a peace treaty. Again, I was watching closely, via American TV. But as the summit was winding down, our phone suddenly rang in Palo Alto. “Ehud, how’s it going? Are you following what’s happening here? What do you think?” I recognized the voice immediately: Ezer Weizman, the former fighter pilot Begin had chosen as his defense minister. I’d known Ezer since the early 1960s, when he’d been commander of the air force and Sayeret Matkal was planning its first operations. Still, even though he had a reputation for batting ideas back and forth outside the bounds of hierarchy or chain of command, I was startled to hear from him. “What do I think about what?” I said. “The solution we’ ve arrived at here. We found there was no way but to give back everything.” The only exception was Taba, a sliver of land where the Negev met the eastern edge of the Sinai, across from the Jordanian town of Aqaba. “Was there no way to convince them, even with some kind of a land swap, to keep the two air bases?” I asked. “Believe me, we wanted to,” Ezer replied. “But no way. Not if we were going to get a peace treaty.” So I said the obvious: if that’s what was necessary for peace, there was no other choice. We were now well into our final year at Stanford. Our home was in a leafy “student village” off campus, called Escondito, for married students from abroad. Our two-storey flat was one of a row of cabin-like structures: a bit like a kibbutz, only smaller, American-style, a lot more upmarket. It had a fenced-off play area for the children and, in a common room for all the village residents, an upright piano. I found the richness of the academic environment — and the time to explore and savor it — enthralling. I’d chosen my master’s program at Stanford because it offered the chance to learn across a range of different schools and disciplines. The official home for my degree courses was the School of Engineering, in a department called “Engineering-Economic Systems’. Its focus was on