Proud, I watched Shaul enter the Unit just as I was leaving, and wished his mother had lived to see him full-grown. Nurit passed away shortly after Entebbe, finally freed from the tragic illness that debilitated her in the last years of her life. We laid her to rest in Nahalal’s cemetery overlooking the Jezreel Valley, under a broad fir tree that shades her spot from the hot sun. She was twenty-nine years old. Shaul grew up in Nahalal, where my younger brother Eyal, who had married Nurit’s sister, took over the family farm after Nurit’s passing.
So, a decade after my most famous mission — though not at the pinnacle of my work in the army, a subject and period that await declassification for another book — I retired from the army at the age of forty. Since then, I’ve seen many of my friends and colleagues — Ehud Barak, Matan Vilnai, Amiram Levine, and others — rise to the highest levels in the army.
But I never wanted an army career. And as a civilian I chose a profession as rooted in the traditions of my family as service in the defense of Israel — settlement. But instead of government-subsidized settlements in the occupied territories, my friends from the army and the Jezreel Valley organized our new village in the hills overlooking Nahalal.
For the first time in Israel, private citizens undertook to build a new settlement without help from the government or from a political movement. Neither kibbutz nor moshav, nor merely a bedroom suburb to nearby Haifa, we planned it from the start as an independent community.
Asked to serve as chief executive officer for the group, I became involved while studying at Haifa University. I finally went back to school during a sabbatical the army gave me in 1980, studying the geography, botany, and zoology of the Land of Israel, just as I had for years. We began construction in 1981. A year later I remarried, to Nomi, and in 1983, we moved into our new home, and had two daughters, Tamar and Shani.
I began this book in the same September 1993 week as the historic handshake on the White House lawn between my former commanding general, Yitzhak Rabin, and my former enemy leader, Yasser Arafat. I wanted to leave the next generation an account of the wars and battles I saw from the tip of the IDF’s spear, to help those future generations understand the value of peace.
As I have always said, I am a son of the Jezreel Valley, born in Nahalal, a village deliberately shaped as a circle. Indeed, an important circle of my life was closed that same week in September 1993 as the first steps on the long road to real peace in the Land of Israel took place — my father, Nahman, died.
A working farmer until the last weeks of his life, he was gladdened to live to see the beginning of a peace process with the Palestinians, an enemy he never hated. He was buried beside my mother, Sarah, who died in 1986, in the Nahalal cemetery at the other end of the same row as Nurit. Hundreds of old-timers and members of our extended family came to the shady grove overlooking the valley to pay their respects to him as the embodiment of the pioneering ideal of a man who devoted himself to Israel’s safety and settlement.
In late 1973, a few weeks after the cease-fire at the end of the Yom Kippur War, while Henry Kissinger still negotiated the disengagement of forces and the IDF field positions on the west bank of the Suez Canal, my brother Udi and I both managed to get home for a few hours.
We told our father, Nahman, about the battles we had fought. He was interested, of course. But when we told him about the agriculture that we saw in Egypt, he became most excited. The Egyptian farming techniques fascinated him, for while we knew the best of Israeli agritechnology, the Egyptians used methods as old as the Bible. We decided to take him down to Egypt, to see firsthand.
We drove over the bridges Arik’s engineering crews had put up to make the bridgehead into Egypt. We took him to Fa’id and to Deversoir, all the way to where Amitai Nahmani was killed, and then through the mango plantations to the dunes where Amit Ben-Horin died trying to invoke the cease-fire.
Only when we reached the irrigation canals of that huge plantation did his excitement finally break through his normally stoic expression. Finding some Egyptian peasants working in the groves, he questioned them for hours in his farmer’s Arabic about when they plant and harvest, how they control the water, and which crops served them best. The farms, not the fighting, interested him.
Like him, I understood there was no realistic choice but mutual recognition between the two people — the Israelis and the Palestinians-who regard the Land of Israel as home. Not that I wanted to run to embrace Arafat. But no people can rule another people without their consent, and no realistic alternative exists to compromise in the Land of Israel between us and the Palestinians. For me, the historic mutual recognition was proof of the success of the Zionist revolution my grandparents helped begin at the beginning of the century, a revolution that believed in eventual Arab acceptance of our presence in the region.
The historic handshake in September 1993 also became the start of a process that enabled me to close two circles in my own life story.
In January 1994 I received a phone call from an Israeli journalist asking if I would be ready to go with him to Uganda to do a documentary, including a trip to the old terminal at Entebbe airport. No Israeli had visited Uganda since the Entebbe rescue.
“Sure,” I said. But that was about all he had as far as his story idea was concerned. He had been sending faxes to the Ugandan government ever since the mutual recognition between Israel and the PLO when, suddenly, many of the Third World and developing countries that had long boycotted Israel announced their renewal of diplomatic relations. But Uganda was so far silent on the issue. Even the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem couldn’t help.
Over the years I had kept up my contacts for anything connected to the African country that had played such an important part in my life. I knew that the Ugandan president’s brother was in Israel, having an operation at one of the country’s best hospitals. The medical treatment had been arranged by an Israeli, with a company based in Nairobi, that did business in Uganda. I gave the journalist the name of the Israeli businessman in Nairobi. “Here’s the intelligence,” I told the reporter. “Now, let’s see how good a reporter you are.”
And sure enough, a week later, I was back in a jeep on the tarmac at Entebbe, but it was daytime, and instead of a web-belt and a weapon, I carried a tourist’s flight bag and a camera. And instead of an officer leading the break-in teams to the old terminal, I was officially a “producer” for an Israeli television news crew.
Nothing had changed in seventeen years. Uganda had seen civil wars and coups, invasions, and finally peace, but nobody had used the old terminal since the night we flew out. The control tower at Entebbe was still riddled with the scars of Shaul Mofaz’s fifty-caliber machine guns mounted on the BTR. I climbed a musty stairwell to the room at the top of the tower, astonished by the commanding view it had of the scene and amazed at how lucky we were that more of us didn’t die that night.
The Ugandan president invited us to meet him at his home in the far north of the country. Not certain how he felt about the rescue, we did not mention my role in the raid. But he told us he regarded Idi Amin as an enemy of Uganda, and praised Israel for its action in 1976. Indeed, on camera, he announced the resumption of diplomatic relations with Israel. Promising Israeli tourists a warm welcome in his country, he took seriously a suggestion that the old terminal be turned into a museum for tourists interested in the rescue and its blow against international terror.