Amos Malka

Aman Director 1998-2001

Welcome! I’m Tom Griffin and this is my intelligence history newsletter.

More than a dozen former Israeli security, intelligence and military leaders appeared in a video calling for an end to the war in Gaza last week. One notable signatory, former Mossad chief Tamir Pardo, has already been profiled on this site, and this post covers another, former military intelligence head Amos Malka.

Elsewhere on the site, I have revised and updated the profile of former MI5 director-general Stella Rimington, who died last week.

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Former IDF intel chief Amos Malka, pictured in 1997 (US Department of Defense/Wikipedia).

Amos Malka was head of Israel's defence intelligence organisation Aman from mid-1998 until the end of 2001.

At the the time of the Camp David summit in 2000 he assessed that PLO chairman Yasser Arafat wanted a permanent status agreement with Israel, but more hawkish oral assessments by his subordinate Amos Gilad prevailed in the aftermath of the summit’s failure.

After retiring from the IDF in 2002, he moved into the private sector, serving on the boards of numerous tech companies.

In 2004, he publicly criticised claims that there had been ‘no Palestinian partner’ for peace at Camp David.¹ Like many senior veterans of the Israeli security establishment, he emerged as a strong critic of the Netanyahu government in the 2020s.