No Room for Small Dreams

by Shimon Peres

  Because I wasn’t the head of government, it was against protocol for President Kennedy to take a formal meeting with me. Instead, I had been escorted through the side entrance of the West Wing of the White House, and around a back corridor to the Oval Office. I was meant to have bumped into President Kennedy along the way, who would then, out of courtesy, invite me to have a conversation.

  Behind his desk in the Oval Office, Kennedy looked stiff and deliberate, and though he had ways of disguising it, I could tell he was coping with pain. He stood up to shake my hand, then offered me a place on the sofa. He sat adjacent to me, in a padded wooden rocking chair.

  “Mr. Peres, what brings you to Washington?” he asked, in his familiar accent.

  I told him that I was there to purchase the Hawk missiles, which Israel deeply appreciated. But I added that we hoped this arms agreement was just the beginning. We needed support—as much as the Americans were willing to give.

  “Go talk to my brother about that,” he replied, shifting attention to the matter of his greater concern. “Let’s you and I talk about your nuclear facility.”

  Kennedy proceeded to lay out in front of me all of the intelligence the United States had gathered on the project, meticulously explaining everything his government knew, having clearly studied the findings in great detail. When he finished, it felt as though there was nothing that the Americans didn’t know about the construction. And yet Kennedy knew that mystery remained, and he was preoccupied with rumors.

  “You know that we follow with great concern any indication of the development of military capacity in that area,” he said. “What can you tell me about this? What are your intentions as they relate to nuclear weapons, Mr. Peres?”

  I hadn’t expected to see the president, let alone to be asked such a question. Under the circumstances, I did my best to reassure him.

  “Mr. President, I can tell you most clearly that we shall not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons to the region.”

  President Kennedy expressed his satisfaction upon hearing this answer, and after a few remaining pleasantries, we concluded the meeting. Once we were beyond the White House gates, our ambassador let me know his displeasure.

  “What were you doing?” he demanded. “Did you get permission to say that? You just made policy in there.”

  “What should I have done?” I replied. “Should I have said, ‘Just a minute, let me call our prime minister and make sure I word my answer correctly’? I had to make a decision, and I wasn’t going to lie.” When I returned to Israel I was criticized viciously by both Eshkol and Meir for the formulation of words I chose. But in time, they would adopt the phrasing as well. In fact, to my lasting surprise, my impromptu statement to President Kennedy became Israel’s long-term policy. It has been described as “nuclear ambiguity,” quite simply the decision to neither confirm nor deny the existence of nuclear weapons.

  For nearly fifty years, nuclear ambiguity has been Israel’s official position—not because the words I chose in that moment were perfect, but because the effect of them produced the structural shift in the region we’d always intended. Before destroying a state—as the Arab nations promised to do to Israel countless times in our first thirty years—a country must possess two things: first, the desire, and second, the belief that they have the military superiority to do so. The existence of Dimona may have increased our enemies’ desire to destroy us. But the suspicions it generated stole from them the belief that they could overpower us.

  Over time, we learned that there is tremendous power in ambiguity. By the 1970s, the conventional wisdom among leaders in the Arab world was that Israel possessed nuclear weapons. What they lacked in evidence, they filled in with rumors, which spread through the region even faster than facts. We did nothing to confirm such suspicions, and likewise nothing to dissuade them. In due time, those suspicions hardened like stone, until they were the immovable convictions of our enemies. Believing that Israel had the power to destroy them, they one by one abandoned their ambitions to destroy us. Doubt was a powerful deterrent to those who desired a second Holocaust.

