No Mission Is Impossible by Michael Bar-Zohar, Nissim Mishal Page A

Sharon—in the future he would not leave a wounded soldier in the battlefield.
    After he recovered, he went back to fighting, then spent four years in the army before becoming a student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. But his heart was not in it. One evening he lay in wait by the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem, and when Moshe Dayan came out of the building he handed him a short note: I am a student now, but I exist. If you have operations in mind—I am ready.
    Dayan remembered him from the days when he was commander of the Northern District and Sharon his intelligence officer. One day the Jordanian Legion had captured two IDF soldiers and refused to release them. Dayan, back from a general staff meeting, casually asked Sharon, “Tell me, is it possible to capture two legionnaires around here as hostages?”
    â€œI’ll check that out, sir,” Arik had replied.
    He got into a pickup truck with another officer and drove to the Sheikh Hussein Bridge, on Jordan’s border, drew his handgun and came back with two legionnaires. Dayan was very impressed: “I only askedif it were possible,” he said, “and he went out and came back with two legionnaires as if he had just gone to pick fruits in the garden.”
    One evening in Jerusalem, while Arik was reading about Duke Godfrey de Bouillon, who had led the Crusaders into Palestine in the eleventh century, he was summoned to the office of Colonel Mishael Shaham, commander of the Jerusalem District. Shaham asked him to assemble a small team of irregulars, cross the border and blow up the home of the Palestinian gang leader Mustafa Samueli in the village of Nebi Samuel. Arik recruited a small group of comrades from the war—Shlomo Baum from Kfar Yehezkel, Yitzhak (“Gulliver”) Ben-Menahem and Yehuda Dayan from the university, Uzi and Yehuda Piamenta from Jerusalem, Yoram Lavi from Kfar Malal, and Saadia, the Palmach sapper. The group crossed the border and reached Nebi Samuel undetected. The mission was not exactly a success—they blew up the wrong house and Samueli survived. The Jordanians opened a murderous fire on Arik’s men, but they retreated in an orderly way and returned home unscathed. In spite of the failure the conclusion was clear: the men had done their best to execute their mission. If they had been better trained, they certainly would have succeeded.
    Arik suggested to Colonel Shaham that they establish a secret unit for special missions across the border. Moshe Dayan embraced the idea in spite of the angry objection of his colleagues. And so, in August 1953, Unit 101 was born.
    Unit 101 was to become a legend, even though it was a tiny unit that existed barely five months. There was no mission its irregulars refused: deep reconnaissance incursions into enemy territory, raids on terrorists in their lairs, risky operations amid hostile crowds. One-oh-one produced a group of warriors that inspired the entire army with a new spirit. “Three men revolutionized the IDF,” a 101 veteran told us. “The commander who pushed the change from above and believed in it—Moshe Dayan; the officer who initiated operations, conceived and proposed, and relentlessly sought combat with the enemy—Arik Sharon; and the fighter who invented new methods and was a teacher to all of us in his tactical planning—Meir Har-Zion.”
    Meir (“Har”) Har-Zion was a young, fearless kibbutz member with extraordinary scouting instincts, a creative mind and an apparently limitless knowledge of the geography of Israel and Palestine. At the age of seventeen he had been captured by the Syrian Army while hiking with his sister Shoshana north of the Lake of Tiberias; after his release, he had crossed the Jordanian border with a female friend and visited the magnificent ancient city of Petra, in spite of the Jordanian patrols that shot fourteen other Israeli adventurers in the 1950s.
    Meir joined the army