Most of you probably saw the coverage of the Netanya bombing on Monday. A young man blew himself up at the entrance to the Sharon mall, killing five Israelis and wounding fifty or so. Islamic Jihad - again - was behind the attack. After thinking about this for a couple of days, I have two basic questions. What is the reason for the attacks? And, since the bombings clearly undermine the goals and authority of the Palestinian government, why hasn’t Abbas moved more vigorously against Islamic Jihad..?
Archive for the 'Terrorism' Category
A year after Arafat’s death and two months after Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, not a thing has changed. It’s the same cycle of violence and retaliation, with the prospect of peace fading into the distance, right…?
No - not right at all. In my opinion, there are factors in place now that will make the drive toward a negotiated settlement much harder to derail than in the past.
A week ago in the Tulkarm refugee camp on the West Bank Israel killed Luay Saadi, a young Islamic Jihad leader who was at the top of its “wanted” list. Evidently Saadi was a rising star of the Jihad’s military arm, the Quds Brigades (not to be confused with the Al Quds Brigades, a Fatah offshoot).
Saadi was reportedly responsible for a bombing in Netanya in July. He also carried out a nightclub bombing in Tel Aviv in February that undermined a ceasefire agreement to which Islamic Jihad had agreed. According to the Palestine News Network:
Saadi was accused of being the mastermind behind the operation. However, more importantly, it became clear that Saadi was not committed to the truce, which was agreed on among all the factions, including the Islamic Jihad. So when the Quds Brigades declared its responsibility for the operation, it surely must have embarrassed the political leadership.
Saadi was a big fish in Jihad. The group vowed, and took, revenge, detonating an explosive by a Falafel stand in the Israeli town of Hadera. Five people were killed. For good measure, it also fired off some more missiles from Gaza.
How does this differ from previous cycles of retaliatory violence? For one thing, it is clearly being carried out by renegade groups, and is out of accord with the Palestinian popular and political consensus.
Arafat cultivated an ambiguous position with regard to bomb attacks on Israel. He usually issued statements in English condemning them; but it is also clear that he secretly enabled attacks by militant groups within his own party and did little to halt those by other factions.
Abbas, in contrast, has worked assiduously to establish and maintain a ceasefire. Israel’s military establishment feels he has not been aggressive enough in containing militant violence, and considers this week’s events to be ample proof - but even allowing this, the Palestinian Authority under Abbas has taken a clear, consistent position against militant attacks on Israel.
Furthermore, as I noted last week, polls indicate that the majority of Palestinians are with Abbas on this. They support the ceasefire. The armed struggle against Israel has taken a back seat to issues of state-building for the first time in five years.
Islamic Jihad has become something of a fringe group, at the far end of the Palestinian political spectrum. The Dutch Strategic Assessment Initiative group had this to say about it in their pre-Disengagment paper on the Palestinian security situation:
Islamic Jihad members are often perceived as the ‘intellectual’ counterpart to Hamas. Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) was created in the early 1980’s as a splinter group from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, under the ideological influence of Iran. Its stated objective is the liberation of Palestine and, contrary to Hamas; it does not seek to challenge Fateh power. This strategic difference is reflected in PIJ’s structure: PIJ is mainly a middle class vanguard and, unlike Hamas, has not mobilized popular support through grassroots activities. However, PIJ is present all over the Palestinian Territories and is particularly strong in the Gaza Strip and the Jenin district. Its leadership is based in Syria and has strong control on local groups…
PIJ has less to gain politically than Hamas, since it lacks Hamas’ grassroots support and organization. Therefore, it is more likely that PIJ may continue operations against Israeli targets, possibly during the process of disengagement… Unlike Hamas, PIJ is not ‘constrained’ by popular pressure to turn into a political party.
Note the Iran angle. I wonder if this helps explain other event that riled Israel this week: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a speech in which he quoted the Ayatollah Khomeini’s call for Israel’s destruction. Islamic Jihad is an Iranian client. Did the timing of the speech have anything to do with Saadi’s death?
It’s interesting to read the full text of Ahmadinejad’s remarks. His main point was that Palestine can overthrow an oppressive U.S.-supported regime Just as Iran did. But the media picked up on the most inflammatory section:
Our dear Imam said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front… Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world. But we must be aware of tricks.
Broadcasted worldwide, this evoked condemnations from the U.S., Europe and the U.N. (Sharon noted that “for the first time in years, ‘the United Nations is standing against extremist countries like Iran and Syria that threaten the region.’).
