I must confess (and do so cheerfully) that I can’t remember which of two former Israeli DMI’s said that to me. It was either General Chaim Herzog, one of the founding fathers of Israel’s Directorate of Military Intelligence who went on to become the Zionist state’s ambassador to the UN and then its president, or General Shlomo Gazit, the best and the brightest of them all. In private conversations with me both men were refreshingly honest.
Herzog, for example, said the following to me on the second day of the June 1967 war: “If Nasser had not been stupid enough to give us a pretext for war, we would have created one in a year to 18 months.”
But it was Gazit who hit the nail of truth most squarely and firmly on the head in one of our conversations.
For about two decades he was the head of research at the Directorate of Military Intelligence. Then, in 1973, he was called upon to become DMI, with a brief to overhaul the agency to make sure there could never again be an intelligence failure of the kind that had occurred in the countdown to the Yom Kippur war. He was, in short, the man to whom the government of Israel turned for salvation in the aftermath of what it had perceived at the time, wrongly, to be a real threat to the Zionist state’s existence.
Over coffee one morning in early 1980 I took a deep breath and said to Shlomo (then Major General Retired): “I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s all a myth. Israel’s existence has never, ever, been in danger.”
Through a sad smile he replied: “The trouble with us Israelis is that we’ve become the victims of our own propaganda.” More
