In the mid-1990s, two IDF major generals were coming to the end of their long and storied military careers. Meir Dagan had led everything from commando squads to armored brigades and would later go on to serve as director of the Mossad. Yossi Ben Hanan, after serving as one of Israel’s most successful tank commanders in the 1973 war, would go on to lead the armored corps and the IDF’s R&D arm — though he is most famous for the 1967 Life magazine cover photo of his 22-year-old self standing in the waters of the Suez Canal, a symbol of Israeli vitality and military success.
By the mid-1990s, the two grizzled veterans, newly released from their military duties, planned to travel together to Vietnam. Both were avid students of military history, including of the Vietnam conflict. They applied for visas and made a special request to the Vietnamese authorities: to meet General Vo Nguyen Giap.
Giap was one of the great strategic minds of the twentieth century, a former schoolteacher who played a central role in developing the strategic thinking and organizational capabilities that transformed ragtag rural provincials into a military force that would rout the most powerful nations in the world, from the Japanese occupation to the French and the Americans over three long decades of conflict culminating in the end of the Vietnam War in 1975.
Giap was also a ruthless and often tyrannical leader, murdering opponents of Vietnam’s communist movement and overseeing a guerrilla war that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of his own fighters to the cause. He was no hero to the Israelis, but he nevertheless cut a fascinating figure in the annals of modern warfare.
Unexpectedly, the request was approved. Giap agreed to meet them. When the Israelis arrived in Vietnam, they sat down with the man who by then had spent decades as his country’s defense minister. It was a long meeting, as Ben Hanan would later recall to Eran Lerman, a former top-ranked IDF intelligence officer and later deputy national security adviser. Lerman, now at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, told the story to this writer.
When the Israelis rose to leave, Giap suddenly turned to the Palestinian issue. “Listen,” he said, “the Palestinians are always coming here and saying to me, ‘You expelled the French and the Americans. How do we expel the Jews?’”
The generals were intrigued. “And what do you tell them?”
“I tell them,” Giap replied, “that the French went back to France and the Americans to America. But the Jews have nowhere to go. You will not expel them.”
