Ehud Barak had been a commander in…

Ehud Barak had been a commander in battles in the Six-Day War but becomes especially known as the leader of special forces units that conduct commando raids.

These include a group of soldiers in the elite General Staff Unit Sayeret Matcal ("Border Reconnaissance").

Among these soldiers is Captain Benjamin Netanyahu, the twenty-three-year-old son of the historian Benzion Netanyahu, who in 1963 had moved his family moved to Philadelphia in the United States, where Benjamin had attended high school.

Barak, born in 1942 in a kibbutz that had been founded in 1932 by his father, an emigrant from Lithuania, had been drafted into the Israel Defense Forces in 1959, thus beginning a distinguished military career (he changed his name at this time from Brog).