Rise and Kill First

by Ronen Bergman

  The day Ayyash was buried, Deif became the head of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. That night, he began recruiting suicide bombers. The next month, he began retaliating.

  Deif and his men carried out four terror attacks. On February 25, 1996, a suicide bomber blew himself up on a bus in Jerusalem, killing twenty-six people. That same day, another suicide terrorist killed a soldier and wounded thirty-six others at a hitchhiking station for soldiers outside Ashkelon. A week later, on the morning of March 3, another suicide attack took place on a bus in Jerusalem, killing nineteen and wounding eight. The next day, on March 4, a bomber detonated his device near the line for an ATM at Dizengoff Center, a busy shopping mall in the heart of Tel Aviv, killing thirteen and wounding more than a hundred.

  Shimon Peres, who had succeeded Rabin as prime minister, grasped the impact of these terrorist attacks on Israeli public opinion, its support for the peace process, and his own prospects in the upcoming elections, scheduled for May. He signed a Red Page against Mohammed Deif and ordered the Shin Bet to do everything it needed to get rid of him, but Deif managed to stay alive. The Palestinian Authority, which was supposed to be helping the Shin Bet fight terrorism as part of the peace negotiations, did nothing. Jibril Rajoub, one of the heads of the Palestinian security apparatus who was close to Arafat, claimed, “I did not have the power. I wanted to [fight Hamas terror], but I didn’t have the men, the instruments, the authority.” Yuval Diskin, Shin Bet liaison with the Palestinians, disagreed. “Jibril’s a liar,” he said. “He had huge powers, but he got orders from Arafat not to try too hard.”

  Before the four attacks, Peres had tried to get Arafat to arrest Deif and thirty-four other terror suspects. He traveled to Gaza for an urgent meeting with Arafat on January 24. With them was AMAN chief Yaalon, who told Arafat, “You must arrest these people right away, or everything will sink into chaos.”

  “Arrest Mohammed Deif immediately!” Peres demanded.

  Arafat looked at them with eyes wide open in perplexity. “Mohammed shu?” he asked in Arabic. Mohammed who?

  Eventually, though, Arafat realized that the suicide bombers made him look, in the eyes of his own people, as if he couldn’t control the Palestinian Authority and, in the eyes of the international community, like someone who was lending a hand, even if only by omission, to the murderous terror. He realized that the peace process would come to an end if Israelis continued to be blown up in buses and shopping malls. After the fourth attack, his security forces waged a vigorous campaign against Hamas, rounding up 120 of its leading members and grilling them using the harshest torture techniques. But by then it was too late.

  “Arafat was a very complicated person,” Peres said, “with a psychology that we weren’t familiar with. On the one hand, he was as sly as a snake. On the other hand, as naïve as a little child. He wanted to be everything at the same time, both a man of peace and a man of war. On the one hand, he had a phenomenal memory—he remembered all the names, all the birthdays, all the historical events. On the other hand, facts and the truth did not always interest him.

  “We sat together, and I ate from his hand—the one with the eczema, and that takes courage. I brought him information on the top Hamas terrorists in his territories. He knew very well that it was accurate, but he lied to my face without any problem. When he was persuaded, it was already too late. The terror ruined me, finished me off, removed me from power.”

  The wave of terror in February and March 1996 was a case study in how suicide attacks could alter the course of history. At the beginning of February, Peres was up twenty points in the polls over his opposition, the conservative hawk Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu. By the middle of March, Netanyahu had closed the gap significantly, and Peres led by only five percentage points. On May 29, Netanyahu won by 1 percent of the vote. This was all due to the terror attacks, which Peres simply couldn’t stop. Yahya Ayyash’s disciples had ensured the right wing’s victory and “derailed the peace process,” in the words of the deputy head of the Shin Bet, Yisrael Hasson.

  Curiously enough, though, after the election, the attacks stopped for almost a year. Some said this was because of Arafat’s campaign against Hamas, and the arrest of many members of its military wing. Others believed that Hamas no longer had any reason to carry out suicide attacks, because Netanyahu had already almost completely stopped the peace process, which was the short-term goal of the attacks anyway.

  Netanyahu did not abrogate the Oslo Accords, but his government heaped innumerable difficulties on the process, and for the duration of his first term, the peace process was almost completely stalled. On the other hand, Netanyahu never hastened to use force or initiate aggressive action. His modus operandi was to do nothing: never taking the initiative, to war or to peace.

  Arafat, for his part, was furious over the continual delays in Israel’s withdrawal from Palestinian territories, and in retaliation he freed some of the Hamas activists he had detained. On March 21, 1997, the organization struck again in the heart of Tel Aviv, when a suicide bomber blew himself up at a sidewalk café, not far from the former home of David Ben-Gurion. Three women were killed and forty-eight people were wounded, some seriously. In the wake of this attack, Netanyahu again displayed restraint, and despite his associates’ suggestions to take military action in the Palestinian areas, he refrained from ordering any use of force.

  The Tel Aviv bombing highlighted a growing gap between the way Israel’s two main counterterror intelligence arms viewed Arafat. The Shin Bet, under Ayalon, thought the Palestinian leader was passive and weak, allowing the attacks to continue and not making an effort to rein in Hamas because he wanted to avoid a confrontation with the fundamentalist Islamist movement.

