No Mission Is Impossible (30 page)

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.”

O
n 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 said: 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.”

O
n 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 budgetary 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.

The incident at the airfield taught members of the IAF and Mossad several lessons: on the next trip, the plane would land and lower the ramp from its tail beforehand, and the truckloads of immigrants would go directly into the Hercules' open belly, without seeing the monster thundering toward them across the runway.

But Sudanese authorities discovered the operation, as well as the airfield. The Israelis found another landing area, roughly forty-six kilometers from Port Sudan, deciding then to arrange an airlift that would include seven Rhino flights, with two hundred Jews departing on each. Overseeing the mission would be the head of the Mossad and Brigadier General Amos Yaron, the paratroopers' chief officer. The operation was
carried out between 1982 and 1984, during which fifteen hundred immigrants were brought to Israel.

On the eve of each operation, a truck would arrive at the landing area and light up the runway. The plane coming from Israel would touch down, run along the landing strip and turn around, opening its large tail door. Members of the air force's Shaldag commando unit would form two lines leading to the gaping door in the shape of a funnel, and when the trucks arrived, the immigrants would walk through the funnel, directly into the belly of the plane, where they would seat themselves on the floor. Many didn't even realize they were inside a plane.

On one of the flights, an elderly, distinguished Kess—a religious and social leader—got up and asked who the senior officer was. The flight crew accompanied him to Brigadier General Avihu Ben-Nun, of the air force. The Kess stood before him and slowly, ceremonially, pulled out an ancient sword from his belt and extended it toward him. “Until now, I've been responsible for their fate,” he said, gesturing with his hand in the direction of his brothers. “From now on, you are,” he continued, handing the sword to a visibly moved Ben-Nun.

At the end of 1984, the situation in Sudan destabilized even further; the country needed emergency humanitarian assistance and food. Israel took advantage of the situation, directing a request to the United States to aid Sudan—in exchange for Jewish immigrants. U.S. Vice President George Bush immediately responded, instructing the American embassy staff in Khartoum to initiate negotiations with Nimeiry. The talks proved a success, and Sudan agreed to the Ethiopian Jews' orderly departure by air, on the condition that they not fly directly to Israel but through a third country. The Mossad identified a small, Jewish-owned Belgian airline and launched Operation Moses: over the course of forty-seven days, the Belgian Boeings would complete thirty-six flights, transporting 7,800 Jews to Israel.

Following leaks by Israeli leaders to the world media, Nimeiry halted the operation. But Bush didn't give up, dispatching seven U.S. Air Force Hercules planes to Gadarif, in Sudan, in an operation called Queen of Sheba. The American planes flew five hundred remaining Jews from
Sudan directly to Israel's Ramon airbase. This mission crowned the close cooperation between the Israeli and American air forces in their common purpose—rescuing the Jews of Ethiopia.

Although Operations Moses and Queen of Sheba concluded successfully, thousands of Jews remained in Ethiopia. During the various stages of this exodus, many families were separated or torn apart, with children arriving in Israel without their parents and vice versa. The ruptures caused tremendous difficulties, and even tragedies, during the Ethiopians' absorption into Israel. At the same time, a lethal civil war had broken out in Ethiopia, and immediate danger loomed over the lives of the country's Jews. Emissaries of the Mossad and the Jewish Agency gathered thousands of Jews in makeshift camps in Addis Ababa, where they awaited a miracle that would bring them to Israel.

And the miracle happened.

In May 1991, seven years after Operation Moses, Operation Solomon was launched. It was carried out at the height of the civil war, as rebel forces opposing President Mengistu advanced from every direction on Addis Ababa. Israel was aided once again by George Bush, by then the American president, whose mediation produced an agreement between the Israeli government and the head of the collapsing regime several days before Mengistu's final defeat. Secret, dogged work by Uri Lubrani, of Israel's foreign ministry, acting under orders from Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, made it a reality.

As part of the agreement, Israel paid $35 million to Mengistu in exchange for bringing the Jews to Israel, while the Americans promised Mengistu and several senior members of his regime that they would receive diplomatic asylum in the United States. In exchange for an unknown sum, the rebel leaders agreed not to disrupt the operation and to observe a temporary cease-fire. The cease-fire, agreed upon by both government and rebel forces, was short: thirty-four hours. Israel had to fly all the Jews out of the country before the fighting resumed.

The mission was overseen by the IDF's deputy chief of staff, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, who bore responsibility for flying approximately fifteen thousand Jews to Israel within thirty-four hours. The organization of the
mission was exemplary, with Israel sending “anything that could fly” to Addis Ababa. El Al dispatched thirty passenger planes and the air force sent numerous cargo jets; leading them, of course, were the Rhinos. Hundreds of soldiers from various units, including infantry, Shaldag and the paratroopers, were sent to Addis Ababa to organize the immigrants and bring them aboard the planes. Especially prominent were soldiers of Ethiopian background who had arrived in Israel during Operation Moses and were now serving in the IDF. The sight of Ethiopian soldiers in IDF uniforms, many of them proudly wearing the red berets, red boots and silver paratroopers' wings, inspired great excitement among the new immigrants, and even the toughest Ethiopian-Israeli paratroopers couldn't stop their tears. The soldiers spread out to secure the airfield, leading the Jews onto the planes. They were divided into groups and each given a number; numbered labels were initially attached to their clothing, but a different process was subsequently discovered—sticking the labels on their foreheads. Within a few hours, 14,400 Jews were brought aboard the planes. Lipkin-Shahak oversaw the operation with his characteristic calm and composure.

As part of the operation, a Boeing 747 was going to break the world record, with 1,087 passengers on board. During the flight, a baby was born, and 1,088 immigrants deplaned in Israel.