On October 16, 1986, the head of Amnon Lipkin Shakh called his assistant Jacques Neria to enter the office. On one of the screens was a monitor from an Air Force drone camera in southern Lebanon. “We receive a report that an Air Force plane has fallen and we see people running in a certain direction, and the IDF’s greatest fear was that if there were survivors, they would not be captured by the Palestinians. It was the nightmare,” recalls Neria.
An Air Force helicopter managed to rescue under heavy fire only the pilot, but the navigator Ron Arad broke his shoulder and it was impossible to rescue him. “Ron Arad stayed there for a whole night in the area, until we learned the next day that the person who captured him was Amal,” says Neria, a former senior member of the Aman and Prime Minister Rabin’s political advisor. “There was a bit of a sense of relief that it fell into the hands of the MLA and not the Palestinians, thinking that we would know how to deal with it.” The MLA is a Shia organization, a militia that fought for control of southern Lebanon against the more religious and more extreme Hezbollah. Navia Berri, the head of the organization, is today the speaker of the Lebanese parliament.
“Within a period of a few months, contact was made with a mediator who worked with Uri Lobrani, who was a representative of the Prime Minister for the benefit of this negotiation,” recalls Yoram Schweitzer, formerly of the Prisoners and Missing Persons team at the Prime Minister’s Office. “Indeed, contact was made through this intermediary directly to Berry and negotiations took place.” The mediator in front of Navia Berri was a childhood friend of his, a businessman from Sierra Leone named Jamil Said who was given the code name “The Scout”.
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Uri Lobrani, then the coordinator of government operations in Lebanon, flew to meet the scout in London: “One of the instructions was to try to lower the price,” recalls Danny Yatom, the former head of the Mossad and who was Rabin’s military secretary. Israel asked for proof that Ron Arad died at the hands of the organization and received a handwritten letter, which was checked and turned out to be authentic, and two photographs from which it was possible to understand that the problem with the broken shoulder still exists but that he is alive.
One of the photos Israel received as proof of Ron Arad’s condition Photo: Handout, Getty Images
“We breathed a sigh of relief and there was a kind of innocence in the air that automatically this person, if he is so close to Bri, will eventually bring us the navigator,” says Neria. “At some point we asked what you wanted, and he told us, ‘There are three requests – the first is that we want you to release the women and children from Yachiam prison. The second is ammunition for our war against Hezbollah. And the third is three million dollars.’ Schweitzer says that “the agreement was going to be decided and clear”.
There are many versions of what happened from here, depending on who you ask. According to one version, Defense Minister Yitzhak Rabin was not willing, as a matter of principle, to pay money for an IDF officer. According to another version, Amal added a demand for the release of Palestinian terrorists with a lot of blood on their hands imprisoned in Israel. According to a third version, the organization added a demand for the withdrawal of the IDF from southern Lebanon.
“Rabin and Shamir should have taken this deal with both hands from the very beginning and replaced Ron Arad with whoever the Shiites demanded,” Yatom says, “These moves could have been made in a much more aggressive way, there was no sense of panic on the part of the Israeli leadership.” Among the versions, one thing is clear – at this stage Defense Minister Rabin ordered the negotiations on the return of the captured navigator to be suspended.
Ordered the negotiations to be halted. Yitzhak Rabin, then Minister of Defense | Photo: Reuters, News
“Loverni told me in the conversations that followed that the mediator also told him that the mere introduction of the Palestinian issue into Berry’s hands gives him the feeling that the business has gotten complicated and that it should be closed quickly,” says Schweitzer. “That’s why a very difficult feeling was created in Lobrani during this conversation and he tried to pass it on.”
Luverny did not knock on the table.
Schweitzer: “Loverny didn’t knock on the table, he consoled the bad. Years after that he said, ‘I regret today in retrospect that I wasn’t more assertive’.”
Withom mentions: “There was another thing that affected Rabin to a certain extent and that was the outbreak of the intifada. Unfortunately, Rabin was in the US and returned within the first two weeks of the intifada and he learned that those who are at the head of the intifada are almost all freed from the Jibril deal, in which we returned 1,150 terrorists.”
Ron Arad and his wife Tammy Photo: News
Schweitzer rejects the claim that Rabin acted out of political consideration: “Rabin, especially when he was in a bargaining situation that was impossible at least in its early stages, he was willing to pay the political price and make the agreement. We know today in retrospect that Rabin prepared a letter of resignation in case the military option In Entebbe in 1976 it would cost a heavy price, he was ready to take responsibility and resign.”
The delay in the negotiations was a mistake that would turn out to be fateful. A few weeks later, Mustafa Dirani, the security officer in the Amal, decided that the organization was too moderate: he left and founded a new organization – “The Believing Resistance” – and took the Israeli navigator with him as a dowry. “Dirani devoured the cards unexpectedly, it was a ‘black swan’ that was not expected or thought about and he complicated the whole event,” says Schweitzer. Neria says: “Mustafa Dirani abducts him and his traces disappear, it’s over, there’s no more,” and Itom emphasizes: “The problem is that we didn’t know about it, Amn missed here. Aman didn’t tell us that Dirani broke up with Navia Berry.”
Ron Arad and his daughter Yuval Photo: News
Almost everything was already sewn up and agreed, and suddenly there is no one to talk to. On May 4, 1988, the IDF attacked Hezbollah targets in Kfar Maidon. No one in Israel knew that Dirani was holding Ron Arad there. Rami Igra, former head of the Prisoners and Missing Persons Division at the Mossad, says: “He was under the custody of the two children of Zakaria Hamza, his deputy of Dirani. When they returned, Ron Arad was not in the room where he was imprisoned.”