In any case, while the speech fueled Israel’s longstanding existential paranoia, it also highlighted the thaw in its relations with the Islamic countries. Qatar is talking about diplomatic relations. Pakistan has held informal meetings with Israeli officials. Afghanistan (albeit now something of a U.S. vassal) recently said it would recognize Israel if a Palestinian state came into existence. There’s talk in Kuwait of normalizing ties.
Ahmadinejad was at pains to promise hellfire and damnation for those Islamic states that broke ranks:
Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury; any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world.
But the days of monolithic non-recognition of Israel by the Arab world may be coming to a close. The Arab states simply ignored the speech. The government of the Palestinians, for whose benefit the call to arms was presumably issued, firmly refused the offer:
(Ahmadinejad’s) statement was widely reported in the Arab world; leaders there reacted for the most part with silence. Most Arab countries have no diplomatic relations with Israel. But the Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said, according to the Associated Press: “We have recognized the state of Israel and we are pursuing a peace process with Israel, and . . . we do not accept the statements of the president of Iran. This is unacceptable.”
Like Islamic Jihad, Iran may soon find itself promoting a fringe position with regard to Israel.
To paraphrase Kahlil Shikaki, last week’s bombing was a tree, not the forest. Groups like Islamic Jihad are seeing the Palestinian leadership and people turing away from armed combat. They are feeling pressure from the PA, from Israel, and from the international community, including some countries that were previously supporters. They have, as it were, their backs against the wall - and will use violence liberally if necessary to defend themselves. But hopefully there is also a perception among their leaders that, in the long term, a different (i.e. non-violent, political) strategy may be needed.
Hamas, and probably groups like Islamic Jihad, have their fingers to the wind. If momentum builds for a political solution to the conflict, they want to be in a position to participate; if a political solution fails, they will resume their place in the vanguard of the armed struggle.
As for Abbas, he needs to establish the Palestinian Authority firmly as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian People, before he can crack down on militant groups (see my post on Palestinian Politics After the Disengagement for more details). The January legislative elections are essential. If they are fair and above-board - regardless of the outcome - the Authority will be in a much better position to tackle the militias.
This may not make the Hadera deaths any easier to take. But it seems to me that Israel, even if only for strategic reasons, would do well to parse its response to such attacks with a finer knife than it has used in the past. The process taking place in the territories now, if it continues in the direction of statehood, will eventually eliminate armed splinter groups by a combination of assimilation to the political process and coercion where the former fails. But Israel could easily undercut this transition by the indiscriminate use of force, which will harm and alienate moderate Palestinians.
Could Israel’s leadership be thinking along the same lines? YNet, presumably passing on information from military sources, reported shortly after the Hadera bombing:
The IDF is preparing to operate like it did during Arafat’s days, even at the price of hurting the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian civilians, and the diplomatic process.
But, as far as I can tell, operations so far have been directed mainly at militants. I have not seen reports of large-scale anti-civilian violence and collective punishment. Also, the Hadera bombing did not stop Israeli cabinet ministers from approving a proposal to re-open the Rafah crossing under European Union supervision - a critical step for Gaza’s economic viability.
Israel wants the Europeans to have greater authority than observers and be able to intervene in dangerous security situations, while the Palestinians want more limited authority for the EU. Israel is also demanding that it receive information in real time from the border control authorities via cameras filming those who use the Rafah crossing, to which the Palestinians object. Nonetheless, Israel would not have control over who crosses the border.
The Palestinians rejected the cabinet decision on Tuesday, but Israeli security officials said Israel may reopen the Rafah crossing earlier than the target date, which isn’t for another six months, in an effort to strengthen Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
Israel has reaped some unexpected diplomatic benefits from the Disengagement and Sharon has staked his political career on it. I think Israel would like to see an end to the conflict. It is thus exercising some caution to avoid escalating the violence or undercutting the PA.
If our names are indeed written in the book of life on Yom Kippur, and our fate ordained, then perhaps Kineret Mendel (23), her cousin Matat Rosenfeld-Adler (21 and newly married), and Oz Ben-Meir (14) were not meant to live out the year. Who, singing Avinu Malkeinu in synagogue, can guess that he will be murdered the following week..?
From the Washington Post report:
Palestinian gunmen killed three Israelis and wounded four others Sunday in drive-by shootings in the West Bank that officials on both sides said would probably hamper efforts to begin peace negotiations.
Only days before Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas was scheduled to meet President Bush in Washington, the armed wing of his Fatah movement asserted responsibility for the shootings…
The Post offers quotes from Israeli spokesmen, to the effect that Abbas is losing control of the Palestinian factions, and should move quickly to disarm them. The Boston Globe quotes Ghassan Khatib, a member of Abbas’ cabinet:
“In Palestine, Fatah people are divided and though Abu Mazen (Mahmoud Abbas) is relatively popular, he needs to be more decisive with his own faction,” he said in an interview.
