His life, year by year.

Mordechai Weinstein, later Gazit, was born in Istanbul on 5 September 1922, to a Jewish family from Ukraine. He chose the Hebrew name later, the family relates, inspired by Jerusalem’s gazit, the dressed ashlar stone he came to know in his archaeology studies. His brother Shlomo took the name after him. His parents were Tzipora and Ephraim.

His younger brother, Shlomo, would later head IDF Military Intelligence and serve as President of Ben‑Gurion University of the Negev; their elder sister was Sarah.

The family immigrated to Mandatory Palestine during his childhood. In a later interview, Shlomo recalled their German-speaking home and how Mordechai and Sarah had already attended school in Turkey and could read and write German.

At fourteen Mordechai joined the Haganah, the Jewish community’s underground military organisation. It was in the years when, with the outbreak of the Arab revolt in 1936, the Haganah began taking in teenagers for signals and communications units. At the age when teenagers today start high school, he was already a member of the underground. Eleven years later, aged 25, he commanded a company in the battle for al-Qastal.

In 1943 he completed the Haganah officers’ course. In the War of Independence he served as chief intelligence officer of the Etzioni Brigade, the Haganah’s Jerusalem brigade, and then commanded a company. He also earned a master’s degree in archaeology at the Hebrew University.

He was later one of the contributors to the Encyclopaedia Biblica (volume 2, 1954), signing his entries with the Hebrew initials M.G.T. In 1946, two years before the state was founded, he was chosen for the first class of the diplomatic school set up by the Jewish Agency’s Political Department to prepare a foreign service for the state-to-be.

Some 600 candidates applied, and only 25 were chosen. Beside him in class sat Aharon Yariv and Yehoshafat Harkabi, both later heads of IDF Military Intelligence. The course ran from November 1946 to spring 1948, and the students were also asked to plan the foreign ministry of the state-to-be.

The ministry drew on the document they prepared when it was set up, in May 1948.

On 10 December 1947 Gazit entered the besieged Jewish Quarter of the Old City as intended deputy commander, and left after a week.

After the Palmach, the Haganah’s full-time strike force, took al-Qastal on 3 April 1948, a company of the Etzioni Brigade’s Moriah Battalion held the village under Gazit’s command. During a lull in the fighting, one of his sentries shot and killed an Arab fighter. No one knew then who he was.

The next morning the Haganah intelligence service in Jerusalem called to ask about him, and only then did Gazit realise that the dead man was Abd al-Qadir al-Husayni, commander of the “Holy War” forces in the Jerusalem area. Gazit examined the body himself and took his papers.

Asked to send the body to the city, he refused: the Arabs were sniping, and his men had not slept for five nights. The Arab commander’s death was a severe blow to his fighters’ morale. Gazit led the exhausted defenders and asked for them to be relieved; they withdrew on 8 April.

Two days later he wrote to his parents, in English: “I am just back from the Castel where I personally had the honour to throw a hand granate at Abdul Kader Husseini.”

On the night of 18–19 May 1948, a force of the Palmach, the Haganah’s mobilised strike force, broke through Zion Gate, and behind it a relief force of about 80 men, loaded with military and medical supplies, entered the Jewish Quarter under Gazit’s command. It had been gathered from different units in the city: students, Haganah field troops, veterans and checkpoint guards.

The Palmach commanders asked Gazit’s men to take their place in the Quarter so that the Palmach could withdraw. Gazit objected: he had been ordered to hold Mount Zion, and his men had not been trained for the kind of fighting the Quarter demanded. By order of the Jerusalem district commander he was made commander of the Quarter.

At dawn he went out to inspect the positions and was severely wounded by shots fired at him. Until the Quarter fell nine days later, he lay wounded in the Misgav Ladach hospital; some of his men fought to the end and went into Jordanian captivity.

When the Quarter surrendered, on 28 May, to the Arab Legion’s commander in the Old City, Abdullah el-Tell, the men of military age were taken prisoner. The seriously wounded were handed to the Red Cross and moved to Jewish Jerusalem. A month after he was wounded, on 19 June, he wrote to his parents from Bikur Holim Hospital, in English.

He told them he was engaged to Rina, and only at the end added: “I forgot to tell you that I was wounded in the chest (lung)”. The injury ended his combat service and cost him a lung. In a 1980 interview he said it “gave me further impetus to go on in government.”

Yitzhak Rabin, who commanded the Palmach’s Harel Brigade at the time, also came back to that night years later: of the force gathered to enter the Old City, he said in an interview, “Mordechai Gazit … was put in command.”

