Who am I?
I was born and grew up in Israel. At 18, I joined the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) and served as an artillery officer for six years. As a young officer, I participated in the Litani Campaign and it was then, in the winter of 1978, that, for the first time, I tasted cherries, as my artillery unit deployed in a cherry orchard in south Lebanon. Later, as a 23-year-old Captain, I joined Israeli forces in “Operation Peace for Galilee”, which soon became “The [first] Lebanon War”. After the war, I left the military, enrolled as a student of International Relations at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and also worked at the Israeli parliament (The Knesset), as a parliamentary assistant. I’ve learnt a lot there and bumped into people like Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ariel Sharon, Yitzhak Shamir, and many others, who would shape Israel’s history and its relationships with other nations. In later years, I would interview many of them both for my books and for the BBC. In 1987, the Palestinian uprising, the “intifada”, broke out, and, almost immediately, I declared, in a newspaper interview, that I would refuse to serve in the Occupied Territories. Subsequently, I left Israel, settled in the UK, joined the Department of War Studies, at King’s College London, and embarked on my doctorate which focused on Civil-Military Relations in Israel. When I finished, I started doing what I love most, which is writing! Luck and timing were on my side. In 1994, former Israeli Chief of Staff, Chaim Bar-Lev, died and the London Daily Telegraph asked me to write his obituary, as their regular writer was on holiday. When the obituaries writer himself died, I replaced him; still, after all these years, I do obituaries for the Telegraph, covering Israel and the Jewish world. Not much later, I joined, as an academic consultant, a team of filmmakers to help produce a six-part BBC TV series called, “The Fifty Years War: Israel and the Arabs” to coincide with Israel’s 50th anniversary. This was a fascinating project and, as the directors and producers, retreated to editing the films, I joined forces with the Egyptian Jihan el-Tahri and together we wrote the companion book to the series. When the BBC asked for a sequel, I - again - joined the same team of directors and producers and we came up with Elusive Peace, a three-part BBC TV series. As before, but this time on my own, I turned to write the companion book to this BBC series (Penguin published both companion books). In 2005, I joined the Department of War Studies at King’s where I still teach on war and insurgency in the Middle East. Around this time, I embarked on detective work which ended in tragedy. The work - the task I took upon myself, was to try and discover who was the mysterious, senior Mossad spy who warned Israel, on the eve of the Yom Kippur War, that Egypt and Syria were about to attack on 6th October 1973. Years of investigations led me to the conclusion that the spy was no other than the Son-in-Law of President Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. Yes, the man who was married to the third daughter of the greatest enemy of Israel, President Nasser, worked for the Israeli Mossad! Or, did he? When, in a subsequent interview, I revealed that the mysterious spy was Ashraf Marwan, the revelations shocked many. What happened next was not good: Marwan contacted me, we met for a chat, he appointed me an adviser on his memoirs, and we kept in touch for five years or so. On 27 June 2007, when we were due to meet up in central London, not far from King’s, his body was discovered in a rose garden just under his balcony; he either jumped or was pushed. I have written a short memoir on my relationship with Marwan, called The Spy Who Fell to Earth: My Relationship with the Secret Agent Who Rocked the Middle East.
Writing is my passion and I have spent my entire professional career focusing on Israel and the Middle East. I am, what you might call an insider-outsider, as I have spent about half my life in Israel and the rest in the UK; so I believe my perspective might interest some of you. This Substack is a place for me to share ideas and reactions to events in Israel and the Middle East; it is all very dramatic at the moment and is likely to continue so in the coming months and years. You will find here a lot about Israelis and Palestinians, war and peace efforts in the Middle East, espionage, books, and more. Exciting!
What’s the Deal?
This newsletter is free, at least for now. And even if I decide to launch a paid publication at some point in the future, there will always be some free stuff and occasional public posts. So, go ahead and sign up, as you have nothing to lose - it would cost you nothing. For a start, as I test the water myself, I’m going to publish extracts from my memoir The Spy Who Fell to Earth. I know that some of you have already read it, and perhaps watched the Netflix film which is based on my book, but even if you have read and watched, you are likely to find new, additional material here, as I am updating the book. At some point, I will embark on a regular flow of great content about Israel and the Middle East.
