by Dan Raviv
One of the main goals was to have trusted Israelis on the inside, in case a war were to break out and Israeli Arabs were to join the enemy.
Shmuel “Sami” Moriah, a senior Shin Bet officer who came to Israel from Iraq and had plenty of experience smuggling Jews out of his native country, led the unit. He recruited 10 other Iraqi-born men for this highly demanding mission.
With detailed cover stories about returning to Palestine after fleeing abroad in the 1948 war, they were sent into Arab villages and cities. Their genuine parents, siblings, and friends in Israel were kept in the dark about their whereabouts and activities.
These Shin Bet agents became so integrated in community life that it was fully expected by neighbors and village elders that they would get married—and most of them did.
Moriah said that he left the decision to each man, but “it seemed suspicious that young vigorous men would stay alone, without a spouse. When we sent them on the mission we didn’t order them to marry, but it was clear to both sides that there is such an expectation, and that it would help the job they were doing.”
The elders introduced them to eligible young Arab women. They had the brief courtship typical in conservative Arab societies. And most of the 10 men married, not ever telling their wives that they were Jewish Israelis.
As time passed, the intelligence from this daring deception proved to be almost worthless. Shin Bet wanted to call off the mission. But now Shin Bet had a tough problem.
“The double life they were living cost them a lot, emotionally,” said Manor, who created this project but then backed away after seven years. “I saw that the price is not worth it and decided to put an end to it.”
The unit was disbanded by 1959, but the ramifications haunted Shin Bet for years. The Muslim wives were informed that their husbands were actually Jewish—and, perhaps even worse, government agents—and then the women were given a choice of being sent to an Arab country, to avoid any local retaliation, or being resettled with their husbands in Jewish communities in Israel.
Almost all chose to stay with their husbands, even in the very changed circumstances. Some of the wives needed and got psychological counseling.
“Problems started surfacing,” the project commander Moriah recalled a few decades later with a grimace. “We tried to rehabilitate the people involved, but we weren’t really successful. The agents’ kids experienced serious trauma. They tried to recover, to forget their past, where they come from, but they couldn’t. A few of the kids succeeded in life, but most of them were left behind. They still suffer from problems.”
In 1965 the Israeli government decided to end the military administration of majority-Arab areas, but for the sake of security Shin Bet was asked to step up its observation of those cities and villages.
Two years later, after Israel’s grand victory at war brought more than a million additional Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza under Israeli rule, Shin Bet was tasked with spotting and quashing dangers in the newly occupied territories.
The intelligence community formed a task force—made up of Shin Bet and Aman men, plus the Mossad’s David Kimche—to explore the politics of the local inhabitants.
“The Palestinians were in a state of shock,” Kimche reminisced. “We thought Israel should exploit the situation by being generous and offering the Palestinians a noble solution that they could live with.” Kimche, with long experience as a clandestine diplomat and honestly trying to pursue diplomatic solutions, proposed granting a form of autonomy to the Palestinians—with a view toward creating a separate state for them. The intelligence men on the task force endorsed that far-sighted vision.
Most Israelis, however, were immersed in a euphoric mood—a shock of victory coupled with a huge sense of relief—that did not foster experimental or generous gestures. Prime Minister Levi Eshkol and his cabinet ignored the task force’s advice.
Israel’s leadership seemed focused only on the here and now, while the immense changes in the Middle East called for complex analysis. A unique opportunity to resolve the heart-rending dispute between Jews and Arabs in Palestine was neglected. Almost half a century later, the Israel Defense Forces—a people’s army, thanks to the almost universal military service by Jews—was still stuck as an occupying force in the West Bank. The dilemmas, clashes, roadblocks, settlements, and patrols all threatened the fragile fabric of Israel as a Jewish and democratic country.
Within two months of the transformative Six-Day War, Kimche himself was moving on. The Mossad sent him to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan in northeast Africa, in August 1967. Kimche’s cover, on a brief visit to that Arab nation, exploited his impeccable English accent and manners. He posed as a British journalist at an important Arab summit. The leaders of eight nations convened to discuss the humiliating defeat of Egypt, Syria, and Jordan by the Israelis.
Their public declaration was simple, summarized and immortalized as “The Three No’s.” The summit’s final document declared that there would be no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with Israel, and no peace with Israel.
This was one of the bases for Foreign Minister Abba Eban’s observation that Arab leaders “never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity” for peace. That seemed true enough at the time of Khartoum, but the same accusation could be directed at Israel, the United States, the United Nations, and a host of other parties with interests but few insights in the Middle East.
The Mossad’s Kimche got to see all this in person, and he reported the details—including observations of Arab leaders and delegates—to headquarters. Intelligence analysts had plenty to analyze, but they could not change the reality. Israel had scored a major military victory in June 1967, and perhaps even had saved itself from total disaster, but there was not a single step forward toward peace.
In Kimche’s words, “The events of the two months after the war were dramatic and marked by a historic opportunity missed by both sides—but especially by us, the victorious Israelis.”
