Shmuel Gonen - Post-war

Post-war

Gonen resigned from the IDF in 1974 and left for Africa, where he embarked on various business ventures. He never returned to Israel except for short visits.

In writing of Gonen in his comprehensive book on the war, Abraham Rabinovich said of him:

The most tragic figure to emerge in the Israeli military hierarchy from the war was Shmuel Gonen. The ignominy of being superseded as commander on the southern front at the height of the war was compounded by his being forced to leave the army after the final Agranat Report. Although the Israeli establishment usually finds suitable jobs for retired generals, he was offered none. Gonen believed Dayan to be responsible for his disgrace and would tell reporters that he had considered walking into Dayan's office and shooting him.

Instead, he spent thirteen years in the jungles of the Central African Republic searching for diamonds with the intention, he said, of becoming wealthy enough to hire the best lawyers in Israel to prove the Agranat findings mistaken and clear his name. He reportedly made and lost one or two fortunes but rejected appeals by his family and friends to abandon his obsession. A reporter who visited him in the jungle after nine years found him somewhat mellowed, self-aware, and not without sardonic humor, and still sprinkling his conversation with apt quotes from the Talmud. The tough soldier appeared to find satisfaction in coping with the brutal challenges of the jungle rather than nursing his grievances in the cafes of Tel Aviv. Some would see it as a form of penance. He died of a heart attack in 1991 during one of his periodic trips to Europe. Among the few possessions returned to his family were maps of Sinai, on which he had apparently refought the war during his jungle exile, and a copy of Kabbalistic work in which the former yeshiva student may have sought explanations for the disaster that had overtaken him beyond what the maps could tell. (Rabinovich, The Yom Kippur War, p. 506)

In an interview with the Maariv daily newspaper on 7 August 2003, his personal assistant, Amir Porat, revealed that Gonen considered assassinating Moshe Dayan after the war, and that he lived in fear that he would somehow "disappear". Throughout his entire military career, he was considered to be a strict disciplinarian, a political right-winger, and even a militarist.

His tragic life story was the subject of a play, Gorodish, by Israeli author Hillel Mittelpunkt.