Israel's Asymmetric Wars (Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy)

The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy Series Editor, Christian Lequesne This series consists of works emanating from the foremost French researchers from Sciences Po, Paris. Sciences Po was founded in 1872 and is today one of the most prestigious universities for teaching and research in social sciences in France, recognized worldwide. This series focuses on the transformations of the international arena, in a world where the state, though its sovereignty is questioned, reinvents itself. The series explores the effects on international relations and the world economy of regionalization, globalization (not only of trade and finance but also of culture), and transnational f lows at large. This evolution in world affairs sustains a variety of networks from the ideological to the criminal or terrorist. Besides the geopolitical transformations of the globalized planet, the new political economy of the world has a decided impact on its destiny as well, and this series hopes to uncover what that is. Published by Palgrave Macmillan: Politics in China: Moving Frontiers edited by Françoise Mengin and Jean-Louis Rocca Tropical Forests, International Jungle: The Underside of Global Ecopolitics by Marie-Claude Smouts, translated by Cynthia Schoch The Political Economy of Emerging Markets: Actors, Institutions and Financial Crises in Latin America by Javier Santiso Cyber China: Reshaping National Identities in the Age of Information edited by Françoise Mengin With Us or Against Us: Studies in Global Anti-Americanism edited by Denis Lacorne and Tony Judt Vietnam’s New Order: International Perspectives on the State and Reform in Vietnam edited by Stéphanie Balme and Mark Sidel Equality and Transparency: A Strategic Perspective on Affirmative Action in American Law by Daniel Sabbagh, translated by Cynthia Schoch and John Atherton Moralizing International Relations: Called to Account by Ariel Colonomos, translated by Chris Turner Norms over Force: The Enigma of European Power by Zaki Laidi, translated from the French by Cynthia Schoch Democracies at War against Terrorism: A Comparative Perspective edited by Samy Cohen, translated by John Atherton, Roger Leverdier, Leslie Piquemal, and Cynthia Schoch

Justifying War? From Humanitarian Intervention to Counterterrorism edited by Gilles Andréani and Pierre Hassner, translated by John Hulsey, LesliePiquemal, Ros Schwartz, and Chris Turner An Identity for Europe: The Relevance of Multiculturalism in EU Construction edited by Riva Kastoryano, translated by Susan Emanuel The Politics of Regional Integration in Latin America: Theoretical and Comparative Explorations by Olivier Dabène Central and Eastern Europe: Europeanization and Social Change by François Bafoil, translated by Chris Turner Building Constitutionalism in China edited by Stéphanie Balme and Michael W. Dowdle In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia by Marlène Laruelle Organized Crime and States: The Hidden Face of Politics edited by Jean-Louis Briquet and Gilles Favarel-Garrigues Israel’s Asymmetric Wars by Samy Cohen, translated by Cynthia Schoch

Israel’s Asymmetric Wars Samy Cohen Translated by Cynthia Schoch

ISRAEL’S ASYMMETRIC WARS

Copyright © Editions du Seuil, 2010. All rights reserved. This book is a translation of Tsahal à l’épreuve du terrorisme, published in France by Editions du Seuil, March 2009. ISBN: 978–2–02–083823–8 First published in 2010 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10444–0 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cohen, Samy. [Tsahal à l'épreuve du terrorisme. English] Israel's asymmetric wars / Samy Cohen ; translated from the French by Cynthia Schoch. p. cm.—(Sciences Po series in international relations and political economy) Includes bibliographical references and index ISBN 978–0–230–10444–0 (alk. paper) 1. Terrorism—Government policy—Israel—History. 2. Asymmetric warfare—Israel—History. 3. Israel. Tseva haganah le-Yisra'el. 4. Israel— Military policy. 5. National security—Israel—History. 6. Intifada, 1987–1993. 7. Al-Aqsa Intifada, 2000– I. Title. HV6433.I75C6413 2010 363.325095694—dc22

2010009100

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2010 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To my “Better Three-Quarters” without whom this book would never have been

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CON T E N T S

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction

1

Part I A Genealogy of “Disproportionate Response” One

Asymmetric Warfare: A Challenge for Democracies

11

The Roots of a Doctrine

27

Three “Peace for Galilee” or the Making of a New Insurgency

43

Four

57

Two

How the IDF Popularized the First Intifada

Part II The Handling of the Second Intifada Five

Botched Engagement in the Intifada

73

Six

Tightening the Screws

93

Seven

The Counterproductive Virtuosity of Targeted Killings

109

Eight

The Resilience of Israeli Democracy

127

Nine

Strategic Inconsistencies

139

Conclusion: The Only Enemy That Can Defeat the IDF . . .

151

Notes

167

Bibliography

181

Index

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

I would like to express my gratitude to all those who helped me write this book. It first goes to the office of the vice president for research of Sciences Po as well as to Christophe Jaffrelot, director of CERI from 2000 to 2008, who offered me inestimable support. My thanks also go to Christian Lequesne, current CERI director, for his invaluable help in securing financing for this translation. I also wish to thank all the political figures, experts, actors, and witnesses who agreed to meet with me: Yossi Alpher, consultant on political-military issues, former advisor to Prime Minister Ehud Barak and cofounder of the Israeli-Palestinian Web site for dialogue www. bitterlemons.org; Yossi Adiri, colonel, former defense attaché at the Israeli embassy in Paris; Aviv Amshalem, captain (reserve); Uzi Arad, former director of the Institute for Policy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya and current president of the National Security Council; Dani Arditi, brigadier general (reserve), former president of the National Security Council; General Christian Baptiste, former defense attaché at the French embassy in Tel Aviv; Yehuda Ben Meir, senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University; General Bertrand Binnendijk, former defense attaché at the French embassy in Tel Aviv; Shlomo Brom, brigadier general (reserve), former director of the Strategic Planning Division in the Planning Branch of the General Staff, Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University; Oded Cameron, captain (reserve); Ilan Cohen, former director-general of the Prime Minister’s Office under Ariel Sharon; Ran Cohen, former Meretz Knesset member; Uzi Dayan, general (reserve), former deputy chief of staff, former president of the National Security Council; Arik Dyamant, president and founder of Ha-Ometz-Le-Sarev (“The Courage to Refuse”); Yitzhak Eitan, general (reserve), former commander

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Acknowledgments

of Central Command (2001–2004); Zahava Galon, former Meretz Knesset member; Boaz Ganor, director of the Institute for CounterTerrorism, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya; Shlomo Gazit, general (reserve), first Coordinator of Government Operations in the Administered Territories after the Six Day War, head of military intelligence after the Yom Kippur War, former Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University; lieutenant colonel Michel Goya; Guy Grossman, lieutenant (reserve); Efraim Halevy, general (reserve), former director of the Mossad and former president of the National Security Council; Ariel (Elie) Levitte, former deputy director-general of the Israeli Atomic Energy Commission; Dan Meridor, Likud Knesset member, former Justice Minister (1988–1992), Finance Minister under Benyamin Netanyahu government in 1996 and president of the Jerusalem Foundation, Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy since February 2009; Ilan Mizrahi, former deputy director of Mossad, former president of the National Security Council; Jessica Montel, president of B’Tselem; Noam Neuman, lieutenant colonel, member of the international law division of the military prosecutor’s office; Noam Ohana, sergeant (reserve); Dani Rothschild, general (reserve), president of the Council for Peace and Security; Yehuda Shaul, president and founder of Shovrim Shtika (“Breaking the Silence”); Tamir Sorek, sergeant-major (reserve); Itamar Yaar, colonel (reserve), former member of the National Security Council; Aviezer Yaari, brigadier general (reserve); Eran Yanowski, sergeant (reserve); Dan Yakir, legal adviser, Association of Civil Rights; as well as all those who preferred to remain nameless (and who appear in this book under one of their initials). This book also owes a considerable debt of gratitude to my Israeli colleagues who helped me find my way through the often tortuous meanders of Israeli defense policy and the army: Yitzhak Ben-Israel, Elie Barnavi and Yoram Peri, professors at Tel Aviv University; Yoram Schweitzer, senior research fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), Tel Aviv University; Stuart Cohen and Efraim Inbar, professors at Bar-Ilan University; Yagil Levy, professor at the Open University of Raanana; Gabi Sheffer, Eyal Ben-Ari and Claude Klein, professors at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem; Uri Ben-Eliezer, professor at the University of Haifa; Ram Erez, a PhD student at Tel Aviv University who was one of the first to guide me. My thanks also go to the Israeli journalists Amos Harel, Amira Hass, Avi Isacharoff, and Gideon Levy at Haaretz newspaper; Ron Ben Yishai at Yediot Aharonot; Hanan Grinberg and Ali Waked at Ynet, Yediot

Acknowledgments

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Aharonot; Ofer Shelah at Maariv newspaper; Shlomi Eldar at Arutz 10 television; Dan Muggia and Haim Tal, freelance journalists. I also wish to thank my old friends Elie (Eliahou) Cohen, Roni and Ovadia Keidar, for their help and encouragement; Israel Elad Altman, at the Institute for Policy and Strategy, Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya; my colleagues at Sciences Po Astrid von Busekist (one of the first to have encouraged me to “work on Israel”) and Alain Dieckhoff; Anna-Maria Lodato at Arte television; Uri Amitai at the Foreign Affairs Ministry audiovisual department. Catherine Nabokov, at the Seuil French publishing house, proofread the French manuscript with a vigilance and rigor that prevented me from making many a faux pas. Cynthia Schoch put all her talent and energy in translating this book into English. Thanks also to Miriam Perier who prepared the manuscript with great skill and patience. Any mistakes that may be contained in this book are naturally mine and mine alone.

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Introduction

The IDF (Israel Defense Forces) is a young army that has gained considerable military experience through the prosecution of seven wars in over six decades: the Independence War (1948), the Sinai War (1956), the Six-Day War (1967), the War of Attrition (1968–1970), the Yom Kippur War (1973), Operation Peace for Galilee in Lebanon (1982– 1985) and the Second Lebanon War ( July–August 2006). Each of these wars has produced a wealth of journalistic and academic literature on their causes, the course of operations, and their consequences. This book, however, is devoted to Israel’s “little wars,”1 those it has conducted against terrorists and guerillas who have attacked Israel. Israel has experienced several waves of terrorism since the state was established: during the 1950s, from fedayeens2 who infiltrated the country from Egypt and Jordan to attack farming villages; in the 1970s, the Black September attacks against Israeli civilians abroad, the most significant being the slaughter of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics in 1972; attacks on villages in northern Israel such as the one against Kiryat Shmona in 1974 that left 16 civilians dead, followed a few months later by the massacre of 24 schoolchildren that also left 62 wounded in the village of Maalot; and the spate of terrorism in the 1990s in the wake of the Oslo Accords. The second Intifada (“uprising” in Arabic) ushered in a new era of violence that resembled no other. Within the span of a few months, Israel experienced a wave of suicide bombings that was unprecedented in its history. The fundamental question posed here is how the army has handled its fight against terrorism. My intention is not to criticize the IDF or sing it praises. Nor is it to discuss the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict in its own right, nor the phenomenon of Palestinian terrorism, which others have already analyzed in minute detail. It is to try to understand

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Israel’s Asymmetric Wars

how Israeli democracy deals with an asymmetric type of conf lict, the “battle of the twenty-first century,” as the Israelis themselves call it.3 Why This Book This book, like many others, has a history behind it, which I would like to mention brief ly as it will shed light on its organization and structure. It is first of all the detailed account of an attentive observer of Israel and its army since childhood and who had actually lived there for over ten years. For many years of my research career at CERISciences Po as a specialist in foreign policy, the “exotic lands” that were my field of study and to which I devoted several books and articles had long been the corridors of the French Presidential Palace, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and to a lesser extent the Defense Ministry. I had developed a keen interest for the work methods of French policymakers, their relationships of power and inf luence, and the mechanisms of decision making in France’s foreign and defense policy. When the second Intifada broke out in September 2000, it degenerated into a violent, bloody conf lict. The death toll rose high on both sides. Murderous folly seemed to have gained hold of this region prone to f lare-ups. The more I observed IDF modus operandi, the less I understood its rationale. The soldiers often displayed an aggressiveness and brutality toward the Palestinian population that was incomprehensible to me. As time went by, international condemnation accumulated. Was this aggressiveness necessary? What was the security rationale behind it? “The IDF has become brutal,” some observers remarked. But why? Was this tightening of the screws part of a strategy? Others, rising to Israel’s defense, explained that the fault lay with Palestinian armed groups that took the population hostage, provoked the soldiers, and forced them to fight in populated areas. And, to what extent could the harm done to the Palestinian civilian population be ascribed to “blunders” and “slipups” on the part of inexperienced soldiers, as the army general staff has so often claimed? Some sociologists explained this aggressiveness as sociological changes that occurred in the army in the late 1990s with the arrival of large numbers of soldiers from countries or social backgrounds that paid little heed to ethical questions and wished to distinguish themselves in the missions their commanders gave them. Was that to mean that it was the soldiers who “set the tone” and shaped the IDF modus operandi? This seemed more than doubtful

Introduction

3

to me, having had some experience, albeit a long time ago, with how the chain of command functioned in this army. The army I once knew taught respect for the civilian population and the safeguard of their security. Commanders spoke of tohar haneshek, meaning “purity of arms,” an expression that means nothing to those who have not been part of this army—“as if arms could be pure,” one observer of Israel remarked. The IDF, like any army, has typically developed its own jargon that makes little sense to anyone who is not part of it. This expression refers to a set of ethical norms and rules to abide by in battle. Such rules moreover can be found, phrased differently, in army manuals of democratic countries such as France and the United States. The ethical code as it appears on the IDF spokesman’s Web site stipulates that soldiers must respect the “purity of arms”: they will “use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property.”4 I tried to understand what actually went on in the field. Was the “brutalization” of the IDF a reality? If brutalization had occurred, when did it date from? What periods could serve as a basis for comparison? Has the “purity of arms” always been honored? Had those who had fought in past wars conducted themselves in an exemplary fashion? What constraints weighed on the military in this type of conf lict? How had the IDF evolved and why? What was left of the values it had instilled in its soldiers? Armed with these simple questions, I set down to work reading and interviewing actors and witnesses in Israel. Three significant elements fairly soon emerged that would be decisive for my further research: 1. The complexity of the Israeli reality. The questions I was asking myself had no clear-cut answers. In its antiterror struggle the IDF is fighting a multiform battle combining defensive action (such as checkpoints or protection of the settlements) and offensive missions such as the arrest of activists and targeting killings. An overall judgment of such diverse activities was impossible. Even the least attentive observation of the IDF modus operandi produces a mitigated assessment. Some units behave brutally, others with restraint. Observation of modus operandi such as targeted killings

4

Israel’s Asymmetric Wars indicates that although in some cases the army takes utmost precaution, in others it is less concerned with sparing civilians. 2. The significance of the very nature of this type of conflict— an asymmetric one—and this does not only apply to Israel. A number of countries, including France and Great Britain in their colonial possessions, and the United States in Vietnam, have been faced with the same type of conf lict and experienced the same dilemmas. Still today, democratic countries are militarily engaged against armed groups they define as “terrorists.” This is particularly the case of the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France, the Netherlands, Italy, and Canada, engaged since September 11 either in Afghanistan or Iraq, or in both theaters of operations at once. It is also the case of India, the victim of terrorist attacks since the early 1990s and which has fought against armed militias in Indian Kashmir and Islamist groups based in Pakistan. The question of the “right strategy” to use in the face of irregular groups is at the heart of all these preoccupations. It is also one of the great challenges posed to democracies and that will continue to be posed in an international environment marked by the threat of terrorism. At the time these pages are being written, the debate is raging about how to respond to Taliban attacks in Afghanistan. NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) countries have lost many soldiers there without managing to put down the Afghan insurgents, without stabilizing the country’s political and economic situation and with the perspective that this war might be lost for the Westerners who engaged in it to destroy a regime that backed al Qaeda, perpetrator of the September 11 attacks. I thus had to broaden my perimeter of knowledge, look into clashes between various regular armies and guerilla forces, to provide my research with an analytical framework that would enable me to expand the initial rather narrow “roadmap” I had set for myself. 3. The importance of History. In reading the work of historians and political scientists on Israel’s “little wars,” on those it conducted in the 1950s against what were called “infiltrators,” against the PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization) in Lebanon in the 1970s–1980s, then against the Hezbollah (“Party of God”) in the 1980s–1990s and the fight to overcome the popular uprising that was the first Intifada, one central fact became clear to me: the strong resemblances between past and present in the soldiers’ and officers’ behavior, even all the way up to the general staff. If one was to understand the latter, one also had to look into the former. As a

Introduction

5

result, this book, which was originally meant to deal exclusively with the second Intifada, was considerably rebalanced in favor of a more theoretical and comparative approach taking into account not only the past of Israel but also the experience of other countries. The Researcher and the Activist Investigating how the IDF has conducted its fight against Palestinian armed groups inevitably means running the risk of appearing to take sides in the eyes of many Israelis who directly or indirectly suffer from terrorist attacks. The question might even seem hostile from the outset, as a way of putting on trial an army that “was only doing its job,” which is to protect the population from such attacks. “Whatever gives you the right to judge the IDF when terrorist Palestinian organizations deliberately strike at Israeli civilians?” I have often heard say. This type of research will probably also arouse hostility from Palestinians who will find that it does not harshly enough condemn the Israeli occupation responsible for their ills, that it does not make sufficient mention of their day-to-day plight and the reasons that have induced some of them to embrace violence. It is in full awareness of these facts that I examine these highly sensitive and emotional issues for both the Israelis and the Palestinians, not to mention their staunch supporters. It is with full knowledge of the issues that I take the risk of seeming overly indulgent with the IDF if I venture to put into perspective some of the accusations levied against it, or if on the contrary I seem unfair toward “an army only doing its job” by daring to assert that in some cases the Israeli military has violated international law. But to both I will answer that I am a researcher who seeks (and also attempts to find), not an activist defending a cause. The Israeli-Palestinian conf lict has its experts in emotions and its specialists in reason. The role of the latter is to attempt to shed light, not to criticize or justify. Research and advocacy are two separate realms of activity, even if it is often hard to maintain an airtight seal between them. My work fits into an overall thinking about the ability of a democracy to combat irregular groups and its handling of an asymmetric conf lict. Readers who are expecting a moral condemnation of one side or the other will naturally be disappointed. I chose to describe the situation as I perceived it. I have tried to understand the logic of the actors involved and clarify the terms of the debate, striving constantly to stave off my own demons.

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On these particularly sensitive subjects, the researcher is often subject to ideological pressure that usually wears a label claiming it to be “scientific.” An anonymous academic who was asked by an academic journal to give an opinion on an article outline I had submitted criticized me for using politically incorrect language by talking about “the IDF,” instead of confining myself to “the Israeli army.” According to him, the use of “IDF” was not an objective way to refer to an occupying force, it being the acronym for “Israel Defense Force.” To go along with this logic would imply renaming all organizations and institutions according to one’s ideological bent. The researcher should not allow himself to be intimidated by this sort of intellectual blackmail. All Israeli and Palestinian names are kept as such in this work. Nor should the researcher allow the warring parties to dictate “conceptual” definitions, as semantics is a preferred instrument in their struggle. Two examples illustrate the trap that can be laid for us. Islamic armed groups that organize suicide bombings attempt to impose a vocabulary that is more compatible with the religious values of the Quran, which prohibits suicide. They thus use the term “martyr operation.” The academic world sometimes yields under pressure, wherefore the use of substitute expressions such as “volunteer death” or “offensive suicide” that avoids using the offending word or softens its effect. Still others use the term but take care to place it between quotes. Yet suicide is an operative concept ratified by the work of Emile Durkheim.5 For the social scientist, it carries no positive or negative connotation. One must be similarly vigilant with the terminology of the Israeli army. All Palestinian militants, whether they attack soldiers or civilians, are defined as “terrorists” (mekhabel). Here, too, it is important to try to stick to the definitions used in the social sciences, however imperfect they may be. There are several competing definitions for the word terrorism. Some scholars, such as the Quebecois academic CharlesPhilippe David, define it as “a usually violent, spectacular and highly publicized act that aims to convince an audience or public opinion of a message that intends to intimidate or force a government to alter or abandon its conduct or its policy. Terrorism can be unpredictable or systematic, but it is always meant to attract attention.”6 For sociologist Isabelle Sommier, “terrorism disregards the laws and conventions of war; it attacks civilians; it is always indiscriminate and arbitrary by virtue of the disjunction it makes between victims and target.”7 Raymond Aron held that “an action of violence is labeled ‘terrorist’ when its psychological effects are out of proportion to its purely physical results.”8 The High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change

Introduction

7

report (A/59/565) to the UN secretary-general in 2004 defines terrorism as “any action [. . .] that is intended to cause death or serious bodily harm to civilians or non-combatants, when the purpose of such an act, by its nature or context, is to intimidate a population, or to compel a Government or an international organization to do or to abstain from doing any act.” These definitions all place emphasis on the target— civilians—the intent—to sway wills—and the modus operandi—to give their act as much resonance as possible. They apply well to the wave of suicide attacks in the years 2001–2005. On the other hand, attacks against soldiers operating in occupied territories cannot be considered as “terrorist.” The Question of Sources Official figures supplied by either camp should be used with caution. Incidents between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians often give rise to conf licting versions aiming to rally media attention and the support of international public opinion, and which are often resolved only well after the events, sometimes never. Casualty statistics, for instance, are a point of contention in battle, especially in an asymmetric conf lict. Not all disputed cases give rise to investigations, either because the context does not lend itself to inquiry (due to the impossibility of gaining access to witnesses in a time of violent clashes, for instance), or because it is not always easy to locate witnesses, or again because Israeli military police investigators do not all speak Arabic. That said, many facts have fortunately been clearly established. Scores of testimonials exist, which have been collected by soldiers’ organizations such as Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence)9 or by NGOs such as B’Tselem.10 This Israeli NGO is reputed for its reliability. The quality of its investigations conducted among both the Palestinian and Israeli population is such to make major international human rights organizations pale with envy. Each of its reports includes a response by the spokesperson for the army or the ministry involved. It is then up to the reader-citizen to form his/her own opinion. The NGO’s work generally receives wide coverage. Its findings must nevertheless be regarded with a degree of caution, for however reliable they may be, they do not always supply very precise indications on the scale of the acts the army is accused of: Are they isolated acts or a recurrent phenomenon? More generally speaking, the statistics provided by NGOs are often incomplete, dwelling on extreme cases without paying attention to the