  Nuclear deterrence was not sufficient to prevent all wars, but it was enough to prevent a certain kind of war. In 1973, during the Yom Kippur War, Egypt and Syria caught Israel by surprise, leaving our cities vulnerable to catastrophic attack during their coordinated offensive. And yet neither country dared to attack the heart of Israel, even when they had the capability to do so; Egyptian troops were ordered not to go beyond the Mitla Pass in the Sinai, while Syrian troops stayed in the Golan Heights. After years trumpeting the destruction of Israel, Egypt and Syria had drastically narrowed their ambitions to a fight over territory lost in the previous war. Years later, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat acknowledged that he feared an attack on the cities of Israel would have justified a nuclear response.

  Nuclear deterrence also created the possibility of peace. In November 1977, Sadat made his historic visit to Jerusalem, one that would culminate in a peace treaty between Egypt and Israel. Upon his arrival, the first issue he raised with President Ezer Weizman was Israel’s nuclear program. And when he faced criticism from his fellow Egyptians, he described a nuclear attack as the only other possibility. “The alternative to peace is terrible,” he insisted.

  By the mid-1990s, Israel had made peace not just with Egypt, but with Jordan. And we were undertaking the painstaking work of forging peace with the Palestinians. In 1995, I took a trip as foreign minister to Cairo, where I met with my Egyptian counterpart, Amr Moussa. We’d come to know each other well over the years, and after a lengthy conversation, he raised an issue still clearly on his mind.

  “Shimon, we are friends. Why don’t you let me go have a look at Dimona? I swear I will not tell anybody.”

  “Amr, are you crazy?” I replied. “Suppose I shall bring you to Dimona and you see that there is nothing there? Suppose you stop worrying? For me, this is a catastrophe. I prefer you remain suspicious. This is my deterrence.”

  I’ve told many people that I built Dimona in order to get to Oslo. Its purpose was not to fight a war, but to prevent one. It was not the reactor that mattered but the echo it generated. I had spent so much of my youth trying to secure Israel for its people. But this was a different kind of security altogether. This was the security of knowing the state would never be destroyed—a first step toward peace that started with peace of mind. In this way, I felt that our work on Dimona, an effort once marked for certain failure, had fulfilled the covenant I had made with my grandfather, but on a far grander scale: to always remain Jewish and ensure the Jewish people always remain.

  CHAPTER 4

  OPERATION ENTEBBE AND THE VIRTUE OF DARING

  I have known terrorism for nearly all of my life. I wasn’t yet ten years old when two Jews were murdered just beyond the edge of the forest in Vishneva. I was fifteen years old when I learned to use a rifle, not to hunt, but to guard my school from the violent uprising that terrorized our nights. I have stood at the sites of unimaginable carnage, and wept with families who lost mothers and children. Before Israel was a state, and in all the years since it became one, we have had to grow up alongside terrorism, to defend ourselves against it, to bury its victims, and to seek its solution. We have learned hard lessons through pain and tragedy—about the cost of hostility, and its causes.

  The scourge of terror is not unique to Israel; it is a global crisis of increasing ferocity, one that all nations must firmly confront. It is like a deadly disease—contagious and spreading—one that cannot be defeated through compromise or concession. To give in to the demands of terrorists is to invite more and bigger demands. In dealing with terrorists, leaders would be wise to remember that when there is a gun to your head, you are not the negotiator; you are the hostage.

  And yet, while the advice may be simple, it requires one of the hardest tests of leadership. Holding firm to such a position demands a willingness to make dangerous and difficult choices. It necessitates, unavoidably, the a
cceptance of certain risks. Modern history tells countless stories of such moments, of impossible decisions made by brave women and men on behalf of those whom they lead. Among them, there is perhaps no clearer portrait of this battle—between conviction and complexity—than the IDF operation in a place called Entebbe.

  On Sunday, June 27, 1976, I entered the prime minister’s office to join in the government’s weekly cabinet meeting. Yitzhak Rabin was presiding. Two years earlier, Rabin and I had faced off against one another to lead the government, and in the aftermath of his victory, he had asked me to serve as Israel’s defense minister. The day’s meeting was much like any other: a discussion of tight budgets and tough challenges related to important work that lay ahead. None of us around the table could have known what was about to transpire as the door of the office swung open and one of my military aides stepped into the room. He hastily approached and handed me a folded-up note, scribbled in a dizzying handwriting that suggested the same urgency as his footsteps.

