Because of their access to highly classified material at such a young age, the army tried to inculcate the NIOs with a sense of moral and legal responsibility during their lengthy training. One of their lessons, for example, dealt with civil rights, and the violation of those rights that sometimes occurs as a result of wiretaps. The trainees were told that they must not exploit the immense power they were given for any purpose other than obtaining information for the benefit of the security of the state. The case study that was used outlined an incident in 1997 in which some men from Unit 8200, attempting to locate calls concerning Osama bin Laden, accidentally picked up then purposely recorded some cellphone conversations between Tom Cruise, who was working in the Middle East at the time, and his then wife, Nicole Kidman. They then distributed the recordings to their pals and read the transcripts out loud.
“And if that eavesdropping was perceived as a forbidden and immoral act,” said Amir, “then it’s clear that bombing that building should be forbidden. The more I thought of it, the more I realized that it was forbidden to carry out such an order.”
Amir raised the matter with the senior NIO and with the command of 8200. The command said they “understood there was a problem,” and the operation was put on hold until further notice. “That satisfied me, and I could go back to my post, which I had closed down, at about 2 A.M., with the sense that the story was behind us.”
However, the next morning, when he sat down at the NIO’s workstation and began directing the shift, he got a call from the Targets Department notifying him that the bombing of the Fatah branch in Khan Yunis was about to get under way. Amir objected, but the officer on the other side of the scrambled line got angry.
“Why does it seem manifestly illegal to you? They’re all Arabs. They’re all terrorists.”
“In my unit,” Amir told him, “we make a very clear distinction between terrorists and those who were not involved, such as people who routinely used the target building.”
But he wasn’t changing anyone’s mind, and by then the operation was already in motion. Two armed F-16 fighter jets were circling over the Mediterranean, waiting for the order. A drone was photographing the building from a distance. As soon as Amir told them someone was in the building, two Hellfire missiles would be launched at the structure.
Amir decided he would refuse to cooperate. The fire in the cedars was spreading.
Impatient calls started coming in to 8200 command from the air force and AMAN. “They were saying, ‘Listen, your unit is refusing to give us such-and-such information,’ ” Brigadier General Yair Cohen, commander of Unit 8200 at the time, recalled. “I said that they must be mistaken, that there was no such thing in 8200 as not providing information, that it had never happened and never would happen.”
At 10:05, Amir got a call from 8200 command. “Yair [Cohen] says this is no time to ask questions,” he was told, “but a time to act.” The operational order required the bombardment to be completed by 11:30, when children would be emptying into a nearby schoolyard.
“This is a manifestly illegal order, and I do not intend to obey it,” Amir said. “The fact that the commander has declared it to be legal doesn’t make it legal.”
There was a pause on the line. “I have conveyed the message from the commander as it was issued,” Amir was told. “I’m happy not to be in your position at this moment.”
A few minutes later, one of Amir’s soldiers told him that phone calls were being made inside the Fatah building. A man was dealing with wage payments, trying to get money to some employees, despite the hard times in the Palestinian Authority and the ongoing war. A secretary was gossiping about a local gigolo.
That was the go signal. The F-16 could fire. Israel could kill them both.
Amir sat in his chair as the on-duty NIO. “A certain serenity came over me,” he said. “I felt that there was only one right thing to do. It was clear to me that this operation should not go forward, that it crossed a red line, that it was a manifestly illegal order over which a black flag flew, and that it was my responsibility, as a soldier and a human being, to refuse to carry it out.”
He ordered the information not be passed on. He ordered all activity stopped.
At 10:50, just forty minutes before the operation’s time window closed, Amir’s direct commander, Y., arrived at the base, relieved Amir of his post, and took the NIO seat for himself. He ordered one of the soldiers to report that people were in the building. The bombing could go ahead.
But it was already too late: The planes had returned to base, at the Tel Nof airfield. Now the information was passed on to them and they took off again, but by the time they homed in on the target, the clock showed 11:25, and the school bell rang.
—
THAT EVENING, THE 8200 command sent an urgent message to the head of AMAN, expressing grave reservations about the operation. It was transmitted to the minister of defense, who ordered the cancellation of the attack on Target 7068.
This was a clear vindication of Amir’s moral stand, but it was too late to silence the storm that the “mutiny in 8200” had unleashed in the military. Unit 8200’s command came under heavy fire from all sides of the defense establishment—even Prime Minister Sharon let it be known that he took a very dim view of what had transpired. Brigadier General Cohen was summoned to an IDF General Staff meeting devoted entirely to Amir. He should face a court-martial, the officers argued, and go to jail for at least six months. One general went further: “That officer should have been convicted of treason and put in front of a firing squad.”
The protests by airmen after the Shehade bombing, a few months earlier, and the refusal of Sayeret Matkal personnel to take part in targeted killing operations were still fresh in everyone’s mind. Someone, possibly from one of 8200’s rival units, leaked the story to the media. There were no details in the report, but, given the already tense public atmosphere, it was enough to get demonstrators from the left and from the right out onto the streets. Although it was only a few days before the Knesset elections, many of the headlines were about the “refusers.”