Did he manage to escape or was the building bombed?
Igra: “There are different versions of this. According to Dirani’s version, which is the verified version, the lock was broken from the inside – someone broke the lock from the inside. Nasrallah also did not know what happened to Ron Arad after May 4, 1988.”
It is possible that Ron Arad was able to take advantage of the absence of his captors and escape, perhaps. From this point it’s all speculation – maybe he was caught and killed. One thing is clear: since May 5, 1988 there has been no sign of Ot Haim Maron Arad and no one knows what happened to him. Nor Dirani himself who was later kidnapped to Israel and interrogated in ways that if he knew where the navigator was – he would have said so already. The miss cost, as far as can be estimated, Ron Arad’s life.
He said he didn’t know where Ron Arad was. Dirani | Photo: Moshe Milner to p
Since then, in every hostage crisis facing a Palestinian organization, one thought hovers over everything: just not another Ron Arad. After October 7 it was clear that this time no mistakes should be made, and unlike 1986 we now have experience. But mistakes were made, first of all the termination of negotiations with Hamas, even though we should have known for 40 years that such a move could be very dangerous.
Should we have taken the first offer that was put on the table and not leave?
Neria: “We should have not made the mistake. When Hamas in the last ‘reveal’ of the deal said ‘I don’t have 10, only 7 and three bodies’ we should have told him ‘Okay, fine, thank you very much, let’s move on’ and not play it and say that we Not ready. This is the mistake that allowed Hamas to come to its senses and free itself from the shackles of the first negotiations.”
According to Schweitzer, “the main conclusion is that negotiations with organizations of this type – it doesn’t matter at the moment if it is an organization like Hamas or Hezbollah – time can play in our favor if we manage to create a military option, but usually time does not play in our favor. Furthermore, in light of the lesson we learned from the Ron Arad affair, I think that the halting of negotiations as occurred with Hamas due to demands or a game they were playing – is ultimately dangerous because it could cause disastrous results for the hostages.”
You mean never cut off contact?
Schweitzer: “I think that never cutting off contact in negotiations with terrorist organizations is a very important principle.”
No one has said that they have seen him since May 4, 1988. Ron Arad in documentation from captivity Photo: News 2
Another lesson since then is that the negotiating team must have a mandate, but Netanyahu actually reduced it even more. According to Neria, “It’s a sign that you don’t want to move forward, you say to the team, ‘I’m sending you, you’ll listen, you won’t talk, you’ll love – you Sitting and saying ‘Okay, I made a note to myself, I will return home’. What is the conclusion of the person in front of you? That you are nothing, that you are zero.”
So is this a mistake?
Neria: “Certainly. What kind of face does the delegation have when the head of the Mossad and Major General Nitzan Alon are sitting and silent like fish and the head of the CIA and the Prime Minister of Qatar are sitting there and everyone is laughing. Look what they sent us, clowns.” Orphan: Many times an opportunity arises – in negotiations you have to be flexible enough to change the way you talk with the other party, to take advantage of weak points you identify in the other party in negotiations to your advantage – and if you don’t have enough room for flexibility and room for action to decide as quickly as possible , you have to pick up the phone for this and that and by the time it gets back to you it’s hours – you missed the opportunity”
Despite past events, the delegation’s mandate was reduced. Shin Bet Chief Ronan Bar | Photo: Shin Bet
“My lesson is very clear from the story of my friend Ron – the window of opportunity in the Middle East is very narrow, it has closed and will not open again,” says Major Ronen Merav, Ron Arad’s friend from the pilot course. “We must not lose any opportunity that is in the open window.”
Another lesson from the tragedy of the missed opportunity to bring Ron Arad back alive is that families must not let go for a moment. “We mustn’t sit quietly, if the families don’t take care of their loved ones, no one will,” says Merav. And Naria agrees: “They were abandoned, so in addition to that you tell them not to talk, to keep quiet, as if it doesn’t exist? What, we fell on our heads? They are told to keep quiet, why are you interrupting us in the negotiations?”.
“It was possible to bring back Ron, Ron Phosphas,” declares Merav. “I missed it too, I was also told to ‘sit’ quietly and I sat quietly, I am committing a sin, I should have fought my friend’s war and turned the tables. And I hear these chants even today. Any statement that increases the price or helps Hamas – the price is Negligible compared to the alternative price, and we, as an Israeli company, have no ability to deal with another Ron Aradim.”
Tami and Yuval Arad: “Time must not be wasted”
Tami and Yuval Arad, Ron’s wife and daughter, told “Ulfan Shishi”: “There is no doubt that mistakes were made in the negotiations for Ron’s reinstatement and it makes no sense for such mistakes to happen again. This is the time to draw lessons, put the desire for revenge aside and take targeted and quick actions that will save the lives of the abductees. We must not waste additional time, we must not cut off contact, we must give the professional negotiation teams a full mandate to do their work. The narrow window of opportunity that has opened now may be the last.”
“The same feeling of being missed will accompany us forever. In good moments and in difficult moments, she is present, as if she has a life of her own, emerging without warning and reminding us that Ron could have been brought back, he could have been saved. We seek to strengthen the courage of the families to voice their pain. They need For the general public to raise their voice. On October 7, the perception of reality for all Israeli citizens should be changed.”
“We learned, among other things, that not only soldiers could be captured. Every family in Israel could have been in the nightmarish place where the families of the abductees are. The Israeli government must make the only humane, moral and ethical decision. They must not be given up, there is a way to save them from a fate that is crueler than that.”
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