Khatib said Abbas’s critics intended to weaken him before his meeting with Bush. “People in Washington should look at this incident as an attack physically on Israelis but politically on Abu Mazen…”
Only several paragraphs down in the Post article do we find out:
The late afternoon shootings came soon after an Israeli police patrol near the northern West Bank city of Jenin killed a military commander of Islamic Jihad, a smaller faction that like Hamas is at war with Israel.
Violence begets violence.
The Post reports that the shooting took place at “a bus stop popular with Israeli settlers hitchhiking south from Jerusalem”. The victims lived in Gush Etzion, a large settlement bloc outside Jerusalem. Settling this area is, by all accounts, a part of Israel’s strategy for annexing territory contiguous with Jerusalem.
The settlers are accustomed to traveling freely around the West Bank, on Jewish-only highways, guarded by watchtowers and gunposts. It’s easy to forget the Palestinians are there. Until they shoot at you.
From the Christian Science Monitor:
Although senior officials in the Palestinian Authority were quick to condemn the shooting, many Palestinians note that it did not take place in a vacuum.
Just last week, four Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids in the West Bank and Gaza, two of them children, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza…
“The Israelis want a cease-fire from the Palestinians, but also to reserve their unilateral right to keep going out on raids and continuing to kill,” says Ziad Abu Amar, a Palestinian legislator from Gaza. “If the Israelis continue to arrest and kill members of (militant groups), it will be embarrassing for others to just sit by and watch.”
Dr. Abu Amar, an author and expert on Hamas on other Palestinian militants, describes the situation as most Palestinians see it.
As long as Israel continues military activities in the West Bank, expands settlements, and keeps building the security barrier, he says, Palestinians will look at the horizon and see more intifada than peace process.
“Did the Israelis expect that once they leave Gaza they will get a license from the Palestinians to swallow up the West Bank? It’s fine to expect that the struggle over the West Bank will continue,” Amar says. “Palestinians will try to resist by using violence.”
What does it mean, that I cannot track down the names of the Palestinian children who were killed last week? It was barely covered.
We prefer to see the violence as one-sided, irrational - as stemming from an implacable Palestinian enmity to Israel, to peace.
We don’t want to see it as related to our own sin, coveting our neighbor’s land: the thing that started the settlement project in the first place.
YNet, reporting on the funeral:
In their eulogies, the family members mentioned their grandfather Eliezer, who immigrated to Israel on his own after losing his wife and son in the Holocaust.
“Matat and Kineret, ask Grandpa Eli to go to Abraham and tell him, ‘You sacrificed your son once, why do I have to sacrifice three times?’” they said.
On her blog, Umkahlil offers a translation from the Arabic of an interview with the leader of the Falcon Brigades, the division of Al Aqsa that claimed responsiblity for the attack:
“Abu Jihad,” leader of the Falcon Martyr Brigades’ southern contingent, told Ma’an, “We are preparing for suicide bombings in Gush Etzion, and God protects our brigade members who caused settlers and soldiers to be frightened after an attack by armed Palestinians. A suicide bomber will achieve more in another coming attack.”
Will the sword never perish from the earth?
Perhaps, in the real Jerusalem, the one we all share at the end of time. Not in this one, which we are trying so hard to keep for ourselves; which others are trying so hard to take from us.
When I was traveling in the West Bank, I kept hearing about kids and adults with signs of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Just about everyone there has terrible stories to tell. Families rounded up and forced to stand at gunpoint, kids cowering under the beds, humiliation or violence at checkpoints, beatings by the IDF. Many, especially the children, bear the psychological marks: depression, irrational fears, bad dreams, bedwetting. It’s the same, I think, for the families of Sderot, the small Israeli town just across the border from Gaza that is the usual target of Palestinian missiles…
From YNet, last week:
The dozens of Qassam rockets that landed in the southern city of Sderot Saturday have confined the residents to their homes, awaiting the Red Dawn alert system to warn them of another approaching rocket and send them running to the nearest shelter.
Five-year-old Liron Stikilov embraces her father Alexander as they stare at the Qassam shrapnel that smashed the bedroom window and tore the blinds.
“I was sleeping in bed with my mom, and then there was a sudden ‘boom’ and the glass shattered,” she says.
“I am very afraid of the Qassam. It has such a loud ‘boom.’ We’re moving to another home, right?”
Liron’s mother, Svetlana, 36, says, “She says (Liron) constantly asks that the family leave Sderot.”