In spring 1949, before moving to the Foreign Service, Gazit joined Eleazar Galili’s team at Maarachot, which researched and wrote the history of the War of Independence. A year after the fighting, he was already studying the war he had fought.

Gazit joined the young state’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in 1949. In the 1950s he served in London, where in 1954 he met Sudanese representatives in secret, in one of Israel’s first attempts to break the isolation around it, and in Burma.

In 1955 he headed Israel’s mission in Rangoon for four and a half months, between two ministers: David Hacohen, the first minister, had ended his posting, and Yaacov Shimoni was appointed in September to succeed him. From there he reported to Jerusalem that Israel and Burma were among each other’s friendliest states and worked closely together at the UN.

As he put it, they were the only two socialist states in Asia: both were then governed by socialist labour parties, and Ben-Gurion and U Nu became close friends. That year Burma’s prime minister, U Nu, visited Israel, the first Asian head of government to do so.

At the end of the decade he returned to Jerusalem as political secretary and head of the office of Foreign Minister Golda Meir.

In 1950‎–‎1951 he was also the Foreign Ministry’s representative on the government committee for holy and historical places, which dealt with preserving sites, tourism and the balance between preservation and development: a meeting point between the antiquities he had studied and the work of the young state. Gazit was also one of those who examined candidates for the foreign service.

Yosef Hadass, born in Aleppo and later Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, recalled in his memoir that after a five-minute conversation Gazit asked the department’s senior researcher, Asher Goren, to test his Arabic. Goren examined him on al-Ahram, Egypt’s leading daily, and after further interviews he was accepted.

He worked in the Foreign Ministry’s research department from 1949 to 1951, and as early as 1949/50 was running it in practice. On 9 March 1959, amid the Berlin crisis, Gazit wrote to Meir about Reuven Shiloah’s proposal to explore Israeli links with NATO. He asked her to sound out French sponsorship.

The letter records an exploratory initiative; it provides no evidence of an agreement or membership.

As head of Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s office, Gazit took charge of one of the painful questions of the day: Morocco, independent since 1956, restricted the departure of its Jews, and Israel was looking for ways to let them emigrate. On 17 June 1959 Gazit sat in a coordination meeting on ways to advance their departure.

When an approach to the crown prince, Moulay Hassan, later King Hassan II, was considered, he was wary: “we must re-examine the matter and check to what extent the prince would be able to keep his promises, if indeed he were ready to make them”. He preferred “at this stage” to take “the normal route”, the diplomatic channel, to influence the king.

Only in 1961, through an agreement with the authorities, did the way open, and tens of thousands of Jews left Morocco for Israel in Operation Yakhin.

On 11 July 1960 Gazit arrived in Washington as minister at the embassy, that is, the ambassador’s deputy, succeeding Yaacov Herzog and serving alongside Ambassador Avraham Harman; he had previously headed Foreign Minister Golda Meir’s office. In 1961, from the embassy, he coordinated the first visit of American scientists to the Dimona reactor.

Beside Ambassador Harman he negotiated with the Americans on the Hawk anti-aircraft missiles, which the United States decided in 1962 to sell to Israel. As early as February 1961, at a meeting with McGeorge Bundy, President Kennedy’s national security adviser, he set out Israel’s position on dividing the Jordan waters: the Jordan to Israel, and the Yarmuk to the Kingdom of Jordan.

In January 1964 he sat beside Harman opposite Secretary of State Dean Rusk, when Israel asked the United States for hundreds of tanks. In 1963 he signed on Israel’s behalf to join the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, and a Geva newsreel caught the moment.

At a farewell reception given for him and his wife by Ambassador Harman in July 1965, it was noted that he had frequently served as chargé d’affaires during his five years in Washington. In his last weeks there he was dealing with one of the conflicts that would lead, two years later, to the Six-Day War.

On 7 July 1965 he raised with Secretary of State Dean Rusk Israel’s concern over a canal being dug in Lebanon.

It was part of the Arab plan to divert the sources of the Jordan, the Hasbani and the Banias, so that their water would not reach Israel and the National Water Carrier it had completed in 1964, and he asked for an urgent American démarche in Beirut.

Two weeks later, at the State Department, he argued that “now is right time from diplomatic point of view” to push the Lebanese into removing the tractors and gradually shelving the entire plan.

In October 1963 he sat beside Justice Minister Dov Yosef at a meeting with the US Attorney General, that is, the justice minister, Robert Kennedy, the president’s brother, as the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) reported.