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overall picture. The Israeli media, too, increasingly publish more and more information, which one must nevertheless take the trouble to double-check. Legal proceedings have taken place, producing convictions or acquittals. Serious investigations, such as those carried out by Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff or by Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelah, shed appreciable light on the subject.11 Attempting to make the most of 30 years of interview research experience, I myself conducted interviews with some 60 civilian and military actors and witnesses for this book: simple soldiers in combat units, colonels, generals, politicians, members of secret service organizations, journalists, human rights NGO officials, and academics. I spoke to “ordinary” people at great length. Israeli society lends itself to investigation like few others in such circumstances, even when the subject remains highly sensitive and topical. It is certainly not easy to gain access to active soldiers or officers, but Israel is an open society. One can always find among one’s acquaintances someone who will offer to introduce you to a friend who is a sergeant, a son who is a captain, a neighbor who is a lieutenant colonel or a general. With the exception of the fringe on the extreme right, I did not get the impression that this society refused to discuss the ethical issue of war in the Occupied Territories. I never met with any hostility to these questions on part of the people I approached. This book has its limits and its difficulties. It does not purport to know everything. The conf lict is far from over and the army still keeps many secrets to itself. Guidelines for opening fire, for instance, have been secret since the beginning of the second Intifada, as the army is wary of the use armed groups will inevitably make of them. The facts must, therefore, be reconstructed from interviews using the caution that such a subject requires. This book thus does not have the ambition to take definitive stock of the situation. And so I cannot help but subscribe to the statement made by Claude Lévi-Strauss: “In a subject such as this, scientific knowledge advances haltingly and is stimulated by contention and doubt. Unlike metaphysics, it does not insist on all or nothing. For this book to be worthwhile, it is not necessary in my view that it should be assumed to embody the truth for years to come and with regard to the tiniest details. I shall be satisfied if it is credited with the modest achievement of having left a difficult problem in a rather less unsatisfactory state than it was before.”12

PA RT

I

A Genealogy of “Disproportionate Response”

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CH A P T E R

ON E

Asymmetric Warfare: A Challenge for Democracies

The Pitfalls of Asymmetric Warfare What is asymmetric warfare and what are the challenges it poses for states? Is there an appropriate way to deal with it? It is certainly one of the most difficult forms of warfare to handle, having little in common with a conventional war between two opposing armies that are physically distanced from the local population. Various terms that have been used to designate this new kind of warfare, depending on the scholar or the period, include “low-intensity,”1 “irregular,”2 “asymmetric,”3 “fourth generation,”4 and “hybrid.”5 The notion of asymmetric warfare seems the most appropriate for the subject at hand. It has its own particular rules, is characterized by cruelty and requires an imaginative, ad hoc response. All wars are cruel, one could rightly argue, but for combatants trained to fight in a conventional war, this kind is even crueler. Asymmetric warfare is above all a response of the “weak” to the “strong” that enjoy military, quantitative, and qualitative superiority.6 It opposes states and nongovernmental actors, “irregular combatants,” “insurgents,” “guerrillas,” or “terrorists.” The use of guerrilla tactics by the weak, when up against a powerful army, is one of its most classic forms. “Irregular combatants,” “insurgents,” and “guerrillas” are not necessarily terrorists, but they become so when they correspond to one of the definitions laid out in the introduction of this book. Asymmetric warriors use methods that enable them to get around traditional military force. They appear suddenly in small groups to

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perpetrate isolated attacks in order to destabilize their powerful enemy, make its missions costly in terms of human lives as well as the economy, erode the support of its public opinion and make it pay a price that is excessive for the stakes it is fighting for. It is essentially psychological warfare, which strives more to destroy the enemy’s morale than its forces. The weak take the lead in initiating hostilities and thus have the advantage of surprise. For the powerful, it is a conf lict with no fixed front line or clearly identified enemy. Wars of decolonization are a good example of an asymmetric conf lict.7 Second, it is a war among civilian populations. As legal scholar Emanuel Gross explains, “For the terrorists, the battleground is the civilian hinterland and not the military front.”8 In fact, the modus operandi for armed groups consists in acting under the guise of civilians or using the population as a human shield. They generally operate from residential buildings in towns and villages, using them as “sanctuaries,” or hide within crowds of demonstrators. They use women and teenagers either as mere auxiliaries or for attack missions, thereby making the entire population suspect. The aim of this strategy is to make the regular armed forces fire on civilians. If they succeed in provoking a disproportionate response to their attacks in the form of massacres or atrocities, the terrorists feel they have won the day by demonstrating the inhumanity of the state they are fighting against, thereby justifying the armed attacks on its population. This kind of warfare is asymmetric not only with reference to the balance of armed forces but also from a legal standpoint as well. When faced with terrorist acts, all countries have the right and the duty to protect their citizens. That duty is even more imperative in a democracy, where leaders must account for their actions, than in any other political regime. The right of self-defense is stipulated in article 51 of the United Nations Charter. It mentions that this right can be exercised in the event of an attack against a member state of the UN. But a state has the right to defend itself against an attack launched by an armed group operating out of the territory of another state.9 However, that does not mean an attacked state can do whatever it likes. A number of fundamental treaties, such as the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907, the Geneva Convention of 1949, and the Additional Protocols of 1977, establish clear limits to the use of armed force by states.10 They are all based on the principles of discernment and proportionality. With respect to an army of occupation, and regarding the protection of civilians in times of war (art. 33), the Geneva Convention stipulates “collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation

Asymmetric Warfare

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or of terrorism are prohibited.”11 Proportionality signifies that there must be a “reasonable” correspondence between the military means employed and the destruction caused by the enemy, as well as between those means and the goal anticipated.12 The problem is that the “asymmetric warriors” feel entitled to do everything that is clearly laid out as being strictly forbidden in the conventions concerning wartime conduct ( jus in bello), of which they are not signatories.13 Article 51 §2 of the additional Protocol I 1977 summarizes the forbidden sectors in these terms: “The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.” The legal arsenal developed in international conventions encompasses the techniques of asymmetric warfare in a far broader way: attacks on civilians, the use of noncombatants to protect combatants, attacks on undefended locations, forced enrolment of children, and such others. International provisions also prohibit the use of arms that exacerbate lethal properties and cause additional and indiscriminate harm (such as nails in makeshift bombs), as well as methods that typify asymmetric warfare such as “perfidy.”14 International conventions target the entire legal rationale of asymmetric warfare by prohibiting “acts that deceive the adversary’s good faith by using to hostile ends the obligation to respect the rules of armed conf lict.”15 But armed groups and democracies don’t fight with the same weapons. The rules of war are based on the principle of reciprocity. But in the case of an asymmetric conf lict, armed groups do not respect or recognize such laws, even though they offer them a certain amount of protection. What can democracies do in this case? Negotiate a political solution, some would say. Such a solution is undoubtedly conceivable eventually, but not while bombs are exploding and destroying cafes, buses, and houses. Negotiating under such conditions would be giving in to pressure and, far from calming the terrorists, running the risk of strengthening their determination by providing proof of the effectiveness and legitimacy of their violence.16 The Dilemma of Democracies Thus, democratic states have a choice only between two unsatisfactory solutions. They can either fight the armed groups while strictly respecting the norms laid down by international conventions that ban them

14

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from entering inhabited areas or searching homes for arms caches and activists, which means allowing their hinterland to become a sanctuary and admitting defeat even before the fight begins, or should be willing to combat in an urban or paraurban environment. And that would entail taking the risk not only of committing “blunders,” but also of triggering a chain of unintended consequences: increased support for the combatants from the local population, international protest, and opposition within their own public opinion. These two equally bad alternatives have led certain authors, including the military historian Martin Van Creveld, to assert that states engaged in this kind of warfare are doomed to fail. Citing multiple cases (Indochina, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Algeria, Sri Lanka, Sudan, and Kurdistan, among others), he attempts to show that “notwithstanding this ruthlessness and these military advantages, the ‘counterinsurgency’ forces failed in every case.”17 He explains that not only have all colonial powers failed, but so have their successors, those who have attempted to take their place in more recent times. In 1975 Andrew Mack was already raising the question of “why big nations lose small wars.” His answer was that states engaged in this kind of warfare are not risking their existence, while the stakes insurgents are fighting for are vital.18 However, there is a nuance here: History is not written in advance and reality has shown that the rules are not absolute. There are numerous examples to the contrary, because there are different kinds of insurrections, and the contexts in which they take place are dissimilar. The Greek Communist insurrection, which grew out of the German occupation, was defeated in 1949. Government troops prevailed, due on the one hand to the break between Tito and Stalin that deprived the insurgents of the Yugoslavian hinterland, and on the other hand to the combat errors committed by the insurgency.19 Second, Van Creveld’s remark most often concerns states that are not involved in a struggle for their survival, which can, therefore, deem in the long run that it is not worth the effort and that their presence on foreign soil is far too costly. But there are cases where a state may consider that it is fighting for its own survival. Such is the case for Israel, which in face of the wave of terrorist attacks in 2001–2004 deemed that its vital interests were at stake. Israel’s case is different from classic colonization of the kind that began in the sixteenth century and ended in the 1960s. The Israelis are all fighting with the idea that they have no other land to return to, contrary to all other instances of colonization. Although they considered withdrawing from the West Bank and

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the Gaza Strip, occupied during the Six-Day War, the concessions they were willing to make ended there. From the Strategy of Terror . . . Above all it should not be forgotten that many insurrections have been crushed with considerable bloodshed. The path generally taken by dictatorships employs excessive brutality, atrocities, massive destruction of combatants and all those suspected of helping them. Their methods involve systematic torture as well as deportation and massive “disappearances,” destruction of property and homes. Many authoritarian regimes have engaged in civil warfare against their own citizens. They are killed without qualms, such as in Hafez El Assad’s Syria and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. The use of force may know no limits.20 The fierce repression in the city of Hama, Syria in 1982, and the crushed insurrections in Iraq in 1991 highlight the ease with which authoritarian regimes can eliminate an insurrection movement. During the civil war in Algeria in the 1990s, the Algerian army led a “total war” against Islamists. Abuse was systematic and civilian massacres numerous. Over 20,000 people were reported missing between 1994 and 1996.21 In Chechnya, Russian forces bombarded villages with canon fire. According to the Memorial Association, the Chechen conf lict in 1994–1996 resulted in 50,000 victims, and there were about as many deaths when it resumed in 1999.22 “Russian forces,” notes Gérard Chaliand, “resorted to unbridled repression and also targeted all the commanders who enjoyed any prestige.”23 The strength of an authoritarian regime in fighting guerrilla warfare lies in the ease with which it can transform itself into a “terrorist state.” “Whereas a democratic regime has to take both national and international opinion into account [ . . . ], as well as try to respect human rights and maintain a sense of discipline in the midst of war, an authoritarian regime can utilize ‘barbarity’ in order to crush those who challenge it. In short, it can descend to the same level as its opponents and adopt their techniques of war.”24 That is what the Germans did systematically in the countries they occupied during the Second World War, as they tried to defeat those resisting occupation. They arrested, tortured, and killed whoever was present when an attack by the resistance took place.25 General Massu’s strong-arm tactics enabled a democracy such as France to overcome terrorism in Algiers, even though years later General de Gaulle, the French chief of state, chose independence, snatching victory from the military for political reasons.

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Thus there is at least one “winning” strategy, that of terror and “barbarism,” to quote the term used by Ivan Arreguin-Toft.26 But democracies in the contemporary era have more qualms about resorting to such tactics. Democracies are increasingly revolted by intentional attacks on civilians. The presence of the media in the most remote geographical areas, the judicialization of international relations, activism by humanitarian NGOs and human rights groups, and international mobilization against weapons liable to hit civilians—antipersonnel mines, cluster and submunitions bombs, chemical weapons—have created a climate in democracies that is very hostile to mass violence against civilians. One could not imagine the leader of a democratic state taking up Alexis de Tocqueville’s assessment at the time of the takeover of Algeria: “I think all means must be employed to aff lict the tribes [ . . . ]. I believe that the right to wage war gives us permission to ravage the country and that we must do it either by destroying the crops at harvest time or all the time, making those quick raids known as razzias, the goal of which is to seize men or livestock.”27 The methods employed by France during the Algerian War would undoubtedly provoke far greater resistance nowadays than what was expressed at the time by intellectuals ( Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre VidalNaquet, Raymond Aron), the French Communist Party, and a few rare high-ranking members of the military like General Pâris de Bollardière, who resigned in protest against the use of torture in the army. If democracies used the same methods as dictatorships, they would have less trouble overcoming irregular groups. But what was legitimate in the days of the colonial wars is far less so today. The quagmire experienced by American troops in the early years of the Iraq War shows the extreme difficulty a democratic regime has of defeating a guerrilla movement supported by its people, as well as the American army’s hesitation about carrying out the kind of brutal repression the Soviets implemented in Afghanistan in the years following the coup in 1979. . . . To That of “Minimum Force” So what can a democracy that prohibits the use of massive terror do? There are no easy answers or ideal formulas, but there are a few elementary principles and knowledge gained from the experience of counterinsurrectional operations conducted by countries such as France, Great Britain, and the United States. Attempts to ref lect on what has been

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called counterinsurrectional warfare date back to the 1950s and 1960s and even earlier—to the time of the great colonial conf licts.28 Most of the colonial powers alternated between a number of different strategies. During the Algerian War there were several competing schools. The “metropolitans” stressed the destruction of “rebel gangs,” while another movement (which set up the special administrative sections, or SAS) considered that the real element at stake was support for the local population, taking its inspiration from the “Lyautey method.” Lyautey believed that North Africa would eventually detach itself from France and that “the supreme goal of our policy [must be that] the separation take place painlessly and native populations continue to look upon France with affection.”29 The SAS proved to be a formidable tool for combating the FLN (National Liberation Front), thanks to the information it gathered among the population. A group of officers inspired by the Indochina War against the Vietminh, including Colonels Trinquier, Godard, and Argoud, tried to counteract the fear brought about by the FLN through “counterfear,” by resorting to counterterrorism.30 The victory in the battle of Algiers strengthened partisans of psychological warfare. Large military operations were abandoned in favor of constant psychological pressure on the civilian population. The British also vacillated between different strategies.31 In Malaya, for instance, they first took a purely military approach against the Communist guerrillas, then tried to “win their hearts and minds,” before adopting the strategy of minimum force.32 The “Lyautey method” and the method adopted by the British in Malaya gradually forced recognition as the most appropriate model in counterinsurrectional warfare. The Americans largely disregarded it during the Vietnam War to their own detriment. “Minimum force” is the source of two action principles. The first presupposes considering the civilian population as one of the keys for success, a central strategic factor and not merely an exclusively humanitarian problem. “The battle for the population is a major characteristic of the revolutionary war,” wrote French Lieutenant Colonel David Galula, who fought in the Algerian War, in 1964. Indeed the insurgent cannot win the war if he does not manage “to control” the population and “to get its active support.”33 “What makes it possible for the guerillas to survive and to expand?” Galula asks. “The complicity of the population.”34 The principle is clear: the strategy of terror toward the civilian population must be turned into one of “gentleness.” One of the main objectives of the antiguerrilla struggle is thus to obtain the active support of the population and cut the counterinsurgents off from it.

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The other basic principle is to make minimal use of armed force. The intensive use of armed force in this kind of war is counterproductive. It plays into the hands of the enemy. “A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty. The reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire,” notes David Galula.35 David Mockaitis on his part remarks that the British counterinsurgency strategy between 1945 and 1960 was based upon three principles: “Minimum force, civil-military cooperation, and tactical f lexibility.”36 An “intelligent” strategy consists above all in adapting to the new rules of asymmetric warfare, trying to exploit the enemy’s weaknesses and not playing the game it attempts to impose. These two ideas, which David Galula’s pivotal book was instrumental in reinforcing, have become vitally important today and are gaining favor in a number of countries, including the United States with its engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. It seems obvious, therefore, that a democracy that has established “lines it cannot cross,” or taboos in counterterrorist warfare, must consider a more subtle strategy combining defensive and offensive measures and initiatives of a political nature, with the aim of obtaining a degree of cooperation from the population and of dissociating combatants from noncombatants, in other words, a combination of coercive and positive measures designed to attain a certain neutrality—or even cooperation—from the civilian population. This strategy presumes the deployment of means aimed at neutralizing insurgents, without, however, using excessive force, which would only intensify resentment and contribute to the cycle of violence. Intelligence-gathering, occupying the space with infantry and spot checks are more bothersome to the enemy than seeking a crushing military defeat, which would be difficult to achieve due to the guerrillas’ ability to enlist new members. Recent studies by the Rand Corporation bear out the wisdom of this approach. Rand researchers compiled data concerning 648 terrorist groups from around the world catalogued from 1968 to 2006. One of their conclusions is that policing measures—infiltration, intelligence, arrests, and shadowing—are a more effective strategy: 40% of them were defeated in this manner while only 7% were defeated militarily; 10% achieved their goals and 43% reached political settlements with the state they were fighting against.37 An “appropriate” counterinsurrection seeks support from the population by not confusing it with the insurgents or showing contempt for it. This strategy requires steering a tight course, trying to maintain

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a balance between being effective in the fight against terrorism and respecting human rights. A democracy cannot afford to use brutal means that, instead of increasing its own safety, only serve to express the frustration of its commanders and the lassitude of its soldiers. The Need to Control Combat Units Strict control of field units is essential, for several reasons. First, because in many cases the intertwining between combatants and noncombatants makes it nearly impossible to respect the principle of discernment. Faced with an invisible enemy that hides among civilians, confusion in the heat of the battle is frequent. No army, however strong its moral code may be, can spare civilians entirely. It is close to impossible. These hits are not necessarily intentional or deliberate, or war crimes.38 Soldiers at checkpoints, for example, know they may be attacked at any moment. This is an extremely nerve-wracking situation that produces the “trigger-happy” syndrome. A unit’s lack of experience has in the past greatly contributed to an increase in this kind of blunder. Armed forces generally don’t speak the language of the country and have not been trained for police work. And they do not know how to deal with street demonstrations without making untimely use of their weapons. The military generally has a hard time adapting to this sort of mission, which places civilians at the center of their preoccupations. Their organizational culture,39 training, and the military ethos that has been instilled in them do not prepare them for such eventualities. The term “stress” has often been used to qualify this state of mind,40 which leads armies to set up excessive safety measures and to calculate very low safety margins for the civilian population. In their eyes, such operations do not warrant sacrificing the lives of soldiers. For soldiers who have learned to trust in values such as sacrifice, courage, and combat, there is nothing more stressful than contact with the population whose sensibility must be taken into account and who must be treated with subtlety. For armies strongly inf luenced by a culture of conventional war, the goal is to destroy the enemy and conquer its territory, not to conduct police operations, set up roadblocks, and make house searches. Subsequently, this kind of conf lict creates a climate of hatred between sides and indifference to the other’s suffering. Each side can see only the face of barbarity in the other. Combatants on both sides are seized by “an upsurge of public and private male-manliness.”41 This kind of warfare is conducive to illegal acts such as revenge and reprisals on

20

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civilians. Certain units that have suffered losses are eager to restore both their f louted honor and their unit’s deterrence capability. Units in the field have a tendency to overreact since they are often incapable of overcoming irregular combatants, are far from their home and country, morally weakened, and subject to humiliating, deadly attacks.42 They take it out on the local population in an attempt to force them to put pressure on the armed groups to stop their attacks, or merely to let off steam. In Haditha, Iraq in November 2005, members of an American army unit massacred 24 civilians, including 7 women and 3 children, in retaliation for the death of one of their fellow soldiers killed in the explosion of a makeshift bomb. According to Lifton, this type of reaction is reminiscent of the My Lay massacre that occurred on March 16, 1968, during the Vietnam War, when a company commanded by Lieutenant William Calley slaughtered about 500 villagers several days after suffering an attack that had ended in the deaths of many soldiers.43 “Revenge,” notes Éric David, “is a classic powerful driving force in violations of law in armed conf licts.”44 This slide into brutality, not to say atrocity, can happen very quickly, even for the army of a country such as Canada, which sees itself as altruistic and generous45 and as having a proponent of “moral” diplomacy. In 1993, during UN peacekeeping operations in Somalia, a 16-year-old Somali youth, Shidane Arone, was beaten to death after breaking into a Canadian military base to steal some equipment. His death was not a matter of legitimate defense. For the Canadian soldiers it was about teaching him a lesson, “bashing him up and throwing him over the barbed wire” so that the other Somali youths “would understand that their lives would be in danger if they came back.”46 French soldiers in Ivory Coast committed the same kind of crime: on May 13, 2005, Firmin Mahé, an Ivorian civilian arrested by a unit from Operation Licorne (unicorn) was smothered to death during his transfer to the city of Man. This kind of behavior not only has no effect on irregular combatants, but also weakens the counterterrorist struggle. It delegitimizes all the efforts made to gain international support. It offers these groups an excuse for their acts and “supplies them with the small number of additional recruits needed to sustain the terrorist activities.”47 The civilian and military leaders of a democracy must show how high they value the fact of distinguishing themselves from the terrorists. This attitude is not merely necessary on an ethical level, but it is also a strategic choice of prime importance. It is in the best interests of political leaders to maintain a mechanism of “democratic inhibition” through adequate training of combat units as well as by educating public opinion. It is