  AMAN, headed by the charismatic and opinionated Major General Moshe Yaalon, thought Arafat was central to the problem. Though both the Shin Bet and AMAN saw the same transcripts of secret conversations between Arafat and Hamas leaders, only Yaalon believed that the intelligence material implied that Arafat had given a green light for terror attacks in order to break the deadlock in the negotiations. Yaalon told the three prime ministers under whom he’d served as head of military intelligence—Rabin, Peres, and Netanyahu—that in his estimation, “Arafat is not preparing his people for peace with us, but for war.” Yaalon said that in retrospect, Rabin’s dictum that Israel should “pursue peace as if there is no terror, and fight terror as if there is no peace” was a “dumb statement,” because the man they were trying to make peace with was the same figure who was creating the terror.

  Yaalon was a member of a kibbutz in the Arabah Desert, and a prominent son of Israel’s leftist labor movement. But, he said, what he saw in the intelligence material as head of AMAN, and later chief of the General Staff, made him change his mind and swing to the right. His meteoric rise in military and political rank amplified his hawkish opinions, and they ended up having a dramatic effect on the shape of Israeli policies in the decades to come. The right warmly welcomed him, since he was one of the few members of the intelligence community to espouse such opinions. He would become one of the closest associates of Netanyahu, who appointed him to his cabinet as minister for strategic affairs and then defense minister, though he forced him out in 2016 after Yaalon, a stickler for law and discipline, insisted that a soldier who shot and killed a helpless wounded terrorist should be prosecuted.

  Yaalon is also considered one of Israel’s most honest politicians, and there’s no doubt that his disgust at Arafat was totally authentic. He remained steadfast in his belief that Arafat continued actively supporting terror. “The Shin Bet is used to collecting evidence that will stand up in court and lead to a conviction,” he said. “But Arafat is clearly much more sophisticated. He doesn’t tell the heads of Hamas, ‘Go and carry out attacks,’ but rather speaks to them about holy war, and releases all their top people he had arrested. There’s no need for more than this. To this d
ay, no order signed by Hitler has been found ordering the extermination of the Jews. Does this mean he didn’t order it to be done?”

  Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser, one of AMAN’s senior analysts, backed up his boss’s words: “When he wanted to, Arafat shut down nineteen Hamas institutions and arrested some of its activists. Then he began letting them go after he decided that it was time to resume terror attacks. Hamas demanded proof of his seriousness. ‘Release Ibrahim al-Makadmeh,’ they told him. ‘That’s the only way we’ll know for sure that you’re giving us a free hand.’ Why Makadmeh? Because he headed a squad that was going to assassinate Arafat himself. Arafat complied, and a short time later they carried out the attack near the former Ben-Gurion residence.” Kuperwasser argues that Arafat was sophisticated enough to release Hamas prisoners who lived in areas under Israeli control, so that the Israelis would be able to blame only themselves, and in any event to release men who had no links with Fatah, so as to keep as much distance as possible between himself and the terror attacks.

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  JERUSALEM’S MAHANEH YEHUDAH MARKET is almost always crowded with people shopping for cheap produce and clothing. Located between the city’s main artery, Jaffa Road, and Agrippas Street, it has served the populace since the end of the nineteenth century. With vendors loudly hawking their meat, fish, flowers, and falafel, and all the colors and smells and sights of an authentic, busy market, it’s also a popular tourist attraction.

  At noon on Wednesday, July 30, 1997, nobody paid any attention when two men wearing black suits, white shirts, and neckties walked through the bustling crowd. The men were carrying heavy attaché cases, and they strode purposefully to the heart of the market, stopping at a distance of 150 feet from each other—just as Mohammed Deif had instructed them. They pulled their bags in close to their bodies, as if they were hugging them.

  The bags were each filled with some thirty-three pounds of explosives, nails, and screws.

  The men detonated them, and the enormous blasts and flying shrapnel killed sixteen people and wounded 178.

  Hamas took responsibility for the attack in a statement sent to the Red Cross. But Deif had also realized that the Shin Bet, after earlier bombings, had identified the remains of the perpetrators and used the information to pinpoint who they’d been in contact with before the attack. So this time, the bombers went to great lengths to conceal their identities. They cut the labels from their clothing, for instance, so Shin Bet investigators wouldn’t be able to trace them to a particular storekeeper who might recognize them. They held their bombs tightly, to destroy as much of their own bodies and faces as possible. Hamas militants had told their families not to set up tents for condolence calls, as is customary among the Palestinians, so the Shin Bet would not be able to identify them and construct a picture of their contacts.

  Nevertheless, after considerable investigative work, the agency was able to report to the prime minister that it had identified who the dead terrorists were, and that Mohammed Deif was behind the planning of the attack and the recruitment of the suicide bombers.

  Ten days after the bombing, Prime Minister Netanyahu convened a meeting of the security cabinet. At the beginning of the meeting, he made it clear that he was done showing restraint. After Mossad and Shin Bet officials explained to the ministers that many of the leaders of Hamas had found refuge in Jordan, Syria, the Gulf states, the United States, and Europe, Netanyahu declared that he was in favor of taking action against them. The cabinet authorized the prime minister and the defense minister to set the specific targets.

