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the interview would be a journalistic coup. For me, it was a risk. He was a famously combative questioner, a bit like Sam Donaldson at White House briefings, or Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys in Britain.

On the night of July 13, I drove to the television studio in Tel Aviv. Mishal confronted me with Yediot’s version of events. I was angry, and showed it. “This report was not some night editor’s mishap,” I said. “It was authorized by the highest levels of a mass-circulation newspaper which is power-drunk, corrupted by power, and manipulative. The so-called ‘story’ was an amateurish and distorted depiction of a chief-of-staff who sees wounded soldiers, turns his back, deserts them and flies away. That is an evil, vain falsehood.” As Mishal pressed me about the allegation that I had fled, I cited, by name, other officers who had been there with me and had confirmed precisely the opposite. I had left Tze’elim, along with Amnon Lipkin, a full 50 minutes after the missiles struck, I said. And only after the helicopters had arrived, the injuries had been treated and the choppers were evacuating the wounded. “A chief of staff’s job is not to treat the wounded, when others are doing that already,” I added. My responsibility was “to keep my head, and ensure a safe and speedy medical evacuation.” That was what I’d done. “I’ve given years of my life to serving this country,” I said. “I have been shot at. I have shot men dead from as close as I am to you now. How did the hand that wrote these things against me not tremble?”

It was certainly high drama. But it was not an act. The way that I’d gone after Yediot prompted some pundits to suggest my skin was too thin. One commentator even said I was obviously not suited to politics. Yet what mattered most to me was what the rest of Israel felt: people who were not reporters or editors, commentators or politicians. Opinion polls the day afterwards showed that something like 80 percent of Israelis believed what I’d said. I think this was only partly due to the details of the argument I made. When you’re under such close, direct scrutiny, I’m sure viewers have an innate sense of whether what they are hearing is the truth.

Almost as soon as I’d got home from the interview, the phone rang. It was someone who, of course, already knew it was the truth: Yitzhak Rabin. “Ehud,” he said, “you did well. Let’s move forward.”

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