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YOSSI AVRAHAMI WAS AN independent businessman from Petah Tikva, thirty-eight years old, married, with three children. In his spare time, he volunteered as an auxiliary traffic cop. Vadim Nurzhitz was three years younger, a native of Irkutsk, in Russia, and a truck driver by occupation. Neither was a professional soldier, but, like many Jewish Israelis, they were reservists, on permanent standby to reinforce the IDF.
The Second Intifada, as the latest war between Israel and the Palestinians became known, required reinforcements. Avrahami and Nurzhitz were called up on October 1, 2000, to guard settlers’ school buses from attacks by Palestinians. On October 11, they were given a one-day furlough. The next day, on their way back to their base in Nurzhitz’s car, they took a wrong turn and ended up in the West Bank city of Ramallah. There had been some rioting in Ramallah in the preceding weeks, and a number of Palestinians had been killed by IDF gunfire. Tension was running high. When the car entered the city, passersby saw the yellow Israeli license plates and began throwing stones at it. The two tried to flee but were blocked by traffic.
Palestinian policemen dragged them from their car at gunpoint, confiscated their weapons, and took them to a police station for questioning. Then they left them at the mercy of a raging lynch mob that had gathered outside.
The two reservists were beaten, their eyes were gouged out, and they were stabbed multiple times. Nurzhitz’s head was bashed in before he was disemboweled with a stick shoved down his throat, and his body was set on fire. When Avrahami’s wife, unaware what had happened, called his cellphone, one of the killers told her, “I slaughtered your husband a few minutes ago.” One of the Palestinians was photographed at the second-floor window of the police station ecstatically exhibiting his bloody hands to the cheering crowd below. The mob then dumped the bodies through the window, onto the ground, and dragged them through the city.
The event left a profound impression on the public in Israel, which quite rightly blamed the Palestinian Authority, whose personnel had not provided protection for the Israelis in their territory but had instead arrested them without any reason and had allowed the mob to murder them inside the police station.
The Shin Bet designated the lynching an “emblematic attack,” whose perpetrators had to be hunted down in perpetuity, “like those responsible for the massacre of the Israelis at the Munich Olympics.” The hunt went on for months and years afterward.
Even more significantly, in the eyes of many in the Israeli leadership, the attack was seen as a fundamental betrayal, proof that the Palestinian Authority’s goal—and, by extension, Arafat’s goal—was not actually peace, but conflict. From that point forward, the PA and Arafat himself would be treated as part of the problem.
In the wake of the Ramallah lynch mob, the IDF greatly stepped up its use of force. Firearms were used more frequently against rioting protesters. The IDF hit back against Palestinian policemen, too, blowing up police stations at night, when they were empty. By the end of 2000, 276 Palestinians would be killed.
The bloodshed was a political disaster for Ehud Barak. Already hobbled by the failure at Camp David, the uprising left him unmoored and ineffectual. He openly and repeatedly blamed Arafat for what had happened, but that only made him look like more of a failure to the Israeli public, for having trusted the Palestinian leader in the first place. And his insistence on continuing the peace process with Arafat brought his popularity level down to unprecedented depths. Close associates described the last months of his term as manic, lacking in focus, and devoid of any clear sense of direction. His governing coalition began to unravel, and in December he was forced to call for elections in February 2001.
Barak was defeated by the very man whose provocation at the Temple Mount had kick-started the intifada: Ariel Sharon.
Sharon had been a political pariah for almost two decades, ever since he orchestrated the disastrous invasion of Lebanon. He’d been forced to abdicate the office of defense minister in 1983, but his misbegotten military adventure—his foolhardy plan to rearrange the whole of the Middle East—dragged on for eighteen years, costing Israel 1,216 lives and more than 5,000 wounded, as well as untold thousands of Lebanese casualties.
Large crowds of Israelis protesting in the streets had called him a murderer and a war criminal. The United States had imposed an unofficial boycott on him—only junior U.S. officials were allowed to meet with him when he was in America, and even then only at his hotel, outside of regular work hours. The man who never stopped on red, as the song went, was publicly scorned and widely loathed for years, despite serving in the Knesset and as a cabinet minister.
