Epstein Secrets

Sharon, Sharon turned to me and the army’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, and said: “Tell me. Why the hell is Arafat still alive?” He looked first at Raful, then at me, and added: “When I was 20 years younger than you are, I never waited for someone like Ben-Gurion or Dayan to ask me to plan an operation

ter under Shimon Peres. But in the intervening years, Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world political stage, and an increasingly un

club on the western edge of Damascus. We would land in transport helicopters a few miles away and unload a pair of armored cars captured in 1967. But Raful’s view prevailed. I could not get the approval of the Airya. I did take heart from Avraham Arnan’s support. He was now Golda Meir’s counter-terrorism

need for a special-forces unit was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. By the summer of 1971, a couple of months after I became sayeret commander, King Hussein’s army had defeated the insurgency of Fatah and a pair of even more militant partners, the Democratic Front and the Popular Front for the Liberation of

Sharon, Sharon turned to me and the army’s Chief of Staff, Rafael Eitan, and said: “Tell me. Why the hell is Arafat still alive?” He looked first at Raful, then at me, and added: “When I was 20 years younger than you are, I never waited for someone like Ben-Gurion or Dayan to ask me to plan an operation

ter under Shimon Peres. But in the intervening years, Arafat was rarely off of my radar. By the early 1970s, he and his fighters had been expelled by King Hussein’s army from Jordan and were re-based in Lebanon. Arafat was becoming a significant figure on the Arab and world political stage, and an increasingly un