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This book is only in part the story of my life – a life that, from my beginnings as a kibbutz boy in pre-state Palestine, has been intimately entwined with the infancy and adolescence and, now, the increasingly troubled middle age of the State of Israel.

Still less is it only a record of its, or my, achievements, although they are inevitably a part of the story.

In setting out to write it, I was also determined to document, from the inside, the critical setbacks as well. Mistakes. Misjudgements. Missed opportunities. And the lessons that we can, and must, be prepared to learn from them.

No less so than I when I was planning a hijack rescue or a cross-border commando operation in Sayeret Matkal, I remain convinced that Israel’s security, Israel’s very identity, can be safeguarded only by evaluating dispassionately the situation in our country and the world. And by looking ahead.

Even when I was a soldier, I never stopped thinking this way, especially when, first as military intelligence chief and especially as Chief of Staff, I knew, in detail, every one of the security threats that faced Israel and was part of discussions and decisions to try to confront them. I still vividly remember as Chief of Staff, every Friday before the arrival of the Jewish Sabbath, sitting with Rabin, who was then Israel’s Defence Minister. Our offices were along the same hallway of the kirya, the ministry’s headquarters in the heart of Tel Aviv. Rabin had a very low table in his office, with two chairs. We would sit across from each other, each with a ready supply of coffee and Yitzhak smoking an apparently endless supply of cigarettes, and we would just talk. Politics. Strategy. Israel. The PLO. The surrounding Arab states. And the wider world.

Many years before I became Prime Minister, I gave a lecture at a memorial meeting for an Israeli academic. Not many people were there. I doubt even they remember it. But I do, because what I said has, sadly, become more prophetic than even I could have imagined. I talked about the imperative for peace as part of Israel’s security. There was a “window,” I said. We were militarily strong. In regional terms, we were a superpower. But politically, resolving the conflict with our Arab enemies would almost certainly become more difficult with time.

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