But Sharon saw politics as a Ferris wheel. “Sometimes you’re up and sometimes you’re down,” he used to say. “Just stay on it.” In early 2001, when Israelis were desperate for a strong leader who could stop the violence, he defeated Barak by 25 percent.
The contrast was immediately evident. Aides who remained in the prime minister’s office after Barak left said the atmosphere immediately became calmer and steadier. Sharon was the complete opposite of Barak: warm, attentive to moods and personal quirks, careful to show respect toward everyone. He was naturally suspicious, but as soon as he came to feel that someone could be trusted, he gave them a great deal of freedom.
He also felt it deeply whenever Israelis or Jews anywhere were killed in a terror attack. “I would come in with news about this or that suicide attack,” said military secretary Yoav Galant, “and see how his heart was crushed. It pained him in the most personal way. Any child or woman or man in Israel who was murdered on a bus or in a mall, he would take it as if they were his relatives, his family.”
Sharon marked a seemingly clear path to end the violence. “He radiated to us all confidence that we were about to win this war, the war on terror,” Galant said. “As Napoleon said, the Roman legions didn’t cross the Rubicon; Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Sharon was a leader, and he led the war on terror.”
Immediately after assuming the premiership, Sharon declared that political negotiations would not take place while the terror attacks continued. Only when calm was achieved, he said, would Israel return to the negotiating table. At the same time, he pressed the IDF and the Shin Bet to step up their operations. “Think outside of the box,” he told the commanders. “Come to me with creative ideas.” He repeatedly reminded them of his own tumultuous times in Unit 101 in the 1950s, and of how Meir Dagan, under Sharon’s command, had successfully hunted terrorists in the 1970s.
Since his stint as defense minister in the early 1980s, Sharon had had his doubts about the IDF’s capabilities, harboring a suspicion that it had “lost its fortitude over the years.” He was mistrustful of army officers as well, perhaps because he remembered how he himself had lied to the politicians when he was in uniform, deceiving his superiors so they would allow him to carry out operations. Now that he was prime minister, he felt that IDF officers were scared of failing, and he was therefore “convinced that senior commanders were lying to him so they would not have to take responsibility,” said Galant.
On the other hand, Sharon felt much more comfortable with the Shin Bet, and he had great confidence in its chief, Avi Dichter. In the war against terror, the first and most important matter on his agenda, Sharon increasingly relied on the agency, giving it more missions and authority.
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AT THE BEGINNING OF the Second Intifada, a significant number of people who’d been involved in terror attacks over the previous decade were sitting in prisons operated by the Palestinian Authority. After the suicide attacks of 1996 toppled Shimon Peres’s government and disrupted the peace process, Arafat had realized that he needed to keep the top Hamas and Islamic Jihad leaders behind bars for at least as long as he was negotiating with the Israelis. But over six months, starting in October 2001, Arafat ordered their release.
Once again, the IDF believed that Arafat was trying
to instigate more attacks on Israel, while the Shin Bet believed he was just frantically trying to avoid losing the support of the Palestinians to Hamas. By that point, hundreds of Palestinians had been killed in the intifada, while only a handful of IDF soldiers and settlers had lost their lives. Hamas’s suicide attacks, however, were starting to even the scales. “The more the suicide attacks increased and succeeded, support for Hamas grew in direct proportion,” said Yuval Diskin, the Shin Bet deputy chief.
The loss of the Awadallah brothers and of its archives had been a powerful blow, but Hamas had begun to rebuild under the leadership of Sheikh Yassin. And as it rebuilt, it began using suicide attacks against Israeli civilians more and more.
On May 18, 2001, a Hamas operative wearing a long, dark blue coat came to the security checkpoint outside the HaSharon Mall, near Netanya. He aroused the suspicion of the guards, who stopped him from entering, and then blew himself up, killing five bystanders. On June 1, another suicide bomber killed twenty-one young people, most of them new Jewish immigrants from Russia, in the line outside a discotheque on the beach in Tel Aviv. The owner of the dance hall, Shlomo Cohen, had served in the naval commandos, “but this was the worst thing I had seen in my life,” he said, with despair in his eyes.
