Here is what is now known: by Monday night, every major Israeli player knew about the Palestinian ceasefire declaration. Sharon was getting regular updates on its progress from European diplomats working alongside the Jordanian and Saudi officials in a small room in Jenin. And ninety minutes after word came that the document had been finished, that Fatah officials had settled on a workable version ready for international release at daybreak – declaring a unilateral cessation of suicide attacks – Israel’s Prime Minister approved the targeted bombing.20
Why. Not a question, a statement. An exhalation.
After the dust had cleared, after all fifteen bodies had finally been recovered from the rubble in Gaza, a July 25 New York Times article would confirm what most assumed: Israel didn’t believe in the ceasefire effort, and wasn’t bothered by having undermined it. The article revealed the attitudes and postures that allowed the bombing to take place, a bombing that came minutes after perhaps – this being the operative word – the most important step Palestinian leaders had collectively taken toward ending terror as a strategic option in years.
Israel felt differently:
Israeli officials acknowledged that they had known of a possible Palestinian ceasefire proposal before the bomb was dropped, but they dismissed it as a futile attempt by Palestinians without influence over terrorist groups.
Raanan Gissin, a spokesman for Ariel Sharon, Israel’s prime minister, acknowledged that there had been talk of a ceasefire, but he said it was being exaggerated … that several ceasefires had already been negotiated and ignored during the 22-month [intifada]. “They had so many opportunities to really issue a ceasefire,” Mr. Gissin said. “Not in one case did we learn about orders issued down to the [Palestinian] field commanders to say, ‘You’ve got to stop.’”
A senior Israeli military official said, “There was no chance it was going to happen. It was only thoughts or dreams or desires of some people who have no influence on terrorist activities.”21
Thoughts or dreams or desires. They’re all that remain. Dreams. Desires. The thoughts of what might have been prevented.
Nine days later, on July 31, a Hamas terror cell blew up the cafeteria at Hebrew University. It was a Hamas cell taking orders from a Hamas organization that, according to media reports, had finally hinted, during ceasefire negotiations with Fatah, a willingness to shift away from terror attacks and their all-or-nothing stance: the destruction of the State of Israel by any means. Not a change in ideology. That never changed. But strategically, Hamas seemed on the unprecedented verge of scaling back its violent strategy – even if temporarily. It was aware of the punishment Palestinians were enduring because of its suicide bombings,22 aware that the Israel Defense Force’s brutal and incessant presence in West Bank towns, the choking checkpoints and curfews, were partly a response to men strapping their bodies with explosives and walking into fruit markets, restaurants, shoe stores. Hamas, it appeared, was beginning to shoot for less lofty goals, if the destruction of a democratic state can be viewed as lofty. It wanted the Israeli military out of the West Bank, wanted Israelis out of the West Bank, wanted a chance to achieve lasting religious and social improvements within Palestinian society. Most importantly, though, it wanted a chance to win big at the polls when the next election came. The decision was almost purely political, the organization beginning to realize that terror, and the military wrath it brought upon Palestinians, was now doing more political harm than good, was making it more difficult to win popular support among secular and moderate Palestinians. So a partial ceasefire, a movement away from killing civilians while still maintaining its militaristic voice, was showing itself to be a savvy, practical move.
But that was before late Monday night, July 22. The night Sheikh Salah Shahada was killed by a one-ton bomb. After that, revenge was reclaimed.
A revenge which tore open my wife’s scorched body and killed our two friends.
Act V – Sheikh Salah Shahada: Sheikh Salah Shahada deserved to die, and Israel wanted him dead. Shahada had been placed atop Israel’s “most wanted” list soon after the Intifada began in 2000.23
To understand why he was target number one for the Israeli military, why Sharon could have cared less about some theoretical ceasefire when Israeli intelligence officials barged into the Prime Minister’s office on the night of July 22, claiming they had pinpointed Shahada’s whereabouts, it’s necessary to understand Shahada the terrorist.
Having founded Hamas’s military wing, he was terror. And he was still serving as the leader of Hamas when the one-ton bomb fell upon him from the night sky. In the early days of Hamas’s violent ascension, Shahada wrote the book on suicide bombings, and had been teaching its message to militant ideologues for over ten years,24 a span during which he planned hundreds of attacks.25 He murdered and created murderers. He was good at his job.
After escaping one in a series of failed Israeli assassination attempts in early July of 2002 – just weeks before the one that would finally get him – Shahada had brazenly revealed on an Islamic website the rudimentary tactics Hamas used to ensure the success of its terror operations. They were tactics he invented and saved for posterity. Among them: “We take advantage of any security breakthrough [reported by network intelligence], define the target, and take some camera shots to decide whether the operation will be conducted or not.”26
A camera shot of Shahada shows an image the Western world has come to associate with Islamic extremist leaders: the long, black beard; the white layers of flowing cloth covering wrinkled, olive skin wrapped around eyes that appear singularly focused. The association in this case was accurate: he had become not only one of the most influential Islamic leaders fighting Israel’s existence, but one of the most extreme as well. In the years before his death, he had grown close to Hamas’s ailing spiritual leader, Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. So close, in fact, that many within the movement were looking toward Shahada as Yassin’s successor, as next in line.27 As divine.
