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Chapter Seven

If you’d visited Tel Aviv in July 1967, you would have sensed a new spirit
of confidence, not cockiness exactly, but a sort of spring in the collective step.
This was not just due to the Six-Day War. It was because the city, if not yet the
rest of the country, had shed the economic austerity of Israel’s first two decades
and was beginning to experience at least some of the consumer comforts which
Western Europe, or America, took for granted. But we were still a decade away
from the first shopping malls, or the upscale cafés and restaurants which
nowadays give places like Dizengoff Street, a few blocks back from the
seafront, the feel of London or Paris on a summer’s day. Television had been
introduced only a year before the war. Color TV was still nearly a decade away.
I can’t say I was surprised to learn, when the archives were opened a few years
ago, that a committee of moral arbiters in our Ministry of Education vetoed
plans for the Beatles to perform in the city. “No intrinsic artistic value,” they
pronounced. “And their concerts provoke mass hysteria.”

Even in Tel Aviv, and certainly the rest of Israel, a kind of cultural austerity
still prevailed, an emphasis on modesty and self-restraint. It was a legacy of
1948, a reflection of the years of shared sacrifice, physical labor, and the life-
and-death struggles which I, like most Israelis at the time, had experienced
within our own lifetimes. That may help explain why I can remember no one
remarking on an aspect of my character which, once I rose to public
prominence, would attract attention, frequent comment, and sometimes
criticism as well: the fact that I seemed so self-contained, reluctant to engage
emotionally with people beyond a circle of close friends or confidants. My lack
of smalltalk, and the kind of gladhanding and schmoozing that are the currency
of political life. At the time of the 1967 war, I was not yet a public figure. Yet to
the extent those around me would have taken note – family, university
classmates, sayeret comrades, or officers in the kirya – my slight emotional
aloofness, my focus on simply getting things done, and the way I internalized
setbacks, even tragedies like the death of Nechemia Cohen, was not exceptional.
It was, in many ways, simply Israeli.

Yet as Israel, Israeli society and my place in them changed, it would be
suggested to me more than once – not always kindly, when it was from critics or
rivals – that I had a “touch of Aspbergers” in me, a reference to those on the
more benign reaches of the autism spectrum with a special facility for math,

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