Efraim Halevy

Efraim Halevy, Ephraim Halevy (Hebrew אפרים הלוי; * 1934 in London ) is a lawyer and from 1998 to 2002, the ninth director of Mossad. He succeeds by Dani Yatom and was replaced by Meir Dagan. From 2002 to 2003 he was chairman of the Israeli Security.

As a person who enjoyed the confidence in Jordan, Halevy played a central role in the negotiation of the Israeli- Jordanian peace treaty of 1994.

Life and career

Halevy was the child of an established orthodox Jewish family. He emigrated in 1948 to Israel, where he attended the religiously oriented school Ma'aleh in Jerusalem. He then studied law successfully at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 1957 to 1961 he was editor of the Journal Monthly Survey. In 1961 he began working for the Mossad and remained there the next 28 years. In 1967 he was named to the Chief Branches Forum of the Transatlantic Institute, where he gave a lecture in 2007. From 1990 to 1995 he was deputy director of the Mossad under Shabtai Schavit and Head of the Headquarters. Efraim Halevy 1996 was the Israeli Ambassador to the European Union in Brussels.

Halevy served as an envoy and confidant of five Israeli Prime Ministers: Yitzhak Shamir, Yitzhak Rabin, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ehud Barak and Ariel Sharon. He participated as a liaison Yitzhak Rabin to the Hashemite royal house an active role in the negotiation of the Israeli- Jordanian peace treaty of 1994. After the failed 1997 assassination attempt in Jordan of the Mossad on the Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal, he was involved in the settlement of the resulting crisis and the release of the arrested Mossad agents. In March 1998, he took the place of the retired Mossad director Dani Yatom and kept it until it was replaced in 2002 by Meir Dagan.

In October 2002, Halevy resigned from his post as Mossad chief, and was chairman of the National Security Council. In 2003 he resigned under criticism of Ariel Sharon by this office and henceforth worked for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Halevy applies in contrast to other intelligence officials who are taking more extreme ideological positions in the Israeli- Palestinian conflict as a sober pragmatist. In 2007 he stated that Israel should try from a position of strength to negotiate with Hamas. You would be respected by the Palestinians and would consider usually word. " They are not very pleasant people, but they are very, very credible," he said.

In 2006 he published the book Man in the Shadows, in which he describes the history of the Middle East since the late 1980s. He spoke in April of the same year in the Daily Show about the book and was a guest on the Charlie Rose show.

In January 2007, an interview with Halevy was published in Portugal, in which he expressed that the West would be in a "third world war" with radical Islam and it would still take 25 years to win this. A nuclear attack by Islamic militants he believed to be likely. In 2011, he remarked that Iran should be prevented from becoming a nuclear power, but warned of an attack on the country, which would have incalculable consequences for the entire region. He added that the increasing radicalization of the ultra-orthodox Judaism imagine a greater risk than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dar.

Works

• The Role of the Intelligence Community in the Age of Strategic Alternatives for Israel (English )
• Man in the shadows: inside the Middle East crisis with the man who led the Mossad. St. Martin's Press, New York 2006, ISBN 978-0312337711. (English )
• 13 años que el mundo cambiaron: mi vida en el Mossad; Paperback, 334 pages. Ediciones B, Barcelona 2007, ISBN 978-8466633932. (Spanish )