TEL AVIV—Israel’s winemakers ought to send a free case or two to Eliezer Cohen. They owe it to him, this diminutive 90-year-old man nicknamed “Cheetah.”
The Israeli Army encourages its officers to lead from the front and take initiative. Mr. Cohen did just that in 1967.
In the closing hours of the Six-Day War, just before a U.N. ceasefire went into effect, he unilaterally occupied much of the Golan Heights.
Israel still holds it today; President Donald Trump recognized its annexation in 2019; and the Israeli wine industry, which now wins awards, has taken root there.
Mr. Cohen was just a major back then. A few days earlier, he'd led Israel’s first air assault mission, where helicopters landed paratroopers to take out Egyptian artillery batteries obstructing the path of Gen. Ariel Sharon’s tanks across the Sinai Peninsula.
Entering his tenth decade in June, he’s still sharp. In an interview on March 11 with The Epoch Times, he regards his and his nation’s past with pride. But he does not sugarcoat what he sees ahead in the Middle East and what it may take for Israel to counter it.
He sees all-out war in the Middle East within five to 10 years—initiated by Iran, not against Israel, but against Iran’s Sunni Arab rivals, the ones who have sought peace deals and cooperation with Israel through the Abraham Accords.
He won’t talk about it in detail. But it’s general knowledge that Israel has nuclear weapons, that any nuclear attack from Iran would provoke Israeli retaliation, and that Arab states that now fear Iran more than Israel, could enjoy protection under Israel’s nuclear umbrella.
Mr. Cohen predicts the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) will attack Rafah. It can’t come this far and not finish the job of destroying Hamas, he says.
“The victory will be Rafah.”
After that, he predicts an “all-out war” between Israel and Hezbollah in the north. Israel has more than 60,000 citizens displaced by rocket attacks who can’t go home unless Hezbollah is cleared out from Lebanon, at the very least those south of the Litani River.
If Hezbollah forces a war there, Israel will attack and destroy it and has the means to do it, he says.
Israel’s attack would probably go beyond that, involving attacks on Lebanese infrastructure in Beirut and throughout the country, he adds.
Mr. Cohen is intimately familiar with Lebanon: after Israel invaded in 1982, going all the way to Beirut, he commanded its airport for the IDF.
The Eichmann Effect
“That’s why I am sure that, although the President of the United States does not like the attack of Rafah, Bibi [Prime Minister Netanyahu]—although he cannot make a decision—he will decide to attack,” Mr. Cohen said.In his opinion, Mr. Netanyahu is indecisive. “There is no other way. We must—three times, must, must, must—attack Rafah.”
The million residents must be evacuated, he said, but he thinks that may take care of itself.
Gaza residents will flee impending violence, he said. They’ve done it 10 or 12 times before in previous rounds of fighting in Gaza.
“Every few years, they’re running for their life. They'll run another time.”
“All those times, they do something bad,” he said, referring to actions like Hamas’ Oct. 7 massacre.
“The Jews are coming. They run away. They do something bad. The Jews are coming. They run away. And they'll run another time from Rafah.”
“Israel will not attack civilians. We never did and we’re not going to do it. We'll attack and you will see them running away.”
And Israel will track Hamas’ leaders, Yahya Sinwar and Ismail Haniyeh, to the ends of the Earth, he said.
“I call it the Eichmann effect.”
Israel defied international law and world opinion in 1960 after tracking Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer who directed the Holocaust, to Argentina.
Mossad (Israel’s intelligence agency) operatives kidnapped him, smuggled him out of the country, and flew him to Israel.
After a 1961 trial that captivated the world, he was convicted and became the only person Israeli courts have ever sentenced to death. He was hanged in 1962, his body cremated, and his ashes scattered at sea.
Mr. Cohen cites Israel’s long arm and longer memory for crimes against the Jewish people.
Mossad, at Prime Minister Golda Meir’s direction, tracked down and assassinated those behind the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics.
“We did it with Eichmann. We did it with Munich. And we’re going to do it with Sinwar and Haniyeh. If not these days, in two months, or two years, these people will pay with their life. I, Cheetah, am sure.”
Mr. Cohen turned his attention to Israel’s next move: against Hezbollah in the north.
Israel will take out infrastructure—electricity, water, bridges, and highways—across the country, he says.
“It will be a big destruction of Lebanon, like in Gaza. That’s exactly what Lebanon does not need. That’s why Israel is considering not destroying Lebanon. It is destroyed enough.
“But if [Hezbollah leader Hassan] Nasrallah continues, he will bring it upon Lebanon. We don’t like it. We don’t want it.”
Israel wants Lebanon to get rid of Nasrallah, but he’s built himself an army stronger than Lebanon’s, Mr. Cohen said.
“But he’s not stronger than the Israeli Army. And the outcome will be the destruction of Lebanon. That’s how I see it.”
“The Israeli army will clean out south of the Litani River any weapons and enemies.”