On returning from Washington, Gazit took up a senior post at the Foreign Ministry in Jerusalem focused on Middle Eastern affairs. In February 1967, four months before the Six-Day War, Shlomo Hillel took over from him.

On 23 February 1966 Gazit wrote a survey of the quiet tie with the Shah’s Iran: oil, trade and security cooperation, without official relations. In it he defined the relations as “a kind of unwritten secret alliance”, giving Israel advantages in the economy, in security and against Nasserism. The historian Uri Bialer cites it in his research.

After Washington he returned to Jerusalem, and in the year before the Six-Day War, as Deputy Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, he was the ministry’s point man for the effort to resume El Al flights over the Straits of Tiran, halted since 1955.

Memoranda from El Al, from his assistant Uri Berger and from Foreign Minister Abba Eban reached his desk, and on 4 January 1967 he and Naftali Ben-Yehuda of the Transport Ministry sent a joint letter to the Foreign Minister and the Minister of Transport. Five months later Nasser closed the straits.

The historian Eitan Barak reconstructed the affair from the file at the State Archives.

After the Middle East department, Gazit served as an adviser at the Foreign Ministry and head of its special-assignments division. “I was thinking of a sabbatical and of writing a study, but the war got in the way a little,” he later told the Agranat Commission, the inquiry into the Yom Kippur War.

The war reached home, too: the family recalls that on its first day, 5 June 1967, he learned through his duties, as events unfolded, that his nephew, the pilot Dan Engel, his sister Sarah’s son, had been killed. His grandson Dan-Eyal is named, in part, after him.

At the end of 1968 he moved to the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption, and until May 1970 he was its deputy director-general, in the years when Israel was absorbing the wave of immigration that followed the Six-Day War. The ministry had been founded only months earlier, under Yigal Allon, and Gazit was one of its first senior civil servants.

His appointment as deputy director-general was announced in May 1969. He then returned to the Foreign Ministry as deputy director-general responsible for relations with the United States and Canada.

Four years after the Soviet Union broke off relations with Israel, Gazit sat across from its envoys in a secret channel, Yevgeny Primakov among them, and passed the reports directly to Golda Meir.

In these years Gazit stood at the heart of Israel’s decision-making: at the head of the Foreign Ministry, and then at the head of the Prime Minister’s Office, as political adviser to two prime ministers. In 1972 he headed the Foreign Ministry as its Director-General.

On 5 September 1972, the day of the massacre of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, the ambassador in Washington, Yitzhak Rabin, reported to him on his conversation with Secretary of State William Rogers. The next day the two exchanged cables on the American position on halting the Games.

On 15 March 1973 he entered Golda Meir’s office as Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office and her political adviser, succeeding Simcha Dinitz, who left to serve as ambassador in Washington.

From that day he sat in “Golda’s kitchen”: the small forum of the Prime Minister and her senior ministers, where the important decisions took shape before they were brought to the cabinet. He kept the post under Yitzhak Rabin.

On 18 April 1973 he sat in the discussion of whether Egypt and Syria were about to attack, one of the three war “alarms” he later counted in his testimony to the Agranat Commission, the inquiry into the Yom Kippur War. In the spring of 1973 Kissinger held secret contacts with Hafez Ismail, the national security adviser of Egypt’s President Sadat.

Gazit sent Ambassador Dinitz cables on the matter on 13 and 15 May, the second conveying Golda Meir’s comments. Five days later, on 20 May, Kissinger and Ismail met for the second time, near Paris. In the secret cables between Jerusalem and Washington, Kissinger went by the code name “Shaul”.

In a letter to Dinitz that spring Gazit wondered whether Kissinger was telling Israel everything that passed in the channel, and wrote: “Quite a few questions remain unanswered, and some doubts gnaw at our hearts”.

In 2019 three scholars published an article on this channel in an international journal of intelligence studies, and named it after his file: “Kissinger’s Lost Peace: The Gazit File”. In June 1973, during Chancellor Willy Brandt’s visit, he briefed the press in English, stressing that Israel had no objection to friendly nations maintaining good relations with the Arab states.

After the visit a secret channel for messages opened between Meir and Brandt, and Gazit ran it: in August 1973 he explained its nature in a letter to Israel’s ambassador in Bonn. Two months later war broke out, and his office became the meeting point between Jerusalem and Washington.

Of the American airlift, the transport planes that brought Israel arms and ammunition in the middle of the war, he later said: “The airlift was decided not because we asked for it.” On the morning of 6 October he left in the middle of the meeting at the Prime Minister’s to arrange her meeting with the American ambassador, Kenneth Keating.

