From a letter in London to a confidential conversation in Jerusalem. The records bring us closer to the questions, choices and daily work of a diplomat.
The Israel State Archives preserve letters Gazit sent, cables addressed to him, drafts he worked on and material collected in his office. They include a secret letter from London in 1954, the Yom Kippur War cables and the work of the team he led towards the 1975 interim agreement with Egypt.
The cable file follows the work by day and hour. At two in the morning on 15 October 1973, Gazit set out the arithmetic behind Israel’s request for a thousand tanks. After the war he returned to the records and wrote twelve summaries, the first in November 1973. A cable and a later summary answer different questions: what was reported during the event, and how he understood it afterwards.Diplomatic recordIsrael State Archives, A-5157/3 — M. Gazit, untitled file: Yom Kippur War cablesDiplomatic recordState Archives — file A-7023/1: the Director-General’s summaries and assessments of the Yom Kippur War (Hebrew)
The family downloads full scans of his files and documents from the State Archives. Each one is read here from the first page to the last, and every quotation is checked against the scanned page. A file that adds something real about him gets a page of its own: the background in brief, page-cited findings, scans where reproduced, what the file does not hold, and a link to the Archives. Not every paper that bears his name is brought here: only what shows another side of him, or another thing he did.
The central file · A-7023/1 · 196 scanned pages
After the war Gazit went back to the cables and set down, summary by summary, what had passed between Israel and the United States in its three weeks. The State Archives published the summaries as an appendix of their own.
Open the file: 4 pages, 4 findings, the twelve summaries
HZ-5980/11 · 1973–1975The Prime Minister’s personal channels: Bonn and Tehran
HZ-5977/2 · 1973–1975The messages between the Prime Minister and the US President
HZ-5973/5 · November 1973With Golda Meir in Washington: the records of the talks and his “points for a summary”
A-7060/7 · January–February 1974The channel from Washington: “To: Gazit – addressee only”
HZ-5977/7 · 1971–1974The senior team he headed, and kept secret
HZ-5976/2 · March–November 1974The disengagement with Syria: the papers he prepared
G-6701/7 · 1974–1975The personal file: a Director-General’s letters
HZ-5973/11 · June 1974President Nixon’s visit: what the Prime Minister would say
A-4183/10 · 1973–1975The Gazit team: preparing for a comprehensive settlement
HZ-5974/15 · 22–28 August 1975The interim agreement with Egypt: the papers he wrote during the shuttleFiles that carry his name in the Archives’ catalogue but are reference files: papers that reached him or were collected in his bureau. They were read to the end in order to know this, and they have no page of their own. A file gets a page here only when it adds something real: another side of him, another thing he did or wrote.
HZ-7029/16 · Mordechai Gazit – the armistice agreements and Mount Scopus ↗71 pages · 1949–1963
A reference file of texts: the armistice agreements of 1949, a UN report of August 1963 and two printed maps of Jerusalem. It holds no letter or memorandum, and nothing he wrote.
HZ-7029/12 · Mordechai Gazit – general – the Suez Canal ↗21 pages · July 1966–February 1967
Embassy reports of July 1966 on an Egyptian idea for an oil pipeline alongside the Suez Canal, and an exchange of February 1967 with the Ambassador in Canberra. The papers were sent to him, as a Deputy Director-General of the Foreign Ministry; of his own the file holds a two-line letter of thanks.
HZ-5974/1 · Mordechai Gazit – American initiatives ↗83 pages · 1968–1975
A reference file: the texts of the American plans from 1968 to 1970, and the Washington embassy’s cables of late 1968. Only one text carries his name: a three-page summary, of January 1975, of the cables on Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s “seven points”. It holds no assessment of his own.
HZ-5974/5 · Mordechai Gazit – the visit of the Africans ↗26 pages · November 1971–January 1972
A reference file on the mission of the four presidents on behalf of the Organisation of African Unity: the mission’s memorandum to Sadat and Golda Meir, Israel’s reply of 28 November 1971, a cable from Dakar and an unsigned paper on the Prime Minister’s words. His name appears only in the file’s catalogue title.
A-4183/1 · Director-General Mordechai Gazit – diplomatic contacts with Egypt and Syria ↗134 pages · 1973–1976
A reference file of the Director-General’s bureau, continued under his successor, Amos Eran: public statements, copies of cables, UN and American texts and unsigned chronologies. One cable is addressed to him. It holds no text, signature or note of his.
A-375/5 · The bureau of Director-General Mordechai Gazit – Abd al-Halim Khaddam ↗27 pages · September–October 1975
Hebrew renderings of interviews the Syrian Foreign Minister gave to the press after the interim agreement between Israel and Egypt. They were collected in his bureau. His name appears only on the cover.
