No Mission Is Impossible

by Michael Bar-Zohar

  Then, on July 17, the ninth day of the conflict, IDF spotters suddenly noticed a group of Hamas fighters, armed to the teeth, virtually sprouting from the ground in Israeli territory, close to kibbutz Sufa. IDF commandos charged at them, probably shooting some, but the intruders collected their dead and wounded and vanished as they had come—in a masterfully camouflaged hole in the ground. The hole, it turned out, was the exit of an underground tunnel, running for more than a mile from a Hamas entry point inside the Gaza Strip, deep under the border fence and almost to the very gates of the kibbutz.

  Two other attack tunnels had been discovered and destroyed since October 2013, but the new tunnel posed a deadly threat to both civilians and military in Otef Aza—the area ”enveloping” the Gaza Strip. After long and strenuous deliberations the cabinet ordered the IDF to launch a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip, with one main objective—finding and destroying the tunnels.

  Thousands of IDF soldiers and scores of tanks crossed the border and entered the outskirts of Gaza City, supported by artillery and the IAF. They warned the civilian population to evacuate certain neighborhoods where they intended to operate; a massive exodus started, but simultaneously Hamas fighters occupied the areas, tended ambushes and planted mines, side charges and other explosive devices, booby-trapping the houses where concealed tunnel shafts were located. This caused heavy street fighting. During the following weeks the IDF discovered 32 attack tunnels that ran for hundreds of yards, sometimes a few kilometers, from Gaza, at 70 to 75 feet under the border fence and ended chillingly close to Israeli kibbutzim and villages. They were reinforced by concrete walls, equipped with electricity and abounded with weapons, ammunition and explosive caches and niches where Israeli Army uniforms and headgear had been stocked. What would have happened to the south of Israel if these tunnels had not been discovered? Hundreds of terrorists, maybe more, might have penetrated into the country and conquered peaceful towns and villages, slaughtering their populations or holding them hostage. The chance discovery of one tunnel had led to an astounding achievement for Israel’s security, but it also triggered a wave of anger at the IDF since they hadn’t acted earlier against the tunnels.

  The price was high—the IDF lost sixty-seven of its best fighters, many of them officers charging ahead of their troops. The Gazan civilian population was painfully hit—over sixteen hundred dead, many of them terrorists, but also a large number of children. The IDF was criticized for destroying numerous blocks of houses, for its artillery shooting into densely populated areas and even firing at several UNRWA schools that had become refugee shelters. The IDF claimed that in several cases fire was opened on its soldiers or missiles fired on Israel from schools and mosques; yet the criticism, from within and without, did not abate.

  It became clear that a regular army, trained to fight regular armies on the battlefield, was not prepared for fighting a terrorist organization entrenched in cities and towns. All the Israeli operations against the terrorist organizations—like Operation Litani, the first and the second Lebanon Wars, Operation Grapes of Wrath against Hezballah in South Lebanon (1996) and the three major missions in Gaza—had ended without a conclusive outcome. In the future the IDF had to develop new, creative methods of fighting terror organizations like Hamas, Hezbollah and ISIS, sparing as much as possible the civilian population.

  The Protective Edge mission ended with a cease-fire, like other similar missions in the past. Yet all the demands of Hamas had been rejected and its leaders emerged from their underground bunkers to an image of terrible devastation and loss. Israel’s victory was clear but not decisive. Hamas still had 20 to 30 percent of its rockets, most of its military units had survived and its leadership was intact. Israel’s leaders had to cope with an angry nation, embittered by the feeling that once again, Hamas had been spared a decisive blow.

  The real hero of the Protective Edge mission was the Iron Dome system, which during fifty days of fighting had succeeded in shooting down 735 Qassam, Grad and M-75 missiles fired at Israel’s populated areas, disregarding the rockets falling in empty fields. Iron Dome had made its debut during the Pillar of Defense operation, but this time the results were even more staggering. During Protective Edge only 224 missiles fell in Israel’s cities and villages, killing five people. The relatively light losses enabled the IDF to carry out its mission without any pressure from a battered and bleeding civilian population. By protecting Israel’s civilians, Iron Dome had tipped the scales of the conflict.