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their duty to explain that human rights violations are contrary to the values of democracy and, above all, that they weaken the fight against terrorism. A democracy must constantly prove that the actions designed to protect its citizens are “measured” and “proportional” to their military objectives—a “lesser evil.” It must not only defend its values, but also be attentive to what means it employs, to the proper training of its soldiers and to what kind of units it enlists. A Refusal to Be Fettered by International Law And yet, theory is often a long way from practice. Many countries do not apply the strategy of “minimum force.” Democracies feel entitled to commit human rights violations organized by their own political leaders and security agencies, including brutal treatment of prisoners, abuse, and torture. The prevailing reaction among democracies is not to be fettered by international law, which does not offer sufficient protection against groups that disregard it. Leaders have to defend their credibility with public opinion, and show that a democracy is not a regime that takes it on the chin without f linching in the name of socalled universal values. They also know that if they do not do everything in their power to defend their citizens, they will be penalized in the next elections. When reeling from the shock of a bombing, public opinion will not forgive another security failure. A vicious circle is quickly established. To reassure public opinion, exceptional measures are taken that will subsequently have to be justified in order to reduce opposition from human rights NGOs, which are sure to denounce them as infringing on international human rights. The political leaders thereby reinforce the conditions for the support they need. They overreact deliberately, as if the survival of the country were at stake, exaggerating and distorting the facts to trigger a “rally around the f lag” phenomenon. The September 11 attacks were compared to the attack on Pearl Harbor, even though al Qaeda was far from having the kind of power and means of destruction and domination possessed by imperial Japan. Political leaders also have to deal with the problem of their credibility in the eyes of the armed groups. Respecting international law to the letter would be the equivalent of sending terrorists the wrong message, which would only encourage them to carry out more attacks. On the contrary, these leaders believe that when dealing with irregular

22

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combatants they must display their determination not to be burdened by moral considerations, since armed groups would only see such loyalty to principles as a sign of weakness. In agreeing to fight in civilian areas and in mistreating prisoners, they convey a political message that seems like a warning: “We will not allow ourselves to be paralyzed by the rules of international law; we will not balk at using illegal means to fight you; you will not be able to use civilians as a human shield; and we will not deny ourselves the right to self-defense.” The only way to break down armed groups is by obtaining intelligence, even at the cost of a few excesses. Survival takes precedence over law. “Necessity” is the main argument invoked by all democracies in an exceptional context. If intelligence obtained in time can save human lives, then it would be irresponsible not to do everything possible to obtain it. “No pain, no gain.”48 It was by virtue of this logic that the United States justified the abuses committed at Guantanamo and at Abu Ghraib prison. And what does it matter if such methods prompt criticism from other countries, they think, without saying so openly, since no state really honors the Geneva Conventions anyway. This line of reasoning is founded on the sole fact of being widely shared, as attested by the work of Oona A. Hathaway, who compared the practices of 166 signatory countries of the international agreements in 5 areas applying to human rights, including genocide and torture.49 Thus the mechanism of human rights violations is a self-oiled one, with terrorism and counterterrorism feeding on each other. However, it would be hard to justify were it not widely supported by the local population in countries affected by terrorism, when this population is prepared to accept the arguments of its leaders and their decisions in the name of security. But sometimes the population is not merely accommodating. It can also be very demanding and call for harsh retaliation, even if that means causing harm to the enemy’s civilian population. The corrosive capacity of terrorism on the values championed by democracies should not be underestimated. Democratic regimes are not totally immune to illegal or inhuman acts when faced with an “imminent threat.” Terrorism and counterterrorism seem to be as connected as Siamese twins. Attacks against the population of a democratic country trigger counterattacks that almost inevitably end in losses among the population on the other side. Human rights violations are nearly always met with more human rights violations. This is almost a general rule. But this attitude is usually counterproductive. If there were a “right strategy” for a democracy that refuses to be drawn into committing

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atrocities, it would consist in creating an insurmountable distance between the means it employs and those employed by its enemies. It would refuse to be drawn into the logic set in motion by the armed groups, in other words fighting by the rules most favorable to the latter, forcing it to commit atrocities against the civilian population— massacres, torture, humiliation, collective punishment—all acts that backfire on a democracy, discredit its struggle and prompt international sympathy and support for the cause of the armed groups. The torture at Abu Ghraib prison did considerable damage to the United States and its crusade to promote democracy, in the Arab world in particular. The French army admittedly won the war against the Algerian “rebels,” but the war left the Muslim population in a terrible state of poverty and created a huge gap between communities. The army admittedly won the battle of Algiers, but the memory of its violent acts left a lasting mark. This kind of warfare also requires paying a great deal of attention to the issue of so-called collateral damage, which can harm armies battling terrorism in a decisive manner. Mistakes are naturally inevitable and unforeseeable in certain cases, given the high degree of overlapping between combatants and noncombatants. But if they occur repeatedly, they wind up turning the civilian population against the armed forces. A large part of the difficulty experienced by the coalition built around the United States in Afghanistan is linked to the proliferation of blunders that have weakened Hamid Karzai’s government and made the civilian population abhor the presence of foreign troops, which it sees as a source of mortal danger. In Iraq, the American troops’ insufficient attention to the security of the population, and terrible blunders such as the one committed at Fallujah (13 Iraqi civilians, including 6 children, killed during a demonstration), have helped turn the people against Westerners, even though they were delighted at first to be rid of their tyrant.50 The Utility of Offering Political Perspectives But this type of warfare cannot be limited to an engagement of military and police methods: a political perspective must be offered to the people in which the conditions are defined for restoring peace. And that is the role of political leaders. David Galula has written that there is no better approach than “to deprive the insurgent of a good cause.”51 Democracies must show that they care about the injustices suffered by

24

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the people, for no one knows better than the armed groups how to exploit such injustices in order to justify indiscriminate violence.52 If “fighting intelligently” means anything, it would first involve avoiding playing into the enemy’s hand by preserving the chance for a cessation of hostilities and negotiating a political solution. It boils down to attempting to cut the armed groups off from their hinterland, but also to distinguishing between hardliners and forces with which reconciliation is possible, and the latter must be treated with respect. At least in the short term, because experience has shown that in this type of conf lict today’s “moderates” were yesterday’s hardliners and all reversals are possible. This strategy combining armed struggle and offers of political progress using microdoses of violence and restraint is the best adapted to asymmetric warfare. All intermediate strategies that use an incoherent mix of collective punishment, abuse of prisoners, and positive reinforcement have little chance of achieving the desired goal of exhausting the pool of potential combatants. No counterterrorist struggle should irreparably jeopardize the possibility of returning to the negotiating table. But this implies close ties between the political powers defining the major goals and the military leaders elaborating the operational strategy. The British prevailed against the Communist guerrillas in Malaya that way.53 They offered the Malaysians their independence in exchange for not taking part in the insurrection. In Iraq, after a long and difficult time trying to make Baghdad safe, General David Petraeus succeeded in turning the situation around to a noticeable degree, thanks in particular to support from Sunni forces. He opted to move from a “passive” attitude to a more “proactive” one, and to bring his garrisons out of their barracks into closer contact with the Iraqi people in order to help them rebuild their civilian infrastructure (schools, roads, hospitals). He did so against the wishes of many officers in the American army who were not inclined to get involved in tasks that did not fit in with their warrior culture.54 However, his “Secure and Serve” method (the security of the population being an indispensable prerequisite for stabilization) was complemented by a principle of seeking contact with the insurgents (“Pursue the enemy relentlessly”), consisting in going after them on their own territory and destroying their caches and explosives manufacturing centers, as well as in separating the “irreconcilables” from the “reconcilables” (by distinguishing the minority of extremists, who were to be killed or captured, from the majority with whom it was possible to negotiate). He succeeded in significantly lowering the number of suicide attacks. Against all expectations, the American army, which had been qualified

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as “rigid,”55 adapted to the new constraints. The U.S. Army and the Marines released a new manual of counterinsurgency fighting based on their experience in Iraq. It included such paradoxical precepts for an officer trained for traditional combat as the following: “The More Force Is Used, the Less Effective It Is”; “Some of the Best Weapons for Counterinsurgents Do Not Shoot”; “Tactical Success Guarantees Nothing.”56 Counterinsurgency strategies often involve “winning the hearts and minds” of the population. In reality, this kind of strategy is not always easy to apply. It requires manpower, time, and a subtle understanding of the political context and interactions with the local population.57 It requires coordination between civilian and military powers and tight control over field units by their commanders. Through one clumsy act a soldier—or “strategic corporal”—could open fire on passersby for no particular reason and endanger that strategy. Conversely, a terrorist attack makes it impossible to extend any gesture of goodwill toward the population from which the terrorist has sprung. To a population subject to attacks, it is difficult to justify that measures of appeasement should be applied toward him. It would be unthinkable at such a time to consider negotiating with the armed groups without appearing to submit to their will and give them the impression that indiscriminate violence pays off. And, as General Rupert Smith has noted, “whilst one seeks to capture the people’s will in conjunction with defending the opponent amongst them, this is often very difficult in circumstances where the two [ . . . ] are of one nation or ethnicity faced by an intervening force. The underpinning confrontation is too easily reduced by the opponent into one of ‘them and us.’ ”58 But, as Machiavelli wrote, a prince must “make himself feared in such a way that, if he does not inspire love, at least he does not provoke hatred. For it is perfectly possible to be feared and not hated.”59 All democracies are constantly subject to a triple question: Are the means of the antiterrorist struggle effective? Are they adapted to warfare among the civilian population? Do they preserve the chances of resuming political negotiations? The “appropriate” strategy for an antiterrorist struggle might ultimately be defined as a “strategy of schizophrenia”; in other words the capacity of the armed forces to split themselves in two. The offensive part would be designed to decimate the armed groups, while the other part, the conciliator, would look after the population, its protection, and well-being. This “schizophrenia” is not obvious. Yet that is exactly what certain American units in Iraq ended up doing.

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The main issue is that many democracies remain on the fence between these two strategies, embracing neither terror nor gentleness. They are aware that they must resist terror but have no idea how to put gentleness into practice. “People should either be caressed or crushed,” wrote Machiavelli; “if you do them minor damage, they will get their revenge; but if you cripple them there is nothing they can do.”60

CH A P T E R

T WO

The Roots of a Doctrine

A Feature of Israeli Strategic Culture Israel has been confronted with irregular armed groups and terrorism for more than the past 60 years of its existence. This is one of the longest experiences of counterinsurgency struggle in recent history. Still today it faces Hamas (partial acronym for Harakat al-muqâwama al-‘islâmiya [Islamic Resistance Movement]) in the Gaza Strip. How has its army handled this war among civilian populations? What strategy has it adopted? It seems clear from the outset that it did not choose the strategy of terror, a strategy of mass destruction and atrocity, contrary to the many accusations that have been leveled at it. But nor has it chosen the strategy of minimal force. Observing the modus operandi implemented by the IDF over more than 60 years, a doctrine emerges that could be described as one of “disproportionate response.” The army has held to this rather roughly hewn doctrine with few major changes since the creation of the state of Israel.1 Disproportionate response is not specific to antiterrorism. It is an essential aspect of Israel’s strategic culture.2 It is part not only of the military’s thinking but also of the political leadership, and is part of the Israeli mindset in general. It has to do with the country’s history, the geopolitical conditions in which the state was built, the way in which the IDF perceives itself in its environment and views its role as guarantor of the state’s survival.3 The point is not to label the IDF or Israel as the “bad guy” or the world’s “monster,” but simply to take note of Israel’s historic self-perception and the way it has believed it must protect itself from its Arab neighbors.

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Living with a sense of extreme insecurity due to its being confined in slightly over 8,000 square miles of land that made up the country’s territory in its 1948 borders, surrounded by several Arab armies and confronted with a systematically hostile discourse from the leaders of its neighboring countries, Israel’s civilian and military leaders immediately set up a strategy based on a few simple postulates. The first of them was based on the belief that the Arab world was “irreducibly” hostile toward Israel. Because of this, Israel could not take the slightest risk and was obliged to adopt a wait-and-see attitude until these countries came around to recognizing Israel’s existence. The second postulate was, and still is, that Israel could not afford to lose a single war, as defeat would mean its disappearance. David Ben-Gurion incessantly repeated that “Israel can win a hundred battles yet its problem will not be solved; but if the Arabs are victorious only once, it will mean our end.”4 Already in 1948 he claimed that Israel’s geography required it to observe the following rule: “He who strikes first wins the battle. Otherwise Israel would be overwhelmed.”5 This perception of the Arab world has led Israel to pay particularly close attention to security issues. “Security policy governed Israeli foreign policy during these years. [ . . . ]. The perception of the security dangers loomed so large for the leadership that it was not prepared to take any short-run risks in exploiting opportunities for building longterm relations of trust with the neighboring Arab states,” notes Ze’ev Drori, colonel in the reserves and former commander of the Givati brigade.6 It has also led Israel to develop military capabilities beyond those of its neighbors. In the event of a major threat, the IDF had to be able to launch a preventive, brutal, and devastating operation—not unlike a blitzkrieg—that would thus prohibit the enemy from taking the initiative. The battle was to take place far from the state’s borders in enemy territory and end with a crushing victory. “Because Israel lacked strategic depth the IDF had an ironclad rule that the war must be fought on the enemy’s territory and that the enemy’s forces must be defeated as quickly as humanly possible.” 7 It was in keeping with this conception that the army launched the lightning attacks in 1956 during the Sinai War and in June 1967 during the Six-Day War.8 The IDF thus managed to forge a lasting image of an “invincible” army. These victories, however, did not prevent Egypt from catching Israel off guard during the Yom Kippur War, inf licting heavy losses, but the Israeli army was able to turn the situation to its advantage. The Syrian attack was fended off and Damascus sustained considerable losses while, along the Suez Canal, an Egyptian attack was held in check by the

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opening of a corridor in a daring military operation conducted by Ariel Sharon that caught the Third Egyptian army unawares.9 Since then, peace has reigned between Israel and its two largest neighbors, Egypt and Jordan. Disproportionate response in Israel is thus the consequence of both an inferiority complex and a superiority complex forged since the state was established. The Israelis react with the brutality of the weak, afraid for their existence, haunted by a recurrence of the Holocaust in the face of Arab leaders who do not hide their desire to destroy the state. But they also respond with the means of the strong who, by the use of force, want to dissuade “once and for all” those who are tempted to attack it. The goal is that, in response to an attack or a threat to the nation’s existence, the strike must be both preventive and substantial so that it prevents the other from gaining an advantage.10 Israel has hence always chosen to respond with greater force than required to ensure its security. But used against irregular forces, disproportionate response takes on another dimension entirely. This strategy, which may be justified in a conventional war, has major drawbacks in an asymmetric conf lict. It risks harming civilians and triggering a reaction that is difficult to control. When dealing with individuals or small groups who blend in with the population to launch attacks and then vanish into thin air, military power has little effect, as countless examples abroad have shown. Already in the 1950s Israel realized its inability to eradicate such irregular groups by frontal and decisive combat, unlike in a conventional war.11 The Israeli leadership quickly agreed on a new conception: In the event of terrorist attacks against its civilians, the army would strike hard at armed combatants as well as their backers and protectors, but also exert pressure on the civilian population that shelters them voluntarily or against their will. The outcome has almost always been identical: Instead of defusing the violence, Israel’s military reaction has heightened it to the detriment of the Israeli population. It has almost always resulted in the death of innocent Arab civilians and exacerbated anti-Israeli sentiment and a thirst for revenge. Each time, it has led to a virtually unstoppable escalation pitting it against forces from Arab countries such as Egypt and Jordan. Such faith in the virtues of brutal force appeared almost simultaneously with the establishment of the Israeli state and the first Palestinian incursions by “infiltrators” (mistanenim), and reemerged even more patently with the Lebanon War in 1982, the first Intifada, the second Intifada, and finally, with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza.

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Israel’s Asymmetric Wars The Fight against “Infiltrators”

The period between 1949 and 1956 was an era already characterized by what Israeli strategists called, to set it apart from classic wars involving armies, a “low-intensity conf lict.” It was actually asymmetric conf lict, a concept that had not yet earned its spurs. The Israeli state has been confronted with security issues since it was formed in May 1948. Border clashes and infiltrations by civilians or Egyptian army units were daily fare during those years. Historian Benny Morris counted between 10,000 and 15,000 incidents annually over the course of the 1949–1954 period.12 The category of “infiltrators” who entered Israeli territory is not a homogeneous one. At first, most of them were Palestinians who had been driven out or who had left of their own accord during the Arab-Israeli War of 1948. They crossed the border to harvest crops left behind or to retrieve property. Others attempted to visit relatives who had remained in Israel or hoped to resettle in their old village. Still others engaged in smuggling or were simply trying to get from the Gaza Strip to the West Bank. In the following years, infiltrators became more aggressive, stealing harvests, irrigation pipes, and other property belonging to Israeli farmers. Benny Morris figures that those who came to attack the population or sabotage Israeli targets numbered about 10 percent. Until 1955 the Arab states attempted to curb infiltration, but the Israeli authorities believed they did not invest enough effort in it. Israel suspected Egypt and Jordan of encouraging, even organizing, infiltration. Local Arab civil and military officials, moreover, found nothing wrong with Palestinians who had left or been forced out of their homes trying to recover their property or stealing from Israelis. The Egyptian military intelligence office recruited fedayeen in retaliation for Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip. It was no longer isolated individuals who were acting but a state using nonstate actors. Infiltration resulted in considerable cost to Israel. Benny Morris notes that between 1948 and 1956, “about two hundred Israeli civilians and scores of soldiers were killed by infiltrators. In addition, dozens of Israeli soldiers were killed in the course of IDF retaliatory strikes triggers by [Arab] incursions.”13 It did major damage to the Israeli economy: civilian guards had to be paid, fences had to be built, and lighting installed along them. Furthermore, new settlers left their mochav (farming village), demoralized by the threat from infiltrators, thus compromising the Zionist undertaking of settling the border areas. Israel’s response was basically military and poorly controlled. It had not only a defensive aspect but an offensive one as well. Guidelines for

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opening fire issued by the high command to the field units were lax. Soldiers were authorized to shoot any Arab crossing the border. Most of the early victims were Palestinians trying to return to their land or their homes. But there was great fear among the Israelis that the infiltrators would become permanent immigrants and augment the number of Arabs who remained in Israel. “From mid-1949, IDF orders to the front-line units were at night to fire at anything that moved, no questions asked, and during daylight to fire at every adult male. But the troops were allowed to open fire at will from several hundred yards away, at which distance it was impossible to distinguish the gender or age of the target. They were also often instructed during daylight to issue a halt order, and to open fire only if the ‘target’ disobeyed.”14 One order issued to the Fifth “Givati” Brigade in 1953 was to carry out the battle against infiltration in the border areas “at all times of the day and night [ . . . ] mainly by opening fire, without giving warning, on any individual or group that cannot be identified from afar by our troops as Israeli citizens and who are, at the moment they are spotted [infiltrating] into Israeli territory.”15 In reality, troop behavior was left to the discretion of the local command. Some commanders took the orders literally, others shot in the air to drive off undesirables. A large number of people were killed due to landmines set along the infiltrators’ presumed paths. Anywhere from 2,700 to 5,000 Arabs, most of them unarmed, were killed between 1949 and 1956.16 Ze’ev Drori also notes the lack of discernment in this type of conf lict: “Infiltration and acts of violence along the state’s borders were equally regarded as falling within the rubric of armed conf lict and terror, calling for a uniform military response.”17 Expulsions were also part of the arsenal used to fight against infiltrators. Those suspected of having managed to settle in Israel on the sly were arrested and escorted to the border. The most brutal expulsions took place in late May 1950. About a hundred alleged infiltrators were arrested and deposited at the Jordanian border in the Arava desert, already intensely hot at that time of the year. Some 30 of them died of dehydration and exhaustion. In answer to the spate of criticism addressed to the army from within Israel itself, notably from the minister of Foreign Affairs, Moshe Sharett, chief of Southern Command General Moshe Dayan replied: “Arabs cross [the border] to collect the grain that they left in the abandoned villages and we set mines for them and they return without an arm or a leg . . . [It may be that this] cannot pass review, [but] I know no other methods of guarding the borders. If the shepherds and harvesters are allowed to cross the borders, then tomorrow the State of Israel will have no borders.”18

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Israel also conducted preemptive punitive expeditions targeting populations on the other side of the border. Responsibility for them was assumed openly, as General Dayan’s remarks make clear: “The only method that proved effective, not justified or moral but effective, when Arabs plant mines on our side [is retaliation]. If we try to search for that [particular] Arab [who planted mines], it has no value. But if we harass the nearby village . . . then the population there comes out against the [infiltrators] . . . and the Egyptian Government and the Transjordanian government are [driven] to prevent such incidents, because their prestige is [assailed], as the Jews have opened fire, and they [i.e., the Arab governments] are unready to begin a war . . . The method of collective punishment so far has proved effective . . . There are no other effective methods [to counter infiltration].”19 These methods, however, were never entirely successful. The military argued that without such reprisals, the situation would be worse. But the humiliation they caused encouraged the pursuit of further attacks against Israel. However, from the Israeli standpoint, the reprisals had a number of advantages, the foremost having to do with domestic politics. Despite the strong electoral base enjoyed by Mapai (the acronym for the Workers Party of Eretz Israel, led by David Ben-Gurion) at the time, its leaders feared that security outbidding from Herut, Menachem Begin’s right-wing party, would shift Israeli public opinion to the right. One of the first large-scale operations was carried out in Sharafat, a village located to the south of Jerusalem, on the night of February 6, 1951. It was meant to avenge a murder and a rape that had taken place in Manahat, southwest of the capital. About a dozen Arabs were killed, most of them women and children. On January 6, 1952, in response to the rape and murder of a young woman from Jerusalem, the army undertook a raid on the village of Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, killing six people, including two women and two children. This string of violent acts on either side continued in the following months. Considerable criticism was voiced within the army, not regarding the justification for these operations but instead the incompetence of the field units and their lack of determination. In light of this, a particularly welltrained and motivated elite unit, Unit 101, was formed in August 1953. A young officer known for his effectiveness, Ariel Sharon, was placed at its command. It indeed turned out to be highly “effective” and distinguished itself by several bloody reprisal operations. The best known of these took place in Qibya during the night of October 14–15, 1953. Following the murder of an Israeli woman and