The findings of all the files in one line, oldest first. Each row opens the finding on its file’s page.
For the war’s fiftieth anniversary the State Archives opened hundreds of files, and many come from Gazit’s own office: meetings he recorded, his cables with Dinitz and with Moscow’s envoy, and the papers of the team he led towards the interim agreement. Most can be read online as scans. Most of these have not yet been read in full for this site; the descriptions follow the Archives’ own.
Summaries and minutes of meetings, including meetings with Rabin, in Gazit’s notes.
Arms procurement with Kissinger, messages to King Hussein, the Iraqi force, and the front summaries Gazit sent to be passed to the Americans.
66 pages: his cables to Shalev and Dinitz from the first night, the situation summaries, the tank arithmetic of 15 October, and his 23 October message on the gains on the ground. Scanned and open via NYU.
A secret working paper by a team headed by Zvi Terlo on the holy places and religious bodies in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria: Jews, Muslims and Christians, the status quo and the communities’ positions.
Minutes of Gazit’s talks with Primakov and Kotov, and the cables he sent about them.
Cables and handwritten drafts on his talks with Primakov and Kotov about Soviet Jewish emigration and the Middle East.
The Soviet trade law, assessments of whether Sadat would open fire, Saudi oil pressure and Mirage jets for Egypt.
Kissinger’s contacts with Hafez Ismail, Egypt’s positions on a settlement, and Soviet Jewry.
Ahead of the Nixon–Brezhnev summit: aid to Jordan, Phantom jets, and the talks with Victor Louis.
Drafts of the interim agreement, lines for a territorial settlement in Sinai, and papers of the team he headed.
Cables and commitments on the disengagement agreements with Egypt and Syria.
Reports from Israel’s missions around the world on diplomacy during the war.
Extracts of Kissinger’s talks with Meir and her ministers, cables up to the interim agreement, and an introduction to the Agranat report.
Israel State Archives · a list prepared for the family
At the family’s request the State Archives compiled a list of every file in which Mordechai Gazit is mentioned. In 406 of them his name is already in the file’s title: most of these are the files of the offices he headed, at the Foreign Ministry and at the Prime Minister’s Office, some shared with his successors. The list shows how wide the work was. Beside the cables of the war and the drafts of the agreements with Egypt and Syria there are files on oil, on the Druze and Circassian communities, on the holy places, and even on daylight saving time.
These rest on the Archives’ catalogue descriptions. The files themselves have not yet been read for this site.
Twenty Foreign Ministry files gather his reports and cables as Minister at the Washington embassy, from 1960 to 1965. Another holds his reports on the visit of Deputy Defence Minister Shimon Peres to Washington in May 1962.
Thirteen files are headed “Mordechai Gazit, Deputy Director-General”. Their subjects: water, refugees, navigation, Egypt’s economy, the Suez Canal, the armistice agreements and Mount Scopus, and the population census (1967–1968).
A file from Prime Minister Levi Eshkol’s office, dated to that day, holds according to the catalogue “a document by Mordechai Gazit on the organisational structure for overall planning regarding the territories captured in the Six-Day War” (site translation).
A Davis Institute file from 1987–1990 holds, according to the catalogue, a review by Gazit following research he did on Foreign Minister Shimon Peres’s moves to advance the “Jordanian option” in 1985–1988, among them the understandings between Peres and Hussein.
A file from Prime Minister Menachem Begin’s office holds a report on Ambassador Gazit’s conversation with the Secretary-General of the French Foreign Ministry. And in the photograph collection: a reception at the French Senate in honour of Yaakov Tsur, showing, according to the catalogue, Tsur, Ambassador Gazit and Alain Poher.
722 files that are open or partly open, each with a link to the State Archives. The 23 closed files are not listed. File names and descriptions are in Hebrew, as in the catalogue.
Selected files from the archive’s official public Pinpoint collection, plus an ISA copy preserved at NYU.
Includes the agreement and annexes, an early-warning proposal and the UN statement at the 22 September 1975 protocol ceremony.
Memoranda of 31 March 1975 and a 4 April conversation recorded on 6 April document the Soviet channel’s principles and the dispute over its status.
Research lead for drafts and annexes.
Research lead for the Prime Minister’s letters in a file named for Gazit.
Research lead for talks with Joseph Sisco and the six-point agreement.
Research lead for records of the Kilometer 101 meetings.
Research lead for the Gazit working team’s diplomatic contacts with Egypt.
Research lead for drafts of the Syria disengagement agreement.
The participant list confirms Gazit’s presence at the 3 p.m. luncheon in Tel Aviv. No named intervention by him was identified in the pages examined.
