Former Israeli General alleges cover‑up of deadly Negev exercise and involvement of Prime Minister Rabin

When I got back, we immediately met with Rabin and agreed on the need to launch a formal investigation. Rabin then asked me to brief the “editors club”, a group of about 15 media figures that operated on a gentleman’s agreement that there would be no publicity or leaks. He believed we should not make public the fact that I and other generals were there when the accident occurred. At this stage, we still hoped to hide the purpose of the exercise if possible, something Rabin knew would be harder if it was known the top military leadership had observed the exercise. When I briefed the editors’ club, I did tell them in confidence that I’d been there. Though not specifying the reason for the exercise, I told them it was for a major operation. The time-honored understanding was that this information would go no further. But it did, presumably at first because of leaks by Israeli journalists, then in a series of detailed reports in the foreign press. Even more frustrating on a personal level, some of the Israeli reports insinuated that far from giving the editors the full story of who had been at the Negev exercise, that I’d tried to hide my presence in order to protect my reputation or shirk responsibility. Two official inquiries followed: the one we’d agreed with Rabin and a standard army legal investigation. They found the cause of the tragedy to be a mix of fatigue after some of the soldiers had spent nearly 48 hours awake, pressure, confusion and negligence. Astonishingly, it turned out the codeword for the mock-firing of the missiles in the first stage of the exercise was the same as for the live missiles. Formal charges were brought against two Sayeret Matkal officers, and reprimands issued to Amiram Levin and Uri Saguy. I was also subject to criticism because, due to the unique complexity of the plan, I’d put Amiram and senior officers within Sayeret Matkal in charge of different aspects of the preparations. This was viewed as possibly reducing the clarity over who was ultimately responsible for each aspect of the planning. Neither I, nor of course Rabin, had played a direct role in what went wrong in the exercise itself. To the extent I’d been involved, it was to make sure the medical teams were helicoptered in, and that the injured soldiers were cared for and evacuated as soon as possible. But politically, the tragedy at Tze’elim would dramatically resurface for both me and Rabin several years later — after I’d left the military and was on the verge of joining his government. I was getting to know Yitzhak much better. The Defense Minister’s office in the kirva was just down the hall from mine. Almost without fail on Friday afternoons, he’d ask me in to chat before going home. We would sit around a low table in the corner of the room, each of us sipping coffee, or sometimes beer, and Rabin invariably puffing on a cigarette. He never raised questions of 249 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_028097