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her two children residing in the village of Yehud, Unit 101 was charged with a reprisal operation, backed up by elements of a paratrooper brigade, against this village that is located a mile and a half from the Israeli-Jordanian border, even though the murderers’ traces did not lead there. Soldiers arriving in Qibya identified 45 houses to blow up. The operation left 69 men, women, and children dead.20 The commando later claimed that Unit 101 had verified that the village was deserted and that most of the 1,500 inhabitants had f led, without imagining that many of them were still hiding out in basements or upper stories.21 The October 26, 1953 issue of Time Magazine claimed that Israeli troops first fired on the men, women, and children who were still in the village before blowing up the houses. The United Nations Security Council condemned the operation. The United States cut off it economic aid to Israel. France and Great Britain demanded that sanctions be levied against those responsible for the raid. Against all evidence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion denied the participation of the Israeli armed force in the massacre, blaming it on disgruntled Jewish settlers along the border. Moshe Sharett, acting prime minister and known for his moderate positions, backed the official version despite his disagreement with the army. According to Dan Yahav, quoting army archives, the orders issued planned for a “severe retaliatory operation hitting the inhabitants of Arab villages.”22 Central Command orders were to cause “destruction and maximum killing.”23 This brutal operation did anything but halt incursions into Israeli territory. “Activists” and “Moderates” The Israeli government then decided to cease attacks on civilians and gave orders only to hit military targets. As of early 1954 the IDF changed its order to read “women and children are not to be hit under any circumstances.”24 In late 1953 David Ben-Gurion withdrew from politics, to be replaced by Moshe Sharett as head of government. Sharett was one of the few moderate politicians in favor of dialogue with the Arabs. He despised the variety of brutal military actions preferred by Moshe Dayan, with whom relations were strained. But his arrival in power was not followed by a change in military strategy. The army’s habits were already ingrained and the hardliner camp dominated the Mapai party. An opposition crystallized in Israel between “activists” and “moderates.” Moshe Sharett described it in a speech given in November 1957: “The activists believe that the Arabs understand only

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the language of force [ . . . ] The state of Israel must, from time to time, prove clearly that it is strong, and able and willing to use force, in a devastating and highly effective way. If it does not offer proof this, it will be swallowed up, and perhaps wiped off the face of the earth. [ . . . ] If peace comes, it will come only if [the Arabs] are convinced that this country cannot be beaten [ . . . ].” According to Sharett, the moderates recommended that “not even for one moment must the matter of peace vanish from our calculations. This is not a political calculation; in the long run, this is a security consideration [as well] . . . We must restrain our responses [to Arab attacks]. And there is always the question: is it really proven that retaliatory actions solve the security problem?”25 This dichotomy, “theorized” by the former prime minister, remains as applicable as ever today. Sharett had nevertheless managed to somewhat temper the army’s warlike zeal. Following a terrorist attack on March 16, 1954, against a bus climbing Scorpion Pass, a winding road in the Neguev in which 11 passengers were shot, Sharett managed to bring the case before the United Nations rather than undertaking the usual retaliatory action. With Gamal Abdel Nasser’s arrival in power in Egypt in 1954, the asymmetric conf lict wound out of control and turned into a classic conf lict between states that would lead to the Suez War. On numerous occasions the Egyptian army sent in squadrons of commandos to attack targets in Israel. Colonel Mustapha Hafez, commander of Egyptian military intelligence in the Gaza Strip, was in charge of these operations. He was eliminated in July 1956 by a letter bomb sent by the Israeli military intelligence. This was one of the very first “targeted killings” (cf. infra chapter seven). The IDF punished Egyptian army officials who allowed or encouraged fedayeen incursions. Several extremely blood reprisal actions were launched against Egyptian army camps—in particular, one in 1955 against a camp in Gaza—that would leave some 40 Egyptians dead and encourage the Nasser regime to purchase weapons from Czechoslovakia. Reprisals and counterreprisals followed in succession until the closure of the Tiran Straits in September 1955. After the confrontation in 1948, the two parties were heading for a second round. The Kfar Kassem Massacre This period is one in which the army least observed the notion of ethics. Despite the official discourse extolling the moral virtues of Israeli

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soldiers, army safeguards lacked force. Intentionally harming innocent civilians did not figure in army policy, but nor was it considered a taboo. Such is the context in which the Kfar Kassem massacre occurred. It happened on October 29, 1956, on the eve of Operation Kadesh, Israel’s code name for the Sinai Campaign. Certain units were given the mission to watch the eastern front to prevent a possible recrudescence of attacks from Jordanian armed groups. One of them, a Magav unit (acronym for Mishmar Hagvul [border guards]), was instructed by Colonel Isachar Shadmi, under whose command it was placed, to put under curfew eight Israeli Arab villages in the “Triangle,” an area located south of Galilee and near the Jordanian border. Shadmi ordered the border guards to enforce the curfew firmly and shoot on sight anyone who violated it, with immediate effect from that very day from 5 p.m.26 At about 1:00 p.m., Shmuel Malinki, border police battalion commander, called his young officers together and conveyed the commander’s instructions. Several officers then raised reservations. One of them objected that the villagers working in the fields were not aware of the time the curfew took effect and might be killed. When asked, “What do we do then?” the commanding officer replied, Allah Yarhamhum (in Arabic, meaning “God have mercy,” usually used when speaking about people who have died). When another asked how to deal with women and children, he answered, “Without sentiments.”27 According to one of the lieutenants on the scene, Malinki told them that “it would be desirable to have a few people killed in each village on the first evening, because that would make it easier to maintain the curfew and help us carry out the mission in the days ahead.”28 One platoon commander, Lieutenant Gabriel Dahan, who was in charge of enforcing the curfew in the village of Kfar Kassem, took the instructions literally; 49 villagers returning from work were shot at close range. “It was obvious that they were not combatants or hostile forces, but people returning to their village who did not try to hide, they were in work clothes and were carrying baskets,” notes Dan Yahav.29 The slaughter was covered up by the civil and military authorities for several days, and thanks to the tenacity of a handful of Arab Communist Party Knesset members and intellectuals, a commission of inquiry was appointed on November 5. The event provoked stern reactions in Israel and the rest of the world. David Ben-Gurion, fearing that the IDF’s good reputation would be tarnished, incriminated the border police in his speech to the Knesset. Moshe Sharett, then minister of Foreign Affairs, disputed this version of the facts and placed emphasis

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on the army’s responsibility.30 A trial was held in 1958. Major Malinki and Lieutenant Dahan, together with eight other soldiers, were sentenced by military tribunal for the murder of civilians in cold blood. The battalion commander, considered to hold primary responsibility for the slaughter, was sentenced to 17 years in prison. Colonel Shadmi, tried in 1959, was cleared of any accusation of crime but received a reprimand and was condemned to paying a symbolic fine of 10 prutot (about 10 cents at the time) for having overstepped his prerogatives by declaring the curfew on his own initiative. Lieutenant Dahan was sentenced to 15 years in prison and demoted to second-class soldier. In 1959 the court of appeal reduced Malinki’s sentence to 14 years in prison and Dahan’s to 10. General Haim Laskov, chief of General Staff, further reduced these sentences, and a few days later President Yitzhak Ben-Zvi granted them a pardon.31 Malinki recovered his rank and was later appointed head of security for the nuclear power plant in Dimona, and Dahan was made head of “Arab Affairs” in the city of Ramleh. This massacre, even if it was not an antiterrorist operation and does not fit in with the problematics of asymmetric war, is nevertheless indicative of a climate of indifference toward the lives of Arab civilians that developed in the framework of the “fight against terror” in the “activist” army and political circles. That a colonel and a commanding officer could give the order to shoot civilians when they posed no danger whatsoever is comprehensible only in the climate of tolerance that reigned at the time toward soldiers who opened fire on Arab civilians. It would have been much more difficult for these officers to give such instructions if they had not felt immune and covered by their hierarchy. Ensuing events did not prove them wrong. Although the court president firmly condemned the massacre, deeming that the order given was “patently illegal,” the chief of staff, the prime minister, and the head of state worked to get the sentences reduced to the point of obtaining release of the convicted officers in a very short time, only three years after the incident. It would, however, be wrong to consider this massacre as resulting from a deliberate mass extermination policy targeting Arab civilians. Proof of this can be seen in the behavior of other border guard officers. Few people have wondered what happened in the other villages also subjected to the curfew. In fact, no other incident occurred. The inhabitants were able to return home after 5 p.m. without incident. Other officers in charge of implementing the orders for opening fire, Lieutenants Nimrod Lempert and Binyamin Kol, as well as Captain Yehuda Frankenthal, refused to obey them and were moreover warmly

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praised by the court president.32 But it was not until October 2008 that the Israeli daily Haaretz published a report on those “who did the right thing.”33 Other episodes dating from the 1950s were also brought to public knowledge many years later. Such was the case of Egyptian prisoners that Israeli paratroopers killed during the Sinai Campaign, even though they had been recruited among kibbutz members. In an interview given to an Israeli newspaper on August 4, 1995, retired general Arye Biro revealed that he and his companions in the paratrooper battalion operating in the Mitla Pass slayed dozens of Egyptian prisoners.34 A commission of inquiry was formed but no proceedings were started on the grounds that the events came under the statute of limitations. Terrorism and Counterterrorism: From Suez to the Lebanon War The military victory won alongside the British and the French against Egypt in 1956 was followed by a long period of calm along Israel’s borders, perhaps the longest that Israel has ever experienced.35 Infiltrations virtually ceased. During this decade, only 35 Israelis were killed by acts of hostility.36 “Disproportionate response” was not the main cause. After the Suez debacle, Egyptian and Jordanian leaders decided to control their borders to prevent the risk of another conf lict. Various incidents, however, marred Israeli-Syrian relations. On two occasions, Israel conducted retaliatory operations against Syrian outposts. One of them targeted the one in Nuqeib overlooking Lake Tiberias. The operation, which took place in March 1962, aimed to punish Syrian soldiers for having killed two Israeli fishermen. In the course of this operation, conducted at night by the Sayeret Golani elite unit, one of the forces that was supposed to take the Syrians from the rear came upon inhabitants of the nearest village who, panicked by the first shots fired by Syrian soldiers, took f light, thus coming between the Israeli soldiers and the Syrian outpost. There were no civilian casualties, despite the difficulties posed by this hasty retreat.37 Nuqeib certainly qualifies as being part of a classic conf lict between regular armies. The target to be destroyed, responsible for the fishermen’s deaths, was military. But the military’s attitude during this operation indicates a shift in the army’s mindset toward greater sensitivity for the lives of Arab civilians, in contrast with that of the 1950s. The army placed considerable emphasis on the notion of respect for civilian populations in its lessons to officers.

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One of the rare attempted attacks was conducted by a Fatah offshoot on January 2, 1965, which tried to plant a bomb near the National Water Carrier, the pumping station carrying water from Lake Tiberias to the southern part of the country. The bomb was defused in time and the group was intercepted by a Jordanian patrol on its return, which killed all its members on the spot. Neither Jordan nor Egypt at the time had any intention of allowing the Palestinians to draw them into a military confrontation with Israel. The Six-Day War, which broke out on June 5, 1967, provides confirmation of this evolution. It was conducted with relative restraint on the part of the armed forces. “Israel took care to use its air power and artillery sparingly in populated areas,” notes Benny Morris.38 But when the fighting was over, several houses in Qalqilya and other West Bank villages had been destroyed, probably with the assent of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, and four villages in the Latrun salient (Imwas, Yalu, Beit Nuba, and Deir Aiyub) were leveled.39 Attacks resumed shortly after the end of the Six-Day War. The PLO reorganized under Yasser Arafat’s leadership and attempted to foment a people’s resistance movement against the Israeli occupier in the Occupied Territories. But the symbiosis between the armed groups and the population did not take. The Shin Bet (Israel’s internal security service) quickly dismantled the activist networks set up by the PLO without causing harm to the civilian population. The mood of the Palestinian population was not conducive to a confrontation with Israel. The 1967 occupation was followed by an economic boom in the Territories and in particular in the West Bank, due to a considerable inf lux of tourists and the possibility for tens of thousands of Palestinians to work on the other side of the Green Line.40 Israel installed a fairly nonintrusive occupation regime that contrasted with the years of Jordanian occupation in Judea and Samaria and the Egyptian occupation in the Gaza Strip, which was not always particularly gentle either.41 Other organizations were formed at this time: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), founded in December 1967 by Georges Habash, and the Syrian-backed al-Saiqa, founded in September 1967.42 Fatah, the PFLP, and al-Saiqa decided to operate from bases in Jordanian territory, southern Lebanon, and various European countries. In the Gaza Strip, on the other hand, in 1970, Israel was faced with a wave of violence, but it was quickly put down by Ariel Sharon, then chief of Southern Command.43 Hundreds of Palestinian activists were arrested or killed, thanks to local “collaborators.” Most attempts made from bases in Jordan were foiled by the army due to

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ambushes and through an efficient network of checkpoints. One of the rare successful attacks occurred in Beer Ora in the Arava desert. An armed group managed to set a mine on a bus route, killing two adults and injuring a dozen children. In reprisal, the army launched a major military operation against Arafat’s headquarters in the Jordan River valley near the village of Karameh. But it ran into considerable Palestinian resistance, backed by the Jordanian army. The IDF lost 33 men and 161 were wounded; 56 PLO combatants were killed and 141 captured. The Jordanian army lost 84 of its soldiers. From a military standpoint, it was a partial failure. But as always in the case of asymmetric warfare, the lack of a decisive victory is tantamount to success for the insurgents, who thus demonstrate their capability to stand up to those more powerful than them. Karameh became the symbol of the first Palestinian victory over the Israeli army. It enabled the PLO to regain prestige and recruit numerous volunteers who f locked to Palestinian camps around Amman. Soon it was in a position to form a state within a state in Jordan, defying the authority of King Hussein and his army. In south Lebanon, Palestinian fedayeens started launching attacks against Israeli villages along the border and took control of the Palestinian camps in an area that the Israelis came to call “Fatahland.” The first rockets fell in December 1968 on Kiryat Shmona, an Israeli border village. The IDF did not have to confront the Palestinian militants in Jordan; King Hussein took care of them himself. Weary of Fatah agitation on his territory, threatened by direct attacks on his person, not wanting to risk another conf lict with Israel, in September 1970 he ordered his armored brigades to attack PLO bases in Amman. Badly weakened, the PLO maintained its presence in Jordan until July 1971, at which time the king ordered any resistance to be crushed. The combats left thousands of Palestinians dead. Neither Syria nor any other Arab state came to the Palestinians’ aid despite Yasser Arafat’s appeals. Anyone who was able to f lee the fighting ended up in Lebanon and it was from this territory that the Palestinians were to continue their struggle. Some of them preferred to go to IDF-controlled territory rather than be slaughtered by the Jordanian army. These events spawned Black September, an organization founded by Fatah in September 1971 to attack Israeli interests abroad, similar to the modus operandi of the PFLP, which favored this sort of operation. With Black September, Fatah had a f lexible cell structure with young and inconspicuous members, making it less permeable to infiltration attempts by the Israeli secret services.

40

Israel’s Asymmetric Wars Shadow Wars in Europe

The Palestinian insurgency was to move in two different directions: the first, which will be examined in greater detail in the following chapter, was to use Lebanon as a territorial base to continue the fight. The second, which will be discussed here, is the attempt to attack Israelis in Europe. The PFLP had inaugurated this strategy, which was more spectacular from a media standpoint than cross-border harassment. The army took a back seat to the Mossad (Israel’s foreign intelligence service, similar to the CIA). On July 23, 1968, the PFLP hijacked an El Al airliner and diverted it to Algiers. On December 26, members of this terrorist group attacked another El Al aircraft at Athens Airport, killing one passenger and injuring a young woman. This operation induced the Israeli government to destroy the Lebanese civil aviation on the ground in Beirut in response to an attack perpetrated by individuals who had left from Lebanese territory.44 On February 21, 1969, a Swissair aircraft f lying the Zurich-Tel Aviv route was blown up in midair by a bomb placed in the hold by members of PFLP-General Command, a dissident offshoot of the PFLP led by Ahmed Jibril. Starting in 1970, attacks were also carried out against Jordanian and American interests. The hijacking of three planes on September 6, 1970, to Jordanian territory was a strong factor in King Hussein’s decision to expel the Palestinian armed groups operating on his territory. Black September took up the torch from Fatah and in turn went into what some have improperly called “international terrorism.”45 It is actually a “national” terrorism that operates outside the national territory the organization lays claims to, which is very different from the al Qaeda brand of international terrorism that makes no national claim and has no territorial base of its own. With Black September’s entering the fray, there was a significant rise in attacks abroad.46 Several spectacular operations were carried out. One of them was the assassination of Wasfi Tal, the Jordanian prime minister, in Cairo on November 28, 1971. On May 8, 1972, the Sabena f light from Brussels to Tel Aviv was diverted and the pilot forced to land at Lod airport in Israel. The perpetrators of this hijacking demanded the release of Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails. The following day, a special army unit stormed the plane, killing two commando members and arresting two others. Three weeks later, a commando from the Japanese Red Army terrorist group hired by the PFLP landed at Lod Airport, drew firearms from their baggage, and killed 27 people in the baggage reclaim area, wounding 71 others, many of them Puerto

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Rican Roman Catholic pilgrims. The Mossad, which became the main agency for fighting terrorism in Europe, was still unfamiliar with these organizations and had a hard time infiltrating them. Protection measures were installed in embassies and El Al offices, but the agency was still unable to avert attacks. The Mossad and the army organized reprisal operations targeting Palestinian officials in Beirut. In September 1972 Black September committed its most spectacular attack: against members of the Israeli delegation to the Olympic Games in Munich. The Federal Republic of Germany’s attempt to liberate them was a fiasco that ended in a bloodbath at the Munich airport. Eleven Israeli athletes were murdered by the Palestinian commando, which managed to leave German territory unimpeded. Golda Meir, then Israeli prime minister, ordered the Mossad to liquidate all members of Black September who had taken part directly or indirectly in the attack (cf. infra chapter seven on targeted killings). This vast manhunt was not without consequence for Fatah. In Autumn 1973 Yasser Arafat decided to disband Black September, having become convinced that the strategy of attacks abroad was counterproductive.47 The PFLP, on the other hand, as well as Waddih Haddad’s faction, continued their operations. On June 27, 1976, Haddad’s group hijacked an Air France airliner to Entebbe and the hostages were released thanks to a bold Israeli army operation.48 In the late 1970s–early 1980s, it was the turn of Abu Nidal’s group to shift into action. It not only went after Israel but also the PLO members who were most in favor of reaching a settlement with Israel. To conclude this chapter, two periods should be distinguished: the first, which goes from 1948 to the Suez War, is characterized by the fight against infiltrators. It was conducted without much imagination on the part of the political and military establishment. Not only did the IDF not manage to control its borders, but also allowed itself gradually to be drawn into an escalation that would lead to the Suez Crisis. The desire to deter infiltrators was probably not the only motivating factor for the Israeli leadership. Israeli military officials had a secondary objective, which was to use these operations as a test bench, that is, a field of maneuvers enabling Israeli units to gain training in contact and combat. Moshe Dayan was convinced that sooner or later, and given Egypt’s rearmament, a second round that would enable it to weaken Egypt for many more years was inevitable.49 Dayan’s intention, according to Gideon Rafael, director-general of the Foreign Affairs Ministry at the time, “was to create a situation of such gravity that it would force the Arab states to take up open battle with Israel.”50 “These actions had

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paved the way to war,” Drori would add.51 By its excessive reactions, the Israeli army drew the other into a spiral of violence that resulted in the 1956 confrontation. The general staff often created the conditions for confrontation to accuse the other of preparing for it. This is typically the phenomenon of a self-fulfilling prophecy that would be repeated time and time again, particularly in the years leading up to the second Intifada. The second period is essentially characterized by the PLO’s failed attempt to gain a foothold in the West Bank and by the attacks against Israeli interests abroad. The IDF and the secret services, being unable to infiltrate Black September and Fatah, carried out a secret and targeted war against the leaders of these organizations. The conf lict took place not among civilian populations but on the territory of friendly nations, mainly in Europe and Beirut. Not wanting to damage its relations with the Europeans, Israel was fairly cautious. Its operations had few blunders. It was also a period in which moderate military leaders dominated the army, such as Haim Laskov (1958–1964) and Tzvi Tsur (1961–1964), both remote from the aggressive operational culture of Unit 101. But the moderation of the 1960s–1970s was to end (temporarily) with the war in Lebanon.