It was he who proposed that Israeli and Egyptian officers negotiate face to face, at the Kilometre 101 talks, held at a point on the Cairo–Suez road where officers of the two armies met. He told the story in an interview with the historian Ken Stein.

In December 1973 he coordinated the expert teams ahead of the Geneva Conference, and in January 1974 he worked on the wording of the disengagement agreement with Egypt. On 6 December 1973 he testified before the Agranat Commission and told it: “Every Jew must ask himself where he erred.”

On 26 March 1974 he submitted three memoranda to Golda Meir under a signed covering letter: a survey of the American National Security Council, a proposal for a small national security policy staff in the Prime Minister’s Office, and a separate discussion of competing intelligence assessments.

The proposed staff would prepare alternatives and coordinate information; intelligence assessments and warnings would remain with the intelligence community. The annexes are unsigned and undated. The file establishes his submission of the proposal, but does not show that it was adopted or that he alone wrote the annexes.

The State Archives hold a file titled “Meetings with the Prime Minister recorded by M. Gazit”, with summaries and minutes from April 1973 to September 1974.

On 7 June 1973 Willy Brandt landed in Israel, the first West German chancellor to pay an official visit. While Golda Meir and Brandt met alone, Gazit led the Israeli delegation in talks with the German delegation. He welcomed Bonn’s dialogue with the Arab states but, unlike his German counterpart, did not judge the situation in the Middle East to be dangerous.

Four months later the Yom Kippur War broke out.

On the evening of 10 June he approached Klaus Harpprecht, Brandt’s friend and adviser: he remarked on a “certain non-committal quality” in the chancellor’s words about Israel’s will for peace, recalled that “even Nixon” had clearly recognised it, and asked that Brandt let Golda know he wanted a “direct correspondence” with her, without the German Foreign Office. Before his flight, Brandt asked Golda how he could reach her directly.

In April 1974 Golda Meir announced her resignation, and in June Yitzhak Rabin entered the Prime Minister’s Office. Gazit stayed where he was: Director-General of the office and political adviser to the new Prime Minister. Between the two governments, in May and June 1974, he represented Israel at the signing of the agreement with Syria in Geneva, alongside Major General Herzl Shafir.

In September 1974 he sat beside Rabin at the White House, opposite President Gerald Ford. In March 1975 he sat on the Israeli negotiating team during Kissinger’s shuttle between Jerusalem and Aswan, and in June 1975 he returned with Rabin to the Oval Office.

In August 1975, at the end of his term, he travelled to Washington with the Foreign Ministry’s legal adviser, Meir Rosenne, to work on the legal and political wording of the interim agreement. Before the cabinet meeting, ministers raised a toast to him and to his successor, Amos Eran.

On 4 September, Gazit signed the Sinai Interim Agreement in Geneva alongside Major General Herzl Shafir. On 22 September, the two also initialled the implementation protocol and maps. These were distinct steps in the diplomatic process that preceded the peace treaty of 1979. Reporting from Geneva described Gazit as head of the Israeli delegation and ambassador-designate to France.

In a 1980 interview he recalled that Sadat refused to let the talks run into 1976, fearing the American election campaign would weaken Egypt’s position. The Muslim day of rest and the High Holidays that fell that September left few working days, so two consecutive 24-hour sessions were needed — a detail he remembered with a smile.

As early as September 1975, in the days of the Geneva signing, the press called him “ambassador-designate to France”. On 23 December 1975 he was appointed ambassador, and until 1979 he represented Israel in Paris.

These were hard years in the relationship: the hijacking of an Air France plane to Entebbe in Uganda, which ended in the rescue operation; the crisis over the release of Abu Daoud, one of the planners of the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics; and the struggle over the reactor France was building for Iraq, which Israel finally bombed in 1981.

After the Abu Daoud affair Gazit was recalled to Jerusalem in protest, and within a month he was sitting opposite the President of France at the Élysée Palace. Largely thanks to his work, relations returned to normal relatively quickly.

During the Entebbe hijacking he conducted the contacts with the French government; in those same days his younger brother, Shlomo Gazit, headed IDF Military Intelligence. He tried to prevent French help for the Iraqi reactor, and told Foreign Minister de Guiringaud: “Whoever supplies the Iraqis with proven fuel is like one who supplies meat to lions”.

In early 1979, thirty days after the death of Shlomo Friedrich, Gazit spoke in his memory. Friedrich, a man of Herut, Menachem Begin’s opposition party, and an old friend of Begin, had headed the “France–Israel Alliance Committee” for more than twenty years, building ties with French politicians across the spectrum.