Maybe the worst thing about this particular attack was the sheer stupidity of it. According to Yasser Abu Moailek’s Letter from Gaza, as well as multiple other sources, Hamas was parading a truck full of Qassam missiles through the crowded Jabaliya refugee camp. One of the missiles went off, killing twenty-one Palestinians, including three children. Trying to cover up its own responsibility, Hamas blamed the incident on Israel and fired the missiles at Sderot in the hope that this act of “retaliation” would make the denial more plausible.
No one was fooled:
Palestinian officials said the explosion was set off by the mishandling of explosives. The Interior Ministry issued a statement calling on Hamas “to shoulder its responsibility for these … explosions instead of making accusations against others.” (AP)
Israel’s reaction was as indiscriminate as Hamas’ provocation. The Air Force bombed Gaza City for four days, inaugurating as well a new technique for terrorizing the enemy. YNet, in an article posted during the operation, reported:
Since the beginning of the week, every two hours almost, during daylight, the airplanes appear. Each time, an F-16 flies through the Gaza sky, leaving behind it a sonic boom, destruction, and anxiety.
Every night, in order to disturb the residents’ sleep, the airplanes appear twice. The sonic booms have turned into the nightmare of Strip residents. They are waiting for them, know they are coming, and are having difficulties adjusting.
For the Air Force, those sonic booms are a true operation. The Strip is short after all, it takes seconds to fly over it, and the boom must appear in the right place. So they calculated the jets’ entry points with millisecond precision. They also checked different altitudes. Every time the planes fly a little lower, to enhance the effect.
In order to deepen the anxiety, every night there are power outages at different neighborhoods in the Strip. Israeli officials have denied any connection to them.
Israel killed fewer people in this bombardment than Hamas did with its mishandled explosives. That does not make it a humane or acceptable form of warfare, however. Post-traumatic stress aside, sonic booms have been shown to damage the auditory nerve. Children are particularly susceptible to hearing loss and consequent impaired language acquisition and developmental delay. Thus, hundreds of perfectly innocent kids may suffer long-term cognitive impairment.
None of these kids - Israeli or Palestinian - deserve what these adults - supposedly leaders - are doing to them.
Meanwhile, in case you didn’t see, there was another episode of Jewish terrorism - to which Israel’s leadership is now actually referring as “Jewish terrorism”. Asher Weisgan, another West Bank settler, a bus driver who drove Palestinian laborers to their jobs in the settlements, opened fire on his own passengers and killed four of them. “I’m not sorry for what I did,” he said. “I hope someone also kills Sharon…“
Sharon was quick to condemn the attack as were numerous members of the Knesset, including the Interior Minister.
Labor Party Whip MK Ephraim Sneh called for security forces to place a curfew on Israeli settlements in the Shiloh area in response to the terror attack.
“The Jewish terror attack in Shilo is a sign of things to come in the next few weeks,” Sneh said. “The Israel Defense Forces must place a curfew on the communities” where the Jewish terrorists came from.
Yahad-Meretz MK Avshalom Vilan echoed Sneh’s sentiments, calling on Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz to order the army to enter extremist enclaves among West Bank settlements, impose a curfew, and carry out preventative arrests.
Interior Minister Ophir Pines-Paz said “Whoever was afraid of a pullout under Palestinian fire received today another instance of murderous Jewish terrorism for the second time in less than two weeks.”
“The increase in incidents of Jewish terrorism requires the security forces to reconsider the nature of their approach towards Jewish extremists and their nesting places,” Pines-Paz said.
“Jewish terrorism is running rampant in the country,” said Hadash-Ta’al MK Ahmed Tibi. “Massacre is followed by massacre. Anti-Arab incitement is flooding the state.”
You will notice that, where the Natan-Zeda shooting was painted by many as an isolated act by a crazy person, there is now widespread talk of Jewish extemists as a group, residing in West Bank settlements no less.
The threat is real but the talk is also political. I have no doubt that Sharon would be quite content if Natan-Zeda and Weisgan emerged as the public face of Yesha, whose supporters will form Netanyahu’s base when he mounts his challenge for prime minister.