The military and intelligence establishments were concerned that Amir could be the first of many soldiers to refuse to carry out orders. From the commanders’ perspective, putting down a Palestinian uprising didn’t leave a lot of room for squishy liberal objectors.
“Unit 8200 is the epitome of the culture of secrecy, always far out of sight, always alone, isolated from the rest of the army, high-quality and covert,” a man who served in a senior position at the time said. “All of a sudden, it found itself under a spotlight inside the IDF, and in the most negative possible context. Everyone always says that the 8200’s soldiers are pampered kids from the best part of Tel Aviv who go to the army and get the best training in the world and then cash in their skills for billions in high-tech startups, and that they must all be left-wingers and homos. The unit is constantly trying to fight that image, and suddenly it gets labeled as being full of anarchists who refuse to carry out orders.”
Amir’s contention that what amounted to an order to murder civilians was manifestly illegal was rejected out of hand by the military. For one thing, only someone actually pressing the trigger, and not anyone else involved in the operation, could refuse out of a belief that such a kill order was illegal, declared Major General Elazar Stern, the head of the IDF’s Human Resources Directorate. Professor Asa Kasher, a philosopher, was invited by the commander of 8200 to discuss the issue. He believed that Amir’s actions were morally incorrect. “I could not under any circumstances endorse the act of the NIO,” he said. “In the situation that prevailed there, when he was an NIO at a distant base, he lacked the moral authority to determine that the order was manifestly illegal. He did not know the entire story. He did not see the entire picture, and he did not know about the broader tactics that the chief of staff had decided on….I’m in favor of asking questions and raisi
ng doubts, but an order should not be refused at such moments.”
Amir was quietly discharged without being indicted, preventing the courts from having an opportunity to determine whether the order to murder civilians in Target 7068 had been legal.
—
THE OPERATION ON TARGET 7068 had violated the guidelines set by the IDF military advocate general’s International Law Department—that the target for elimination must be an individual directly linked to terrorism. But that wasn’t the only guideline that was now breached all too regularly—part of a general decline in the prevailing moral and legal standards.
There was also a guideline that called for an investigation each time innocent civilians were killed along with the target. In fact, this protocol was almost never followed. The inquiry into the Shehade killings, which ultimately came to the conclusion that no one was to blame for the deaths of twelve civilians, was the exception, and it, too, was set up only after heavy public and international pressure on Israel.
Another guideline now frequently breached dictated that there should be no killings when there was a “reasonable arrest alternative”—when the terrorist could be detained without endangering the lives of soldiers or civilians. Alon Kastiel, a soldier in the Cherry unit’s intelligence section, said, “Everything about my military service changed after the outbreak of the intifada. Before that, we made very great efforts to capture wanted men alive. After the outbreak, this modus operandi ended. It was clear that we were out to kill.”
Operational orders from that period indicate that the expectation was that the wanted man would be killed the moment he was identified. In Operation Two Towers, for example, the operational order contradicts itself: “1. The objective is arrest; 2. If the ‘framing’ [positive identification] is of a senior PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] figure Walid Obeid, Ziad Malaisha, Adham Yunis, the force is authorized to execute interception.” The term “interception” is a euphemism for “elimination” or “killing,” and it came to be used frequently as a way to sidestep the ILD’s guidelines. The operation unfolded accordingly: Malaisha was “framed” and “intercepted,” shot dead.
Yet another violation of the ILD’s protocol regularly occurred as a result of the provision that only the prime minister had the authority to approve targeted killing ops. AMAN officials resented the fact that Sharon had given the Shin Bet overall authority on assassinations.
In order to bypass the IDL guidelines, AMAN set up an identical parallel apparatus to carry out, without needing Sharon’s approval, what it called “interception operations” against anyone linked to acquiring, developing, stockpiling, transporting, or using weapons on behalf of terrorist organizations. “Orders barred me from carrying out assassinations, but no one forbade us to shoot at anyone launching Qassams or transporting explosives,” said a senior AMAN officer.
On some occasions, a shipment of weapons or a Qassam-launching squad was in fact identified in real time, so the killing was indeed justifiable. But often, “interception” was simply another word for a preplanned assassination, because AMAN wanted a certain person dead. “We called it interception, but of course it was assassination,” said an AMAN official. “We ran one operation after another, without stopping.” Some of these were legitimate military actions, some were assassinations of key terrorists, and many were in a gray area between the two.
Over time, the military and intelligence communities got better and better at inventing novel ways of gaming the official protocols. The IDF had greatly broadened the open-fire procedures, such that in terrorist-infested areas, soldiers were instructed to shoot at anyone holding any kind of firearm, Molotov cocktail, or explosive device, without any warning, and then confirm the kill. In order to create situations in which armed suspected terrorists would emerge from their hiding places and into the streets and alleys, where they would be exposed to Israeli gunfire, an operational procedure code-named Grass Widow was developed.
