Ami Ayalon
Shin Bet director 1996-2000
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R. James Woolsey, US Director of Central Intelligence from 1993 to 1995, died last week. Obituaries have been published by the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Associated Press (gift links).
Ami Ayalon in 1996 (Clandestine Immigration and Naval Museum, Haifa; CC3.0).
Admiral Ami Ayalon, a highly decorated former commando, headed the Israeli Navy from 1996 to 2000, before leading the Shin Bet security service from 1996 to 2000. Taking up the latter post in the aftermath of the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, he secured a dramatic reduction in terrorism through co-operation with the Palestinian Authority.
In 2003, he co-founded the People’s Voice Initiative, a movement supporting a two-state settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with Palestinian academic Sari Nusseibeh. A member of the Knesset from 2006 until 2009, he contested the Labour Party leadership in 2007, losing a run-off vote to Ehud Barak.
Background and education
Ayalon’s parents migrated from Transylvania to Palestine in the late 1930s.1 His father’s younger brother, sister and brother-in-law were killed in the Holocaust.2 His uncle, Jonah Rosen, fought with the Special Operations Executive in Yugoslavia and Hungary.3
Amichai ‘Ami’ Ayalon was born on a kibbutz near Tiberias in 1945.4 The Ayalon surname was adopted shortly afterwards, when David Ben-Gurion sent his father on a three-year mission smuggling Jewish refugees to Palestine from Hungary.5
Ayalon lived with his father in Argentina during 1959 and 1960. He only learned years later that their visit was part of the operation to kidnap Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.6
He received a B.A. in Economics and Political Science from Bar Ilan University in 1980 and an M.A. in Public Administration from Harvard University in 1992.7
