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Yet the saddest note came at the end. “I apologize for being healthy, for not getting old according to plan,” he said, adding that even without the title of president, he would keep working for peace.

There were three other candidates for party chairman: Yossi Beilin; Ephraim Sneh, the friend who’d been the paratroopers’ chief medic when we’d fought at the Chinese Farm in 1973, and at Entebbe too; and Shlomo Ben-Ami, the academic and diplomat whom Shimon had taken along with Yossi and me to meet visiting foreign politicians, and who was now also a newly elected member of the Knesset. When the vote came, it was assumed by most political commentators that I was going to win. The only question was whether I’d get the 50 per cent of votes needed to avoid a run-off, where the outcome might be less predictable. But I got 57 percent against Yossi’s 28, with the remaining 15 percent split between Ephraim and Shlomo-Ben Ami.

* * *

Now, we had to put ourselves in a position to defeat Bibi and the Likud. Policy priorities were ultimately what would matter most: strong and credible steps to confront terror and safeguard our security, allied with the leadership and will to try to negotiate a peace with Syria and the Palestinians; and, at home, a recommitment to the values of an open, tolerant democracy. But in at least one important way, I approached my new role as if it was one of our operations in Sayeret Matkal, or the need to reshape our armed forces when I was chief-of-staff. My first priority was to put in place the practical foundations for a successful election challenge against Bibi. Through Jean Frydman and other business supporters with the means and the desire to help, my brother-in-law, Doron Cohen, assembled sufficient funding for us to begin engaging with the strategists who had helped deliver electoral success for a trio of other centre-left political leaders overseas: Bill Clinton, Tony Blair in Britain and later Gerhard Schroeder in Germany.

My main early political focus was on holding Bibi and the government to account in the Knesset, above all on the torturous process of ensuring our security while implementing the West Bank redeployments agreed in Oslo II. We’d made a small start under Rabin and Peres, but the three major withdrawal phases due in the

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