During the course of the conflict in the occupied territories, several variations of the Grass Widow technique were used, baiting gunmen out of their hiding places and exposing them to fire from a concealed sniping position. In one variation, an Israeli force would arrest a comrade of the terrorists out in the open on the street, prompting armed gunmen to come outside and attack the force. In another, an armored car would drive up and down a street, with a loudspeaker broadcasting an Arabic recording of shouted challenges like “So where are all the big heroes of Izz al-Din al-Qassam? Why don’t you come out and fight? Let’s see if you are men.” Or, more provocatively, “All the Jihad are fags” or “Hamas are sons of whores. Your mothers work in the streets and give it out free to anyone who wants it.” These are some of the more refined remarks—others are even less suitable for print. Perhaps surprisingly, this method has worked well. Gunmen come out to shoot at the offending vehicle and end up getting picked off by a sniper from Grass Widow concealed in a nearby apartment.
Grass Widow operations killed dozens of gunmen from all the Palestinian organizations. From the military’s point of view, the system worked, and the IDF gained relative freedom of action in the streets of Palestinian cities. The legality of these operations, however, is debatable at best.
—
BY THE SUMMER OF 2002, the Shin Bet and its partners were able to stop more than 80 percent of attacks before they turned deadly. The targeted killings were clearly saving lives. But there was a disturbing trend in the data, too: The number of attempted attacks was increasing. Rather than being worn down, the Palestinians were spawning more and more attackers. That meant that Israel had to focus on more targets. But it also raised a fear that, over time, the terrorist groups would learn from each individual defeat and would adapt and get smarter and tougher, leading to a potentially endless escalation in a potentially endless war.
“We felt we had something like a year, perhaps a little more, to give them such a punch that would make the whole business not worth it, from their point of view,” said a senior Shin Bet official from that period.
That concern led to a new plan, code-named Picking Anemones. Although Israel already had declared every member of those organizations part of the “ticking infrastructure,” it had almost never touched the political leaders. But that reasoning had evolved. “In Hamas, there was no distinction between the political and military echelons,” said AMAN chief Major General Zeevi-Farkash. “The leaders who are called ‘political’ are involved in everything. They lay down the policy and issue orders about when to carry out attacks and when to hold back.” Indeed, the argument went, the only point of declaring a political wing was to fabricate international status and give certain leaders immunity from assassination. “We had to build a clear-cut deterrent,” Zeevi-Farkash said. “There’s no such thing as a political echelon which we will not touch.”
Every leader of Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad was now a target. The plan was to kill them all.
IBRAHIM AL-MAKADMEH KNEW THE Israelis were going to kill him. He should have, anyway, considering that the Palestinian Authority’s intelligence agencies told him as much. They’d heard it from a Shin Bet double agent, who said he’d been asked by the Israelis to monitor Makadmeh’s routines. Why else would the Shin Bet want to know his comings and goings, if not to kill him?
Maybe he didn’t believe it. Makadmeh had published some books and articles on religion, jihad, and Jewish immigration to Palestine, and he was an Islamic theorist. An extreme Hamas strategist, he advocated a holy war to destroy the Jewish state, and he served as the liaison between the organization’s political and military wings. But he was also a dentist and a popular lecturer at the Islamic University of Gaza. He was a learned man of academia who spent most of his time immersed in politics, rather than direct involvement in terror operations.
The PA operatives told him to lie low for a while and to wait until the Israelis got tired of looking for him. Makadmeh ignor
ed them and continued lecturing at the university as usual. His assistant and two bodyguards picked him up at his home, in the Gaza neighborhood of Sheikh Radwan, at about 9:30 on the morning of March 8, 2003.
An Israeli drone watched.
The assistant called the dean’s office at the university to let him know Makadmeh would be there shortly and that he expected students to be waiting in the lecture hall. “Despite the risk to his life,” the assistant added—a dramatic flourish he probably didn’t really believe.
Makadmeh, the assistant, and the bodyguards made it a thousand feet down Al-Jalaa Street before four Hellfire missiles fired from two Apache helicopters destroyed the car.
They, along with a little child who was playing in the street nearby, were the first casualties of Operation Picking Anemones, approved by Sharon and his security cabinet in early 2003. The basic assumption was that what the leaders of the jihadist terror organizations wanted their followers to do—suicide attacks—would take on a different dimension when a price tag was attached, namely their own lives. Or, as Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry’s political-security staff, described it, “They all know that the seventy-two virgins in paradise is an option that cannot be proved, and they, the leaders, are simply not prepared to check it out for themselves.”
Operation Picking Anemones was more nuanced than the wholesale assassination campaign against political leaders that AMAN chief General Zeevi-Farkash had advocated. The operation would not, in fact, go after all Hamas and PIJ leaders. Sheikh Yassin, the founder of Hamas, for instance, was left off the initial list of targets, for fear that more Palestinians would join the fighting if he were killed. But the point was the same: to let Hamas and the PIJ know that calling yourself a political functionary was no longer cover.
Rise and Kill First Page 63