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Labor leadership contest. “Shalom, Ehud,” he said when I answered the phone and, without small talk or preliminaries, asked me: “What do you think we should do?”

I said I couldn’t offer specific suggestions. “It’s a detail-related question, and I don’t know the details.” But I advised him on the process I felt would be needed to come up with the right answer when the chief-of-staff, the former air force chief Dan Halutz, briefed the cabinet. “Halutz will propose what to do. Push him,” I said. “When he presents his recommended action, ask him for his assessment of what Hizbollah will do in response. When he, or the head of military intelligence, has given you the range of possibilities and told you which is the most likely, say, OK, let’s assume that happens. What’s our next step? How is that going to lead us to our main objectives? And what are the objectives?” Newspaper reports the next morning said that Shimon, and only Shimon, did indeed press the chief-of-staff about each further stage of the operation and about the aims that we wanted to accomplish. But Halutz finally fobbed him off by saying that once they got to the later phases, they could discuss it.

From the first reports I received through my army contacts, I feared the operation would go badly. There was no doubt we could inflict damage on Hizbollah. But there were no clear answers to the questions Shimon had raised. The initial Israeli air force response had been put in place more than five years earlier, when I was Prime Minister. Codenamed “Operation Cinnamon Sticks,” it was designed to take out all of the fixed Hizbollah missile sites we had been able to identify. We knew its limitations. A lot of the rockets were fired from mobile launchers. But in one exercise, the known “Hizbollah” sites were replicated in the Galilee. They were destroyed in 43 minutes. I had no doubt that part of the plan would succeed. In the early hours of July 13, it took only 34 minutes to destroy the nearly 60 launchers we had pinpointed over the previous five years.

But Operation Cinnamon Sticks had been intended as a first step in a far wider assault on Hizbollah and other targets, including a number of infrastructure installations, deeper inside Lebanon. It was part of a plan for a full-scale war, if the government decided that was necessary. As the early public statements by Olmert and other ministers made clear, they did not intend to start a war, at least at the outset. They certainly didn’t have a coherent plan for one. But they would soon find themselves in Israel’s longest single armed conflict since 1948. When Hizbollah fired hundreds of missiles at Israeli towns and cities, our operation intensified not by plan or military logic, but improvisation. As a former Prime

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