  The next day, Netanyahu called in Mossad director General Danny Yatom and demanded a hit list. Yatom was accompanied by the head of Caesarea, HH, and Caesarea’s chief intelligence officer, Moshe (Mishka) Ben-David.

  Ben-David was something of an odd man out in the Mossad. Short and solid, he wore an unconventional long beard and had entered the Mossad, in 1987, at the relatively advanced age of thirty-five. His mother, a translator and editor, had spoken to him only in Russian, so he spoke that language before he learned Hebrew. When he turned eighteen, his knowledge of Russian made him a natural candidate for Unit 8200, where he listened in on the Russian advisers who were then assisting the Egyptian and Syrian armies. When he retired from the IDF, he represented an Israeli youth movement in the United States for a while, then returned to run a youth center in Israel. He raised horses in the Jerusalem mountains, wrote books, and earned a Ph.D. in literature and a black belt in karate. He also married and raised three children.

  It was only after achieving all this that Ben-David decided to apply to the Mossad. “It really interested me,” he explained, “and I also understood the Zionist and national importance of contributing to the country’s security after a number of years doing things for myself. I saw that war was raging in Lebanon and that peace was still far off, and that it didn’t really matter to anyone from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv.”

  It wasn’t that no one cared, exactly, he said. It was simply easier to pretend the world was not such a dangerous place. “The Tel Aviv café crowd gets edgy when they encounter a clear view of a world in which the State of Israel still faces an existential danger, and the fact that there are not a few people and institutions that really are making every effort and sparing no expense on plotting how to hurt and destroy us,” Ben-David said. “It’s much more pleasant not to think about the bad people and just sit back….I think that the great majority of the people in the Mossad are like me. The love of adventure, of intrigue, and the desire for a good career are good only up to the final call for Flight 337 to Tehran. That’s when it all ends. Without conviction that your cause is just and strong patriotic motivation, you can’t survive your second operation.”

  Yatom and his aides arrived at Netanyahu’s office with dossiers on several potential Hamas targets in Europe and the Middle East who were responsible for weapons acquisition or fundraising. One of them was Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who had abducted and killed two Israeli soldiers in 1988 and later escaped to Egypt. Netanyahu rejected the list. “Bring me some big fish, not these minnows,” he said. “I want leaders, not merchants.”

  Netanyahu’s order posed a difficult problem for Ben-David and his colleagues. The senior leadership of Hamas was in Jordan, a country with which Israel had signed a peace treaty three years before; Israeli intelligence, under an order from Rabin and out of basic diplomatic courtesy, couldn’t operate there without the Jordanians’ permission. And it was clear that King Hussein—whose subjects were mostly Palestinians—was not going to grant that permission.

  Whether the Mossad made these logistical difficulties clear to Netanyahu is a matter of some dispute. “Netanyahu told us he wanted execution without footprints,” Ben-David said. “The head of Caesarea [HH] told him, ‘I know how to carry out such an operation with rifles, pistols, or bombs. I have no experience in directing a silent operation. When you have to act to hit a target, you have to reach actual contact with the target, and everyone is watching—it isn’t clandestine, and if something goes wrong, you can’t drop the gun and run away.’ Netanyahu said, ‘This is important enough for you to carry out a silent mission…because I don’t want to jeopardize relations with Jordan.’ He also said, ‘I need the leaders of Hamas to be wiped out. I cannot allow more suicide bombings like these to happen.’ ”

  On the other hand, Brigadier General Shimon Shapira, the prime minister’s military secretary, who was present at all the meetings, maintained that the Caesarea representatives never suggested that executing a mission in Jordan would be a problem. “They gave us the impression it was a stroll in the park, the same as doing it in the center of Tel Aviv,” Shapira said. “Everything was simple. No risks, nothing that could go wrong.”

  The Mossad came back with a list of potential targets—four Hamas leaders living in Jordan. Netanyahu’s eyes lit up. He was familiar with one of the names: Musa Abu Marzook, head of Hamas’s politic
al bureau. Marzook had been working unimpeded in the United States up until Israel requested his extradition. The request was approved, but Prime Minister Rabin decided to give up on it, because the Shin Bet warned him that a trial would likely expose its sources of information. Instead, the Americans deported Marzook to Jordan.

  Marzook also was an American citizen, which didn’t bother Netanyahu—he was fine with killing him—but it made the Mossad wary. In order to avoid the damage to relations with the United States that might be incurred, the Mossad put Marzook last on its list of targets. This meant his name was behind Khaled Mashal, Marzook’s deputy, behind Hamas spokesman Muhammad Nazal, and behind Ibrahim Ghosheh, a senior member of its political bureau.

  The Mossad had only a little information on each of them, and a scarcity of resources or time with which to fill in the gaps. A targeted killing could be executed only if there was sufficient intelligence about the target, so it was reasonable that the person at the head of the order of priority should be selected, if only because there was more intelligence about him. This way, the life of the last person on the list should have been relatively safe.