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sometime were. It called for mental application, an ability to assess risks, to find answers under enormous pressure when, inevitably, things went wrong. It required not just brawn, but brains.

A week before I began my final year at Hebrew University, I went to see Eli Zeira, the senior intelligence officer who’d so brashly predicted the course of the Six-Day War, in hopes of sounding out my prospects of picking up my military career where I’d left off. Despite a yawning gap in rank and age – Eli was nearly fifteen years older – I felt I could be open with him. Not only did I know him from Sayeret Matkal, which came under his purview in the kirya. He was a scientist manqué and was eager, as soon as I arrived in his office, to hear about my physics studies. When I did manage to turn the conversation to the army, I told him I was thinking of returning after I graduated. Yet before finally deciding, I wanted his honest opinion about my chances, at some point, of being given command of the sayeret. He began with a series of caveats. The choice of future leaders of the sayeret was not be his to make. When the current commander, Uzi Yairi, ended his term in roughly 18 months’ time, I’d still be too young to have a realistic chance. “Maybe even next time around,” he said. And in any case, I would first need to get some experience in the regular army. “But then,” he concluded, “my opinion is that you have a very good chance of becoming commander of the unit.” That was more than enough. I figured that whether it actually happened would now ultimately be down to me.

My last year at university was the closest thing I would have to a normal student existence. I was called away only once. But it was for a battle which would turn out to have a lasting impact on the course of our conflict with the Arabs, and on the prospects of eventually finding a way to make peace. It was Israel’s largest military action since the war, across our new de facto border with Jordan. And it was directed at a new enemy: a fledgling army of Palestinian fedayeen, called Fatah. It was led by a man that I, like almost all Israelis, had never heard of at the time: Yasir Arafat. Born in Egypt, as a 19-year-old he had fought against the establishment of Israel in the 1948 war. Although Fatah had nominally existed for nearly a decade, it was only now emerging as a political force, in large part because of the Arab armies’ humiliating defeat in the Six-Day War. A Palestinian political leadership already existed, in the shape of the Palestine Liberation Ogranization. But it was based in Cairo. Its chairman was, for all practical purposes, an adjunct of President Nasser’s leadership role in the Arab world. Though Arafat had not yet explicitly challenged this state of affairs, his, and Fatah’s, rise after the war carried a powerful, message for the existing Arab presidents and prime ministers: their brash promises of victory before the

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