He say that he, too, was a refugee. “I was a Jewish Palestinian as a child. I know exactly what this means. I know exactly what happens to them. But we settle and are reborn and live life.
“They do not settle. They stay all their life as refugees. This is the bad point. No democracy, no education.”
Israel, by contrast, has a healthy Western-style democracy.
“Israel is the 52nd state of the United States in the Middle East. We represent the interests of the United States here. We do it, excuse me, better than the Americans do it for themselves.
“Israel is a leading country in life science, in medicine.”
He mentions physicist Haim Sompolinsky of Hebrew University, who in March won the 2024 Brain Prize, awarded by a Danish foundation, for his work on the interlink connecting the brain’s physical structures with thought, memory, and decision-making.
Mr. Sompolinsky is one of three winners sharing a $1.4 million prize.
“The progressive, the innovative, top academic and science people—we represent the Western world here.”
Darkly, he sees a future wider Middle East war as Iran tries to control the oil in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq, and elsewhere, he says.
A Jewish Palestinian Refugee
Mr. Cohen’s history parallels his nation’s. His family was Sephardic. A great-grandfather came from Azerbaijan. His grandfather grew up in Izmir, Turkey, and walked with his family to Israel, a horse-and-cart journey taking a month.
As a youth of 14, he and his family endured four months of siege in their home in Jerusalem’s Old City in 1948 before it fell to Jordan.
That makes him one of the hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees from Arab lands.
Israel absorbed the Jewish refugees. They were very different from the left-leaning Ashkenazi Jews who led the state’s formation and kept socialist governments in power for almost 30 years.
Most were from non-Western countries. Artisans, merchants, or shopkeepers with strong traditional values, they formed the base shaking up Israeli politics by electing Menachem Begin in 1977.
Conservative coalitions have governed Israel for about 35 of the 47 years since, including the 15 years Benjamin Netanyahu has been prime minister in stints dating back to 1996.
As a boy, Mr. Cohen received the nickname “Cheetah,” which much of Israel still knows him by, for his abilities at running and jumping.
A friend says he was tagged with it because he was so poor he'd take huge risks climbing up roofs to recover a ball.
An eighth-grade dropout, he started training as a mechanic at 14. “I gave my salary to my mother.”
Mr. Cohen educated himself to pass high school equivalency exams so that he could train as a pilot. He fought as a fighter pilot in the 1956 Suez War, when Israel, France, and the United Kingdom retook the Suez Canal after Egypt nationalized it.
In 1967, he commanded a unit of 30 Sikorsky helicopters made in Connecticut, a 1964 gift by West Germany’s defense minister to Israel, he says.
Egypt led an alliance that also included Syria and Jordan.
Iraq and Saudi Arabia, which don’t border Israel, had troops positioned ready to join the invasion.
Israel’s First Air Assault
On June 5, Israel attacked preemptively, destroying enemy air forces on the ground in a few hours and then swiftly attacking Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Gaza Strip, Syria’s Golan Heights, Jordan’s West Bank, and East Jerusalem.In the war’s opening hours, Mr. Cohen and his helicopters rescued downed Israeli pilots.
That evening, the Air Force ordered him to meet with Gen. Sharon on the Egyptian border. He had a force of 10,000 men.
Mr. Sharon tasked Mr. Cohen and paratroop Col. Danny Matt with taking out 24 Egyptian artillery batteries.
“We planned this in five minutes as Sharon sat in his car and ate cheese,” Mr. Cohen reminisced.
“And he says, ‘Cheetah and Danny, you see this place Um Katef with 24 cannon batteries. They’ll kill me when they hit with the cannons the main axis of [my advance across] the Sinai to Ismailia.' He had to capture the main axis.”
“He said, ‘Danny, Cheetah will take you to the backs of the cannons of the Egyptians. If you will not kill them, if you will not stop them, I cannot penetrate to sunlight.”
Mr. Cohen landed 150 paratroopers in a first wave. He returned to ferry in two more equal-sized waves.
The first wave meanwhile moved two kilometers across the desert and quickly took nine or 10 of the batteries. Mr. Cohen, bringing in the second wave, saw the attack in the night.
The crews of the other batteries fled, and Mr. Sharon’s path to the Suez Canal was clear.
‘I’m Cheetah, and I Think Simple’
In the early 1980s, he accompanied Mr. Sharon on a visit to Alabama’s Fort Rucker to meet with the American father of air assault, retired Lt. General James Gavin, who commanded part of the 82nd Airborne as it jumped into Normandy on D-Day in World War II.“He wanted us to tell his officers why they shouldn’t need weeks to plan an air assault,” Mr. Cohen said with a twinkle in his eye.
“He wanted us to show his officers: ‘Guys, Sharon here said to Danny Matt and Cheetah, take this and this.’ And that was the planning. And they did. They succeeded. Simplicity was the name of the game.”
