My Country, My Life by Ehud Barak

Author:Ehud Barak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

15

Chief of Staff

On the morning of April 1, 1991, I got up even earlier than usual, to visit the graves of the men who had lost their lives in my battalion in the Yom Kippur War. I also went to pay my respects to Uzi Yairi, killed when he’d rushed from his desk in the kirya to join Sayeret Matkal’s response to the terror attack at the Savoy Hotel. Then Nava and I drove to Jerusalem. At Israel’s national military cemetery on Mount Herzl, we stood before the resting place of Nechemia Cohen, Yoni Netanyahu, Dado Elazar, and Avraham Arnan. From there, we went to the prime minister’s office. With Dan Shomron and his wife looking on, Shamir presented me with my third star and formally made me chief of staff.

For years, I’d developed the habit of carrying around a notebook in which I’d jot down thoughts on things I thought that the Israeli military, and I as an officer, could have done better: errors, oversights, and how we might fix them. In the weeks before becoming ramatkal, I’d filled dozens of pages on issues large and small I hoped to address as the commander of the armed forces. A lot of them dealt with what I sensed was an erosion of cohesiveness in the army and, since ours was a citizen military, a fraying of the relationship between the army and Israeli society. To some degree, this was inevitable in a country now nearly forty-five years old: we were developed economically and free of the kind of existential threat we’d faced in the state’s early years. But the political divisions over the war in Lebanon and the morale-sapping effort to quell the violence on the West Bank and in Gaza had further strained our unity of purpose.

Militarily, we were indisputably strong enough to defeat any of the Arab armies, even if they launched a joint attack as in 1973. Our most important overseas ally, the United States, was committed to helping us retain that position—what both we and they called Israel’s “qualitative military edge”—in the interest of our security and their own. But we were facing a series of new, unconventional challenges. One of them, which had shown up on Dan Shomron’s and my radar over the past year, was Iran. Though geographically distant, it was potentially the most serious in the longer run, as Dan himself warned Israelis in his final interview as chief of staff. Iran was likely to become even more assertive regionally now that the Gulf War had weakened its neighbor and rival, Iraq. We also knew, from our intelligence sources, that the Iranians were making preliminary efforts to develop a nuclear weapon.

Yet the most immediate security concerns were right next door. In Lebanon, Hizbollah fighters were being armed and financed by the Iranians and by Syria as well. They were mounting increasingly effective operations against the Israeli troops we’d left in the security zone. Even closer to home, Palestinian attacks on both troops and

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