The challenge now, I told my exhausted team, was to make sure we were prepared for this new reality. Part of the spadework was already in place. Much as I’d hoped that Arafat and I could turn a new page in Middle East history, I had directed our army chief-of-staff, nine months before the summit, to draw up contingency plans for the likelihood of an unprecedentedly deadly eruption of Palestinian violence if we were to fail.
Now, I felt we had to go even further, and to prepare a proactive alternative to the negotiated deal we’d been unable to secure. I proposed considering a unilateral Israeli pullout from the West Bank and Gaza. The territorial terms would, necessarily, be less far-reaching than the proposal Arafat had rejected. But I felt we should still withdraw from the great majority of the land we had captured in 1967, still leaving the Palestinians an area which the outside world would recognize as wholly sufficient for them to establish a viable, successful state.
And crucially, this would finally give Israel, our country, a delineated, final border with the territory captured in the Six-Day War.
Gili, clearly uneasy about accepting the idea that the chances for a negotiated peace were definitively gone, left to try to get some sleep on the long flight ahead. Danny and Shlomo Ben-Ami as well. Within an hour or so, the plane was full of irregularly slumped bodies, the silence broken only by the drone of the 707’s engines and the occasional sound of snoring.
I sat, wide awake, in one of the seats at the front.
My sleeping habits were another inheritance from Sayveret Matkal. During those years, nearly everything of significance which I did had happened after sundown. The commando operations were, of course, set for darkness whenever possible. The element of surprise could mean the difference between success and failure, indeed life and death. But all of my planning, all my thinking, tended to happen at night as well. The quiet, and the lack of distractions, helped to discipline my mind. I found that it helped to free my mind as well, sometimes only to discover that it went off in unexpected directions.
It did so now. Perhaps even I was still reluctant to accept that Camp David meant that the opportunity for a transformative deal with Arafat was finished. Yet whatever the reason, I began thinking back to the first time that my path and his had crossed. It was in the spring of 1968, nearly a year after Israel had defeated the armies of our three main Arab enemies — Egypt, Syria and Jordan. Israeli forces were advancing on a Jordanian town called Karameh, across the
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