Epstein Secrets

ld War Two-vintage halftracks. Our training battalion was based, alongside the country’s main armored brigade, in a huge, hillside army camp outside Beersheva in the Negev. I knew that our fironut — basic training — would be tough. That was the whole point. But we endured a seemingly endless array of inspec

did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied. I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel departme

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

ld War Two-vintage halftracks. Our training battalion was based, alongside the country’s main armored brigade, in a huge, hillside army camp outside Beersheva in the Negev. I knew that our fironut — basic training — would be tough. That was the whole point. But we endured a seemingly endless array of inspec

did, it had to be a step up from what lay ahead of me in the Negev. “Yeah. Sure,” I replied. I heard nothing further in the days after I got back to Beersheva. But at the end of the month, I was ordered to report to a small hut in an army base near Tel Aviv. It belonged to Maka Esser, the personnel departme

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

avy losses. Go see Tzipori.” Motke Tzipori was in charge of organizing the armored units. He sent me to Julis, the training base between Tel Aviv and Beersheva, where tanks from maintenance units around the country were being brought. Once they were reasonably operational, and as more reservists arrived from

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