  Iron Dome—the star of operation “Protective Edge.”

  (Yariv Katz, Yedioth Ahronot Archive)

  The Iron Dome was composed of a very sensitive radar that detected the firing of one or more missiles; a sophisticated computer calculated the exact trajectory of the enemy projectile, and a battery of Tamir anti-missile missiles, activated by IDF soldiers, would intercept the enemy rocket before it reached its target and blow it to smithereens in the clear blue sky.

  The Iron Dome’s father was a curly-haired, mustachioed and warm Moroccan Jew, Amir Peretz. A former paratrooper who had spent a year in a hospital after being severely wounded, he had later served as mayor of Sderot, a town located barely 3.7 kilometers from the Gaza border fence.

  Shortly after being appointed defense minister in 2006, Peretz ordered the army—despite fierce opposition of the generals, the defense ministry, the media, learned engineers and scientists and a large part of the body politic—to launch a project for defending Israel from the Qassam and other rockets. The man charged with the project was a brilliant scientist, Dr. Danny Gold.

  The objections were based on the then-limited threat of the rockets; the huge funds needed to develop another anti-missile system besides the Israeli-American joint Project Arrow for intercepting long-range missiles; the preference of many experts for the laser-based Nautilus system and the cynical disbelief that something would come out of the minister’s project.

  A popular newspaper, expressing the feelings of many, published a screaming front-page headline:

  Iron dome—a failure known in advance.

  Perhaps they were right. The minister of defense had been involved in the partly failed Second Lebanon War; he had been ridiculed by photographs published in the media showing him trying to watch IDF maneuvers through binoculars whose lens covers had not been removed. . . . And after all, he was a trade union leader, a politician, not a general; what did he understand about military matters?

  That was 2007. But in 2014, during and after Protective Edge, the Israeli media and political leaders competed in showering kudos, compliments and flowery messages of gratitude on Peretz, who alone had made Iron Dome a reality and turned the small interceptor system into a game changer. The thousands of rockets still in the hands of Hamas had suddenly become obsolete.

  During the Protective Edge mission, the Israeli military industries delivered the ninth Iron Dome battery to the army. “With thirteen batteries we’ll be able to fully protect all of our cities and inhabited areas; when we put in place twenty-four batteries, all of Israel’s territory will be safe,” Peretz told the authors of this book. General Gabi Ashkenazi, a former chief of staff, who had been utterly opposed to the project (but had dutifully carried it out), quipped: “Binoculars or no binoculars, Amir Peretz saw farther than all of us.”

  On September 23, about three weeks after the cease-fire, Israeli commandos located the two Hamas terrorists that had murdered the three teenagers on June 17, starting the vicious circle of violence. Amar Abu Aisha and Marwan Qawasmeh were killed in a firefight in Hebron.

  AMIR PERETZ, FORMER DEFENSE MINISTER

  “A month after I assumed my position, I summoned the General Staff and asked them, Why don’t we have any means to counter the terrorists’ most primitive weapon—the Qassams? They said there were two kinds of threats: tactical and strategic. The Qassams were not even a tactical threat: in seven years we had seven people killed. One a year—that doesn’t justify spending millions.

  “I s
aid: Let me tell you a story I heard from an old man in a Sderot street. ‘Long ago,’ he said, ‘in my native village in Morocco, a rumor reached the village elders. The Angel of Death was coming to the village to take a life sometime during the next two weeks! What to do? The elders decided to inform the population that, one, the Angel of Death was coming; two, he’ll arrive during the next two weeks; three, nobody knows whose life he will take.’

  “ ‘And what was the result of that?’ the Old Man said. ‘All the inhabitants of the village ran away, to the last of them!’