CH A P T E R

T H R E E

“Peace for Galilee” or the Making of a New Insurgency

On June 3, 1982, Israeli Ambassador to London Shlomo Argov was seriously injured in an attack perpetrated by the Palestinian Abu Nidal group. The Menachem Begin government thus decided to embark on Operation Peace for Galilee, the largest operation ever launched against the PLO in Lebanon. The IDF deployed virtually all of its regular forces, some 1,500 tanks and its entire air force and navy. Operation Peace for Galilee is worth examining in depth. It proved to have serious negative repercussions for Israeli security, the army’s deterrence capability, and the country’s image on the international scene. On the military level, it provides a counterexample of how to combat terrorism. The “strongest army in the Middle East” ventured into the operation in total disregard for the pitfalls of counterinsurgency warfare in order to satisfy a highly debatable political objective that was criticized at the time by several generals in the military establishment and the political elite. It is without a doubt the most serious error committed by Israeli strategists in their fight against terror. Mounting Tension on the Israeli-Lebanese Border Already well before the PLO defeat at the hands of King Hussein’s Jordanian army in September 1970, Palestinian combatant groups had gained a foothold in Lebanon and were recruiting in Palestinian refugee camps in the country’s south. After its defeat, the PLO moved en masse into southern Lebanon and set up its base there to launch

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attacks against civilian Israeli targets. Yasser Arafat set up headquarters in Beirut. Foreign terrorist groups such as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Japanese Red Army also set up bases in PLO strongholds in southern Lebanon. In 1970 the PLO carried out several terrorist attacks. Some 60 Israeli civilians were killed during the year 1974 alone.1 The PLO’s installation in Lebanon exacerbated the already palpable tensions among the various Lebanese factions coveting power. In April 1975 civil war broke out, pitting Christians against Muslims, whom the PLO sided with. Syria, which intended to bring Lebanon back into its fold and prevent the civil war from spilling over into its territory, invaded the country in May 1976, alternating support for the Palestinians and the Christians. In March 1978 the PLO hijacking of a bus in Israel, near Haifa, ended with the death of 37 Israelis.2 The government of Menachem Begin, which came to power with the 1977 elections, ordered the army to launch a vast retaliatory operation against the PLO. Operation Litani went after PLO militants in Lebanon with the aim of pushing them far back from the Israeli border and strengthening the Christian enclaves in southern Lebanon. Three infantry brigades were deployed, backed by aviation and artillery support. The operation was disappointing from a military standpoint. The IDF modus operandi had changed since the time of the “war against infiltration.” Raids carried out by small infantry units operating at night into Arab villages or PLO units in the Egyptian or Jordanian army were no longer undertaken. Since the Six-Day War, and even more so since the Yom Kippur War, the IDF had undergone considerable transformation. It had been strengthened, professionalized, and equipped with sophisticated, high-tech air and ground weaponry. It also intended to take fewer risks with the lives of its soldiers who had paid a heavy price during the Yom Kippur War. These new resources were used in the fight against the PLO in Lebanon. However, its strategy remained unaltered. It was still one of disproportionate response, though now deployed with less “discriminating” modus operandi, such as aerial bombardment and artillery shelling, which were less in a position to distinguish between combatants and noncombatants. Bombardment not only struck Palestinian combatants and their shelters, but also served to create a climate of fear among the civilian population in southern Lebanon. The objective was to push them back toward the north with the hope that such exodus would frighten the Lebanese and arouse their opposition to Palestinian presence on their soil.

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Operation Litani resulted in several dozen civilian fatalities, the destruction of hundreds of houses, and the f light north of tens of thousands of people who abandoned their homes to escape bombardment.3 The Israelis lost 18 men and killed 300 Palestinian combatants.4 The only tangible outcome of this operation was the installation of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) along the Israeli-Lebanese border. It did not prevent further PLO artillery and rocket fire against northern Israel. Despite often severe retaliation by the Israeli air force, the IDF was unable to put a stop to artillery attacks against its territory. Ariel Sharon’s “Grand Design” Tension mounted in July 1981 between the two parties. In response to Katyusha rocket fire that claimed several lives in the resort town of Nahariya in the country’s north, the IDF bombarded PLO bases in southern Lebanon and its headquarters in Beirut. These attacks left 100 Palestinians dead and 600 wounded.5 The PLO retaliated with massive rocket fire into northern Israel, forcing a portion of the inhabitants in Kiryat Shmona to evacuate the town. On July 24 President Reagan’s envoy Philippe Habib wrested a ceasefire from Syria and Israel that Begin’s government and the Likud viewed practically as a defeat. Not only did the accord officialize Israel’s inability to vanquish the Palestinians militarily, but also represented a de facto recognition of the PLO. This accord and the April 1981 deployment of Syrian Sam missiles in the Bekaa Valley, which the Israeli government viewed as a provocation, prompted Begin to envisage a large-scale operation that would deal the Palestinian organization a decisive blow. The plan for Operation Peace for Galilee came together very quickly. There was nothing improvised about it,6 nor, like so many others, was it designed solely to “protect Galilee.” It was hatched, matured, and planned in minute detail by the hardliner clan, those Moshe Sharett defined as “activists.” Its main architect was none other than Ariel Sharon, the hero of Unit 101 and its reprisal operations in the 1950s, then of the Yom Kippur War. He had become Defense Minister in Menachem Begin’s cabinet in August 1981. Ariel Sharon’s “grand design” had several objectives. The first of them was to get rid of the PLO “once and for all” and thus put an end to the increasingly assertive demand for an independent state in the Occupied Territories. Since he was invited to take part in the UN General Assembly in 1974, Arafat had acquired international stature

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and many world leaders hosted him with every consideration.7 Ariel Sharon, a staunch partisan of developing settlements in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip, and, like Menachem Begin, fiercely hostile to the idea of a Palestinian state, was worried about the PLO leader’s newfound prestige. Bringing the PLO to its knees in Lebanon would sap his inf luence in the Occupied Territories and forestall any Palestinian demand concerning the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Sharon believed that the strengthening of the PLO in Lebanon enlivened aspirations to autonomy in the Occupied Territories. The solution to the Palestinian problem was not to be found in the framework of an independent Palestinian state in Judea-Samaria and the Gaza Strip, but in Jordan, a position he had long since held. Destruction of the Palestinian organization was thus an absolute priority. From an operational standpoint, Ariel Sharon did not appreciate the way the army had handled the Palestinian problem in Lebanon. He believed the IDF had not properly fulfilled its mission during Operation Litani in 1978, as it left the Palestinian organization’s military potential intact. He viewed the establishment of the UNIFIL in the wake of Operation Litani, as more of a constraint on Israel than on the Palestinians.8 The PLO’s potential subsequently rose steadily to achieve a force of over 14,000 armed combatants equipped with artillery and a few fairly outdated tanks. The ceasefire agreement secured by Ambassador Philippe Habib irked him considerably. He viewed it as a means of reinforcing Yasser Arafat’s prestige among the inhabitants of the Occupied Territories. His second objective was to work toward a Christian-dominated Lebanon with which Israel would sign a peace treaty. This was David Ben-Gurion’s long-standing dream.9 Over the preceding years already, Israel had maintained secret relations with the Gemayel family, which was trying to secure its support against the Syrians. In March 1976 in Haifa, Yitzhak Rabin had already hosted the envoy of Pierre Gemayel, leader of the Christian Phalange at the time. The Israeli government, encouraged by the Mossad, granted the Maronites financial and military backing.10 When Begin came to power, this relation turned into a de facto alliance. Hundreds of Phalange officers and NCOs (Noncommissioned Officers) received military training in Israel.11 Sharon also sought to enlist the Christian clan’s support to help him vanquish the PLO, which had become a “state within the state” in southern Lebanon, and to secure the election of Christian candidate Bashir Gemayel, Pierre’s son, to the presidency in Lebanon. Several contacts were made between him and Bashir Gemayel. In November

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1981 Sharon informed the latter of Israel’s intention to launch a largescale attack in Lebanon against the PLO and the Syrian armed forces. In January 1982 he visited the Gemayel family and the country’s Christian leaders and spoke to them of his plan to alter the military situation by laying siege to Beirut, which would enable the Christians to occupy West Beirut, the Muslim stronghold, and get Bashir elected as head of state. After which, Israel and Lebanon would discuss the signing of a peace treaty or a nonaggression pact.12 Sharon’s plan, labeled Operation Big Pines, came up against sharp resistance within the Israeli security cabinet and even within the army. It involved a major attack that would take the army to the outskirts of Beirut. Several military officials, among them intelligence chief General Yehoshua Saguy, had strong doubts about the Christians’ loyalty. He was backed in this by the commanding officer of Northern Command, General Amir Drori, who did not believe such an operation could rely on such doubtful support. But Mossad director Yitzhak Hofi, a reserve major general who handled ties between Israel and the Phalangists, supported the alliance with the Maronites. Resistance was allayed through the defense minister’s various stratagems. At each major step of the way, Ariel Sharon presented a variety of other options that were lures to insidiously gain acceptance, piece by piece, for a plan that the majority of the cabinet members disapproved. Zeev Maoz referred to Sharon’s manipulation of the restricted council of ministers as “salami tactics.”13 General Saguy, tired of fighting a losing battle, stopped arguing against what he viewed as a militarily debatable undertaking and which moreover raised the thorny problem of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon once the military objectives were achieved, without resolving it. Using as a pretense the attack against the Israeli ambassador to London perpetrated by the dissenting PLO Abu Nidal faction to embarrass Yasser Arafat, the Begin government approved the launching of this vast offensive. It began on June 5, 1982. On June 9, in the space of two hours, the air force destroyed Syria’s Sam batteries in Bekaa, thus gaining control of Lebanese air space, and on June 11 it entered the outskirts of West Beirut where the PLO was entrenched. Early Setbacks From that point on, the military undertaking accumulated setbacks. Bashir Gemayel, as Saguy feared, denied the Israelis assistance in their

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fight against the PLO, explaining this refusal by the wish to avoid finding himself “at the head of a small Christian state within a divided Lebanon.”14 That was a tough blow for the Israeli army. Letting things stand as they were and withdrawing would inevitably lead the Palestinians to cry victory and show that they had put up a heroic resistance to the powerful Israeli army. On the other hand, entering Beirut and hunting down the PLO carried great risks for the IDF and would provoke pressure from the United States. Ariel Sharon and Chief of General Staff Raphael Eitan (Raful) nevertheless chose the second option. In the initial phase, they placed the Lebanese capital under siege and bombed PLO positions. The siege lasted nine weeks, punctuated by massive artillery and air attacks and occasional ground assaults. Several apartment buildings were destroyed, taking a heavy toll among the Lebanese and Palestinian population.15 Footage broadcasted by the media of columns of smoke rising over the city alienated the support of Western public opinion and sparked criticism even from within Israeli society. Sharon urged the Israeli cabinet to authorize a vast offensive on Beirut. The ministers approved only a gradual military advance,16 but the army continued to prepare for an assault on the capital to chase out the PLO once and for all. Many voices were raised within the units asking whether entering Beirut was included in the objectives assigned to the army. Colonel Eli Geva, commander of an armored brigade, refused to obey orders to enter Beirut with his tanks, believing that it represented too high a risk for the population. He asked to be relieved of his command and to pursue his mission as a mere soldier. Since pressure from Prime Minister Menachem Begin did not alter his decision, he was discharged from the army. On August 1, another air and land offensive was launched to boost pressure on West Beirut. On August 12, the area underwent intense air and land bombardment. Sharon requested approval for another land assault that was to be confined to downtown Beirut. The cabinet refused outright, and withdrew his right to command the artillery and aviation without approval from the prime minister or the entire cabinet. As for Arafat, realizing that the PLO could no longer stand up to Israeli military pressure, he finally agreed to the offer made to him by Ronald Reagan’s emissary Philippe Habib. It resulted in an agreement to evacuate 14,000 Palestinian combatants from Beirut on August 21. A multinational force made up of American, French, and Italian soldiers was deployed to oversee the evacuation. Some PLO forces remained and took refuge in the Bekaa Valley. Arafat set up his new headquarters

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in Tunis. Once elected president, Bashir Gemayel repeated his refusal to sign a peace treaty with Israel in the course of a private meeting with Begin on September 1 in Nahariya. But the IDF, the Mossad, and the Lebanese Forces nevertheless agreed to “mop up” West Beirut, arrest, and disarm the Muslim militias. Bashir Gemayel was as eager as the Israelis to use drastic methods to get rid of these “intruders.”17 Sabra and Chatila On September 14, Bashir Gemayel was assassinated during an attack organized in all likelihood by a Syrian secret service agent. The IDF then entered West Beirut. Sharon, believing that there were still 2,000 Palestinian combatants in Lebanon, authorized the Christian Phalangists led by Elie Hobeika to enter the Palestinian camps around Beirut to root them out. After three days of combat in the camps of Sabra and Chatila, 800 men, women, and children had been massacred.18 Israeli military officials present in Beirut were fully aware of the Phalangists’ thirst for revenge against the Palestinians following the assassination of their leader, Bashir.19 In a meeting with Defense Minister Ariel Sharon on August 12, General Saguy, head of military intelligence, had already predicted that “the Phalange [would] find a way [ . . . ] to settle old scores. One day the murders would start, and they will just go on and on without end.”20 General Eitan, speaking with President Reagan’s special envoy Morris Draper and U.S. Ambassador Samuel Lewis, in a meeting in Jerusalem, also predicted that there would be “a relentless slaughter.”21 During the September 15 cabinet meeting, one member, David Levy, argued that they could expect a real “slaughter. Then no one will believe we went in to create order there, and we will bear the blame.” He nevertheless voted in favor of the decision to authorize the Phalangists to enter the camps.22 When Elie Hobeika went to General Yaron’s headquarters, in the afternoon of September 16, to iron out the details of the camp invasion, the latter warned him against atrocities.23 During the night, journalist Ron Ben-Yishai called Sharon at home to inform him that Israeli officers stationed in Beirut were reporting that a massacre was taking place. But apparently the phone call elicited no particular reaction. The country’s military and civilian authorities were aware of the risks of allowing the Lebanese Phalange to operate in the camps. For the IDF, the camps needed to be cleared of combatants and it helped the Phalange by sending up f lares.24 Eitan approved the loan of two IDF bulldozers “to demolish illegal structures.” The

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Phalangists used them to bury bodies in the ground. The army and political authorities were in favor of the physical elimination of the combatants, not of noncombatants. But they took no measure to prevent the tragic consequences that such an operation was bound to have on civilians. This massacre provoked considerable outrage in Israel. A demonstration gathering 400,000 people (one-ninth of the Jewish population at the time) was held in Tel Aviv. The prime minister was forced by the pressure of public opinion to appoint a commission of inquiry, which was placed under the authority of Supreme Court President Yitzhak Kahan. The commission found the Phalangists guilty and held Israel and the IDF indirectly responsible for the bloodbath. Sharon was judged harshly for having neglected to fulfill his duties. These findings led him to resign from his post as defense minister. However, Begin kept him in his cabinet as a minister without portfolio. The commission ascribed “a certain degree of responsibility” to Begin. This vague phrasing enabled the prime minister to remain in office. General Eitan was held responsible for dereliction of duty. Nearing retirement, he left the army soon afterward. General Yaron, who had declared before the Kahan Commission, “we were all insensitive, that’s all,”25 was found to have committed a breach of his duties. The commission recommended that he not serve in a position of field commander for three years. He was later promoted and appointed military attaché to Washington. The Kahan Commission severely reprimanded General Saguy for not having defended his convictions to the end and recommended he be relieved of his functions. He resigned from the army and began a new career in politics this time, getting himself elected to the Knesset on the Likud ticket. More generally speaking, the commission stated: “It is regrettable that the reaction by IDF soldiers to such deeds was not always forceful enough to bring a halt to the despicable acts.”26 In August 1983 Begin, affected both by the disappointing outcome of this war and the death of his wife, withdrew from politics. The first phase of the Lebanon War drew to a close with the bloody episode of the Palestinian camps. It ended with thousands of deaths. The IDF had deployed impressive forces (90,000 troops and thousands of tanks). It is difficult to arrive at a precise tally of civilian deaths caused by the Israeli army. Official Lebanese sources put the number of those killed at 19,000, “a vast exaggeration,” according to historian Benny Morris.27 The Israeli army, for its part, has challenged these estimates, but without giving any further details. Israeli academic Avner Yaniv underscores the massive artillery unleashed “even at the cost of

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heavy civilian casualties among the Palestinians and the Lebanese.”28 Extensive demolition took place in Palestinian refugee camps of houses that “sheltered terrorists.” The Ein Hilwe camp was entirely demolished as a result of bitter fighting between armed Palestinians and Israeli forces.29 In his diary, an IDF officer noted that the quantity of bombs and shells dropped on the camp reminded him of the bombing during the Second World War.30 Hundreds of thousands of people chose to f lee the region and take refuge in the country’s north. This massive exodus to Beirut and other regions in Lebanon fit in with the army’s strategy: to provoke rejection among the local population who were concerned by the inf lux of these thousands of people jeopardizing regional ethnic and economic balances. But despite its firepower, the army was not in a position to achieve its strategic objectives. The Quagmire and Hezbollah’s Rising Inf luence The most difficult phase for the IDF, withdrawal from Lebanon, however, was just beginning. On completion of this vast military operation, civilian and military leaders intended to present withdrawal as that of a victorious army returning home after having brilliantly accomplished its mission. In fact, the insurgency remained active and Lebanon was more than ever under Syrian inf luence. The IDF evacuated Beirut and the Multinational Force returned to the Lebanese capital at the request of the newly elected president Amin Gemayel, Bashir’s brother. Yitzhak Shamir, who had replaced Menachem Begin, and Moshe Arens, the new defense minister, decided to pull the army out of Beirut, but ran up against the question of a total withdrawal from Lebanon. This turned out to be a major political stumbling block in that it would mean acknowledging the failure of the Likud’s “grand design”—the eradication of terrorism in Lebanon—as well as the breakdown of the IDF’s deterrence capability. Undertaken in adverse conditions, withdrawal from Lebanon would have encouraged further attacks against northern Israel. For that reason the Israelis did not want to embark on it without the assurance of “adequate security arrangements . . . in the areas evacuated.” They also wanted “these arrangements to be enshrined in a formal peace accord.”31 None of these conditions was obtained. An accord signed on May 17, 1983, stipulated an Israeli withdrawal to the international border. The two countries would put an end to the state of war that had existed since 1948. This document, which was ratified by the Lebanese Parliament, was, however, repealed by Amin

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Gemayel in the spring of 1984 under Syrian pressure and various local factions that were opposed to concluding a peace treaty with Israel. The idea of a total evacuation was gaining ground in Israeli public opinion. The Israeli government decided to withdraw the army along the Awali River. Its departure from the outskirts of Beirut revived the fighting between Muslims and Christians. Syrian artillery bombarded Christian East Beirut. The Druze slaughtered hundreds of Christians in the Chouf district. The alliance between Israelis and Maronites soon crumbled. “Peace for Galilee” crystallized several sources of discontent toward Israel, which steadily swelled. It came from the Syrians, who had suffered serious military humiliation from the IDF air force at the start of this war, and then from the Shi’ites. Now that the Israelis had rid them of their Palestinian tormentors, they found less justification for Israeli presence. Israeli generals and the defense minister, to whom only the alliance with the Christians mattered, did not undertake a policy of aiding the population and showed little interest in building bridges with it.32 This large segment of the Lebanese population, initially well disposed toward Israel, was left to the inf luence of radical Shi’ites. Israeli presence, and Western presence in general, provoked the emergence of a new guerrilla force led by Hezbollah that was more effective than the PLO. At first it was a small Shi’ite group backed by Iran and Syria. It perpetrated several suicide attacks using trucks loaded with explosives against foreign forces in the country. The October 23, 1983, twin bombing of the American and French command posts caused the death of 241 Marines and 59 French soldiers. These attacks prompted French and American withdrawal from Lebanon. On November 4, 1983, a truck demolished Israeli army headquarters in Sour, killing 23 soldiers and 5 Shin Bet officers. The army and Shin Bet “retaliated after each major incident with mass arrests, wholesale torture, and the occasional assassination of suspected Shi’ite militants.”33 Any attack against the army induced Israeli security forces to respond with reprisals against Shi’ite villages. “Extortion, intimidation, beatings and torture became the norm, and Shi’ite militants were from time to time liquidated in their homes and villages by locally hired assassins or Shin Bet operatives.”34 In the words of a senior Shin Bet official, Rafi Malka, “Lebanon gave us Lebanonization, levantinization . . . In order to stay sane and stay alive, you had to do things that were unacceptable. The Shin Bet was no exception. It was a struggle in a wild west and people paid with their lives if they tried to behave according to accepted standards.”35 Shin Bet agents, who excelled in infiltrating

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Palestinian groups in the Occupied Territories, had more trouble carrying out their infiltration work in the Shi’ite milieus in Lebanon. Yitzhak Rabin, the new defense minister, tackled the matter again after the July 1984 elections, the outcome of which was so close that the two main parties ended up sharing power on a rotating basis, each camp occupying the post of prime minister for two years at a time. Rabin prepared a phased withdrawal plan. But this withdrawal, which was not supposed to give the impression of a retreat, had the opposite effect. It encouraged the hostility of all the anti-Israeli factions that had cropped up in Lebanon—Shi’ite, Sunni, and even Christian—toward Israel and its army, which they perceived as weakened and on the verge of leaving Lebanon without having achieved victory.36 Rabin announced the implementation of an “iron fist” policy. It did nothing to change the situation. That did not mean that the Israelis resorted to ruthless methods such as those used by the Syrian army or the Iraqi army against the civilian population and which involved bloodily crushing hundreds of civilians if necessary. In his book Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, Benny Morris claims, “a harsher policy, with mass executions and expulsions, and the destruction of whole villages could have halted the Shi’ite campaign. But given Israel’s behavioral and democratic norms, this was never an option.”37 The IDF had to come to terms with a tragic dilemma: pulling out meant encouraging the resistance, staying would encourage it just as much. The least one can say is that no leader until Ehud Barak in 2000 was able to resolve this dilemma. In any event, IDF deterrence capability was virtually ineffective. The withdrawal was completed in June 1985. A contingent of 2,000 soldiers working together with the South Lebanon Army (SLA)—a Christian militia equipped by Israel—was put in charge of maintaining a security zone along the border with Lebanon. This decision was fraught with consequences for Israel. It was a trap that ensnared the country for 15 years, with Hezbollah regularly harassing this force, kidnapping and killing soldiers and planting mines in the path of IDF patrols.38 Several violent episodes punctuated relations between the IDF and Hezbollah during the 1990s. In June 1993 Israel sustained two lethal attacks in which it lost nine soldiers, while several civilians in the town of Kiryat Shmona were hit by Katyucha rocket fire. The IDF retaliated by bombing Hezbollah sites (headquarters, rocket launchers, the movement’s leaders’ homes). Operation Justice Recovered lasted from July 25 to 31, causing 147 Lebanese civilian deaths and the f light of 350,000 others, which, from the Israeli perspective, was supposed to serve as