I am sure most readers have heard about the bus shooting in Gaza yesterday. Four deaths… relatively few, as incidents in this conflict go. But the fact that it was “Jewish terrorism” is drawing a lot of attention. It breaks the usual boundaries that govern our understanding of the conflict. In addition to mourning the deaths - as we should all of them, Jewish and Arab, over all these decades - we might reflect a bit on the nature of violence and on our own part in perpetuating it. To dismiss Natan-Zada as “other” is just too easy…
As Andrew wrote in his last post, a lot of very important things have been happening while the world focuses on Disengagement. Andrew has addressed the Old City already, which gives me a chance to talk below about the powerful moment of the Vatican standing up to Israel. But first I first wanted to make sure everyone knows: Moshe Dayan’s eye patch is for sale on eBay…
Now, I know I just did this with my recent post on Tiki Barber and Shimon Peres, but maybe now more than ever, we all need to spend a little time on the more mundane and slightly humorous matters affecting Israel and Palestine. Like history for sale.
So, here I go. As I said above, it has indeed been reported in Haaretz:
“Several items of great Israeli historical interest have been trading on the online auction site eBay. The original eye patch worn by former defense minister and chief of staff Moshe Dayan has been offered for the sum of $75,000…”
You can go to the article read to about who is selling it (and that one of Ben Gurion’s chanukiyot — made from bullet casings — is also out there for the taking), but my questions go in other directions. And perhaps an eye patch wearer reading this can help (and before I proceed, let me say that I don’t mean to be offensive in any way here – losing an eye is definitely no joke). Did Moshe Dayan really only have one eye patch? If not, what exactly makes this “original”? Dayan lost his eye in the early 1940s and died in 1981 — so down the road, will we find out that someone else is selling the one he wore during the Six Day War? Or Yom Kippur? How much will those others go for, and will the emergence of more eye patches lessen the value of the “original?”
Will we see a hapless soul come to “Antiques Roadshow” someday saying that their grandfather fought with Dayan, who later gave the eye patch to the grandfather as a token of appreciation, only to be told it’s a fake? Or that, while clearly an eye patch of the era and region, it’s worth only a few shekels now because Dayan eye patches are easily had on eBay?
Does one treat an eye patch like an athlete treats the ball (or base or net) from a memorable achievement or others do their clothing from a momentous day – saving it for the mantle shelf or the attic? Has it been preserved in any way since he died? For that matter, how do you clean it when you’re wearing it each day?
And last, who’s bidding on this? Someone with an eye patch collection? Or someone with an interest in the symbols of famous people? Will the same person go after Arafat’s keffiyeh when it comes, as it surely must, up for auction? How about that for a traveling exhibition — Dayan and Arafat: Personal Effects for Peace.
But unlike Moshe Dayan’s eye patch, at least one thing was not to be had this week by sale or any other means of persuasion: the Vatican’s stand on terrorism and Israel.
Now, I will keep this short and direct (for once), as I know that discussions about the Vatican/Catholicism and Israel/Judaism are complicated and painful. Certainly the reaction of some to this story cannot be divorced from that history, nor the fact that the current Pope was a member of the Hitler Youth.
But leave all of that aside for a moment and consider what happened. As reported by Haaretz in two articles (here and here) the Pope spoke last week and deplored “death, destruction and suffering” in Egypt, Turkey, Iraq and Britain. No mention of Israel despite the fact that just 2 weeks prior a suicide bomber struck in Netanya, killing five and wounding 90.
So the Israeli Foreign Ministry summoned the Vatican Ambassador to Israel to ask about the oversight. The Vatican did not respond as so many do these days, with a tearful apology, but instead defended itself. And also questioned Israel’s right to demand inclusion.
First the Vatican said that they consistently decry Palestinian terror, and need not do so in every speech anywhere about terrorism. But second the Vatican said it could not include Israel in that list when Israel’s reactions to terror strikes often violate international law. So how could they condemn the first but not the second? Put another way, would Israel really want Palestine included in the list as well?
Who knows whether this incident will lead anywhere beyond a diplomatic squabble. But what we do know is that the Vatican has taken a critical stand for the future of Israel and Palestine. If nothing else, if Catholics, particularly in the United States, look to this stand by the Vatican and ask themselves the simple question of why the Vatican would do this, perhaps the question about what exactly Israel is doing in the Palestinian Territories will be raised as well. A question long overdue for most.
But this should hopefully raise the same question for the Jewish people — why would the Vatican do this? Again, if not dismissed with charges of anti-Semitism, perhaps it will lead some to ask questions they have avoided so far.
But maybe the Vatican’s stand will lead to an even deeper question. Because now we see the effects of what the Vatican is speaking out against — the violation of international law in response to terror — in our own midst. When columnists in the Washington Post and New York Times are arguing for racial profiling to stop terrorism and defending the killing of an innocent Brazilian in London resulting from “shoot to kill” tactics learned in Israel, with much of their twisted reasoning based on the Israeli experience, we have only this question left to ask: What sort of light Israel has really become unto the nations?
