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I sensed, at the time, at least the start of some connection. I suspected that Arafat viewed me, as he had Rabin before me, as a “fellow fighter”. But if so, I now wondered whether that might have been part of the problem in his ever truly understanding my mission at Camp David. My motivations. Or my mind.

Even in Israel, my reputation as a soldier has sometimes been as much a burden as an advantage. A whole body of stories has followed me from my 36 years in uniform – a career which, after Sayeret Matkal, led me up the military ladder until I was head of operations, intelligence, and eventually of the entire army as Chief of Staff. By the time I left the military, I was the single most decorated soldier in our country’s history. Some of the stories were actually true: that when we burst onto the hijacked Sabena airliner, for instance, we were dressed as a maintenance crew; or that, in leading an assassination raid in Beirut against the PLO group that had murdered Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics, I was disguised as a woman. Not the most attractive young lady, perhaps, though I did, painfully, pluck my eyelashes, and, with the help of four pairs of standard-issue Israeli Army socks, develop quite a comely bosom. I rejected the idea of wearing a long dress, in favour of stylishly flared trousers. I was going on a commando operation, after all, not a prom date. But I did wear heels. So yes, a woman, of sorts.

Yet some of the stories were just plain myth. I had given up counting the times I’d heard about my alleged prowess in recording the fastest-ever time on the most gruelling of the Israeli army’s obstacle courses. In fact, I was a lot more like Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin.

The main misunderstanding, however, went deeper. The assumption appeared to be that my military achievements, especially in Sayeret Matkal, were down to a mix of brute force and raw courage. Courage, of course, was a requirement: the willingness to take risks, if the rewards for success, or the costs of inaction, were great enough. Few of the operations I fought in or commanded were without the real danger of not coming back alive. But whatever success I’d had as a soldier, particularly in Matkal, was not only, nor even mainly, about biceps. It was about brains. The ability to make decisions. To withstand the pressure of often having to make the most crucial decisions within a matter of seconds. It was, above all, about thinking and analyzing – and always, always, looking and planning ahead.

And as our plane droned onward towards Israel, I knew that I would now need all of those qualities more than ever.

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