frustration of trying to convince the generals in the kirya to give us the go- ahead. Some of them agreed Israel needed a specially trained commando force. But not everyone felt Sayeret Matkal could, or should, take on that role. Rafael “Raful” Eitan was perhaps the most strident. He had fought with the Palmach in 1948. He was an officer in Unit 101 and a commander of the parachutists’ Battalion 890. He was now kaizhar, in overall charge of all infantry and paratroop forces. He insisted that such work required a real sayeret, by which he meant the paratroopers.
Yet 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 Palestine. That meant a quieter eastern frontier. But the Palestinian groups rebased across our northern border in Lebanon. When Jordanian Prime Minister Wafsi al-Tal was assassinated, it proved to be the start of a series of killings and terror attacks by a new group within Fatah, called Black September. There was at least some potentially encouraging news from Egypt. When Nasser died in September 1970, he was succeeded by a less flamboyantly militant vice-president, Anwar Sadat. Yet in both Egypt and Syria, a number of our air force pilots were still being held prisoner.
I felt an especially strong motivation to help bring the pilots home. They had risked their lives for us. It seemed to me we owed them the same. One of the men being held in Syria, Pini Nachmani, had a personal connection to many of us in the unit. He had worked with us on sayeret missions. I came up with a plan that, while undeniably risky, seemed to me to have every chance of success. It was to abduct a number of Syrians from an officers’ club on the western edge of Damascus. We would land in transport helicopters a few miles away and unload a pair of armored cars captured in 1967. But Raful’s view prevailed. I could not get the approval of the Airya. I did take heart from Avraham Arnan’s support. He was now Golda Meir’s counter-terrorism adviser. Also from the fact that Chaim Bar-Lev’s successor as chief of staff was an old friend of the sayeret: Dado Elazar, Avraham’s Palmach comrade from 1948. Yet winning over the remaining doubters in the kirva was obviously going to take time.
As so often during my years in uniform, however, Sayeret Matkal’s birth as a special-forces unit came by force of circumstance: not in an officers’ club near Damascus, but a few miles away from our base, on a runway at Lod Airport.
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