Mr. Gavin asked Mr. Sharon how Israel would have planned to rescue the 52 U.S. embassy hostages in Iran.
An American attempt in April 1980 failed with helicopters succumbing to mechanical failure, and one colliding with an aircraft.
President Jimmy Carter finally aborted the mission.
Mr. Cohen said he put his hand up and offered that Israel’s chief had asked for a rescue plan.
He'd learned a mission had been launched and said he knew it would fail, without knowing the details, even before it became public.
He knew, he said, that the United States would launch helicopters from ships in the Arabian Sea. He‘d visited Tehran many times under the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini’’s predecessor, the shah of Iran, an Israeli ally.
He knew Tehran was a big city, nearly impossible for a rescue force to get out of.
“Thousands of ... Shiites with Kalashnikovs were walking the streets of Tehran in those days” after the Ayatollah overthrew the Shah in 1979, he said. “Yeah, they would kill every American.”
His plan would have been not to go to Tehran or the U.S. embassy there at all, he says. Instead, he said, he would have raided Iran’s holy city of Qom, which had thousands of high-ranking Shiites.
“We should go to Qom and capture something like 55 high-ranking Shiite [generals], bringing them to the mosque in Washington.
“[And say to Iran], ‘One for one, send me my embassy people and I’ll send you the generals.'”
Mr. Gavin was stunned by the idea, Mr. Cohen said. “He said, ‘oh my God, oh my God.”
“Why am I telling you this?” he rhetorically asked the reporter. “You have to think another way in the Middle East. And the Americans [were] not doing it.
‘Tell People I Told You To Do It’
Five days after his attack for Mr. Sharon at Umm Katef in the Sinai, Mr. Cohen’s unit was at an Israeli base near Poriya, west of the Sea of Galilee, which Israelis call Lake Kinneret. It was June 10, 1967, a Saturday.“Shabbat morning,” he recalled.
Standing in his kitchen, in a high-rise apartment overlooking Tel Aviv, he points to a Golan map mounted on his refrigerator, with handwritten notes marking locations as they existed in 1967.
Gen. David “Dado” Elazar “told me to fly here to destroy this building,” he said, pointing to Ein Gede on the lake’s east bank, then on the Israel–Syria border.
“The Syrians had used a British-built fortress above it to direct the shelling of northern Israel for two decades. Major Cohen took the troops and they took out the building.
“Then, instead of bringing the soldiers back from here to here. I took an initiative—I was a major—not to fly them back to Israel. I left them here. This was the main intersection of the Golan Heights.”
He points to a location about 10 kilometers inside Syria, at the junction of Routes 98 and 789, at a town variously called Fiq, Afik, or El Al. He left 30 paratroops there.
“When I returned [to Poriya], I told Danny, ‘I left them here.’ He said, ‘What? Only 30 soldiers? Let’s start immediately with a big air support.’ ”
“I said to Danny, ‘Why fly them here [to Fiq]? Let’s keep going.” Mr. Cohen, flying recon that day, had seen how far the Syrians had pulled back.
They flew more paratroops east until they drew Syrian fire at a place called Boutimiya. Today, it marks the Syrian–Israeli border at the easternmost tip of the Golan Heights.
Between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m., with the ceasefire scheduled to start at 6 p.m., they moved in 250 paratroopers. And the helicopters ferried in another 450 troops to reinforce them, racing against the clock as sundown and the U.N. truce approached.
“This was the first capture of the Golan Heights,” Mr. Cohen said. An Israeli tank unit had driven across the Northern Golan to capture Quneitra two days earlier, but only that town.
Mr. Elazar was up in Quneitra that day and didn’t know about any of this.
“At 7 o‘clock in the evening, we went to his command post and we told him that first we did this, then second we did this, and then we went here. And he said, ’You what? Tell people I told you to do it. Otherwise, you'll go to jail.”
The Golan Heights, at 430 square miles about a third the size of the average U.S. county, is now the center of Israel’s wine industry.
It’s unlikely to return to Syria. The Assad regime in Syria has never seriously sought peace with Israel, and for the past decade, the nation has been torn by civil war.
President Trump recognized Israel’s annexation, but other countries haven’t followed suit.
The Golan’s strategic location overlooking Galilee and Syria’s history of using that height to bombard Israel unites Israelis in not wanting it returned.
Published sources say about 100,000 people left in 1967—Israel saying they fled, Syria saying they were expelled—with 7,000 staying behind.
By 1973, he was Col. Cohen and the Air Force’s Sinai commander at the outset of the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
He commanded the captured Egyptian air base at Ismailia while Israel held it and remembers the American C-5 jumbo cargo planes shuttling in and out of it with supplies after the war was over.
He retired from the military in 1974, was an El Al pilot for 25 years, and also served as director general of Ben Gurion International Airport.
He served seven years in the Knesset representing Yisrael Beiteynu, a co-founder of the conservative party led by Avigdor Lieberman.
