It was Friday, May 14, 1948, and Israeli founding father David Ben Gurion had declared independence that afternoon, before Shabbat began. But the British Mandate over Palestine didn’t officially expire until midnight.
Tzila Amidror, a former fighter in the Jewish underground and prisoner of the British who was going into labor, vowed to wait until every British soldier had left.
Shortly after midnight, she brought a son into the world – and Arab armies invaded the nascent state of Israel.
“They waited like my mother until the end of the Mandate,” says Maj. Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror, who went on to tackle Israel’s most pressing security challenges as a senior military defense official and head of Israel’s National Security Council from 2011-13 under Mr. Netanyahu.
Today, with IS sweeping across the Middle East, he says it’s imperative that Israel maintains a security buffer along the Jordanian border. He doesn’t trust international forces or the PA to do the job. Nor does he take comfort in Israel’s military superiority. “Look at Napoleon,” Mr. Amidror says over lemonade in his living room.
As a young paratrooper in the 1967 Mideast war, he saw UN peacekeeping forces marching out of Gaza, weapons pointed down – a precursor to fighting that saw Israel capture not only Gaza but the Sinai, Golan Heights, and West Bank. And the PA’s powerful security chief in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, used to tell him, “General, don’t worry, we know how to deal with Hamas,” he recalls, “and look what happened.”
In 2007, Hamas overthrew Mr. Dahlan’s forces in a week of street battles, forcing the PA to retreat to the West Bank. And even within the West Bank, he says, the PA is not nearly as effective as Israel. “When it comes to fighting terrorism, they are not in our league.”
Amidror, who wears the knitted yarmulke of an observant Jew, realizes that Israel’s security needs run counter to Palestinian aspirations for a sovereign state in full control of its borders and territory, but says, “with all due respect to the dream of the Palestinians, we are not ready to sacrifice our security to fulfill their dreams.”
However, unlike other religious Zionists, Amidror sees maintaining a Jewish majority as more important than keeping all the land. “For the long range, Israel should find a solution where it would not have to embrace into the state of Israel another 2 to 4 million Palestinians…. We should find a territorial compromise,” he says.
Amidror says he hopes Israel will be “smart enough” not to shut the door to the two-state solution. It can do that, he says, by limiting settlement building to areas that it plans to keep, and by giving Palestinians an ability to build their infrastructure so they are confident that they can run a state.
Doing so is in Israel’s interest, he maintains.
“We have to find a solution to the Palestinian conflict – not because it will change the Middle East or solve any of the problems of the Middle East, and not because we cannot live with it another 100 years,” he says, “but because it will release a lot of energy inside Israel and will open the ability for much better relations with our neighbors.”