  “I told the generals that the same thing happens with the Qassam rockets. We don’t know when and where they would hit and who is going to get killed, but that disrupts the normal life of thousands of Israelis. Our duty is to guarantee them a peaceful life. So perhaps it is not a strategic or a tactical threat on our lives—but it is a moral threat.

  “They didn’t buy that; they were all against me. The army and the industries, civilians and military, media commentators and editorial writers, they all attacked me. I felt completely alone.

  “When the matter was brought before Prime Minister Olmert, he washed his hands of it. ‘You’re minister of defense,’ he said to me, ‘it’s your decision and your budget.’ At least he didn’t veto the project.

  “When I finally made the decision to go ahead with the plan, I was attacked again for choosing the Iron Dome project instead of the Nautilus that was based on the destruction of enemy missiles by laser beams. I rejected that project for two reasons: first—at the time Nautilus was static, and the equipment couldn’t be moved from one position to another. And the second reason—laser beams couldn’t work properly when the sky was covered with clouds. That meant that for at least three months a year our towns and cities would be exposed and defenseless. Iron Dome, on the contrary, could easily be moved, and guaranteed protection in all weather and all through the year.

  “I chose Iron Dome and once again found myself isolated and vilified. The following ten months were a nightmare.

  “But today? The entire nation is praising the Iron Dome. It has also become a unique case in the U.S.-Israeli relations. The American president and lawmakers voted extraordinary budgets for the Iron Dome, beyond the annual help of three billion dollars to Israel. That was the first time that the U.S. financially participated in a project in which no American industries were involved, just ‘blue and white,’ a pure Israeli achievement.”

  EPILOGUE

  The Lost Tribe Returns

  CHAPTER 26

  FROM THE HEART OF AFRICA TO JERUSALEM: OPERATION MOSES (1984) AND OPERATION SOLOMON (1991)

  On an October night in 1981, two Israeli naval vessels, the missile ships Reshef and Keshet, arrived secretly to the coast of Sudan. Fighters from Flotilla 13 descended from the ships on rubber rafts, embedding radar echo reflectors into the coral reefs as a way of indicating safe routes to the shore. The task was difficult; the reefs were spread over a wide area, and the fighters acted clandestinely because Sudan was an enemy country. Mapping the approach paths to the beach, they located four inlets that would facilitate their assignment: bringing the Jews of Ethiopia to Israel through Sudan.

  The operation had in fact begun in 1977, when Prime Minister Menachem Begin summoned the head of the Mossad, Yitzhak Hofi, and told him, “Bring me the Jews of Ethiopia!” Begin knew about the unstable regime of Ethiopia’s dictator, Mengistu Haile Mariam, the deep distress of the country’s Jews and the longing of this ancient, legendary community to immigrate to Israel after living and preserving the commandments of Judaism in Africa. The Mossad was recruited for the task; initially, small numbers of Jews were brought to Israel from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia’s capital, but Mengistu quickly locked the gates leading out of his country. Thousands of Ethiopian Jews had heard about the stirring idea—literally to “ascend,” in the Hebrew, to Jerusalem—and had set out on foot toward neighboring Sudan. The trek would eventually lead to the deaths of thousands, who, for the length of the journey, found themselves at the mercy of thieves, wild animals, disease and hunger. The trip would become a saga of agony and heroism. Upon their arrival in Sudan, the majority would be absorbed into refugee camps, where they were forced to hide their Judaism, fearing the authorities and other refugees. The Mossad dispatched numerous agents to Ethiopia under various covers, and they did their best to get many of the Jews out of Sudan. At Begin’s request, the Egyptian ruler, Anwar Sadat, reached out to the Sudanese dictator, Gaafar Nimeiry, to ask that he look the other way as Ethiopian Jews made their escape. Nimeiry agreed—in exchange for large bribes—but only a handful of Jews were able to leave his country with real or fake documents, while the vast majority remained in camps under terrible conditions.

