“This intelligence superiority” Interview with Yaalon, August 16, 2011.
This part was termed “framing” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
The timing was fortuitous Interview with Diskin, June 28, 2017.
CHAPTER 28: ALL-OUT WAR
“Peace is a common interest” Statement by the prime minister, protocol of Knesset session no. 59, December 13, 1999.
Barak had to keep his promise and pull out of Lebanon Gilboa, Morning Twilight, 25–28 (Hebrew). Ronen Bergman, “AMAN Chief to PM Barak,” Yedioth Ahronoth, February 12, 2016.
They planned to have him assassinated A Unit 8200 communications monitor by the name of Mor, a fluent Arabic speaker, was the expert on identifying Mughniyeh’s voice. Out of respect for Mor’s ability, experience, and dedication, the code name given to Mughniyeh in those years, “Maurice,” echoed her name. However, for many years, Imad Mughniyeh had seemingly vanished, and Unit 8200 could find no trace of him in Hezbollah’s communications traffic. On May 21, 2000, Mor, stationed at a Unit 8200 Grizim base in northern Israel, identified his voice while listening in to the communications of a tour by Hezbollah leaders along the border of Israel’s security zone in Lebanon, probably in preparation for Israel’s anticipated withdrawal. “It’s him! I’m sure. It’s him. That’s ‘Maurice’ talking,” Mor exclaimed joyfully. Based on the surveillance and the location of the source of the conversation, AMAN and the Air Force began plotting to kill Mughniyeh. Summary of meeting on May 22 in handwriting of prime minister’s military secretary, Gen. Moshe Kaplinsky, shown to the author by “Ben,” April 2014.
Nasrallah celebrated the withdrawal as a complete victory Nasrallah speech, Bint Jebail, May 26, 2000.
“that there was no other option” Interview with Barak, April 2, 2014.
ferment among the Palestinians had reached new heights Interview with Yaalon, December 21, 2016.
“We were not preparing, and we did not intend to start” Interview with Rajoub, May 3, 2010.
“We’re on a giant ship that’s about to collide with an iceberg” Interview with Margalit, November 17, 2016.
No Israeli leader had ever agreed to give away so much Landau, Arik, 263 (Hebrew).
Barak hadn’t done enough in advance Members of the American delegation, notably Robert Malley in his book Camp David: The Tragedy of Errors, blamed Ehud Barak for his condescending and insensitive behavior. Barak conducted the bulk of the negotiations via Yossi Ginossar, who was now a secret conduit to Arafat and—it later emerged—his business partner. Uzrad Lew, Inside Arafat’s Pocket, 163 (Hebrew). Interviews with Barak, August 26, 2015, and Merhav, December 20, 2016.
“If Clinton had adopted Carter’s strategy” Interview with Itamar Rabinovich, July 2013.
attempts were made to bridge the gaps Landau, Arik, 262–65 (Hebrew).
“we were breathing gunpowder” Interview with “Hendrix,” August 2013.
“to remove the abomination” Interviews with Alexander Pantik, November 2003, and Gillon, January 27, 2016. Gillon, Shin-Beth Between the Schisms, 100–36 (Hebrew). Documents from military police investigation of the “Jewish Underground” that plotted to blow up the Temple Mount mosques in author’s archive, received from “Bell.”
soon they clashed with the police Landau, Arik, 269 (Hebrew). Anat Roeh and Ali Waked, “Sharon Visits the Temple Mount: Riots and Injuries,” Ynet, September 28, 2000, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-140848,00.html.
By the time of the next morning’s prayers Interviews with Ahmed Tibi, August 23, 2002, and Tirawi, June 2002. Bergman, Authority Granted, 106–10 (Hebrew).
Inside Israeli intelligence, the argument Interviews with Aharon Zeevi Farkash, April 10, 2013, Mofaz, June 14, 2011, Yaalon, August 16, 2011, Dan Halutz, July 5, 2011, Dichter, November 4, 2010, Diskin, October 18, 2011, Ben-Yisrael, June 5, 2011, Giora Eiland, June 5, 2011, Ayalon, June 22, 2011, Gilad, June 25, 2012, and Kuperwasser, January 2011.
