Epstein Secrets

gn team. This wasn’t just because I wanted to guard against complacency. It was because, deep down, still I didn’t trust the numbers. I retreated to Kochav Yair on Friday evening. On Saturday, two days before the election, I had a surprise visitor, someone I knew from Yitzhik Mordecai’s team. He said he had a

ERSIGHT_011813 / BARAK / 57 A few days later, the “pre-endgame” around the summit began. Not in Washington or Jerusalem or Ramallah or Gaza, but in Kochav Yair. Nava and I still spent almost all our weekends there. We valued the quiet, or at least the slightly quieter, time away from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. S

ighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their “‘anti-occupation” rationale for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us politically to strike back hard if that proved necessary. It was clear to me that Hizbolla

s never responded. Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in Katyushas and in blood. The reality was that in the half-dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon border was quieter than at any time since the la

ign team. This wasn't just because I wanted to guard against complacency. It was because, deep down, still I didn't trust the numbers. I retreated to Kochav Yair on Friday evening. On Saturday, two days before the election, I had a surprise visitor, someone I knew from Yitzhik Mordecai's team. He said he had a

VERSIGHT_028190 / BARAK / 57 A few days later, the "pre-endgame" around the summit began. Not in Washington or Jerusalem or Ramallah or Gaza, but in Kochav Yair. Nava and I still spent almost all our weekends there. We valued the quiet, or at least the slightly quieter, time away from Jerusalem or Tel Aviv. S

fighters of Hizbollah said publicly, our withdrawal would be bad news for them. It would deprive them of their "anti-occupation" rationale for firing Katyushas into towns and settlements in northern Israel, and free us politically to strike back hard if that proved necessary. It was clear to me that Hizbolla

ns never responded. Equally predictable were the prophets of doom on the Israeli right, who said the Lebanon withdrawal would bury northern Israel in Katyushas and in blood. The reality was that in the half-dozen years following the pullout, the Israel-Lebanon border was quieter than at any time since the la

iled in Israel at about 2 a.m. on January 18, 1991, almost exactly 24 hours after the Americans began their bombing raids over Baghdad. I was home in Kochav Yair. Like other Israelis, we’d set up a sealed shelter. Though I felt a bit silly doing it, having assured the government Saddam was vanishingly unlikely

at the “Litani line” might help impede cross-border raids. But especially since the remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas, with a range of up to 20 kilometers, they could fire rockets over the security zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with be

iled in Israel at about 2 a.m. on January 18, 1991, almost exactly 24 hours after the Americans began their bombing raids over Baghdad. I was home in Kochav Yair. Like other Israelis, we'd set up a sealed shelter. Though I felt a bit silly doing it, having assured the government Saddam was vanishingly unlikely

at the "Litani line" might help impede cross-border raids. But especially since the remaining Palestinian fighters and Hizbollah were acquiring newer Katyushas, with a range of up to 20 kilometers, they could fire rockets over the security zone. My deeper concern was that we intended to hold the area with be