“We all knew he was a party man,” Gazit said, “and yet no one thought of him as a party man”; the secret of his influence, he added, was “his integrity, his goodness and his generosity” (translated from the French, as quoted in Yoel Haddad’s article).

A photograph of him with the singers Rika Zaraï and Enrico Macias is kept in the Getty archive, taken, according to the archive caption, at an evening event in Paris on 29 May 1976.

And in its farewell item of 5 July 1979, Le Monde described the impression he left: he learned French with surprising speed, and his courtesy and good grace won him sympathy and esteem, even when there were political disagreements. (The sources differ on when he actually took up the post, late 1975 or 1976.)

In 1980, after 31 years of service, Gazit took early retirement from the civil service and chose research. He became a fellow at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, and the family relates that in the same period he also taught for about half a year at Brandeis University.

At one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious universities he researched President Kennedy’s Middle East policy, a period he had lived through at the embassy in Washington. That research became his book on Kennedy’s policy toward the Arab states and Israel.

As a scholar, too, he stayed loyal to Golda Meir, under whom he had headed both the Foreign Ministry and the Prime Minister’s Office. When she was accused after the Yom Kippur War of having missed a chance for peace, he came to her defence in lectures and articles, arguing from the documents that no opportunity had been missed.

Henry Kissinger, across from whom Gazit had sat in the negotiating rooms of 1973‎–‎1975, had once worked at the same center. He saw research as an extension of his career rather than a departure from it: a practitioner, he said, could offer political science a different angle from a theorist’s.

Of his archaeology degree, he recalled that the war led him to keep “serving the new state rather than minding my own little shop.” His books and articles examined negotiation, Kennedy’s policies, and Israel’s relations with the United States and its neighbours.

His first two books appeared in 1983: one on the peace process of 1969‎–‎1973, the other on President Kennedy’s policy toward the Arab states and Israel. In 1993 he published the essay “Peacemakers”, on mediation in the Arab–Israeli conflict.

Three of his studies appeared in the international Journal of Contemporary History: on the peace talks with King Abdallah (1988), on whether an opportunity for peace with Egypt was missed in 1971 (1997), and on the beginnings of the strategic relationship with the United States (2000).

His book Israeli Diplomacy and the Quest for Peace, published in London in 2002, sets out his research across four decades of diplomacy: from the Bernadotte mediation of 1948, through the Sinai Campaign of 1956, to the London Agreement of Hussein and Peres in 1987.

He was a research fellow at the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace at the Hebrew University. At the Truman Institute, too, he kept checking facts with people on the other side. In April 1982 he wrote by hand to the lawyer Aziz Shehadeh of Ramallah, one of the first Palestinians to back a Palestinian state alongside Israel openly.

He sent him material on the question of Palestinians’ Jordanian citizenship, argued that in 1960 Jordan had extended its naturalisation rules to all Palestinians, added that “more research is required” to establish what had happened to that decision since, and wrote: “I benefited from our talk the other day.”

Shehadeh replied at legal length, and disagreed: in his view there was no legal basis for the claim that all Palestinians could obtain Jordanian citizenship as of right. Gazit’s records and studies serve researchers to this day, those who agree with him and those who dispute him.

After his retirement his tie with the United States took a new direction. Back in Jerusalem he headed the American Jewish Committee’s Israel office, on Ethiopia Street, the family relates.

In 1982 he published “America and Israel” in Partisan Review, on the friendship between the two countries and Israel’s fears of relying on it, and the same issue listed him as a visiting professor at Boston University.

In 1984 ten young Israelis, aged 28 to 38, were selected under his guidance for an American Jewish Committee programme to get to know American Jewry, and on their return they met him to review what they had learned and how to improve the programme.

That year he also sent Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, with a handwritten note, material he had found in the Foreign Ministry archive: “This is the ‘crop’ after a search in the M.F.A. archive.”

Mordechai Gazit died on 29 May 2016, aged 93, sixty-eight years and ten days after he was wounded in the Jewish Quarter. He left behind books, articles and files in archives from which one can learn today about the founding years of Israel’s foreign policy.

His name appears in some twenty documents of the official documentary series of United States diplomacy, from the Kennedy years to the Ford years. A company commander in 1948, director-general of two ministries, political adviser to two prime ministers, ambassador and scholar: few served the state on so many fronts, and for so many years.

And to his family he left the memory of Motke: husband, father and grandfather.