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Peres’s assurance that I’d be the campaign manager, that hadn’t happened. I wasn’t
really surprised by that, however. When he offered me the job, I wondered how
he’d managed to clear it with much more established Labor politicians. It turned
out he hadn’t. Haim Ramon, the veteran whom I’d urged Yitzhak to bring back for
the election, was put in charge. Shimon did ask me to head a small advisory team
which reported directly to him, but all the key decisions were taken at weekly
strategy sessions chaired jointly by him and Ramon. I still hoped to make the
campaign a referendum on Yitzhak’s murder, and on the need to recommit Israel to
democracy and dialogue over vitriol and violence. But Haim began with the
assumption that, given Peres’s lead in the polls, we should simply play it safe,
ignore the issue of the assassination, and try to ignore Bibi, too. He described it as
a soccer match. We were leading by two goals, he told our first strategy meeting.
The other side was never going to score unless we screwed up. “To win, we do
what all good teams do. We play for time. We kick the ball around. We kick the
ball into the stands. We wait for the final whistle.” I tried, without success, to argue
that we were underestimating Bibi. “He may be young and inexperienced in
national politics. But I know him from when he was even younger. He knows how
to analyze a task, break it down, work out a plan and execute it systematically and
tenaciously. If we play it safe and don’t define the campaign, he’ll seize on every
error we make and he will define it.”

I wanted us at least to connect with Yitzhak’s legacy. I argued to both Peres and
Ramon that we should promote Shimon as the candidate with the background,
experience and vision to take forward what he and Rabin had begun. I also wanted
us to echo a core assumption in all that Yitzhak did as a military and political
leader: that peace was achievable only if Israel and its citizens felt secure. Even
before the renewed terror attacks, I argued that we had to recognize that, much as
Israelis yearned for peace, many were conflicted and fearful about the Oslo
process. I said our central campaign message should be bitachon ve shalom.
Security and peace. “In that order,” I added. “We should tell voters openly that we
expect groups like Hamas to try to launch attacks. But they don’t want a secure
Israel. They don’t want peace. Don’t play their game.”

Yet the scale and intensity of the bombings threw everything into crisis. After
the bomb in the Dizengoff shopping mall, Peres called an emergency cabinet
meeting at the kirya. He knew that we had to find a way to reassure Israelis we
were getting a grip on the situation. We had got a start in our regular Sunday

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