By early November, suicide bombers were striking in the streets of Israel almost every week, and sometimes every few days. On December 1, three bombers in succession killed eleven people in Jerusalem’s Ben Yehuda pedestrian mall, the same place where a suicide attack in 1997 had led to the attempted assassination of Khaled Mashal. The next day, a man from Nablus blew himself up on a bus in Haifa, killing fifteen and wounding forty. “We are facing an all-out offensive,” the Northern District police commander said when he reached the scene.
The offensive did not stop. In March 2002 alone, 138 men, women, and children were killed by suicide bombers, and 683 were wounded. The most atrocious of the attacks occurred on Passover, on the ground floor of the Park Hotel in Netanya, where a Seder banquet was being held for 250 of the city’s disadvantaged people. A suicide bomber dressed as a religious Jewish woman entered the hall and blew himself up, killing thirty—the youngest aged twenty and the oldest ninety—and wounding 143 others. George Jacobovitz, a Hungarian-born Nazi death camp survivor, was there with his wife, Anna, also a Holocaust survivor from Hungary. They were celebrating Seder night with Andrei Fried, Anna’s son from a previous marriage, and his wife, Edit. All four were killed.
The year 2002 was, according to Shin Bet chief Dichter, “the worst year for terror attacks against us since the establishment of the state.”
Chief of staff Mofaz said, “This was a national trauma. It cast upon us loss of life, damage to our national security, damage to our economy. There was no tourism, people were scared to go to shopping malls, scared to sit in restaurants, and didn’t ride in buses.”
The Israeli intelligence community had come across suicide bombers before, “but we did not realize that it could be done in such huge numbers,” said Major General Yitzhak Ben-Yisrael, head of the Administration for the Development of Weapons and Technological Infrastructure (Maf’at in Hebrew) at the Israeli Ministry of Defense. “Even when we grasped that this was the main threat, we had no solution for it, neither in combat doctrine nor in weaponry. What can you do against a suicide bomber when he’s already walking around in your streets looking for somewhere to blow himself up?”
Terrorism in general, and suicide attacks in particular, created a strange and frustrating situation within the Shin Bet and IDF. “Unequivocally, there was a sense of impotence,” said the head of the IDF Planning Directorate at the time, Major General Giora Eiland. “The frustration was huge. We were under great pressure to do something, both from above [the IDF command and the political echelon] and from below [officers and soldiers in the field]. And your neighbors and relatives and people in the street stopping you and asking, ‘Where are you military commanders? A fifty-billion-shekel budget—what do you do with the money? What do you do with yourselves all day?’ ”
—
IN THE ABSENCE OF any larger strategy for how to respond to the suicide-terrorism offensive, the Shin Bet just continued doing what it had always done: assassinating the people instigating and organizing the terror.
During the first year of the intifada, the hits were carried out in a diffuse manner, without any clear direction. The first one took place shortly after the intifada began, when the Shin Bet discovered that a Fatah operative by the name of Hussein Abayat was behind many of the shooting attacks on the roads in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo.
Since the lynching in Ramallah, all the areas under the control of the Palestinian Authority had been designated hostile territory in which it was necessary to operate with extreme caution and with the support of large IDF forces. But entering with such a large force in order to arrest or kill Abayat would give him time to flee to a hideout. The only way to reach him, the Israelis concluded, was with a combined operation using an undercover commando force and an attack from the air.
The air force commando unit Kingfisher (Shaldag in Hebrew), which designated targets by laser deep behind enemy lines, was assigned to the operation. It was selected because at the time it was the only available unit trained to act in close cooperation with the air force.