  “Air France Flight 139 from Ben-Gurion Airport to Paris-Orly has been hijacked after a stopover in Athens,” the note read. “The plane is now in the air, its destination unknown.”

  I passed the note to Rabin. As soon as the meeting was adjourned, he asked a smaller group of cabinet ministers to form a task force and join him in the downstairs conference room to discuss options. We shared what little we knew—which, we acknowledged, was next to nothing. It was decided that we would issue an official statement providing the initial facts as we understood them, and confirming that the government had no intention to negotiate with terrorists. Rabin adjourned the meeting, and we each began our work—to understand what had happened, and to plan for a response.

  Over the coming hours, details trickled in. We learned that the terrorists who had boarded the plane in Athens were members of the infamously violent Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and that they had commandeered a plane with nearly 250 passengers, including more than one hundred Israelis, and twelve crew members from France. That afternoon we received a report that the plane had refueled in Libya. Mordechai “Motta” Gur, the IDF chief of the general staff, pulled me aside to say that he thought it possible the plane was headed for Israel. I phoned Rabin to describe the new intelligence. We agreed that if the hijackers did indeed want to come to Israel, we should let them. We had some experience launching hostage rescues, and doing so at our own airport on our own soil was certainly preferable if necessary. That had been the case four years earlier, when terrorists had hijacked a Sabena flight from Vienna to Tel Aviv. We were able to rescue the passengers then. But that was on our home territory. This was very different. For now, we had little choice but to wait.

  In the late hours of the night, I joined Yekutiel “Kuti” Adam, chief of operations of the IDF, on a drive to the airport where the IDF’s elite commando unit, Sayeret Matkal, was rehearsing for a possible hostage rescue. I had incredible faith in the bravery and the skill of the Sayeret Matkal. They were deeply creative, strong not just in body, but in mind. They were the best fighting force in Israel. I considered them the greatest in all the world. The unit’s recently appointed commander was Yonatan Netanyahu, brother of the future prime minister. I had met Yonatan a number of times, after being told by several senior officers how special he was, and how much they expected me to like him. He was a great fighter, they elaborated—astoundingly courageous—but also something of an intellectual, a lover of literature. And indeed, on the occasions when we spoke, it was just as likely that we would discuss antitank missiles as we would the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Born the same year as my daughter, he was young enough to be my son, but wise enough to be my contemporary.

  When Kuti and I arrived, Yonatan was on a another mission in the Sinai. His deputy commander, Muki Betzer, had assumed the duty of briefing the commandos on the situation and leading their preparations for a night raid of the plane—using an empty fuselage nearby. But in the early hours of the morning, the plane changed course and was no longer headed for Israel, but for East Africa. At 4:00 A.M., we confirmed that the passenger jet had landed at Entebbe Airport, on the banks of Lake Victoria—twenty miles outside of Uganda’s capital and more than two thousand miles from where we were standing.

  The challenges this presented were enormous. In the aftermath of the 1973 war, Rabin and I had worked to modernize and replenish our military, and to prepare it for the “long arm” option—an ability to strike targets far beyond our immediate horizon. But no country or army had ever contemplated a challenge of this dimension. It was going to require a military operation to take place thousands of miles away, against armed terrorists and, perhaps, the Ugandan army—all carried out with suboptimal intelligence, against a ticking clock. Most of our senior military leadership seemed to feel that a military rescue operation was simply impossible.

  While the challenges were great, the stakes were even greater. First, there were the hostages themselves—more than one hundred Israelis in grave danger. We would later learn that some of the terrorists were from Germany, and were barking orders in German. One of the hostages, a Holocaust survivor, had become hysterical upon hearing the language. Later she would be reminded again of the Holocaust—as would we all—when the hostages were separated into two groups, with Jews on one side and non-Jews on the other. It was a haunting whisper of the past, and a discomfiting reminder of our own obligations.