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a means of pressure on the Lebanese government to put a stop to the attacks against Israel. On signature of an accord between the two parties, Israel committed to halt fire against civilians, whereas Hezbollah agreed to refrain from firing rockets at Kiryat Shmona. But it still left the Party of God free to continue its attacks against the Israeli army. Operation Grapes of Wrath in April 1996, approved by the interim Prime Minister Shimon Peres, was a sort of repeat performance of Operation Justice Recovered. It was launched in retaliation for Hezbollah Katyusha attacks against the population in northern Israel. The IDF f lew 600 sorties and fired some 25,000 shells; 400,000 Lebanese f led the combat zone. A shell accidentally fired on the village of Qana caused the death of 102 Lebanese civilians. The shell missed its target and hit a UN compound that served as an assembly point for refugees.39 Internal and Regional Consequences of the “Disaster” Operation Peace for Galilee was a “disaster,”40 the Israeli army’s “greatest folly.”41 Its negative repercussions for Israel are still palpable to this day. True, the PLO was chased out of Lebanon, but it was not destroyed, and the demand for a Palestinian state remains. Several thousand combatants remained in Lebanon and above all, it did nothing to resolve the Palestinian problem in the Occupied Territories, on the contrary. In 1987 the first Intifada, the “stone uprising” that would last six years, broke out. The peace with Lebanon was never made. The Gemayels refused to play the role they were assigned and would not open hostilities against the Palestinians. The “grand design” for redrawing the map of the Middle East turned into a fiasco. The Christians argued that if they had any hope of running the country, they could not turn the Muslim population against them and sign a peace treaty with Israel. From June 1982 to June 1985, Israel sustained 650 losses and nearly 3,000 wounded.42 The PLO lost more than 1,000 men. This war weakened the PLO, but did not disqualify it. Arafat renounced terrorism in his 1988 declaration and returned to the Occupied Territories in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Later he negotiated the Oslo accords, which led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority. The “grand design,” meticulously planned by the military, suffered from a number of shortcomings. It ignored the complexity of Lebanese society. It bore the stamp of arrogance and self-assurance characteristic of that generation of bold generals the likes of “Arik” (Sharon) and

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“Raful” (Eitan). Both of them had been placed at the head of the most prestigious elite units such as the paratrooper brigade and had marked the 1950s by their not always very commendable ingenuity in the peulot tagmul (retaliation operations). The “Big Pines” plan did not anticipate either any hostile reaction to Israeli presence on Lebanese territory or the risk of a quagmire. It was taken for granted that the population would welcome the Israeli troops as liberators. This was indeed the case in the early days of the operation, when Israeli troops were greeted with sheaves of rice by the Shi’ite population in southern Lebanon, delighted to be rid of the armed Palestinian groups that had taken over these areas and laid down the law. This warm welcome did not last long: “The Israelis were blind to the political realities of the country and their own unpopularity in the Arab world. So much so that these difficulties were not foreseen, and no available source gives any reason to believe that they were seriously considered,” remarks historian Martin Van Creveld.43 Very soon the Shi’ite population turned against Israel. That is when the troubles began in earnest. The IDF was in fact one war behind. Operation Big Pines was mounted and prepared in the manner of a classic military operation against a well-armed and well-equipped army far from populated areas. Such thinking was ill suited to counterinsurgency warfare.44 Sizeable armed forces were engaged against irregular, more mobile groups on uneven terrain favorable to the insurgents. After the IDF’s initial successes and its swift arrival at the gates of Beirut, its tactics were basically static. It generally responded to each attack with bombings, which had little effect on irregular groups and caused harm to the population. The notion of “winning hearts and minds,” although within its reach at the time, was f lagrantly missing from the Israeli strategy, which carried no provisions for protecting the welfare of civilians. The apparition of this new Shi’ite force, Hezbollah, backed by Iran, had considerable consequences in the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict. Hezbollah introduced suicide bombing tactics to the Middle East,45 which proved unstoppable, at least at that time. Hamas later made them one of its preferred modus operandi, before the Fatah adopted it in turn. Between September 1983 and the final withdrawal from Lebanon in May 2000, Hezbollah attacks claimed 250 lives among Israeli soldiers.46 The army lost 1,500 men between 1982 and 2000, for a calamitous outcome.47 The most serious consequence was that Sharon’s “grand design” turned the entire area along Israel’s northern border into a hostile region in the hands of radical groups that not only

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wanted to run foreigners out of the country but also intended to make Lebanon an Islamic state. Compared to them, the Palestinians came to appear as a far more bearable threat to Israel’s security. Israel ruined its good relations with both the Christians and the Shi’ites. As for Syria, it gained greater control over Lebanon than what it had enjoyed before the 1982 Israeli invasion. The final withdrawal in 2000 lent substance to the idea that “the best army in the Middle East” had been unable to gain the upper hand over a less well-armed guerrilla. This “defeat,” never acknowledged by the army, encouraged the movement in the Occupied Territories that would break out in September 2000 and become known as the second Intifada. Another outcome of this war on the Israeli domestic front was the dawn of protest movements.48 In the beginning it was soldiers who refused to support this war and founded the first “refuznik” movement Yesh Gvul (there is a limit).49 The number of conscientious objectors to the war rose well into the hundreds: 170 of them were tried and imprisoned; 1 out of 5 was an officer.50 In the 1990s was founded the Four Mothers Movement, which pressured Israel to withdraw its troops from Lebanon.51 Operation Peace for Galilee gnawed away at the trust the Israeli public had in its leaders. Although at first the operation enjoyed the support of 67 percent of the Israeli Jewish population, this figure had fallen to 15 percent when it ended.52 It undermined the confidence the Israeli youth had in an army that had embarked on a war that was not of vital necessity.53 In the eyes of world public opinion, Operation Peace for Galilee appeared as a war of aggression that sought to redraw the map of Israel’s northern borders. That was unacceptable. Israel had chosen to use military force to solve a political problem that could not be resolved by anything other than political means. A “destructive and spectacular” tactic was used in the 1970s right from the beginning of the fight against the PLO in South Lebanon to annihilate its infrastructures that had enabled it gradually to install a “state within a state” and conduct terrorist operations against Israeli civilians from this territory. Once again the brutal method chosen by Israeli civil and military leaders to solve the problem of Palestinian terrorism rested on the belief that it was enough to “hit hard to make the Arabs come to reason.” This simplistic viewpoint has produced and will continue to produce further disillusionment.

CH A P T E R

FOU R

How the IDF Popularized the First Intifada

For the first 20 years of IDF occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip that began in June 1967, no major confrontation occurred between the army and the Palestinian population. There was no rebellion or general uprising. Palestinian nationalist activities were quickly thwarted. Militants did not enjoy sufficient support among the Palestinian population. Groups that attempted to form were quickly identified and their members arrested thanks to a network of agents and informants that Shin Bet had had no trouble setting up at the time. This security organization was thus able to foil a considerable number of planned attacks.1 Economic prosperity in the wake of the Six-Day War had created a sense of well-being among the population, at least during the first decade, and enabled the Israelis to maintain a “liberal” occupation using a relatively small military and police staff. A brigade of a few hundred soldiers was enough to keep order. But the population’s attitude toward the occupation changed gradually without the main Israeli government officials realizing it. After finishing his mandate as first Coordinator of Government Operations in the Occupied Territories in 1987, General Shlomo Gazit published an essay in 1988 in which he prided himself in the “twenty years of relative calm” that these territories experienced during his time.2 In January 1988 his successor, Schmuel Goren, even more optimistic, presented the occupation as a “brilliant success.”3 Unrest Disregarded A relatively minor incident, however, starkly revealed the scale of the discontent that had taken hold of Palestinian society, weary of an

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occupation to which it could see no end in sight. The Israeli leadership’s optimistic viewpoint turned out to be a far cry from the reality on the ground. The spark that ignited the powder keg was a traffic accident. On December 8, 1987, an Israeli truck collided with a collective Palestinian taxi in the Gaza Strip not far from the Jebalya refugee camp, killing three passengers and injuring several others seriously. The East Jerusalem Arab newspaper al-Fajr spread a rumor claiming that it was a “maliciously perpetrated” murder.4 On the way back from the funeral, thousands of young Palestinians attacked the sector’s army fortification. Rioting spread through the entire camp, and the border police and army reinforcements called in for help were greeted by a shower of stones and Molotov cocktails. Disturbances had already broken out in the past in the Gaza Strip, but they usually ended at nightfall. This time, they began again at dawn, never to abate, and spread to the West Bank. On the third day of the uprising, Yitzhak Rabin, defense minister in the coalition government led by Likud leader Yitzhak Shamir, got on a plane to Washington without altering his schedule in the least to negotiate a major arms contract that included the purchase of F16 planes. No one realized that the Intifada had begun or gauged the dimension it was taking on. The government refused to send reinforcements to the scene of the riots, convinced that, as in the past, the IDF would manage to restore order in no time with the numbers it had stationed in the Territories. Only the field units noticed the obvious difference in the nature of the unrest. The demonstrators were unusually bold. They did not hesitate to defy the soldiers or fearlessly wrest weapons from their hands. On December 21, on return from his trip to the United States, Rabin accused Iran and Syria of having fomented the disturbances, although they were entirely spontaneous. The prime minister for his part laid the blame on the PLO, whereas a secret service report explicitly stated that the uprising had come as a surprise even to the organization itself.5 The unrest very quickly spread throughout the entire Occupied Territories. The revolt, in which every stratum of the population took part, had a popular twist. It was expressed through demonstrations, strikes, the throwing of stones and Molotov cocktails at IDF forces, by roadblocks paralyzing traffic and complicating settler and army activity. It was characterized by a low level of militarization. Firearms, bladed weapons, and explosive devices did circulate but in limited numbers and claimed few victims, as admitted by the Israeli leadership. The revolt was extremely widespread and took the political leadership, the

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army, and the secret services totally by surprise. Not only did the secret services fail to see it coming, despite clear signs of immense discontent, but they also underestimated its scale and its deep-seated reasons, believing that the “agitation” would be short-lived. In fact, a number of changes had occurred in Palestinian society since 1967. They were patent, but no one paid them sufficient attention. Contrary to the approach advised by Defense Minister Moshe Dayan in June 1967, the army increasingly interfered in Palestinian civil affairs. Following the League of Arab States’ outright rejection of Israel’s offer to begin peace talks at its 1967 summit meeting in Khartoum, the Israeli authorities prepared for a lasting presence in the Occupied Territories until a political settlement of the conf lict could be found. Many Israeli officials believed that from a strictly security standpoint the Territories offered the “strategic depth” that Israel lacked and they should not be returned without sufficient guarantees.6 At first the military administration set up there merely saw to the population’s vital needs, but it then began intervening more and more intrusively in the economy of the Territories, for instance, curbing freedom of the press and overseeing school curricula. It levied customs duties and taxes on the population. It also controlled the crossing of bridges spanning the Jordan River. A permit was required of Palestinians wishing to obtain the most ordinary of services, such as buy a telephone, open a business, or travel abroad. Arbitrary detention of suspected members of a radical organization was common. But the economic boom enjoyed by Israel and the spillover effect it had for the Palestinians fairly largely offset these difficulties. In Gaza, on the other hand, armed groups emerged that attempted to prevent any cooperation between the two parties, readily attacking those who tried to go to work in Israel or cooperate with the Israeli authorities.7 The IDF, under the leadership of Ariel Sharon, then commander of Southern Command, put order in the Gaza Strip by directly going after these groups and reducing them to naught. But bringing them to heel did not settle the thorniest of the problems: poverty in the refugee camps. It was in Jebalya camp, packed with tens of thousands of people, that the December 1987 uprising got its start. The situation began to change in earnest with the development of the settlements. At first, only members of religious right groups such as Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful) claimed the right of the Jews to resettle the Holy Land. In 1977 there were 3,200 settlers in the Occupied Territories. The Likud’s arrival in power altered the situation totally. Menachem Begin encouraged the development of settlements

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that drew not only religious Jews but also many Israelis who were attracted by government-offered economic incentives and the perspective of a “healthier lifestyle” far from the polluted urban areas. In 1986 the number of settlers had reached 60,000.8 The colonization process developed to the detriment of the Palestinians, from whom much land was confiscated. It gave the impression that Israel was rampantly annexing the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The Palestinian economy began to deteriorate and its unemployment rate rose steadily. The early warning signs of radicalization of the population became apparent in the year 1987. Clashes between soldiers and rioters multiplied. Stones and Molotov cocktails were thrown, tires burned, roadblocks set up more frequently. Soldiers and officers were attacked and even disarmed. In August an Israeli officer was shot down right in downtown Gaza. Strikes in schools and shops as well as the f lying of Palestinian f lags—which was strictly forbidden—became commonplace. Army and the civil administration authority were rapidly eroding. The country’s civil and military establishment did not fully measure the scale of the discontent. The political leaders “along with most of their constituents f launted their blindness by behaving as though the Palestinians would forever remain resigned to whatever Israel did in the territories,” note Schiff and Yaari.9 In late 1986 military intelligence had indeed drawn attention to the risk of disturbances in the year to come, but without emphasizing the danger of it and without demanding that the government examine the issue.10 The army general staff did not believe the unrest would go beyond isolated incidents. Nothing was done to prepare soldiers for the possibility of a mass uprising. The political leadership and the army always focused their attention on their main priority, the “great strategic threat” posed by a large-scale conventional attack. Fundamental issues such as the Palestinians’ national aspirations or their economic and social problems were neglected in favor of a “tactical” handling of the disturbances. The Shin Bet did not expect an uprising either. At the very beginning, it asked the government to send reinforcements into the Occupied Territories and conduct mass arrests, but in the wake various scandals that tainted and discredited the organization, its advice went unheeded. Even if it took into consideration the increasingly difficult living conditions for the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip, the Israeli civil administration, which was supposed to gauge the Palestinian “mood in the street,” did not for all that draw the conclusion that an outbreak of violence was imminent in the Occupied Territories.11 Israeli public opinion was indifferent to the Palestinian question and a long way from what

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was happening hardly a few dozen miles from Tel Aviv. The national unity government did its best to avoid dealing with sensitive issues that might threaten the coalition’s harmony. Because of its divisions, it was unable to set a clear political line that in any event ruled out both Likud and Labor Party recognition of Palestinian national aspirations. Labor had, until the right came to power in 1977, done its utmost to banish Palestinian figures, expelling them if necessary, who might have been a political partner for negotiations when the time was right. A Disoriented Army The machine that fueled the insurrection, at first limited, began to work frenetically, implacably. It assumed the appearance of brutal repression, the result of which only further encouraged the rebels’ fervor. The political as well as military reaction was inconsistent, indecisive, and hesitant. The soldiers became engaged in police repression for which they were not trained and with which they were quickly unable to cope, leading them to resort to unbridled violence. The army’s reactions were rather paradoxical. It chose to wield both an “iron fist,” as the government requested, while stopping short of crushing the uprising in blood. Repression was thus at once severe and controlled, producing contradictory behavior, now brutal, now restrained. The army frequently changed tactics, obviously disoriented by events that overtook it and for which it was unprepared. This incoherence resulted in many deaths and especially a very large number of wounded among Palestinian civilians, although these did not calm the population’s insurrectional fervor. At no time was there any fundamental discussion on either the deep meaning of the events or the specific nature of the conf lict. Rabin decided to send several units into the Occupied Territories. Not only was their deployment belated, but these units did not receive any specific training in civilian riot control. At the start of the revolt, dozens of young Palestinians set upon small groups of soldiers, assailing them with stones and Molotov cocktails. The IDF at first tried to disperse the demonstrators using standard police methods: tear gas, truncheons, rubber bullets, and such others. The army’s objective was to avoid killing the demonstrators, who were often very young. Orders were clear: restore order and the authority of the armed forces, restore normal traffic circulation in the West Bank, and clear the road of obstacles that prevented the security forces from circulating

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and doing their job properly.12 But, ill-equipped and poorly trained to face this sort of danger and feeling their life threatened, they fired their weapons to extricate themselves from perilous situations. Many Palestinians were killed during these demonstrations by gunfire from IDF units. In the first few months, 26 Palestinians were killed.13 In the space of a year, 300 Palestinians were dead and 600 wounded.14 To avoid more civilian deaths, in February 1988 the IDF established written guidelines regarding the use of force that required an “appropriate” and measured reaction. Real bullets could be used only as a last resort once all other ordinary means of crowd dispersal had been tried. They were to be fired first in the air, then at the ground and legs and as a last resort straight ahead to kill. Random brutality was forbidden. Arrested Palestinians were not to suffer any form of abuse.15 Soldiers were not to fire at stone-throwing demonstrators at a range of less than 40 yards and that too only at the lower part of the body. It was forbidden to shoot at groups of children or individuals who threw fire bombs. However, when demonstrators ended up threatening traffic circulation along the main arteries of the West Bank, Yitzhak Rabin gave orders to open fire on those throwing Molotov cocktails.16 But army guidelines for restraint were not always clearly issued and reinforced. According to historian Martin Van Creveld, “the rules of engagement were constantly broken. Sometimes this was deliberate, the handiwork of such scoundrels who are always present in any army and enjoy that sort of thing. More often it was a question of soldiers and even recruits being sent into the territories with short notice and poor training.”17 In a number of instances, soldiers used real bullets even when their lives were not in imminent danger. According to James Ron, a Canadian researcher and investigator for the NGO Human Rights Watch, the phenomenon is part of the “hidden practices” that had developed in the army whereby soldiers violate regulations governing the use of their weapons, even if that means giving false testimony when an inquiry is opened in the event of a fatality.18 Foreign television channels showed scenes of violence that disturbed international public opinion. Furthermore, rubber bullets, when fired at too close a range, proved fatal in many cases. One of the major errors the Israeli government made was not to have organized units specially trained in crowd dispersal such as those that exist in many other democracies. Dozens of civilian lives could thus have been spared. Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff attribute the lack of special units to “Israeli indifference to the death of Palestinian civilians.”19 Israel’s state comptroller had identified this serious shortcoming in the

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armed forces in 2000 and called them to remedy the situation, later noting that little improvement had been made. A number of democratic armies and police forces have been faced with violent demonstrations and have managed to handle them while minimizing risks to civilians. But restraint is possible only in three conditions: adequate training, the use of nonlethal means of dispersion, and very strict control by the competent civil and military authorities. In this Intifada, only two out of the three conditions were met. One factor preventing the formation of specialized crowd dispersal units was the conviction that the demonstrations would not last. At the height of the Intifada, Chief of Staff Dan Shomron told the daily newspaper Yediot Aharonot on January 15, 1988, that calm would be restored “in two or three weeks.” The formation of special units would have entailed unnecessary expense. It is also likely that the army refused, out of a purely corporatist concern, to surrender keeping order to special police units, considering that in any event it was the only force legally entitled to intervene beyond the state’s borders. The army, it was believed among the high command, could handle this problem on its own. Certainly, the police forces had the Magav border guards, but this unit was known for its brutal methods, and the political and military authorities called on it to spread fear, not to calm an angry crowd. Attempts to use nonlethal weapons were deployed. The army first used Hatsatsiots, machines mounted on half-tracks that scattered gravel at the demonstrators, then helicopters that sprayed sticky paint on the demonstrators to identify them and later arrest them. None of these methods managed to put an end to the uprising. In some cases, units received orders to “seek contact” with the demonstrators. Jeeps were sent into sectors where they were likely to act and attack army vehicles with stones and Molotov cocktails. Soldiers waited in ambush to fire at them. The government authorized the use of special units known as Mista’arvim, soldiers masquerading as Arabs. One of them, baptized Duvdevan (Cherry), operated in the Gaza Strip, the other, Shimshon (Samson), in the West Bank. Their role was to infiltrate the Palestinian population disguised as Palestinian women or adolescents to try to arrest—and failing that, to kill—armed activists. Their use was officially brought to light in October 1988. This type of operation may have prevented attacks, but it did not play a decisive role against the Palestinian uprising. Similarly, the 1988 assassination of Abu Jihad by an Israeli commando that landed in Tunis, where the new PLO headquarters were located, in no way diminished the rebels’ determination.

