Kate Whitehead

Yossi Alpher talks about why he has two passports – American and Israeli – and says that he believes peace with the Palestinians is close to impossible

Overnight Zionist I was born in 1942 in Washington, DC. It is a very political city and if you’re inclined that way you’ll absorb a lot of the political thinking. When I was in high school, I was featured in a Sunday afternoon interview programme that was broad­cast nationwide, called Youth Wants to Know. It exposed me to senior political figures, such as JFK (John F. Kennedy) before he became president, and Russian visi­tors at the height of the cold war. It was an eye-opening experience for a teenager, which I credit with my later interest in strategic issues.

My father was a doctor and my mother an elementary school principal. I have an older brother. I’m the black sheep of the family – I surprised everyone by wanting to go to Israel, because I didn’t grow up in a strong Zionist atmosphere. After my bar mitzvah at age 13, I remember turning to my parents and saying, “I’m done. I don’t see any interest in being in a synagogue any more”. That’s what being Jewish was all about in the diaspora. It was only later, once I was in university, that I realised I could be Jewish as an identity. I remember telling my parents, “I’m going to Israel, I think I’m Israeli, I think that’s my Jewish identity.” An overnight Zionist.

To the promised land I was 20 when I first went to Israel. I spent a year on a kibbutz studying Hebrew, then I came home and finished my senior year at Columbia (University, in New York). In 1964, I went straight into the army (the Israel Defense Forces) because I understood that this was the way to become Israeli. That was a very unusual act for an American Jew at the time because you lost your American citizenship.

It was a few years later, when I show­ed up at the US embassy and asked for a visa, that they gave me my passport back. I was a citizen again because the (US) Supreme Court had ruled that going into the army of another country was not grounds for taking away citizen­ship. I’ve had two passports ever since.

In the army, I insist­ed I wanted to become an officer and go into intelligence. As a new immigrant that isn’t something that necessarily happens, so I had to campaign. It meant signing on for additional time, so I spent a total of four years in the army. I was in a unit that brought me into contact with the Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency).

Kibbutz living I got married on the kibbutz when I was in the army. My wife is also American; I knew her from the States. Kibbutz life didn’t suit us, especially when we began to contemplate having children. This was in the late 1960s. You have a baby and you put it in a communal house from infancy. At night, walking past the houses for the little kids, I used to hear cries and think, “I wouldn’t like that if that was my kid; no one is there.” Also at that time, kibbutzes didn’t encourage children to go to university because they knew they would lose them.

One night, my wife and I were visited by the elders. They said, “We’ve decided that after the army you’re going to teach biology in the local high school.” I asked what qualified me to teach biology. They said, “Well, you’re a university graduate.” This was ridicu­lous; I had majored in oriental studies. It was another reason we decided to leave. I was still in the army when we moved to a suburb of Tel Aviv. After the army, I began working at the Mossad.

I spy I was in the Mossad for 13 years. In 1981, I moved to the Jaffee Centre for Strategic Studies, at Tel Aviv University. The centre was a by-product of the disaster of the Yom Kippur war (fought in October 1973, in which a coalition of Arab states launched a surprise attack on Israel) and the need for a civilian think tank to second-guess the establish­ment.

It was made up of former security people, like myself, and academics. I wasn’t supposed to say I had been in the Mossad – I had to say I was in the Prime Minister’s Office or that I worked in the security commu­nity. My breakthrough in terms of identifying myself as ex-Mossad came when I published a book, Periphery: Israel’s Search for Middle East Allies, in 2015, which had to go through layers of censorship.

That led me to being inter­viewed for Shelter (the 2017 Israeli espionage film for which Alpher was an adviser). I talk about various clandestine operations I was involved in – intelligence collection and analysis, recruitment and secret diplomacy. The Mossad has now adopted a more PR-friendly approach to letting veterans talk.

A new strategy I spent many happy years at the Jaffee Centre. Moving from the army to the centre was moving from intelligence thinking to strategic thinking – when you move into strategic thinking you factor in your own Israeli issues as well, whereas in intelligence you’re think­ing only of the enemy.