Shahada’s death sent supporters into hysterics – hundreds of thousands poured into the streets of Gaza for his funeral (and those of the other victims).28 Internally, Hamas operatives were set aflame, as revealed by the following statement released after Shahada’s death:
Retaliation is coming and everything is considered a target. [There] won’t be only just one [attack] … After this crime, even Israelis in their homes will be the target of our operations.29
But it wasn’t just his death that so enraged the masses; it was also the attack’s unintended brutality: 145 injured and fifteen dead, including nine children. And the scenes. The scenes which played over and over on Palestinian television. Scenes identical to this one, recounted by a visiting Dubliner, captured hours after the bomb fell:
I ran here and just saw pieces of flesh everywhere, one man running away holding a lump of flesh on a metal tray and another pulling out a baby boy with half his face blown away, obviously dead.
Everyone was screaming, shouting, crying and shouting, “Revenge to the Israel child-killers.” I have never seen anything like it. I just kept thinking: “If the British Army wanted to take out Gerry Adams (President of Sinn Féin, Northern Ireland’s largest nationalist party), would they use a bomb that size in a residential area like this?”30
After the attack and the images that relentlessly played on Palestinian television, there would be no chance for a ceasefire. Everyone knew this, and the international community took out its frustrations on Israel with harsh statements of condemnation, as per usual. But this time, it wasn’t the typical scenario: the Western world (Europe) bullying Israel with one-sided expectations of restraint, leaving the United States to step in and defend its democratic baby brother. This time was different, for the White House, remarkably, joined a deafening chorus of disapproval for Israel’s actions, something the Bush administration – itself still reeling from the terror of September 11, 2001 – very rarely did. White House Spokesman Ari Fleischer summed up the President’s view thus:
This statement from the White House – severe by its own standards – merely underscored the powerful reverberations that rippled out from Sharon’s decision to attack, with some critics cynically going so far as to accuse Sharon of intentionally sabotaging the historic ceasefire talks.32 Diplomats intimately involved in the negotiations, having witnessed a senior Fatah official meet with Hamas leaders to hammer out a workable draft just two hours before the F-16 strike, certainly felt this was the case, as evidenced by an assessment from an international mediator, who wished to remain anonymous:
Those directly involved in drafting the [cease-fire] statement believe that this was a purposeful initiative on the part of the Israeli leadership to undermine what the Palestinians believed was the chance to stop the suicide bombs. This was a very ham-fisted operation on the part of the Israelis. They were apparently desperate to short-circuit whatever they wanted to short-circuit and obviously in the short term the chance of any such declaration is now gone.33
Even though Sharon remained defiant in the face of such criticism, calling Israel’s targeted assassination “one of the biggest successes,”34 there were immediate calls from within Israel’s government to investigate what happened, to find out how the military’s intelligence – which claimed the attack would have minimal collateral damage – could have been so woefully misguided. Nobody was happy. It had been a disaster. A horrible mistake.
All this history, or the appearance of history, compressed, the con temporary Middle East squeezed into a four-day span, a snapshot, a week-in-the-life-of.
The above events, stitched together using journalistic reports, reports that almost unilaterally point the implicit finger of blame upon Israel, make up only part of the story. For there are partial-truths, details left out, details found buried just beneath the surface. It’s a matter of narrative construction – a matter of history cut and pasted by those in the business of disseminating information. Which story to tell?
The following detail comes not from a journalist’s pen, but from counter-terrorism experts at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Israel (ICT), which proclaims itself as “the leading academic institute for counter-terrorism in the world.”35 See, what wasn’t reported in any newspaper after the Hebrew University bombing was the fact that after September 11, 2001, the U.S. State Department had updated its list of terrorist organizations, placing Hamas on it. It was a move that reverberated loudly in Gaza. Hamas’s literature became obsessed with the influence and presence of the United States in Israel, calling it, among other things, “the patron and participant in the Zionist project in the region.” It was an early sign that Hamas operatives were beginning to consider the United States as another enemy at home, and its citizens as fair and desirable targets.36 And in the winter of 2001, Hamas’s intentions were made clear in a statement intended for world consumption: “Americans are the enemies of the Palestinian people” and will now be considered “a target for future attacks.”37
This detail was absent from newspaper accounts after the bombing of Hebrew University’s cafeteria, in which five Americans were among the nine killed. Also absent was mention that Hamas operatives had likely targeted the location because of the number of American students who frequented the area, had targeted it because Americans had explicitly become legitimate strategic targets of terror for Hamas. The organization had been planning to strike Americans for months, well before Shahada was killed. And the preparations for the Hebrew University bombing were made before ceasefire negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas reached their apex. It was meant to happen all along, though a ceasefire could theoretically have delayed or canceled the operation.