  Then an idea arose: to bring them out of Sudan by sea, with assistance from the IDF. Along with several former Flotilla 13 commandos, agents of the Mossad—among them Yonatan Shefa, Emmanuel Alon and others—acquired a resort named Arous on the Sudanese coast, running it as a diving and leisure center for tourists from Europe. The site served as a vacation village with an array of activities; but the visitors weren’t aware that, on certain nights, the staff would drive hundreds of miles in antiquated, dilapidated trucks, picking up numerous Jews at secret meeting points and bringing them to the Sudanese shore. The operation—along with every other operation run by the Mossad in Sudan at that time—was conducted by a young, courageous agent, a yarmulke-wearing blond by the name of Danny Limor.

  On November 8, 1981, a civilian ship called the Bat Galim (“Daughter of the Waves”) departed from the port of Eilat carrying a military commander, Major Ilan Buhris; also on board were medical equipment, field kitchens and roughly four hundred beds. Members of Flotilla 13 embarked with two commando boats known as Swallows, as well as nine Zodiacs, and the Bat Galim raised anchor. The Mossad dubbed the mission Operation Brothers—a fitting name, as its organizers indeed viewed the Ethiopian Jews as brothers.

  On November 11, the Bat Galim reached its destination. That night, numerous Jews arrived on the beach in tarp-covered trucks, which had traveled many hours, risking interception by the Sudanese Army at any moment; they were even forced to break through Sudanese military checkpoints while making the trip. The passengers, exhausted by the long journey, and some of them quite afraid, were lifted onto the rubber boats and then brought to the ship. Many of them had never seen the sea in their lives; a few tried to drink the water. They were received on deck with bread, jam and hot tea. The Israelis subsequently organized a group sing-along as a way to calm them and even screened a movie; many of the passengers had never seen one. Two and a half days later, the ship docked at the Sharm el-Sheikh base in Sinai, where 164 immigrants descended onto the shore.

  Preparations immediately got under way for a second voyage, which set sail in January 1982 and brought another 351 immigrants to Israel. The third, in March 1982, almost ended in disaster: one of the boats, transporting four Mossad agents, got stuck among the coral reefs at the same moment that Sudanese soldiers armed with Kalashnikovs suddenly appeared and threatened to shoot them. Fortunately, the mission commander responded with remarkable chutzpah, unleashing a verbal barrage at his Sudanese counterpart: “Are you crazy? You want to shoot at tourists? You can’t see that we’re here to organize a diving expedition? We’re tourism-ministry employees, bringing visitors to the country, and you want to shoot them? Who’s the idiot who made you an officer?” The English-speaking commander was embarrassed, apologized, and took off with his soldiers. In fact, he had been looking for smugglers. Bat Galim set sail without further difficulties and delivered 172 additional immigrants to Israel, although the incident made clear that this method was too risky and wouldn’t work anymore; it would be necessary to find another way of extracting Ethiopia’s Jews.

  One morning, tourists at the resort discovered that the entire staff, minus the locals, had disappeared. The “guides”—members of the Mossad—had left letters apologizing for the facility’s closure, citing budge
tary reasons. The tourists were flown back to their respective countries and received a full refund.

  Meanwhile, back in Israel, it had been decided to transport the immigrants by other means, flying them on the air force’s Hercules planes, known as Rhinos. Mossad agents found an abandoned British airfield south of Port Sudan, and a special air force team prepped it for landings. Ethiopian Jews would be picked up at a secret meeting place and brought to the airfield, where the landing strip was illuminated with special torches. But when the air force’s Hercules landed, the Ethiopians were scared nearly to death. The flying metal colossus, which they were seeing for the first time in their lives, landed with a roar of the engines, moving straight at them. Many fled, returning only after the Israeli organizers won them over with heartfelt explanations. In the end, the plane took off with 213 Israel-bound Jews.