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in north Tel Aviv set up with French backing and an accent on French language and culture. Unlike the girls on the kibbutz – proud of their plain, utilitarian clothes and sensible shoes – she wore make-up and perfume and, when she was out of uniform, bright print dresses. She never tried to make me feel out of place. Still, it was sometimes hard not to wonder whether she saw me as a country bumpkin – a nice, interesting, bright county bumpkin, perhaps, but still an interloper or a curiosity in her world.

It wasn’t until April, the day before I was due to leave for the French commando fortress in Mont Louis, that I plucked up the courage to ask her out. I needn’t have worried. She smiled. In fact, she proposed that since I was about to leave the country, she should be the one doing the asking. She invited me to dinner that evening at the apartment she shared with her parents and younger sister, about a half-mile from the kirya, a few blocks back from the Mediterranean. Dinner was less awkward than I feared, but I still felt nervous, until the dishes were cleared and Nili and I went out to chat on the apartment balcony and, just before I left, to share a first kiss.

We wrote each other almost every day while I was away in France. Once I got back, we met whenever I wasn’t preparing for a sayeret operation. This was the first girl I’d known whom I could talk to, and listen to, on almost any subject with a feeling that it was natural and somehow meant to be. But in the second half of 1963, I was working almost non-stop on preparing for a sayeret operation. I still saw Nili when I could, sometimes at her apartment, but also occasionally going out to a movie, a meal or a concert in Tel Aviv. Yet what I most wanted was an acknowledgment that we were not just dating: a commitment that we intended the relationship to last. I didn’t say this to Nili. Years later, she would say this was down to pride. In fact, I was afraid she would say no. And in the periods when we were apart, I couldn’t help asking myself why she hadn’t raised the question of a deeper commitment.

Even more frustrating, by the time I entered Hebrew University in September 1965, our relationship was again being conducted by mail. After her military service, she took a two-year posting at our embassy in Paris. I could understand the attraction, not just because of her taste for all things French. She was working with the Mossad to help Moroccan Jews skirt an official emigration ban and get to Israel. Still, it meant that charting our future together, if we had one, was going to have to wait.

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