came up with the solution, one that would have the unintended effect of elevating our mission further in Israeli lore. The three least burly-looking of us would go in as women: a boyish looking guy named Lonny Rafael, Amiram Levin, and me.
Still, there was another, potentially deeper concern that had yet to be addressed. In all sayeret missions, since the beginning, we knew we might end up having to fight, shoot and, if necessary, kill. Yet now we would be going in with the expectation of killing three specific men. We had black-and-white photos: Mohammed Youssef al-Najar, or Abu Youssef, an operations officer in Black September; Kamal Adwan, one of Arafat’s top military planners; and Kamal Nasser, a member of his leadership circle and his spokesman. Nominally, it was understood we would seize them and bring them back to Israel if possible. I had us exercise how we’d do that. But none of us really believed that once our teams made it into the apartments, the Palestinians would surrender. We assumed we would have no option but to kill them.
The killing was not the main issue. After all, I had drawn up a plan a year earlier to target Arafat himself. Though no one in the sayeret took any pleasure in having to take a life, at the end of the day we were a part of the army. Black September, and Arafat’s Fatah more broadly, were not only at war with the existence of Israel. They were behind a campaign of terror. Certainly there was no significant public opposition, after the horror of Munich, to going after those who were deemed to be part of the operational or political direction of Black September. Our uneasiness inside the unit, however, revolved around what I’d extolled as its “spirit” when I became commander. Beyond all the specific qualities we needed to succeed in our operations, our image of ourselves was as thinking soldiers. We might sometimes find it necessary to kill, but we were not killers.
As I explained to each of the men I’d be leading on the operation, the Mossad, Dado, and ultimately Golda had concluded that these three men were appropriate targets in the wake of Munich. As a battalion-level commander, I did not feel I was in a position to challenge their judgement, unless we had been ordered to carry out an attack that was clearly improper or immoral. In that case, I would have no hesitation in refusing. I said I viewed what we were being asked to do in Beirut not as an act of revenge, but a deterrent. It was a way of leaving no doubt in the minds of potential future terrorists that massacres like Munich carried a heavy price.
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