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The elimination of all moderate nationalist leadership in the Occupied Territories was probably even one of the major reasons the insurrection gained popularity, the Palestinians feeling that they could no longer count on anyone but themselves. Routine Brutality The inability to overpower the demonstrators led to the implementation of a policy of collective punishment: destruction of telephone and electric lines, imposition of curfews in towns and villages, uprooting of trees or entire orchards that had served to conceal throwers of Molotov cocktails, demolitions of houses of those who had taken part in acts of sabotage. These demolitions, which were previously subject to authorization from the defense minister, were left to the discretion of regional commanders. During the first years of the Intifada, 58 people were evicted. Every Palestinian arrested throwing stones or Molotov cocktails, or simply suspected of it, was taken to the HQ of the military government to be questioned and then handed over to the law. The army conducted thousands of arrests. The homes of fire bombers were destroyed. Such collective punishment aimed to crush the population’s morale. Yet all these measures, however harsh, only provoked further resistance to the occupying forces.20 The minister of defense approved the systematic use of clubs. Some officers believed this would prevent more killing of civilians. The truncheon became the instrument that symbolized repression. During a televised interview, Rabin let slip that they had to “break their bones,” an unfortunate expression taken from colloquial Hebrew, synonymous with “break their backs.” Many soldiers took this instruction literally. “In the end the blows were bestowed with a force bordering on fury and on a scope that suggested an army out of control. Rather than being hailed as a symbol of sanity, or the lesser of two evils, and rather than being used with discretion to subdue rioters resisting arrest, reverted to being an emblem of barbarity and was employed with abandon by men who had simply let the uprising get their goat,” Schiff and Yaari write.21 Often thousands of innocent Palestinians were injured, some crippled for life. With prisons overf lowing and the courts unable to cope with the high number of cases to try, soldiers increasingly tended to settle the problem of keeping order themselves by exercising an unwritten right to punish. Palestinians caught red-handed throwing stones or merely suspected were brutally beaten. “There were countless

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instances in which young Arabs were dragged behind walls or deserted buildings and systematically beaten all but senseless.”22 This form of release had a high degree of emotional charge. The “strongest army in the Middle East” was being defied by kids who had the nerve to rebel instead of submitting. Soldiers and their officers were suffering from a collective wounded ego, which only exacerbated their violent and undisciplined behavior. They made the Palestinian population pay the price of their frustration. “Now they opened fire at the wrong persons under the wrong circumstances and in the wrong manner; now they administered beatings, either ‘authorized’ or ‘extracurricular’; now they inf licted humiliations such as forbidding captives to relieve themselves or making them hop around on one leg and sing Israeli songs while cursing their own Palestinian leadership; now they invented ingenious forms of torture, as when a soldier used a bulldozer to bury captured demonstrators (they came out alive).”23 Thousands of officers and soldiers were affected by a “moral blind spot,” notes legal scholar Moshe Negbi, “when they gave and/or carried out the order to strike Palestinian prisoners brutally and cruelly—to the point of breaking their bones and sometimes resulting in death—as a means of punishing and preventing violent outbreaks and disturbances.”24 Such practices were denounced in no uncertain terms by military judge Emanuel Gross, but they nonetheless continued with the approval of the high command and the government. Some officers even went as far as issuing the command to enter Palestinian homes, extract those suspected of having disturbed the peace, and beat them severely. This was the case of Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Meir who carried his zeal so far as to finish off the job with kicks and punches if the clubs broke. Judge Amnon Strashnov, chief military prosecutor during the first Intifada, vigorously condemned this officer’s behavior but decided to have him tried in a disciplinary hearing instead of in criminal court. It thus fell to Chief of Staff Dan Shomron to sentence him, who merely gave him a “severe reprimand.”25 Many other testimonies collected by James Ron confirm this sort of abuse practiced totally unlawfully by young army officers. For instance, he reports the testimony of soldier Amir, whose lieutenant, acting on orders from his superior, took it upon himself on January 19, 1988, to enter the village of Beita in the West Bank, declare a curfew, arrest a dozen Palestinians youths, and take them to a nearby field where he ordered his soldiers to strike them hard in the kneecaps.26 Torture was also used. Arrests were carried out by the thousands, and the courts required proof of participation in illegal activities from

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the security forces. Since the arrested Palestinians refused to admit anything whatsoever, they figured that all they could do was to use force to make them confess. The use of torture gradually spread, essentially by the Shin Bet, in charge of collecting intelligence. Torture became the topic of bitter debate in Israel until the Supreme Court banned it outright. Although a signatory of the International Convention against Torture, Israel did not ratify it until August 1991. Following several complaints from human rights organizations and figures on the left, the commission presided by Justice Landau banned it in 1987, although it authorized the use of “moderate physical pressure,” an expression that left the security services considerable latitude for interpretation. The idea was not to deprive security forces of the means of obtaining information about planned attacks. It was not until September 1999 that the Supreme Court unanimously banned Shabak’s27 methods of investigation used on Palestinian prisoners, which were akin to torture. In particular, it expressly forbid violent shaking (tiltulim), keeping prisoners tied up in painful positions, sleep deprivation, covering a prisoner’s head with a bag, and deafening music. It put an end to an 11-year period during which acts contravening international conventions against torture were legally permissible, under cover of the label “moderate physical pressure.” The Court, however, did say it remained prepared to admit the excuse of “necessity defense” in cases where the situation would prompt the government agent to resort to such methods (in “ticking bomb” conditions).28 When the Generals Rein in the Political Authorities Virtually all important decisions were improvised: the early reactions to the uprising, the totally unprepared deployment of army units in the Occupied Territories. They had devastating and entirely counterproductive effects. The practice of systematic clubbing “was instituted quite casually, almost incidentally,” write Schiff and Yaari.29 The first Intifada claimed 1,200 lives in 6 years and wounded over 20,000.30 The number of Palestinian deaths during the first 2 years was fairly high, greater than those in the following years (289 in 1988 and 285 in 1989, 125 in 1990, 61 in 1991).31 This is three times fewer than under the second Intifada. But the context was one of a popular uprising primarily by civilians who had no connection to any armed group, and whose aim was not to kill or terrorize Israelis but to do away with an occupation of which no one could see the end. There were relatively

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few attacks against Israeli civilians in either the Territories or in Israel: 8 in 1988, 20 in 1989, 17 in 1990, and 14 in 1991. The number of Israeli civilians killed started to increase in 1994 with the beginning of suicide attacks (57 in 1994, 16 in 1995, 40 in 1996); 69 soldiers were killed in the Occupied Territories. The death toll would probably have been even higher if among army officials there had not been certain fairly moderate figures such as Chief of Staff Dan Shomron and head of Central Command General Amram Mitzna in charge of IDF forces in the West Bank.32 On a number of occasions they took considerable heat from right-wing ministers and Knesset members in the government coalition, in particular Ariel Sharon, who accused them of being “too soft,”33 and demanded a tougher stance, thus overturning the stereotype according to which, in a democracy, the military are the “hawks” and the warmongers, the civil leadership advocates of peace. When Justice Minister Avraham Sharir suggested “whole blocks of buildings should be demolished” if necessary and Likud MP Yitzhak Moda’i chimed in, “The IDF has been given an assignment and should carry it out!,” General Mitzna retorted, “Israel is a country ruled by law, and the IDF must operate within the confines of that law.”34 Mitzna reminded his officers that Israel could not afford to alienate the Palestinian population for good or compromise any chance of a political settlement. During a visit to a kibbutz in the Jordan Valley, he was taken to task by soldiers who complained of not having enough support from their hierarchy and demanded the right to shoot at aggressors regardless of their age, sex, or the circumstances. He answered, “Are you suggesting that we shoot women and children for throwing stones? Yes, sometimes even a stone can kill, but that’s no reason to go around shooting the people who throw them. This is Israel, not Syria!”35 Dan Shomron, backed by several other generals such as head of military intelligence General Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, argued that the solution to the Intifada was not a military one, that the uprising was a political problem and that it could be dealt with only by political means. They nevertheless firmly believed that anarchy must not be allowed to take hold. Three hundred officers and soldiers were subject to disciplinary proceedings or brought before the courts. The military tribunals did their best to judge the cases brought before it, but not all of them were brought to its attention and considerable pressure was exercised not to prosecute offenders.36 The courts demonstrated greater severity toward mere soldiers and young officers; ranking officers often enjoyed considerable immunity. Among those found guilty, the large majority of

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them got off lightly with transfers, reprimands, deprivation of rank and fines for symbolic amounts.37 The Inversion of Symbols The Intifada seriously undermined soldier morale. Incidents of soldiers refusing to serve, a phenomenon that had emerged during the Lebanon War, were again on the rise.38 The army experienced increasing difficulty to recruit men to serve in the front lines. Reservists who had completed their period of duty asked to meet with Israel’s president, Chaim Herzog, to protest against the endless occupation that led them to employ insufferable brutality.39 In the army, these “softies” were accused of “shooting and crying,” an attitude that appeared paradoxical and ambiguous to say the least. In answer to this, some of the accused soldiers replied, “When . . . you are obliged to perform your duties which are against your conscience, against your education and your worldview, and you don’t know whether you will accomplish your mission . . . it is not a disgrace to cry.”40 The debate about the erosion of ethics in the Israeli army’s behavior took on an unprecedented scale. An in-depth study conducted by the Department of Communication and Journalism at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem among 22 conscript and reserve soldiers who had participated in the fight against the Intifada revealed a more complex situation. Some of them approved acts of army violence, whereas another segment of them showed a more ambivalent, even ambiguous attitude.41 It was during this time that many civil society organizations were formed, such as the Civil Rights Association and B’Tselem, which became the most inf luential human rights organization in Israel. It was created on the initiative of left-wing political figures such as Zahava Galon, a Knesset member from the left-wing Meretz party. Rightwing Knesset members such as Dan Meridor, former justice minister and liberal right politician, tried to demonstrate that democracy and occupation were incompatible. The “brutalization” of the IDF dates back to this period and not the second Intifada, as many have claimed. A phenomenon of dehumanization of the other clearly appeared and lasted well afterward, as indicates the testimony of Captain A., who served in the Shimshon battalion in the West Bank in 1999–2000: “The situation was considerably better in the Territories at that time. There was no more talk about Intifada. The economy was good. I served in control posts for a long time. The

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army had maintained them out of fear of attacks. What I saw there was not very pleasant. The soldiers’ attitude was inhumane. They’d make a group of workers going into Israel to work wait for no reason, just like that, to annoy them, to delay them, to show their strength. They were always shouting and using vulgarity. Arabs were beaten at checkpoints. They were made to empty everything out of their car at the control post even if the people in the car weren’t suspected of anything, even when it was unnecessary. No one in the upper echelons said that the soldiers were not permitted to punish, that it was not their prerogative. They allowed the soldiers to behave immorally. One of the problems is that instructions weren’t clear. You were told that you could hold back a car for hours if you suspected something. Soldiers took advantage of that to ‘punish’ Palestinians after an attack. Not all units behaved the same way. A lot depended on the personality of the commander who either let soldiers do what they want or kept a rein on them.”42 According to a 1995 army study that was leaked to the press, 72 percent of the soldiers interviewed believed it was “very demoralizing” to serve in the Occupied Territories and 46 percent of them admitted having been witness to “reprehensible attitudes” toward Palestinian civilians.43 The Intifada was a failure not only for the army but also for Israel. While the Palestinian cause gained support throughout the world, Israel’s former image of the “little nation in danger” continued to erode. Israel earned the status of oppressor, of Goliath facing the Palestinian David. The inversion of symbols worked extremely well. The Israelis did much more to publicize and popularize the Palestinian cause than the Palestinians did themselves. The Israelis did a much better job than their adversaries of discrediting themselves on the international scene and undermining the confidence of their closest allies in Europe and the United States. Palestinian radicalization was accompanied by the creation of Hamas, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in late 1987. After winning the 1992 elections, Labor Party leaders became aware of the danger there was in allowing the occupation to continue without any political offer and the Palestinian population without any leadership. They also perceived the danger of the growth of Hamas, which took advantage of the political void in the Occupied Territories. The political offer was the work of a small group of figures gathered around Yossi Beilin, close to Shimon Peres, who worked with PLO moderates such as Ahmed Qorei (Abu Alaa), to prepare the Oslo Accords that came in the wake of the end of the Gulf War and the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference. Yitzhak Rabin, although he did not instigate it,

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backed their initiative, which culminated with the signing of the Oslo Accords in September 1993 on the White House lawn. Their goal was to establish a Palestinian Interim Self-Governing Authority and an elected Palestinian Council in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for a transitional period not to exceed five years, with a view to a permanent settlement based on UN Security Council resolutions 242 (1967) and 338 (1973). The five-year transition period would begin with the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the area of Jericho. Negotiations between the Israeli government and representatives of the Palestinian people on the permanent status of the Territories would begin as soon as possible, but no later than the beginning of the third year of the interim period. It was understood that these negotiations would pertain to the unresolved questions of Jerusalem, refugees, the settlements, security arrangements, border issues and cooperation with other neighbors, and other matters of common interest. These accords aroused a wave of optimism in Israel among partisans of a peace settlement with the Palestinians, but came up against resistance from the Israeli right and nationalist and religious settlers. One of them, Ygal Amir, assassinated Rabin on November 4, 1995. On the Palestinian side, they provoked opposition from the most radical groups, including Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, which tried to torpedo the Accords by perpetrating suicide attacks in Israel starting in 1994. Five years after the Accords were signed, neither party had scrupulously fulfilled its commitments. In July 2000 at Camp David, President Bill Clinton attempted to launch negotiations toward a final settlement of the conf lict. But the second Intifada and inconsistent policy on the part of leaders on both sides jeopardized his efforts.

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The Handling of the Second Intifada

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CH A P T E R

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Botched Engagement in the Intifada

A New Brand of Violence The al-Aqsa Intifada ushered in an era with a new brand of violence.1 It began with a popular uprising following Ariel Sharon’s visit to Temple Mount on September 28, 2000. But unlike the first Intifada, which was basically a civil uprising against the symbols of an occupation that has lasted since June 1967, the second Intifada very quickly lapsed into an armed struggle between Palestinian activists and the Israeli armed forces. Almost from the very start, armed men took to hiding among crowds of Palestinians, using them as cover to shoot from. The IDF retaliated forcefully, each time causing several casualties. Time and again, the IDF has been pilloried for its brutal behavior. It has even been accused of having perpetrated massacres, particularly during Operation Defensive Shield in Jenin in March 2002. It is said to have become brutalized during the second Intifada, with “large segments” having been “considerably Algerianized.”2 Within Israeli society itself, peace advocates have raised their voices to criticize an army that has supposedly lost all humanity. The army’s ethos is said to have deteriorated. “Killing innocent people has gradually become the norm, and this norm is placed in the service of an objective: to deprive another people of their freedom and human rights,” claims Zeev Sternhell, historian, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and leading figure of the Israeli movement Peace Now.3 Between the start of the second Intifada on September 29, 2000, and December 26, 2008, 4,792 Palestinians were killed, including 2,222 civilians who did not take part in the hostilities, according to B’Tselem.4

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In his book The Other Army of Israel, Yagil Levy, an Israeli army sociologist at the Open University of Raanana, focuses on the sociological changes the army has undergone since the late 1990s, which he views as an explanation for the army’s “brutality.”5 According to Levy, the “old elites” from the kibbutzim, most of them Ashkenazi and secular, who once formed the ranks of combat units, have gradually left these units and moved toward the more gratifying technological military jobs, making way for “new groups” that are eager to demonstrate their combativeness and thus be promoted to posts of command. Among these groups are Israelis from oriental countries, new immigrants (Falashas, Russian immigrants) and religious soldiers in “knitted yarmulkes” (nationalist religious Jews). “Bulldozer operators who demolish Palestinian houses, engineer corps and infantry soldiers who enter homes through breaches made in the walls, armored division soldiers who use sophisticated night vision equipment [ . . . ] can be counted among the new military figures, most of them from the East, new immigrants, ‘knitted yarmulkes’ and a few women.”6 He claims these units tend to interpret orders from the political authorities in a way that suits them, in other words in a “warmongering manner, and refrain from carrying out orders that seem moderate to them, especially the evacuation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.”7 This “bottom-up” explanation is, however, rather reductive. It is not low-ranking soldiers who make the sort of decisions described by Levy, particularly as regards the deployment of checkpoints and the razing of homes. Nor are they the ones who decide when to arrest an activist or kill him. His book does not demonstrate the possible causal link between undeniable sociological evolutions and military operations on the ground. Contrary to his prognosis, the army’s withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2005 was conducted with great discipline. If one examines the past, cases of extremely brutal army behavior toward the Palestinians were noted during the first Intifada, well before the army’s so-called sociological transformations. It was soldiers belonging to “older generations” who put down the uprising of the first Intifada (1987–1993) with clubs and rif le butts. They were also the ones who went to war against Lebanon in the early 1980s. Contrary to Yagil Levy’s theory, the objectives and preoccupations of the high command and political echelon carry more weight. Not that the role of the ordinary soldier matters none, but the main lines of the modus operandi are essentially determined at the highest military echelons and require the approval of the chief of general staff who in turn answers to the political authorities. Though soldiers in the field

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have a certain degree of autonomy, they exercise it in the framework of guidelines worked out at higher levels with which they have virtually no contact. The IDF is not an army of independent militias. On the whole it is highly disciplined. Policy toward Palestinian armed groups is decided at the highest level of command. IDF response has not always been “proportionate,” far from it. In many cases, violence has been perpetrated without security justifications. The desire to assuage public opinion has guided policy choices as much among the political leadership as in the army. Anger, frustration, and the inability to defeat radical groups have prompted reactions of sheer revenge in the army, as, for instance, the destruction of several houses in the Gaza Strip or the destruction of the Gaza power plant in retaliation for the June 2006 abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit from Israeli territory by armed groups. But to declare, as does Zeev Sternhell, that “killing innocent people has gradually become the norm” is excessive. A more careful examination of the facts compels one to use better judgment. The reality on the ground is more complicated than what human rights activists claim, albeit sincerely. For the IDF, it was not only a question of restoring order but also of protecting lives and protecting itself. In the space of four years, suicide attacks killed nearly 1,000 Israeli civilians, the worst spate of terrorism Israel has ever known. It is a war in which soldiers are at risk daily. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere, which inevitably makes them very nervous and ready to pull the trigger at the slightest alert. Clashes are violent. The question is, therefore, whether, in such difficult circumstances, the IDF handled the ordeals it has had to face during the second Intifada in the most appropriate manner. What is most striking is not so much the IDF’s “brutalization” as its chronic inability to think in terms of asymmetrical warfare. Despite the experience gained over the preceding decades, the general staff seem to have learned neither about the mechanisms of this type of conf lict, nor from their own mistakes. The conviction that “Arabs only understand force” and that a violent and disproportionate reprisal will settle the score has remained firmly ingrained. The high command has not been attentive to the risks of excessive use of military power. It is not always realized how dangerous this type of retaliation can be. In particular it mishandled the critical phase of engaging in the Intifada, believing that harsh and brutal reprisals against the armed groups would be enough to put an end to the uprising. Even while it managed to avoid the worst— massacres and other forms of mass violence—the Israeli army made several mistakes, the most serious one at the outset of the Intifada.

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Israel’s Asymmetric Wars The Roots of the Uprising

Although the second Intifada is generally considered to have begun on September 28, 2000, with Ariel Sharon’s visit to Temple Mount, this is not entirely accurate. The causes of the second Intifada run much deeper. Mutual trust between the two adversaries, which had never been great, deteriorated over the years 1993–2000. Certain events that occurred during this time would lead to the new uprising. For many Palestinians, the Oslo Accords did not bring about the expected improvement in their living conditions. These accords had divided up the territories occupied during the June 1967 Six-Day War into three areas: Area A, which since 1994 included Gaza as well as the cities of Jericho, Jenin, Qalqilya, Ramallah, Tulkarm, Nablus, and Bethlehem, an area over which the Palestinian Authority exercises civil jurisdiction, including police powers; Area B, including other West Bank areas (other towns and refugee camps) and in which the Palestinian Authority exercises civil jurisdiction, internal security being handled jointly with the Israeli army; Area C, including the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, in Gaza (now dismantled) and East Jerusalem, and which remain under Israeli control. But settlements continued to spread after these accords were signed. Although in compliance with the Oslo process no new settlements were created, the extant ones developed considerably: the number of settlers went from 115,000 to 230,000 in the decade following the signing of the accords.8 The army was still omnipresent, except in the Area A, which had been handed over to the Palestinian Authority. Checkpoints, some of which had been set up during the first Intifada and the start of the Gulf War in 1991, had not been removed. The accords did not bring an end to land expropriations either. Construction in East Jerusalem continued. A virtually impenetrable barrier surrounded the Gaza Strip. Bypass roads were built to enable settlers to move from one place to another without having to transit through autonomous Palestinian territory. On the Israeli side, the army’s mood was pessimistic. More and more officers who had supported the Oslo Accords and who held moderate positions began to doubt Arafat’s good will, believing he had not altered his main goal: to regain control of all of historic Palestine, including Israel in its 1967 borders. Many officers even believed that the accord was an “aberration” from the security standpoint: in many sectors it resulted in entrusting the security of Israeli citizens to Palestinian police officers, many of whom were hostile to Israel.9 The increasing

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ranks in Palestinian Authority security organizations were also cause for concern. The Palestinians were arming themselves even as the Oslo Accords were being put in place. Large numbers of weapons circulated and were arming inhabitants with no official responsibility in the Palestinian Authority security services. They were purchased abroad or stolen from Israel.10 These officers believe that the second Intifada did not begin in September 2000 but instead well before, and the facts do not entirely contradict them. A series of violent incidents had punctuated Israeli-Palestinian relations since the signing of the Oslo Accords. The Israelis had hoped that the Palestinian Authority would help Israel prevent attacks, but they were soon disillusioned because Hamas and the Islamic Jihad did not abandon violence; 161 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks in the years immediately following the creation of the Palestinian Authority. The February 1994 massacre perpetrated in Hebron by Barukh Goldstein, a Jewish settler, against Palestinian worshipers who had come to pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs, was followed by several suicide attacks organized by Hamas. The death of Yahya Ayyash, Hamas’ bomb maker, caused by a booby-trapped telephone sent to him by Israeli intelligence services, provoked bloody reprisals, with 58 Israelis killed in one week. But one of the events that weigh the most heavily in Israeli army’s collective memory is the Western Wall Tunnel incident in Jerusalem in 1996. Netanyahu, recently elected, authorized archaeological digs in the northern portion of the Western Wall Tunnel, disregarding a decision made by the Rabin government that opposed any excavation work due to the extreme sensitivity the subject had for the Palestinians. Netanyahu, a right-wing politician, made it a symbol of the strengthening of Israeli sovereignty over holy sites. Ehud Olmert, then mayor of Jerusalem and Likud member, spoke enthusiastically of an “extraordinary gift for humanity.” Yasser Arafat, who viewed the work as a crime against the Muslim faith, called a mass demonstration that degenerated into violent clashes. Nearly 70 Palestinians were killed as well as 16 soldiers and Israeli police officers. This confrontation is still cited by the military as a warning sign of the Palestinians’ desire to come to blows. Violence again broke out on the day of the Naqba (“the day of the disaster”), May 15, 2000, the Palestinian way of marking the anniversary of Israeli independence. Demonstrators began by throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. Shots were fired from their ranks by the Tanzim (an armed faction of the Fatah, Yasser Arafat’s party) as well as

