Fighting Terrorism Read online

  Shortly after Israel withdrew from Gaza, it became abundantly clear that the PLO had no intention of fulfilling any of its commitments under the Oslo agreement. Arafat refused to convene the Palestine National Council to annul the PLO Covenant, daily generating new excuses until the Israeli government even stopped asking. Equally, it became apparent that far from taking action against terrorist organizations in Gaza, the PLO presided over a fantastic explosion of anti-Israel terrorism from Gaza that threatened to turn its mini-state there into a replica of the PLO mini-state in the Lebanon of the 1970s. Within a year and a half after Oslo, the agreement heralded by the Labor government as “the end to terror,” acts of terror against Israel had reached unprecedented dimensions. In the first eighteen months after Oslo, 123 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, many of them launched from Gaza, as compared to sixty-seven in the comparable period before Oslo.3 This was more than double the casualties in terrorist attacks during any comparable period in the preceding two decades—proportionately as if 6,000 Americans had died from terror attacks in a year and a half.

  To understand the true intentions of Yasir Arafat and the rest of the PLO leadership, one had only to listen to what they were saying in Arabic to their own people. Several days before the signing of the Oslo accords in Washington, Arafat gave an interview in which he interpreted the event for his followers, telling them that the Oslo accord was the implementation of the Phased Plan decided upon in 1974: “[The agreement] will be a basis for an independent Palestinian state in accordance with the Palestine National Council [of the PLO] resolution issued in 1974.”4 This was the same position elaborated by Abbas Zaki, one of the PLO’s security chiefs in the newly “liberated” territories: “This is merely a cease-fire before the next stage … I am for negotiations, but they are not the only means. The revolutionaries in Algeria and Vietnam talked peace and fought at the same time”5—that is, just as the FLN “talked peace” before completely driving the French out of Algeria, and just as the North Vietnamese “talked peace” before completely driving the United States out of Vietnam (peace talks for which Henry Kissinger and his Vietnamese counterpart were granted the Nobel Peace Prize), so, too, could the PLO talk peace until Israel had been completely driven out of “Palestine”—which is to say, all of Israel. The overly blunt Zaki was discounted as having fallen from grace with Arafat. But to no avail. Arafat’s confidants kept making the same points. When Jericho was evacuated by Israel, the commander of the PLO forces entering the city announced: “In Jericho we have taken the first step in the direction of Jerusalem, which will be returned to us in spite of the intransigence of the Zionists.”6 PLO Foreign Minister Farouq Kaddoumi granted an interview in which he added: “The Palestinian people know that there is a state [Israel] that was founded by compulsion of history, and that this state must be brought to an end.”7 Arafat later dropped the metaphor and told the leadership of his “Force 17” Fatah group in Gaza (which includes a highly regarded terrorist leader known by the name “Abu Hitler”): “With blood, fire, and sweat will we liberate Palestine and its capital, Jerusalem.”8 A few days later he added: “In 1974 we accepted the decision [the Phased Plan] to establish our rule over every territory that will be freed from Israeli rule, and we will fulfill this decision.”9 The day before he had said: “We will establish Palestinian authority over every place that will be liberated from the Zionist enemy. We have achieved the first stage, but the way remains long and hard. We will continue our march until we can fly our flag over Jerusalem, the capital of our country, Palestine.”10 One of the leaders of Arafat’s security services in Jericho, Abu al-Fahd, put it more simply: “We will continue the struggle for the liberation of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beit Shean”11—in other words, all of Israel.

  With this kind of policy, it is no wonder that soon after Israel’s withdrawal the various terrorist groups headquartered in Gaza understood that the time had come for an unprecedented murder spree against Israel. Downtown Jerusalem and central Tel Aviv became the scenes of horrible carnage as buses exploded and crowds of pedestrians were mowed down by machine-gun fire. The same happened in the Israeli towns of Hadera, Afula, and Ashdod, and at Beit Lid near Netanya. Virtually no part of the country was safe. Some of these murders were carried out by PLO operatives, whom Arafat did not discipline in any way. Most were conducted by two Islamic movements in Gaza, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, which dramatically expanded their operations after the Israeli withdrawal. Here, finally, they had nothing to fear. They could hatch their plans, arm their killers, dispatch them to Israel, and receive those that came back with no fear whatsoever of Israeli reprisal or interception. For as part of the Oslo accords, the Israeli government agreed, incredibly, to give up on the right of “hot pursuit” and preemptive attacks against terrorists, principles that had guided all previous Israeli governments and which Israel continues to apply against the bases of the militant Islamic organization Hizballah in Lebanon. Instead, Israel now relied on Arafat’s promise to act against terrorism—thereby creating the only place in the world in which Islamic terrorists would enjoy the promise of immunity from Israeli retaliation.

