equivalent of the American navy SEALs. But Bibi’s dinghy got tangled up, and he found himself in the canal, being tugged down by the current. Only the SEALs, and Bibi’s mix of calm and endurance, averted disaster.
When I returned as commander, Bibi had gone through officers’ school and was given a team of his own, making him one of half-a-dozen core, operational officers with whom I worked from the planning stages of every mission, through the training and the operation itself. Especially with Bibi, since he was newest to the role. He was smart, tough and, even by sayeret standards, supremely self-confident. It also was clear that he understood my determination to build the unit into a military strike force — which was one reason why he urged me to bring in his older brother. Bibi was 22 at the time. His brother — Yonatan, or Yoni — was 25. He had led a company of paratroopers in the 1967 war, before going off to university. He’d taken a bullet in the elbow while helping to rescue one of his soldiers behind Syrian lines on the Golan. “He wants to return to the army, and he’s exactly the kind of officer you want,” Bibi said.
I brought Yoni in for a chat. Over the next several years, I would get to know him much better, becoming not just friends but neighbors, when he bought a flat a few floors up from ours. But even in this first meeting, I found him a contrast to his younger brother. Bibi was practical, detail-oriented. Yoni was a more complex character. He was interested in history, and philosophy. He wrote poetry. He would sometimes feel the need to get off by himself, and just think. He was a man of action, too. Taller and trimmer than Bibi, with a thick thatch of dark hair swept back from a craggy face, he was the Central Casting image of a soldier. He also had real, battlefield experience. Not only did I invite him to join Sayeret Matkal. I put him in charge of our training teams. When Danny Yatom left the following year to train as an armored officer, I made Yoni my deputy.
However different in some ways, the Netanyahu brothers were close. They seemed almost driven, to excel and to succeed. As I got to know them both, I sensed that the drive did not come merely from within. It came from their upbringing, their family background, and in particular their father. Ben-Zion 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 on an upturned wooden box, and proclaiming that the Arabs would never willingly accept a Jewish state. Long before the 1948 war, and
113 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_011584