Epstein Secrets

oth were furious over the obviously pre-arranged seizure of Sinai, Gaza and the canal. It took a while for the message to sink in. In a speech to the Knesset after the conquest was complete, Ben-Gurion declared the post- 1948 armistice null and void, and said Israel would never again allow “foreign forces”

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

e travelled to Jerusalem, the capital of a country which neither Egypt nor any other Arab country even recognized. He met Begin, and he addressed the Knesset with a call for peace. It is impossible to convey to Israelis who did not live through the birth of the state, and our tumultuous early decades, the

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

oth were furious over the obviously pre-arranged seizure of Sinai, Gaza and the canal. It took a while for the message to sink in. In a speech to the Knesset after the conquest was complete, Ben-Gurion declared the post- 1948 armistice null and void, and said Israel would never again allow “foreign forces”

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