  Not coincidentally, this immunity facilitated an expansion of an Islamic fundamentalist specialty—the suicide attack. That these fundamentalists inculcate young men (mostly disturbed social misfits) to immolate themselves and their victims for the greater glory of Allah is well known. What is less well known is that the more deadly of these attacks, those that require fairly sophisticated explosives and planning, are seldom carried out by solitary individuals. A whole array of people inculcate the suicide, provide him with explosives, guide him in their use, select the chosen target, arrange for his undetected arrival there, and promise to take care of his family after the deed is done. In short, suicide attacks require a significant infrastructure, and the people who provide it are anything but suicidal. On the contrary, they very much want to live; they want to kill, and not be killed. And it is these suicide factories that sprang up in Gaza, free of any fear of retribution from Israel, and which, alongside the more conventional forms of murder by more conventionally minded terrorists, claimed an increasing price in Israeli lives.

  But what of Arafat’s promise to uproot these terrorists from their strongholds? For nearly two years following the Oslo accords he did not apprehend a single perpetrator of terrorist acts, even though some of the known murderers were serving in his own “police.” Though the Israeli security forces provided him lists of known perpetrators, and though his police force had ballooned into an army of 16,000 armed men—per capita ten times the police force of Israel—Arafat did practically nothing to rein in terror. Following Arafat’s arrival in Gaza, the Israeli government made more than a dozen requests for extradition of known murderers, many of them serving in the PLO “police”—including Sammy Abu Samadana, murderer of more than thirty Palestinian Arabs and at least one Israeli, now a commander in the PLO police; and the brothers Abu Sita, who murdered an Israeli in March 1993 and are now active in the police force. Indeed, the entire “Fatah Hawks” terrorist organization was incorporated into the PLO police en masse, despite the fact that its members continued terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens well after the signing of the Oslo accords.12 Arafat’s refusal to extradite to Israel fourteen Palestinians wanted for murder prompted the legal advisor of the Labor government to state that “this refusal by the Palestinian Authority is a violation of the Oslo accords.”13 Further, the people Arafat appointed to fight the Palestinian terrorists included some of the most savage killers on the PLO’s roster of terrorists, including Amin al Hindi, one of the masterminds of the Munich Massacre who now became head of the PLO’s “general intelligence service.”14

  The awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasir Arafat—who more than anyone else alive contributed to the spread of international terrorism, who presides over an organization whose central and guiding political idea remains the desruction of Israel, and who personally presided over countless atro
cities against civilians of virtually every nationality in the free world in the service of this goal—is without question the lowest point in the history of the prize, and one which vitiates it of any moral worth. The utter moral obtuseness of the decision to grant Arafat this honor caused the resignation from the Nobel committee of one of its five members, Norwegian Member of Parliament Kaare Kristiansen—the first person on the Nobel committee ever to leave it in protest over an impending award. (Fifty-five years earlier, it had been another Scandinavian, the Swedish senator Brandt, who had half-jokingly recommended awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to Hitler and Chamberlain for the capitulatory “peace” agreement signed at Munich in 1938.15 But before the Nobel committee could even consider the idea, Hitler upset the applecart by invading what remained of Czechoslovakia. What had been offered in jest in 1939 became a black comedy in 1994.)

  If one needs a textbook case on how not to fight terrorism, Gaza is it. For if hitherto Israel had shown the world how terrorism could be fought, now it showed how terrorism could be facilitated. From 1993 on, the Israeli government committed many of the mistakes that a state could commit in the war against terror. Its most fundamental mistake, of course, was to capitulate to the terrorists’ political demands. Seeking relief from PLO terrorism by giving the PLO land, it directly encouraged and emboldened a renewed rash of Islamic terrorism under the PLO umbrella aimed at obtaining even more land. (Later it would negotiate the trading of additional tracts of strategic land for a temporary halt in terror, thereby practically ensuring this terror will reappear once the Palestine state is established and Israeli concessions are stopped.) In Oslo, Israel demonstrated to the PLO and its imitators that terrorism does indeed pay.

  Equally, the Israeli government severely impaired its operational capacity to fight terrorism by committing no fewer than six classic blunders:

  1. It tried to subcontract the job of fighting terrorism to someone else—in this case to the terrorists themselves.

  2. It tied the hands of its security forces by denying them the right to enter or strike at terrorist havens, thus creating inviolable domains for terrorist actions.

  3. It released thousands of jailed terrorists into these domains, many of whom promptly took up their weapons and returned to ply their trade.

  4. It armed the terrorists, by enabling the unrestricted flow of thousands of weapons into Gaza, which soon found their way into the hands of the myriad militias and terrorist gangs.

  5. It promised safe passage for terrorists by exempting PLO VIPs from inspection at the border crossings from Egypt and Jordan, thus enabling the smuggling of terrorists into Gaza and Jericho, and from there into Israel itself.16

  6. It betrayed its Palestinian Arab informants, many of whom were murdered by the PLO, leaving Israel without an invaluable source of intelligence against terrorist operations in the evacuated areas.