When Israeli officials were quoted after Shahada’s death, were asked to justify the bombing in the midst of a Palestinian ceasefire effort, no media outlet chose to substantiate their claims by going to counter-terrorism experts for a word. If they had, those Israeli officials who were made to appear as insensitive, as callous – calling the ceasefire between Hamas and the Palestinian Authority “futile” and “pointless” – would have been supported by much of the intelligence community. For ICT seemed to affirm, in a series of articles written between 1998 and 2002, Israel’s justifications for killing Shahada. It described Hamas as highly decentralized, as an impossibly chaotic organization incapable of controlling its terrorist wing, a wing composed of individual ideologues independently congregating under Hamas’s Islamic umbrella. It would have been highly unlikely for any ceasefire declarations to have actually found across-the-board adherence, much less recognition. Leadership on the ground simply didn’t exist in a traditional sense. Nobody had control over the actions of a fractured terrorist wing at a time when Hamas had no official political might.
Meaning: Israel may have been justified in assassinating Shahada; meaning: the journalists may have gotten their stories partially wrong; meaning: Israel as the bad guy worked better, sold more papers, made good copy. Blame the Jews. A common theme throughout history, no?
And absent from all media reports, after Shahada was killed, was the following excerpt contained in an article filed in late 2001 by Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior ICT researcher:
[Israel] should give priority first and foremost to the destruction of Hamas’ … operational and strategic leadership … through precise targeted operations, including the use of elite units in the heart of PA [Palestinian Authority] territory. This should significantly reduce the threat of suicide and other attacks in Israel’s heartland, and also prevent the transformation of Hamas as the leading political force in the territories.38
So Israel was following the best intelligence available at the time, however flawed such intelligence may have been.39
But questions remained. If Sharon’s government truly believed the ceasefire was futile, then why did Israel release funds to the Palestinian Authority? Why allow Peres to renew high-level talks when days before he had been banned from speaking with the Palestinians? These don’t seem like the actions of a government taking things lightly. They don’t square with the post-mortem justifications rattled off by Israeli officials after Shahada was killed. Things simply don’t add up. Never will.
And the fuzzy mathematical equation that led to Israel’s assassination of Shahada – and Hamas’s subsequent bombing of Hebrew University – reaches farther back into the shadowy recesses of state politics than most realize. It reaches back to calculations Israel made decades previously, which unintentionally assisted Hamas’s birth in the 1980s.40
In the 1960s and 1970s, the Muslim Brotherhood movement (from which Hamas would eventually emerge) migrated from Egypt and established itself in the Israeli-occupied territories. The movement’s overarching mission was to lead an Islamic revolution in Palestine – a social and religious awakening within a Palestinian society dominated by the PLO’s secular, nationalist stance. The Brother hood was not explicitly political in its structure or solely nationalist in its vision. Instead, it was intent on influencing Palestinian society, and thus the nation, by grabbing the hearts and minds of citizens rather than the state levers of power. It thus focused its efforts on Islamic education and social construction, building mosques and educational centers in conjunction with a focus on da‘wah – the communal development of broad-based social welfare services.41
The Brotherhood’s desire was ultimately the formation of an Islamic state, but its efforts were focused on “internal jihad” – a cultural and religious initiative within Palestinian society – rather than “external jihad” against Israel and the West. And this reformist approach adopted by the Brotherhood, this building of social and Islamic institutions from the ground up, was seen by Israel as desirab
le. It was seen as a potential way to weaken the PLO by mitigating its nationalist reach with a competing, cultural Islamic revolution. The Brotherhood’s war was internal. To Israel, it was innocuous. And so Israel gave “tacit consent”42 to its actions by ignoring its initiatives and, sometimes, even encouraging them43 by allowing the Brotherhood’s institutions, unencumbered by Israeli suppression, to thrive.
During this time, the Brotherhood had no violent arm, and was not engaged institutionally in terrorism or violence directed against Israel. The organization was viewed in practice, if not in principle, as pacifist.
But things would change.
In the mid-1980s, Islamic Jihad was formed by breakaway Brotherhood activists, who created an organization that embraced a political, violent struggle against Israel. The ideological foundations of this struggle were Islamic, thus melding nationalist aspirations with religious ideology. And after several, high-profile attacks against Israel, the organization enjoyed growing popularity on the street – a popularity that did not go unnoticed by the Brotherhood.44
Then in 1987 the Intifada erupted – an uprising that swept through Palestinian society in the form of nationalist demonstrations and nonviolent protests, giving the PLO a shot of adrenaline. The Brotherhood, which bristled at the PLO’s “claim for exclusive national authority,” saw Palestinians taking to the streets and knew it needed to make an institutional shift or risk losing its influence. The Brotherhood looked to the right and saw Islamic Jihad’s popularity. It looked to the left and saw massive crowds waving PLO banners and chanting nationalist slogans. And when it looked straight ahead, a hybrid path appeared. And Hamas was formed.
What Do You Buy the Children of the Terrorist who Tried to Kill Your Wife? Page 5