“trying to attain diplomatic achievements by means of spilling Israeli blood” Interview with Mofaz, June 14, 2011.
Arafat…was being dragged along by the tide of events Interview with Diskin, June 1, 2017.
“I slaughtered your husband a few minutes ago” Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, The Seventh War, 37–39 (Hebrew). Mark Seager, “ ‘I’ll Have Nightmares for the Rest of My Life,’ ” Daily Telegraph, October 15, 2000, http://www.jr.co.il/articles/politics/lynch.txt.
The Shin Bet designated the lynching an “emblematic attack” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
In the wake of the Ramallah lynch mob Figures from the human rights NGO B’Tselem, http://www.btselem.org/hebrew/statistics/fatalities/before-cast-lead/by-date-of-event.
Sharon had been a political pariah for almost two decades Gad Barzilai, Wars, Internal Conflicts, and Political Order: A Jewish Democracy in the Middle East, SUNY series in Israeli Studies, 1996, 148. Michael Karpin, Imperfect Compromise: A New Consensus Among Israelis and Palestinians, 94.
Large crowds of Israelis protesting in the streets Landau, Arik, 171–75, 207–11 (Hebrew).
The contrast was immediately evident Interviews with Shalom Turgeman, June 28, 2011, Assaf Shariv, January 28, 2007, Danny Ayalon, June 22, 2011, and Weissglass, June 11, 2012.
felt it deeply whenever Israelis or Jews anywhere were killed Interview with Galant, June 1, 2011. Sharon at first tried, or at least wanted to look as if he was trying, to speak with Arafat, and in April 2001 he sent his son Omri to a secret meeting with the Palestinian leader in Ramallah, but it ended quickly. “It was clear that relations between the two [Ariel Sharon and Arafat] could lead only to a blowup,” said one of the participants. Interview with “Date Palm,” August 2017.
“lost its fortitude over the years” Interviews with Galant, June 1, 2011, and Weissglass, June 11, 2012.
“support for Hamas grew in direct proportion” Interview with Diskin, June 1, 2017.
“this was the worst thing I had seen in my life” Interview with Shlomo Cohen, March 28, 2012.
“We are facing an all-out offensive” Shuli Zuaretz and Sharon Rofeh, “Haifa: 14 of 15 Dead in Attack Are Identified,” Ynet, December 2, 2001, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-1373989,00.html.
138 men, women, and children were killed by suicide bombers State of Israel, “Special Committee for Examining the Targeted Killing of Salah Shehadeh,” February 2011, 21 (author’s archive, received from “Ellis”).
“the worst year for terror attacks against us” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
“This was a national trauma” Interview with Mofaz, June 14, 2011.
“we did not realize that it could be done in such huge numbers” Interview with Ben-Yisrael, June 5, 2011.
“The frustration was huge” Interview with Eiland, June 5, 2011.
shooting attacks on the roads in the West Bank “He was killing us,” said Uri Halperin, AMAN’s top officer for the northern West Bank. Interview with Uri Halperin, May 27, 2014.
“Then we fired two missiles” Anat Waschler, “The Drone Pilots’ War,” Air Force Journal, December 1, 2000.
instead of the call he was expecting Interview with “Matan,” June 2012.
tried to eliminate the secretary general of the PFLP Ali Wakad, “The Funeral of Abu Ali Mustafa Is Held in Ramallah,” Ynet, August 28, 2001, http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/1,7340,L-1058108,00.html.
Sharon grew even more frustrated with the defense establishment’s impotence Ben-Tzur, recounting the meeting to me in April 2010, asked that the name of the bank not be mentioned.
“Foreign investors won’t come here” An analysis of the destructive effect that the Suicide Bombers Intifada had on the economies of Israel and the Palestinian Authority can be found in Ben-Yisrael, �
�Facing Suicide Terrorists: The Israeli Case Study,” in Golan and Shay, A Ticking Bomb, 19–21.
“both judge and executioner” Interview with Hasson, November 17, 2010.