  All these errors produced one essential outcome: Gaza became a zone in which terrorism could operate without fear of retribution. Just as free-trade zones encourage trade, the creation of any “free-terror zone” is bound to encourage terrorism. To understand how Gaza under the PLO facilitated terror, it is enough to imagine how terrorism would multiply in the United States if, say, Wichita, Kansas, were a free-terror zone, Gaza-style. After the bombing in Oklahoma City, Timothy McVeigh, or others like him, could escape to this inviolable domain. The FBI could not enter it. The local police would shield, rather than apprehend, the terrorists. Extradition would be out of the question. It is not hard to see that under such conditions all the sundry terrorists and demented loonies in North America would flock to Wichita, quickly transforming it into the terrorist capital of the continent, and another head of the hydra of international terrorism as well. The creation of even semi-free enclaves for terrorists—where the authorities struggle against a substantial pro-terrorist sympathy in the population—such as in Northern Ireland or in the Basque region of Spain, creates horrendous conditions for the security services trying to uproot terrorism. This is why, although the campaigns against terrorist groups in France, Italy, and Germany were ultimately highly successful, Britain and Spain could never quite succeed in eradicating the scourge.

  After increasingly bloody and savage attacks emanating from Gaza began to turn Israeli public opinion against further Israeli withdrawals, and after Israel’s closure of its cities to Gazan workers imposed economic hardship on his regime, Arafat had to show Israel that he was doing something against terrorism. Brushing aside demands that he take forceful action against terrorists from Gaza, he staged instead mock detentions of a cadre of regular Islamic detainees, releasing most of them within days, all the while offering feeble circumlocutions to pass as condemnations of terror. Arafat reneged, too, on his promise to disarm the Islamic movements—in Gaza alone, Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad have thousands of men under arms. After some internal scuffling between the PLO and these groups threatened to explode into full-scale conflict, Arafat quickly shifted gears and proceeded instead to seek a strategic alliance with the militants, pleading with them that a tactical pause in their terrorist activities would enable the Rabin government to hand over more territory to the PLO, from which the Islamic groups could resume even more intense attacks at a later date.17 Thus a clear pattern was established. As long as Israel continued to hand over additional land, the relative diminution in terrorism would continue. As soon as Israel stopped its withdrawals, the terror campaign would be resumed in full force.

  A momentary suspension of terrorist attacks is not to be confounded with actual dismantling of terrorist capacities, and many Israelis, familiar as they are with the endless stratagems of the terrorist organizations, do not confuse the two. Yet it is difficult for many outside Israel to accept the failings built into the Oslo accords, especially since so many hopes for peace have been vested in these agreements. At the time of the signing of the accords, my party and I were virtually isolated in our warnings that Arafat would not keep his word and that his was merely a tactical peace and not a genuine one. We were widely castigated as enemies of peace, somewhere between the Hizballah and Hamas on the inane scale of categorizations that typify discussions about Israel in the Western media. Oslo was peace. If you were for it, you were for peace. If you were against it, you were against peace. Of course, our argument was that handing Gaza over to Arafat would immediately create a lush terrorist haven and safe house a few miles from Tel Aviv. As I had written a few months before Oslo: “Gaza’s security significance rests on its proximity to Israel’s cities and on its dense urban center, both of which make it a natural lair for terrorists staging attacks against civilians. In fact, Gaza consistently served this purpose during the nineteen years it was under Egyptian rule.”18

  When the Oslo deal was signed, my party and I repeated this warning, but much of the public at first dismissed our arguments. Only a year and a half later did the situation become so intolerable that even Israel’s president, Ezer Weizman, and leading commentators of the Israeli left were ready to declare that at the very least Israel should suspend the next phase of the Oslo accords and rethink the wisdom of handing over parts of the West Bank, ten minutes away from the outskirts of Tel Aviv, to a PLO army and to the Islamic terrorists. A few ministers in the Labor government echoed these doubts, thereby contributing to a growing mood of public skepticism which threatened the continued implementation of the Oslo accords. The PLO’s scheme for achieving a Palestinian state on the strategic mountains overlooking a truncated Israel appeared in jeopardy. Arafat reintensified his pleading with the Islamic militants, offering Hamas a share in future political powers while explaining that the common long-term goal of vanquishing Israel would now best be served by a hiatus in terrorist activities. Finally, after months of intense negotiations between Hamas and the PLO, an understanding was arrived at between the leadership of both movements. The Hamas militants agreed to ease up on terrorism, or at least not to wage it in and around Gaza, so as to permit Arafat to extend th
e Palestinian domains to the suburbs of Israel’s major cities. As they made clear to Arafat, in no way did they give up their plan to fully resume the “armed struggle” once the additional territories had been procured. A senior Israeli military officer described this suspension of violence as a “temporary respite” aimed at “consolidating political gains.” Further, the PLO–Hamas understanding did not prevent lower echelons of militants from continued terrorist attacks, some of which (like the July 1995 suicide bombing of an Israeli bus in downtown Ramat Gan) continued to exact a growing toll of innocent Israeli lives. The Israeli Army’s Deputy Chief of Intelligence explained that “he feared that once the Israeli Army evacuated West Bank towns, they too might become terrorist havens”; 19 moreover, even if Arafat actually took real steps to prevent the launching of terrorist attacks against Israel from the cities handed over to him, “the Palestinian Authority [PLO] would lose any motivation to fight terrorism once Israel withdrew from those cities.”20 Yet it was this tactical interlude between bouts of terror which has been celebrated by enthusiasts the world over as proof of the success of Oslo, and of Arafat’s success in “pacifying” Gaza.