Epstein Secrets

the Israeli Defense Force — also seemed to have lost the cutting edge, or perhaps the desperate motivation, of the pre-state militias. At first, Ben- Gurion relied on young recruits in the new army’s infantry brigades to counter the fedayeen attacks. Nearly 90 reprisal operations were launched in 1952 and

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

Miliekowsky, as he then was, studied at Hebrew University at the same time as my father, in the early 1930s, and was an impassioned supporter of Ben- Gurion’s main right-wing Zionist rival, Ze’ev Jabotinsky. My father remembered him gathering bemused groups of students during breaks from classes, standing

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

the Israeli Defense Force — also seemed to have lost the cutting edge, or perhaps the desperate motivation, of the pre-state militias. At first, Ben- Gurion relied on young recruits in the new army’s infantry brigades to counter the fedayeen attacks. Nearly 90 reprisal operations were launched in 1952 and

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