing would come down to how our message, our ability to forge alliances, and my own personal and political appeal, measured up against Bibi.

The new system of separate elections for party and Prime Minister meant that in order to win a majority, I would need the support of voters outside Labor as well. I set out to establish a broader movement, a big tent under which a majority of Israelis could coexist politically. I realized this risked provoking anger among some Labor activists. But I wanted to convey to voters that I was reaching out beyond my core party constituency: to “soft” right-wingers nearer the political center; to the Sephardim who since 1977 had overwhelmingly voted Likud; to the growing number of Russian immigrants who had helped Bibi defeat Peres; and to those among the Orthodox who still subscribed to tolerance and moderation in the mold of the old-style National Religious Party in the first few decades of the state. Though the candidates on our Knesset election list would all be from Labor, I ran the Prime Ministerial campaign under the broader banner of Yisrael Ahat – One Israel. I envisaged it as an alliance of at least several different parties with Labor at its center.

I began with Bibi’s jettisoned Foreign Minister, David Levy. He was a Moroccan-born 1950s immigrant whose career had begun at the grassroots, in the northern town of Beit She’an, but who went on to become a key part of Begin’s victory in 1977. The leading Sephardi figure in the Likud, he was at one point mentioned as a future leader. Many Israelis, especially on the left, now portrayed him as a figure of ridicule. But I’d always had a higher opinion of him. During the

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