The victors naturally felt that they were both brilliant and lucky, but immediate challenges raised doubts as to whether the brilliance and the luck would hold out. It could fairly be said that most Israelis enjoyed—even reveled in—the fact that Jerusalem was reunited, and Jews could again pray at the iconic Western Wall of King Solomon’s holy Temple. Many also derived deep satisfaction from returning to locales in the West Bank that were an authentic part of Biblical history. Yet hardly anyone with a scintilla of sensitivity enjoyed being an occupier: unable to avoid the friction and inequalities between Jews with power and Arabs who had just lost their dignity.
On the Arab side, Arafat’s PLO could easily blame the six-day humiliation on the political leaders of governments that never truly cared about the Palestinians. The PLO was hatching its own ambitious plans, calling on Palestinians to rise up against the Israeli-Zionist occupation. This nationalist rhetoric was reminiscent of the Vietcong, then successfully confronting the powerful American armed forces in Southeast Asia, and of the FLN, which had driven France out of Algeria.
The essence of the strategy was to make the occupied territories ungovernable for the Israelis. The PLO hoped to control daily life in the 500 towns and villages of the West Bank and Gaza, and left-wing theorists among the guerrillas believed a Palestinian revolutionary government would be inevitable.
The PLO borrowed not only foreign concepts, but also operational tactics. Deriving additional inspiration from China’s Mao Zedong and Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Palestinians also had active assistance from Colonel Ahmed Suedani, the head of Syrian military intelligence who was credited with catching Eli Cohen in Damascus. Suedani was known as an enthusiastic supporter of “popular struggle” throughout the Middle East—everywhere, that is, except in Syria.
Palestinian militant cells mounted hit-and-run operations against Israeli army vehicles and patrols. They managed to execute ambushes on the narrow streets of West Bank towns.
In Israel itself, Palestinians detonated bombs in mark
ets, movie theaters, bus stations, and restaurants. One of the most publicized events took place in October 1967 inside the Zion Cinema in the heart of the overwhelmingly Jewish western part of Jerusalem. During a screening of Howard Hawks’s El Dorado, two Arab sisters placed a bag of explosives, wired to a clock, on the floor near their seats and hastily left. The bomb failed to go off and the attackers were arrested, but the thought of a large blast in a crowded, enclosed hall was alarming to Israelis.
The PLO soon realized the importance of the news media. “If you strike, it means you exist,” became the Palestinian leadership’s tactical philosophy.
The notion was broadened when Palestinians found that they did not actually have to act. They merely had to claim. Thus, for many years, accidents and natural disasters were attributed to “our brave Palestinian fighters.”
However baseless the propaganda, it was effective. One of the first such ploys followed an accident that befell Defense Minister Moshe Dayan. He was an amateur archeologist who showed no regard for regulations governing where and where not to dig. In 1968, during an excavation, he was trapped by a cave-in and suffered injuries to his back and ribs. The PLO claimed it had sent a commando unit to assassinate Dayan, and that was why he was nearly buried.
Nonsense of that kind occasionally made the claimants, at least, feel a bit better.
The Israeli government started to cope with issues that would be more fateful than anyone realized at the time. What was the legal status of the territories captured in the 1967 war? Were they “liberated” portions of the ancient Land of Israel, thus rightfully under Jewish control eternally? Or “occupied” acreage that belonged to the Arab residents?
In the absence of a clear and considered decision by Israeli politicians, the intelligence and security agencies were forced to enact an administrative policy. They developed a “carrot and stick” approach, designed to preserve the status quo while maintaining order as the highest priority. In an attempt to drive a wedge between the majority of the Palestinians and a dangerous minority, the Israeli chiefs decided that almost all inhabitants would be permitted to conduct their lives normally. That was the carrot.
The stick was a policy of punishing, strongly and surely, anyone participating in subversion or outright violence. Palestinians who aided guerrilla groups were clamped into prison, and their houses were flattened—usually by dynamite, in almost flamboyant explosions meant to serve as an example to others.
Losing one’s home was serious punishment, but for many Arabs the most severe penalty would be separation from one’s land, family farm, or vineyard. Thus, Shin Bet turned to expulsion as a major stick. Palestinians believed to have ties with PLO terrorists were escorted across the bridges into Jordan and banned from returning. More than anyone else, this policy was identified with Dayan.
Transforming the carrot-and-stick theory into practice was no simple task. Shin Bet officers were not prepared for it. The new territories in Israel’s hands were terra incognita to them: an unknown land where the agency had no men in the field and did not know the population. Shin Bet had to start from scratch.
As a first step, Harmelin’s operatives, with the help of Aharon Yariv’s military intelligence staff, used psychological warfare by spreading rumors of how tough the Israeli hard line would be. These were not so much accurate as they were chilling.
After it was clear that Israel’s determination to remain in the territories was known to their inhabitants, Shin Bet turned to the second and major stage: preventing any attempted Palestinian uprising and combating terrorism.
In no time flat, Shin Bet licked the immediate problem. Palestinians were unable to organize a broad uprising, because the Israelis were quickly able to install networks of informers and secret agents all over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Arabs in the territories were recruited, either by monetary payments or by various forms of intimidation. The agents often gave Shin Bet advance information of attacks planned by guerrillas.
