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Yet the most immediate security concerns were right next door. In Lebanon,
Hizbollah fighters were being armed and financed by the Iranians and by Syria
as well. They were mounting increasingly effective operations against the
Israeli troops we’d left in the security zone. Even closer to home, Palestinian
attacks on both troops and civilians, though on nowhere near the scale of the
first months of the intifada, showed no sign of ending. I had my own views on
both. In Lebanon, I still believed we should pull out all our troops and focus our
security arrangements on what really mattered: protecting the citizens of
northern Israel. As for the lessons to be learned from the intifada, my view that
we needed a political dialogue had inadvertently become public, from remarks I
made in Moshe Dayan’s honor at a memorial event a few months before
becoming chief of staff. “We are currently in a struggle with the Palestinians — a
long, bitter and continuing struggle,” I said. “A people cannot choose its
neighbors. But we will have to talk to the Palestinians about matters, especially
about issues that are vital to them.”
Still, I was the commander of the armed forces, not a politician. Though all
chiefs of staff had political influence, if only as part of the decision-making
process on all major security questions, making policy was for our elected
government. My main focus was on how to improve the military’s fitness to
respond. I’d lived through, and more recently fought in, all of Israel’s wars. I
felt that we had yet to apply some of the critical lessons from those conflicts.
Leading tanks into battle against the Egyptians’ deadly Sagger missiles in 1973,
and a decade later watching whole Israeli armored columns stalled and attacked
by small bands of PLO fighters or Syrian commandos in Lebanon, had hardened
my conviction that Israel needed a leaner, more mobile army, with more
specialised strike units, as well as more easily targeted, less vulnerable weapons
systems. I wanted to shift the emphasis to weaponry that relied on Israel’s
strengths in new technology, invention and engineering. In a sense, this was the
macroscopic equivalent of one of the guiding principles of Sayeret Matkal:
brains, not just brawn.
While cost-saving wasn’t the catalyst, I did realize that a change in strategy
would mean a change in how we allocated our resources. When Israel bought its
first Mirage jets from France in the 1960s, they cost about a million dollars
apiece. The price tag of an F-16 was now closer to fiftv million dollars. The cost
of a tank had increased tenfold. I wasn’t going to deprive the air force of state-
of-the-art aircraft, key to our ability to fight and win a war. But while we still
needed a strong armored corps, it was important to realize that units like the
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