On November 9, 2000, Abayat was seen by a Palestinian Shin Bet source getting into his black Mercedes and leaving the village of Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, with some of his men. A Shin Bet operative accompanying the source was in touch with the Joint War Room, and the JWR was in touch with the air force and the land forces. Kingfisher spotters designated the vehicle with laser markers for two formations of two Apache helicopters each, who were following at a distance. The car stopped at a house, and a crowd gathered around it. “We waited a few minutes until it moved off again and away from the people,” the deputy commander of the Apache squadron said. “Then we fired two missiles. I fired one, and the second was fired by the squadron commander, who was leading the other formation. They both hit the target. Until then, we had executed missions like this only in Lebanon. It was a strange feeling [doing this inside an Israeli-controlled area].”
The killing of Abayat was the first aerial assassination in the occupied territories. It was unusual also because the Shin Bet generally preferred low-signature killings: those without open involvement of Israeli forces, which was forbidden by the peace agreement of 1994. But now the orders were coming to take out specific targets in the territories, with or without the involvement of Israeli forces.
One of them was Iyad Haradan, a commander of the Islamic Jihad in the Jenin district. On April 5, 2001, Haradan picked up the handset of the pay phone he habitually used (many terrorists now realized that the Israelis were listening in on their cellphone conversations and had begun to use public pay phones instead), in downtown Jenin, when it rang. But instead of the call he was expecting, there was a loud explosion that killed him instantly. The device had been planted there the previous night by a Birds unit. The area had been under surveillance of two drones, and when Haradan’s voice was identified on the phone, the signal activating the bomb was sent from the JWR. A similar operation on June 27 killed Osama al-Jawabra, a member of Fatah’s Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades in Nablus.
The Shin Bet also tried to eliminate the secretary general of the PFLP in Palestine, Abu Ali Mustafa, using various low-signature methods—poisoning, booby-trapping his cellphone, blowing up his car in a way that would make it look as if explosives that Mustafa himself was transporting had gone off by mistake. But when those plans failed, the Shin Bet gave up trying to be discreet. On August 27, an Apache helicopter fired rockets through the window of Mustafa’s office in Ramallah. Israel claimed that its decision to hit Mustafa “was not because of his being a political leader, but in spite of this”—according to the Israelis, he was directly involved in terrorism.
Israel’s assassination of Mustafa did not quell the suicide attacks at all. Furthermore, for the Palestinians, a line had been crossed. “I would like to remind Israel of the period of the early 1970s,” a PFLP leader said. “We must respond in a manner that will deter the Israelis from further attacks on Palestinian leaders.” In an act of retaliation two months later, on October 17, in the Hyatt Hotel in Jerusalem, members of the PFLP assassinated Rehavam Zeevi, a minister in Sharon’s cabinet and a former IDF general, who held extreme nationalist views.
Zeevi had been an admired and prominent Israeli, a good friend of Sharon’s since their army days. In truth, none of the other targeted killings or the other aggressive military operations carried out by Israel had accomplished anything, either, other than killing 454 Palestinians, wounding thousands more, and prolonging a bloody and asymmetrical conflict that left more Israelis dead.
Sharon grew even more frustrated with the defense establishment’s impotence. One morning, his bureau chief and right-hand man, Dov Weissglass, asked the head of the Shin Bet’s intelligence division, Barak Ben-Zur, to meet him at an unusual venue, the entrance to the international trading center of a Tel Aviv bank.
Weissglass had arranged for entry passes to the center’s operations room.
He took Ben-Zur to the middle of the large space, surrounded by flickering screens that recorded the money flowing in and out of Israel, the oxygen of the country’s economy.
“What do you hear, Ben-Zur?” Weissglass asked after a long minute of silence.
Ben-Zur was puzzled. “Nothing,” he said. “I don’t hear a thing.”
“That is exactly it. There’s nothing to hear. No action. Foreign investors won’t come here, because they’re scared something will happen to them, and they aren’t bringing money because it’s not clear what will happen tomorrow. If you—the Shin Bet, the IDF, the air force—don’t do something, then on top of the blood and the grief and the mourning and the terrible sadness, this country will face economic collapse.”
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