  It became clear to me that we faced, fundamentally, a question of principle. If we were unable to rescue the hostages, our only alternative was to negotiate their release, ultimately giving in to the demands of terrorists. This, I feared, would create a terrible precedent with unknown consequences. “If we give in to the hijackers’ demands and release terrorists,” I said during one of the heated government meetings over the coming week, “everyone will understand us, but no one will respect us.” Yet the opposite—however grim the results—held: “If, on the other hand, we conduct a military operation to free hostages, it is possible that no one will understand us—but everyone will respect us.” I understood that attempting such an audacious and unlikely rescue posed a great risk to the passengers. But my determination to find an alternative was driven not out of lack of concern for their well-being. On the contrary, it was rooted in the interest of the lives and safety of passengers in the future. The greatest danger of all was terrorist organizations concluding that such actions as those taken in Athens were effective. One plane could become hundreds. Victims could be measured in the many thousands as opposed to hundreds.

  We also risked something less measurable but equally important: our national confidence. During the 1967 war, we had demonstrated such an impressive showing of force and skill that we were seen, the world over, as tough and brave. At home, it was a powerful source of pride. After so many years of uncertainty, we came to believe that we had achieved our ultimate aim: securing a state that couldn’t be undone. But in 1973, Egypt and Syria launched a coordinated assault against Israel that caught us by total surprise. We were able to fend off the attack, but at a high cost, and throughout the country there was a sudden and sharp loss in confidence. Over the course of a month we’d gone from deeply self-assured to deeply unnerved. It was a return to wariness—to openly existential questions about our security—and it created an unsettling fear that in the prideful wake of the 1967 war, the country’s confidence had drifted toward arrogance. When I became defense minister the following year, I dedicated a significant portion of my work to figuring out what had gone wrong, and to correcting the deficiencies that had allowed such a catastrophe. We ordered a major overhaul of the military intelligence, which had failed to warn us of the imminent attack. In the meantime, I spent my days reading hundreds of pages of raw material, rather than relying on the Intelligence Corps’s assessments. I was even known to do unannounced spot checks throughout Israel, making sure that the new rules we put in place across the military were being followed.

  We were still bandaging our wounds that
summer of 1976. Great empires have fallen when their people lost confidence in them. Great countries and great companies, too. Israel was fueled by the ambitions of its people, and a crisis of this nature jeopardized our own sense of self and, in turn, our future state. “If we will need to release terrorists,” I wrote one night during the coming drama, “Israel will look like a rag, and even worse, she will be one.”

  In the face of such an extraordinary situation, I knew there was little choice but to act. When I was told there was no way to make a rescue possible, I decided to heed the words of my late mentor, Ben-Gurion, who had passed away in 1973. “If an expert says it can’t be done, get another expert.”

  •••

  I returned home as the sun was rising on Monday morning, and phoned Rabin to brief him on the latest information we had. After a shower and a coffee, I went back to the Defense Ministry, where I spent the day, alongside dozens of others, poring over unreliable information. Intelligence was coming in from a number of sources, and much of it contradicted itself. At the end of the day, all we knew was that the plane was still on the tarmac in Entebbe. We didn’t yet know the hijackers’ demands.

  Gur told Rabin that we had yet to come up with a solid plan, but we were looking into a possibility involving paratroopers. Rabin seemed satisfied, temporarily at least, that planning was under way, and a rescue mission remained a possibility. But that evening, after further conversation with Gur, it became clear that no one else really believed a military operation was feasible. There were too many uncertainties, they said, too many unknowns, too little intelligence, too many risks.

  I shared their concerns. Even in the best of circumstances, we would need to pull off the most daring operation in our history. And these were not the best of circumstances. But I was not ready to give up.