Israeli officers, acting on tip-offs, were able to swoop down on subversive meetings and lay ambushes to capture Palestinian squads on their way to attacks. The system that permitted these successes became known as “preventive intelligence,” which is the greatest desire of every internal security service that has to deal with violence and terrorism. The ultimate aim is to avoid having to search for perpetrators after an act of violence. Instead, they should be prevented from carrying it out in the first place.
By December 1967, Shin Bet had chalked up an amazing record of triumph: Most of the PLO cells collapsed, and their headquarters within the West Bank were forced to retreat to Jordan. Two hundred Palestinian guerrillas were killed in battles with army and Shin Bet units, and more than a thousand were arrested.
The failure of the attempted Palestinian uprising in 1967 was not, however, due solely to the efficiency of the Israeli secret services. Credit should be shared with the Palestinian militants for being so poor at developing professional skills.
They did not adhere to the practice of compartmental-ization that is so basic in spycraft and underground movements. Instead, they organized in relatively large groups, knew one another by genuine names, and relied on local Arabs not to turn them in to the authorities. Arafat himself and his senior commanders, completely disregarding the rules of a good conspiracy, knew most of the members of the cells. Their communications system was primitive, and their codes were simple. No escape routes were planned. Their “safe houses” were not really safe. Nor were the members of guerrilla squads prepared to withstand interrogation when captured. As soon as they were picked up by Shin Bet, they would tell everything they knew.
Their codes were broken, and their weapons and explosives were confiscated. Like dominoes, the cells fell one after another. Failing to live up to Mao’s dictum that a guerrilla fighter must have the support of the population and feel “like a fish in the water,” the Palestinian fighters could not “swim” unnoticed among their neighbors, who pursued favors from the Israelis by sweeping guerrillas to the Shin Bet shore.
Motivated by Israeli carrots and sticks, the local populace shunned any armed uprising and preferred peace, quiet, and prosperity.
Full credit was given to Shin Bet. The importance of Harmelin’s agency within the intelligence community was growing, and its case officers became known as the “kings of the territories.” Almost as in a feudal regime, each Israeli operative was given his own region, generally a village or a group of villages. He had to be Israel’s eyes and ears, knowing everything that happened in his fiefdom. The officer would typically know most of the villagers by name, while they knew him only by an alias—usually an invented Arabic name, such as Abu Musa, “Father of Moses.”
If a Palestinian wanted a building permit, the military government in the occupied territories would first check with the local Shin Bet case officer. An Arab merchant who wished to export his citrus crop from Gaza or his olive oil from the West Bank was able to obtain the necessary licenses only with the assent of Shin Bet.
Palestinians felt compelled to make deals, morning, noon, and night. They would supply information, and in return Israel delivered security and fringe benefits such as jobs and travel permits.
Shin Bet’s success came at a price, however. As the years and decades went by, Israeli society was increasingly judged in the outside world by its security policies. While potential rebellions were crushed, Israel’s goodwill around the world was being squandered. Instead of continuing to be an admired favorite of international public opinion—as it was in most of the Western world’s press in June 1967—the Jewish state became the Ugly Israel.
All the good the country had done was swept aside by negative headlines. The underdog of the crisis that led up to the Six-Day War was now seen as a brutal occupier of another people’s land.
Shin Bet became the security service of an occupying power, self-confident and even arrogant. Having to cover a lot more ground, perfectionism and meticulous work gave way to hasty and
often inequitable improvisation.
With Shin Bet’s growing intelligence networks, there was an urgent need to expand its manpower. A new and modern complex of buildings was built in a northern suburb of Tel Aviv to house Shin Bet headquarters, replacing the old one in Jaffa near the flea market. The recruiting criteria were made less demanding, playing down old-fashioned high standards.
Everything was done in a hurry, and the social profile of Shin Bet’s personnel changed. Arabic speakers were essential, so new staff members hired were from the Oriental, Sephardic sector of the Jewish populace. As in many Israeli institutions, that was a change from the initial domination of the European, Ashkenazic Jews filling positions of leadership.
The changed nature of the work also dictated new methods. At a time when thousands of Arabs were being detained for questioning, when booby-trapped cars were exploding, and when hotels and airliners were terrorist targets, it was felt essential to extract information as quickly as possible. The time factor became the most important element of Israel’s preventive intelligence. Fast action sometimes seemed to require brutality, without pausing for a second thought.
At first, Shin Bet found it difficult to adjust to this new reality. Harmelin once saw one of his young interrogators slap the face of a Palestinian suspect, and the agency chief fired his employee on the spot. Harmelin did not agree that physical violence was necessary as a shortcut to information.
Shin Bet operatives learned the hard way what the occupation meant. Theirs was dirty work in the service of a perhaps noble cause. Harmelin and his deputy, Avraham Ahituv—who would be the next head of the agency in 1974—did manage to suppress terrorism, but they had to do it by introducing what their men called “the System.”
The security methods were indeed systematic in creating a double standard of justice. One, democratic by nature, applied to Israeli citizens; an entirely different one, operating in the gray area between the permissible and the forbidden, was used against Palestinian troublemakers and suspects in the territories.