Dichter presented the new strategy to Sharon The Shin Bet also proposed two other measures that the cabinet approved only at a later stage—limited land incursions into Palestinian Authority territory in order to carry out arrests (Operation Defensive Shield), and the construction of a separation barrier (the West Bank Barrier) between Israel and the Palestinian areas. Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
“Go for it. Kill them all” In an interview with David Landau, the defense minister at the time, Benjamin Ben-Eliezer recalled a similar statement by Sharon when he ordered the IDF and the Shin Bet to “kill the dogs,” which Ben-Eliezer said was “his most moderate demand.” Landau, Arik, 291 (Hebrew).
CHAPTER 29: “MORE SUICIDE BOMBERS THAN EXPLOSIVE VESTS”
by the time the bomber reached Israel, it was generally too late Interview with Ben-Yisrael, June 5, 2011.
the “ticking infrastructure” behind the attacks Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
They would all be targets Interview with Ilan, November 5, 2014.
“Terror is a barrel with a bottom” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
“A simple example is the automobile” Interview with Ben-Yisrael, June 5, 2011. Ben-Yisrael, “Facing Suicide Terrorists,” 25–26.
“I realized that we were winning” Interview with Ilan, November 5, 2014.
“They flew around there all the time” Interview with Yaalon, December 21, 2016.
most civilians…did not know how The most important of these was a UAV capable of delivering missiles, Hermes 450, informally known as Zik (“spark” in Hebrew), manufactured by Haifa-based Elbit Systems Ltd. and Israel Aircraft Industries’ Heron and Heron TP.
As the United States had, in Operation Desert Storm Interview with Wesley Clark, January 23, 2012. (Thanks to Eytan Stibbe for help in arranging the meeting.)
the prime minister banged his fist on his desk Interview with Galant, September 4, 2014.
set up a special squad to retrofit the drones Precisely Wrong: Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles, Human Rights Watch, June 2009.
to put themselves at the Shin Bet’s disposal Interviews with Galant, September 4, 2014, Dichter, November 4, 2010, and Farkash, November 7, 2016.
Unit 8200…underwent the biggest change Interview with “Fidel,” April 2014.
put their fleet of observation aircraft Yitzhak Ilan Lecture, Herzlia IDC, May 2013.
The result of all this was “intelligence fusion” Interview with Yaalon, December 21, 2016.
“a man who does not work in the Yiddish language” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
“The General Security Service…is in charge” Shin Bet, Preventive Strike Procedure, paragraph 1, January 3, 2008 (author’s archive, received from “Ellis”).
the framing stage State of Israel, Special Committee for Examining the Targeted Killing of Salah Shehadeh, 26.
“The scalability is the message” Interviews with “Leila,” March 2013, and “Amazonas,” October 2011.
“we could run four or five a day” Interview with “Amazonas,” June 2017.
Operations run out of the JWR killed twenty-four people in 2000 Data from NGO B’Tselem, http://www.btselem.org/hebrew/statistics/fatalities/before-cast-lead/by-date-of-event.
“that these operations were executed by the government of Finland” Interview with Kuperwasser, December 24, 2014.
“Absolute panic” Interview with Weissglass, June 11, 2012.
The IDF began putting out statements after each hit Interview with “Pixie,” August 2016.
Hebrew for “targeted preventive acts” After the first wave of assassinations (before 9/11), Sharon began receiving complaints from the United States. He decided to send Dichter to Washington to meet American intelligence chiefs and explain to them how the assassinations policy was saving lives. Dichter asked his aides to translate the PowerPoint presentation into English. Like most Israelis, these aides were sure that their passing grades in high school English were enough to qualify them for the job. They repeatedly used the phrase “focused preventions,” which, Dichter realized later, “sounds more like a kind of condom than killing terrorists.” Dichter met his counterparts at the Pentagon and enthusiastically began lecturing them on “focused preventions,” careful not to use more explicit terms, but his sharp eye soon picked up that “they didn’t have any idea what I was talking about.” Eventually, according to Dichter, CIA director George Tenet raised his hand and said, “Ah, now I understand you, Dichter, you mean targeted killings.” “Then I realized,” he says, “that it was enough already of the laundered language and it was fine to say ‘killing’ and that’s that.” Interview with Dichter, November 4, 2010.
“I thought that was a problematic situation” Interview with Farkash, March 14, 2011.
“What does that mean, you ‘aren’t aware’?” Interview with Ayalon, March 14, 2016.
