recommended that Begin fire Sharon and Saguy. They left Raful in place, but only because his term as chief-of-staff was due to end in a matter of weeks. Arik at first refused to go, and Begin refused to fire him. Yet in the end, popular pressure forced the issue. When another demonstration was called in protest at Sharon’s continuing as Defense Minister, a right-wing political activist tossed a grenade into the crowd, killing a young Peace Now member. Even Arik was evidently shaken by the spectre of one of his presumed political admirers murdering a fellow Israeli for peacefully protesting. Or at least shaken enough to step down as Defense Minister. He did remain in the government as a minister without portfolio. Still, Begin himself would quit as Prime Minister, retiring into virtual seclusion, about half-a-year later.
Like the rest of the senior officers corps, I tried with difficulty to get on with my own job. I imagined the contribution I could best make for now would be, as Head of Planning, to ensure the mix of forces and weaponry deployed in any future conflict were better suited to the task than in the Lebanon war. But I didn’t believe that such technical failings or planning lapses, however serious a contribution to the more than 650 Israeli lives lost, were what had mainly caused the war to go wrong. The central mistake was what had bothered me all along: the invasion was not a considered response to a particular security threat. It was an overreaching exercise in geopolitics, with sleight-of-hand used to evade the need to make and win support from government ministers and, critically, the public. Even with questions still to be resolved about when and how to withdraw the thousands of Israeli troops that were still inside Lebanon, I remember wondering aloud to a few army friends, and to Nava as well, whether we would look back in a decade’s time and see the war as “our Vietnam’. In fact, Israeli troops would still be in south Lebanon nearly two decades later, when I had left the military and was about to become Israeli Prime Minister.
Even as a two-star general in the kirva, | doubted I would be in a position to help fix the deeper issues raised by the war. Any real influence would be in positions like the chief-of-staff and his deputy; the head of operations; the head of military intelligence. They were the core of the armed forces’ leadership and had the most regular dealings with senior figures in government.
But I’d failed to factor in the effect of the inquiry recommendations. Within days of the report, Israel had a new Defense Minister: Moshe Arens, who returned from his post as ambassador in Washington. Among his first orders of business was to act on the inquiry’s verdict on Raful and Yehoshua Saguy. As chief of staff, Arens settled on a choice I suspect most senior officers saw as the
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