as a good time to settle down in a way that would be impossible if I stayed on in the upper reaches of the military. Perhaps do something more academic, in a university or a policy think-tank. For the first time, politics had some appeal, too, though I didn’t say this to him. At that point, I had no idea how, or even whether, I might get involved. But since my appearance on Moked, others seemed to assume it might happen at some stage. Out of nowhere, a leading political journalist, Hanan Kristal, had written a story in 1986 purporting to predict the successors to Israel’s political old guard: Peres and Rabin in Labor, Begin and Shamir in the Likud. It appeared in the newspaper Hadashot. The paper ran side-by-side photos of the ostensible future leaders, doctored to look older, who Hanan predicted would go head-to-head in the election of 1996, a decade away. One was Israel’s ambassador to the UN and a protégé of Misha Arens: Bibi Netanyahu. The other was me. Rabin listened with patience to my obviously settled intention to leave, but remained firm that I should stay and become Dan’s deputy. In the end, I agreed Id think things over and that we’d talk in a week’s time. In the meantime, I went to see two veteran generals who had found themselves in a similar situation, mentioned as possible chiefs of staff but never chosen: Arik and Ezer Weizman. I saw Arik on his farm in the Negev. He was obviously enjoying his extraordinary political rehabilitation since the Lebanon war. His expanding girth was settled into a sofa in the living room. I filled him in on my conversation with Rabin. “I’m considering leaving,” I said. “It just seems like a long time to wait, even if I do get the job after Dan. There’s a lot else I want to do in life.” Arik was probably the general most experienced in being denied the chief-of- staff’s office. On at least two occasions, he might reasonably have been considered. But in a career littered with tense encounters with his superiors, it never