Eventually, the Shin Bet found a weak spot Interview with Ilan, January 26, 2016. Harel and Issacharoff, Seventh War, 181–88 (Hebrew).
“It’s that crazy Dichter” Dichter and his people flatly deny Ayalon’s allegations and argue that Arafat, and certainly Karmi, had no intention of stopping the fighting. Yitzhak Ilan, who was in charge of the assassination operation against Karmi, says, “The claim that it was only after Karmi’s elimination that the Tanzim began carrying out suicide terror attacks is an outright lie. He had dispatched two suicide bombers previously, but it simply didn’t work. We located one of them, and the other lit a cigarette while on his way, detonated the bomb, and his body was blown to pieces in a deserted place. Karmi was in the midst of preparing a third terror attack when we killed him.” Interviews with Dichter, November 4, 2010, and Ilan, January 26, 2016.
“I call it the banality of evil” Interview with Ayalon, March 14, 2016.
In times of war, the law falls silent Interview with Menachem Finkelstein, July 18, 2012. Among those young officers was Dr. Roi Scheindorff, a New York lawyer who became one of the youngest ever appointed a deputy attorney general in charge of Israel’s fight to avoid having its officials prosecuted in international tribunals because of their involvement in assassinations and targeted killings.
a top-secret legal opinion signed by Finkelstein IDF Advocate General, “Striking Against Persons Directly Involved in Attacking Israelis in the Framework of Events in the Warfare in Judea and Samaria and the Gaza District, January 18, 2001 (author’s archive, received from “Ellis”).
For the first time, a legal instrument had been proposed Ibid., page 1, paragraph 1.
“I submitted the opinion with trembling hands” Interview with Finkelstein, July 18, 2012.
a principle of “proportionality” must still apply IDF Advocate General, “Striking Against Persons,” 8.
“It was a stamp of confirmation” Chief Justice Aharon Barak wrote the court’s detailed judgment on assassinations. In a masterpiece of jurisprudence, the Supreme Court had ruled that the assassinations were legal in principle, as long as they met certain conditions, similar to those required in the advocate general’s opinion. Many of the principles in this judgment were adopted by the legal advisers of the American intelligence community and are today a cornerstone of the concept that permits targeted killings. Interview with Diskin, October 18, 2011. Supreme Court 769/02, Public Committee Against Torture v. State of Israel and Others, December 14, 2006. Comprehensive analysis of judgment in Scharia, Judicial Review of National Security, 58–66. Interview with Diskin, October 23, 2011.
In his desk, Prime Minister Sharon kept a booklet Interview with Weissglass, June 11, 2012. The foreign minister
of Canada, Bill Graham, visited Sharon at his bureau on May 26, 2002, to plead with him to stop the assassinations. “These are illegal acts,” the minister insisted. In the middle of his heated speech, military secretary Galant brought in a note. Sharon read it to himself, and then out loud, in English so the Canadian would understand. A Hamas member, according to a Shin Bet report, had just left Jenin for Israel, carrying a backpack with nine kilograms of explosives, screws, and nails. The Shin Bet and the air force were requesting permission to kill him. “Mr. Minister,” Sharon asked with the hint of a smile, “you tell me, yes, what would you do in my place? Authorize? But you’ve said it’s illegal. Not authorize? And have the blood of the victims as your responsibility, and in your worst nightmares?”
“never to get into a fight with the Americans” Interview with Ariel Sharon, May 2002.
“It’s hard to believe as a Texan how small Israel is” Michael Abramowitz, “Bush Recalls 1998 Trip to Israel,” Washington Post, January 10, 2008.
“Sharon was in the clouds” Interview with Turgeman, June 28, 2011.
“After that, there was a perfect disproportion” In order to improve coordination between the countries, deputy assistant to the president Elliott Abrams ordered that a direct encrypted phone line be set up between the White House and Sharon’s office. “Our aim,” says Danny Ayalon, then the Israeli ambassador in Washington, “was to be certain that when the president woke up in the morning he would get the same intelligence picture in the Presidential Daily Briefing that Israel was seeing.” Interviews with Weissglass, June 11, 2012, and Ayalon, October 9, 2012.
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