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the Palestinian police. Tanzim activists used ambulances to arrive at the site of the riots.11 IDF sharpshooters retaliated. Eight Palestinians were killed and hundreds were wounded during these incidents. The IDF had another strong reason to be pessimistic. In keeping with pledges made the day his government was sworn in, in May 1999, Ehud Barak ordered the IDF to withdraw from southern Lebanon. The operation was completed on May 24, 2000. For the generation of senior officers who had fought in Lebanon, especially those with the rank of colonel and lieutenant colonel (brigade and battalion commanders), in other words, the operations branch high command, it was a major humiliation. They felt that the government had not allowed them to win the war against the Hezbollah by calling up reservists. They also claimed that Israeli public opinion did not support the army, since it was poorly informed by the government, which was unable to explain the real stakes of the battle to Israeli citizens. Bitterness developed among these officers, which is reminiscent of the frustration felt by the French military on its withdrawal from Indochina in 1954, and then from Suez in 1956.12 In the Occupied Territories, the idea began to spread that if Hezbollah had defeated the IDF in southern Lebanon, nothing would be easier than to follow this example and inf lict such heavy losses on the army that the Israeli population would call for an end to the occupation. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was immensely popular in the Occupied Territories, gave a speech on May 26 that goaded Israeli leaders and considerably galvanized Palestinian combative energies: “Brothers, I tell you: This Israel with all its nuclear weapons is more fragile than a spider web.” Like many high-ranking officers, Chief of General Staff Shaul Mofaz himself was part of that cast of officers who resented Ehud Barak’s May 2000 decision to withdraw from Lebanon. Being against it, he was obliged to organize the withdrawal in spite of himself. These officers believed that any Palestinian attempt at revenge had to be nipped in the bud. They had to be stripped of the illusion that the IDF had been weakened by the ordeal in Lebanon. It was thus urgent to “restore deterrence” for an army eroded by successive failures of 18 years of war in south Lebanon.13 In a country surrounded by hostile neighbors that depends entirely on the military to ensure its survival, the army’s deterrence capability is a basic pillar of its strategy. Calling it into question would be tantamount to an “existential threat” for Israel. When deterrence ceases to function or when it is defied, there is no greater national emergency than to reestablish it, usually via a display of force or a

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military feat. The deterrence debate rages in Israel after each operation or war that does not end in a crushing military victory. The Flare-Up Such is the backdrop against which Ariel Sharon’s visit to the al-Aqsa Mosque Esplanade took place. On the day of his visit, Sharon refrained from entering the mosque, a holy place for Muslims, and the friction between police and demonstrators congregated on the esplanade was not marked by any major incident. Two days later, on Friday, the day of prayer, Fatah called a huge rally. That very morning, an Israeli border guard had been shot by a fellow Palestinian patrolman. The two men were members of a joint Israeli-Palestinian patrol set up further to the Oslo Accords;14 20,000 Palestinians took part in the rally. The Fatah youth movement Shabiba had piled up thousands of projectiles. When prayer ended, demonstrators hurled iron bars, stones and Molotov cocktails at police and onto the plaza of the Wailing Wall located beneath the esplanade, where Jewish worshipers gather to pray. Police burst onto the esplanade and fired rubber bullets. Seven Palestinians were killed and hundreds wounded. It was the beginning of a general escalation. Marwan Barghouti, one of Fatah’s most popular leaders in the West Bank, called a three-day strike in agreement with the party leadership. The first shots were fired on the Jewish settlement of Psagot. Repeated riots broke out in the West Bank and in Gaza. From one of the very first demonstrations, gunmen took to hiding in crowds, using them as cover to shoot from. In the Gaza Strip, Shabiba organized a violent protest. Hundreds of youths charged the IDF outpost at the Netzarim junction. The violence of the attack prompted soldiers from the Givati unit to open fire. The Palestinian security officers who were supposed to control the crowd returned IDF fire. It was during this clash that a television cameraman from French television Channel 2 filmed the scene of the death of young Mohamed al-Durrah. If the report is to be believed, he was killed by Israeli bullets. The footage was shown over and over again in Palestinian homes, fanning passions.15 That same day, six other Palestinians were killed by IDF fire. “The new Intifada soon shed its popular aspect and lapsed into an armed Intifada,” note Harel and Isacharoff.16 The first Intifada was basically a civil uprising against an occupation that had lasted for 20 years. The second was mainly a conf lict involving groups that had chosen armed struggle to promote their demands.

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Armed combatants dispossessed noncombatants. The latter feared for their lives and increasingly stayed away from street demonstrations to avoid the danger of IDF reprisals that caused several deaths each time. During the month of October, there were 5 or 6 Palestinian casualties per day, whereas they were 12 in all on the Israeli side.17 Following the serious riots started by Israeli Arabs on October 1, the police opened fire and killed 13 of them. This major incident revived hostility in the West Bank. In Nablus, hundreds of faithful occupied Joseph’s Tomb, a Jewish enclave in the middle of Palestinian-controlled territory. The crowd prevented the Palestinian police from evacuating an injured Israeli border guard. He died of his wounds a few hours later. A wave of emotion ran through the Israeli public and the army, which is not in the habit of leaving its wounded behind. The incident illustrated the ineffectiveness of the Palestinian police, and Israeli security forces realized they could no longer count on them for help. On October 12, two Israeli reservists who had stumbled into Ramallah on their way to base were lynched by a mob while the Palestinian police stood by. The sight of soldiers defenestrated by demonstrators exhibiting their bloody hands revolted the Israelis, who were appalled by the cruelty of the act. Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s reaction was vehement: “This is the Middle East, not Switzerland! This time they’re going to pay a heavy price. We’ll bomb them from Jenin to Jabalya,” he reportedly roared during a meeting with his staff.18 He ordered the bombing of Palestinian Authority targets. The army made sure, however, that the Palestinian Authority was given warning prior to each bombardment. Barak did not want to break off with the Palestinians. Talks were underway between his government and Yasser Arafat’s government even during the f lare-up of violence in the Occupied Territories. Violence spread very quickly. The Palestinian Authority did nothing to pacify its people and made no attempt to put an end to the demonstrations. Israel, on the other hand, retaliated with unprecedented strength and resources. On October 27 in Kfar-Khalil, south of Nablus, Fatah organized another demonstration infiltrated by gunmen who opened fire on soldiers posted at the roadblock. The soldiers retaliated. Five unarmed Fatah activists were killed. The escalation had reached new heights. Armed conf lict intensified, further distancing noncombatants from the action. Attacks with firearms increased against settlers and army vehicles. In November the first car bombing took place within the Green Line. Ambushes against IDF forces became more frequent. On November 13, 2000, a Fatah member in Ramallah who was part of Force 17, Arafat’s presidential guard, opened

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fire on a military transport bus near the Wadi Hirmieh junction, killing two soldiers. Gunmen fired from the village of al-Bireh, in Area A controlled by the Palestinian Authority, on the neighboring settlement of Psagot, triggering harsh retaliation from Israeli soldiers. Not all these attacks were carried out by Fatah militants. They were also perpetrated by “loose cannons,” many of them delinquents or former Palestinian Authority security service members who had gone into the service of armed conf lict with Israel. Local cells of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, an offshoot of Fatah, were organized all over the West Bank. In November 2000 Hamas, which had remained on the sidelines of the armed conf lict so as not to have to defy the Palestinian Authority, mobilized in turn. The movement had sustained losses in the West Bank in clashes with the Israeli army. But its popularity was especially on the wane among the population, which favored Fatah men who dared to face the army and the settlers. Hamas leaders placed a car bomb in Hadera, killing two Israeli civilians. Israel took revenge by liquidating Ibrahim Bani-Ouda, one of the organizers of this attack. Hamas retaliated with a suicide bombing in Netanya in January 2001, which injured some 30 Israelis and paved the way for similar attacks. A division of labor became established between Fatah and Hamas. The former attacked settlers and soldiers in the Occupied Territories, then made forays into settlements to attack their inhabitants. Hamas launched suicide attacks inside the Green Line. But this distribution of roles did not last long. Israeli retaliation was ruthless. By late October 2000, 141 Palestinians had already been killed and 500 wounded; 186 were killed in November and December (540 wounded) and 82 during the first 3 months of 2001.19 According to the director of Aman, Israeli military intelligence, less than a month after the conf lict began, the army had fired 1,200,000 bullets, or about 100,000 per day.20 “From within besieged outposts, soldiers had gotten in the habit of ‘emptying’ entire crates of ammunition,” Harel and Isacharoff indicate.21 Tanks were already brought into action in the second week of the conf lict. Helicopters were used with increasing frequency. Reprisals were harsher in the Gaza Strip than in the West Bank. Approaching the end of active duty, the head of Southern Command, General Yom-Tov Samya, close to the settlers, advocated strong-arm tactics. Chief of Central Command General Yitzhak Eitan was a moderate who was wary of the settlers and believed in the virtues of restraint. The former authorized the use of f lechette shells that disperse dozens of metal antipersonnel darts when they explode, thereby

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increasing the risk of injuring innocent civilians, whereas Eitan prohibited them. This weapon is not banned under international conventions. Although the army denies having used it, many reliable witnesses testified to the contrary, such as Brigadier General Tzvi Fogel, chief of staff of Southern Command: “At first we used it a great deal,” he states, but “we banned it when we understood [ . . . ] it also caused causalities among noncombatants.”22 Similarly, in the Gaza Strip, since the f lat terrain made protecting vehicles difficult, the “exposure” procedure (hissuf )—the clearing of wooded or uninhabited areas along roads where gunmen could hide and shoot at vehicles—was used much more systematically than in the West Bank. Israeli MKs who came in the early days of the uprising to inquire about the situation in the Gaza Strip were warned by General Samya: “No one’s going to tell me how to win this war.”23 The personality of military leaders was not the only factor that made a difference, but it was a contributing one. In December General Doron Almog replaced General Samya. The new commander’s way of thinking was not much different from his predecessor’s. To better defend Israeli positions, he established “special security zones” along the Israeli border and the Philadelphi Route24 — where very relaxed guidelines for opening fire prevailed. “These ‘special security zones’ were nothing short of unofficial ‘killing zones,’ ” according to Drucker and Shelah.25 “Crush” the Uprising The IDF did not provoke the uprising, but did it handle it skillfully? What strikes all informed observers is both the army’s inability to halt the attacks in the early months of the revolt, when they were usually perpetrated by poorly organized and lightly armed groups or by men often acting on their own initiative, and the brutality of its response, frequently very deadly. The army believed a strong reaction was necessary. Chief of Staff Shaul Mofaz and his deputy, General Moshe Yaalon, in particular, wanted to avoid a repetition of the events of 1996 and 2000 by conveying an unambiguous message of resolve. Mofaz’s strategy was not one of appeasement, deescalation, and a gradual return to calm, but instead one of crushing the insurrection. The IDF retaliated harshly as soon as the first incidents occurred in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and did not hesitate to open fire on the demonstrators. “The IDF’s excessive reaction was intended not only to contain the confrontation but to force the Palestinians to surrender.”26 Already

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with the Western Wall Tunnel incidents in 1996, new guidelines for opening fire had been drawn up under the control of the Chief Military Prosecutor’s International Law Department. They allowed soldiers “in certain previously specified sectors to ‘shoot to kill’ armed Palestinians who were suspected of wanting to take Israeli soldiers’ lives.”27 The units were trained and outfitted for the same type of armed confrontation as in 1996, in such a way as to make the adversary surrender while keeping their own losses to a minimum. The IDF has always been mindful to spare soldiers’ lives. But although the loss of young soldiers can be justified in a conf lict in which Israel has to defend its existence, it is deemed intolerable in cases of “lowintensity” conf lict. This type of conf lict does not jeopardize the nation’s survival, but partly confines the army to policing tasks, arresting activists wanted by the Shabak, for which the IDF plays the role of domestic security subcontractor. The watchword is “let us protect the children” (lishmor al hayeladim). In the eyes of public opinion, such missions do not justify young soldiers’ taking the slightest risk. The IDF, having learned its lesson from Lebanon and successful campaigns by citizens’ movements such as “Four Mothers,” wanted to avoid losses among its soldiers, which might lead public opinion once again to withdraw its support for missions in the Occupied Territories. The IDF sought to regain the legitimacy it had lost during the war in Lebanon. Diplomacy and War at Odds The army’s behavior cannot be dissociated from the fundamental rift that appeared between the IDF and the prime minister. In the months following the failed Camp David conference in July 2000, Ehud Barak’s government continued to pursue negotiations with Yasser Arafat in the hope of reaching a compromise before the following Israeli elections. The outbreak of the Intifada complicated his task. Barak could not afford a diplomatic failure or deterioration of the security level. Any misstep in the field had negative repercussions on diplomatic negotiations.28 Barak thus ordered reprisals to be “targeted and controlled.”29 Ground forces commanders increasingly took personal initiatives that were in contradiction with the government’s policy. In December, just before Hanukkah celebrations began, Vice Minister for Defense Ephraim Sneh visited units stationed near Ramallah. Colonel Gal Hirsch, troop commander in that sector, informed him that he had ordered Route 443, one of the main access roads from the West used

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by the Palestinians, to be closed and that he had decided to prohibit them from leaving the city. Sneh was stunned: this type of decision was a prerogative of the political echelon, not a brigade commander. Elsewhere, it was Palestinian Authority officials who found themselves stopped at roadblocks that should not have existed.30 Checkpoints were set up without the defense minister—who was also the prime minister—having ordered them. Sneh informed Barak of this so that he could wield his authority and prevent his diplomatic efforts from being derailed by the untoward initiatives of a handful of military commanders. “Some of the decisions and commitments the Prime Minister made [to the Palestinians] and transferred to the army via his military secretary ‘evaporated,’ ” admits Gilead Sher, Barak’s chief of staff.31 In the first phase of the uprising, General Yaalon objected to any request to ease the economic blockade in order to aid Palestinian civilians, due to the ongoing confrontation. He banned the export of fruits and vegetables from the Gaza Strip on the pretense that the enemy had to be “broken.”32 When officers in the Coordination of Government Operations in the Territories, an army unit established to assist Palestinian civilians with the everyday difficulties they face, objected that hunger and despair fueled terrorism, he stood his ground. The Palestinians had to pay “a daily price” and if Israel alleviated the pressure, the enemy would grow stronger and terrorism increase.33 Minister Amnon Lipkin-Shahak, himself a former chief of staff whom the prime minister placed in charge of coordinating actions to restore calm in the Occupied Territories, denounced army dealings, including the interception of goods at checkpoints intended for the population, the bulldozing of greenhouses, nurseries, and harvests, “supposedly for security reasons,” which aroused “Palestinian anger to unprecedented heights.” According to him, the “policy of collective punishment . . . was a program set up by the military leadership that ignored the guidelines and intentions of the political leadership.”34 Two policies were thus fashioned: government policy attempted to conciliate security in the Occupied Territories and decisive progress in the peace talks; and the policy of the army, which was hostile to peace talks and which made the restoration of order and the IDF’s deterrence capability its priority. The two approaches were radically different. According to Efraim Sneh, “the Prime Minister’s policy [contrary to Mofaz] did not view the Palestinian in the Territories as an enemy who must be defeated, nor did it view the Palestinian Authority as such.”35 Shlomo Ben-Ami, Foreign Affairs minister in Barak’s government at the time, confirms this split between the political authorities and the

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army: “we were striving to reach a political agreement.. . [but] the IDF felt the need to win a battle.”36 “Excessive” Army Inf luence? For many, these difficulties ref lect the “excessive” inf luence the IDF had gained over Israeli politics and the government’s inability to impose its will on the generals. These problems have been cited as proof of the existence of a “state within a state.” This standpoint warrants qualification. Israeli generals certainly wield more political power than in any other democracy. They play a preponderant role in public debate, unlike the case in many European countries, for instance. They don’t hesitate to express their viewpoint, even if it contradicts the prime minister’s. IDF chiefs of general staff can criticize government decisions— even those that fall strictly within the prerogative of the political level, without running the risk of being dismissed. The Israeli army enjoys considerable popularity among the population, not only due to the protracted state of war, but also because the IDF is perceived as the last bastion against destruction of Israel and because it represents the “army of the whole nation,” even if this notion, which was deeply entrenched in the Israeli consciousness in the early decades of the state’s existence, has certainly worn thin in recent years, as the numbers of young people who try to evade mandatory military service attest.37 The IDF nevertheless remains an essential actor on the national scene. Generals are respected figures and slated for promotion to senior government positions when they return to civilian life, even if their virtually “untouchable” status is increasingly contested by a segment of civil society (human rights NGOs, soldiers’ mothers, refuzniks, peace movement activists). On the whole their popularity among the public remains higher than those of politicians, often discredited due to their mediocrity or involvement in various scandals. The army is perceived as a corps whose members are perceived as self less, loyal, and devoted. But it is not a monolithic corps. It is not a closed caste.38 It is not unusual to see senior military officers speak out on burning topics without coordinating their viewpoints. Officials outside the army, such as the director of the Shabak or Mossad regularly take part in debates. At the same time, the prime minister and his defense minister can go into the field and directly question brigade commanders, short-circuiting the military high command. Politicians have devoted military personnel in their personal staff. They are able to diversify

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their sources of information. And as in any democratic army, military officials also think in terms of their career and know that their appointment to ministerial positions depends on the loyalty they show toward the civil authorities and their ability to make decisions based on professional rather than ideological criteria. In Israel, it is rare for the army to openly disobey the political authorities. None of the great Israeli army leaders has to my knowledge denied the principle of military subordination to the political level.39 The degree of civil government control over the army depends more on the quality of the political leadership than on the army’s conduct. Some prime ministers, such as Levy Eshkol, have had indecisive personalities.40 Others have had boundless admiration for the military, such as Menachem Begin, who spoke of his generals as if they were biblical heroes. At the time when the decision was made to invade Lebanon in 1982, he was in fact deceived not by the army but by the defense minister, Ariel Sharon, who gave him inaccurate information about how far the IDF had penetrated into the Lebanese territory. The army doubtless has considerable inf luence, but in major strategy debates the government imposes its will. Never has an Israeli head of government claimed that the government had no right to interfere in army business, as did Albert Sarraut, president of the Council in France when Nazi Germany reoccupied the Rhineland in 1937, with respect to relations between the French government and the army under the Third Republic. None has purely and simply abdicated his power and handed it over to the military. In the case of a decision to use armed force, which is the topic at hand, the civil authorities have never entirely left the military free rein.41 Many Israeli prime ministers, such as Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, and Ariel Sharon, were themselves once prominent military officials. Many defense ministers were once generals, such as Moshe Dayan, Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, and Shaul Mofaz. Generals Haim Bar-Lev, Rafael Eitan, and Mordechai Gur have held important government positions. It has often been asserted, in this regard, that high-ranking military officers who go into politics behave as army representatives, thereby reinforcing the “militarization” of Israeli society. Experience shows, however, that once in power, they behave like full-f ledged statesmen. The history of the state of Israel is full of examples of disputes between the prime minister, or the defense minister, and his or her chief of the general staff; the latter always ends up submitting. David Ben Gurion decided to withdraw the army from the Sinai in 1956, despite opposition from Moshe Dayan. When Egyptian President Anwar Sadat

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offered to go to Jerusalem for peace talks with the Israelis, in 1977, General Mordechai Gur, the Ramatkal, and General Shlomo Gazit, head of military intelligence, publicly claimed that this visit was merely a “trick.” Prime Minister Menachem Begin urged them to keep their disagreement to themselves. The evacuation of the Sinai Peninsula in 1982 in keeping with the peace treaty with Egypt was also enforced by a reluctant high command. When the Oslo talks started in 1993, Yitzhak Rabin did not inform the Israeli generals. It was only once the Oslo Accords were signed that the military was readmitted to the negotiation process with the Palestinians. When Chief of Staff General Ehud Barak expressed his disapproval, Rabin overstepped him. The army did not any less loyally implement the prime minister’s directives. Ehud Barak and General Mofaz did not get along well. The decision to withdraw IDF forces from southern Lebanon in May 2000 was made by the prime minister against the opinion of his chief of staff. And during the Camp David summit in July 2000, the prime minister ordered contacts to be pursued with the Palestinian Authority despite warnings from the director of Aman (military intelligence), who cautioned him that Yasser Arafat would not sign the accord negotiated at this summit. Mofaz had trouble getting over the off handed manner with which the Prime Minister treated him. It was on a piece of crumpled paper that Barak had informed him, just before getting on a plane to go abroad, of his decision to make budget cuts in army expenditure. As regards the Intifada, the two men’s positions were virtually irreconcilable. In the eyes of the military, Barak conducted a contradictory policy. On one hand he encouraged the army to show resolve in its contacts with armed Palestinians, on the other he recommended caution. Mofaz, fundamentally hostile to the peace process, advocated a hardline policy toward the Palestinians. He publicly asserted that Oslo represented a threat to Israel’s existence. This is moreover why Binyamin Netanyahu, prime minister at the time, had appointed him chief of general staff in 1988, over other possible candidates whom he deemed too moderate. But the prime minister’s decision-making power has never been challenged. When Ehud Barak wanted to impose his will, he did. For instance, when he ordered the IDF not to make incursions into Area A—under Palestinian control—the order was obeyed. Armed activists were shooting at that time in Area B and C and then hiding out in Area A where they were untouchable. Since the al-Aqsa Intifada began, rockets had been fired from villages such as Beit Jallah in Area A against the Jewish settlement of Psagot. These attacks caused little damage but they created a sense of

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insecurity that is hard for the settlers to bear. Such pressure led Barak to authorize targeted killings. The first took place on November 9 and was perpetrated against Hussein Abiat, a Tanzim militant. IDF retaliation for attacks from Beit Jallah was all the more violent since it was not allowed to go into this location to stop them. The counterattack on Beit Jallah produced little effect. The Prime Minister’s Inconsistencies The difficulties that emerged at the beginning of this second Intifada between Mofaz and Barak’s entourage originate more in the prime minister’s lack of a clear direction, his prevarications, and ambiguities. The Palestinian uprising put him in a difficult position. He wanted to seal an agreement with Arafat before the February elections, but he had to show public opinion that he would not compromise on security issues. He wanted to be both the prime minister of peace and the prime minister of security. Arafat, though he did not instigate the insurrection, exploited it to improve his bargaining position with the Israeli government. The army tried to take advantage of the wavering in the prime minister’s policy. Barak, himself a former chief of general staff, could have taken disciplinary action against any deviation from the course of action he set out. He did nothing of the sort. Not once did he go into the field to check that his orders were being enforced. Not once did he summon the chief of staff to call him to account. Sometimes he gave orders to exercise restraint, at others he gave orders to grant ground forces commanders “more freedom to decide”42 after having ordered a “targeted and controlled” response. General Fogel, who was not an advocate of excessive force, claims that nothing was kept hidden from the political echelon, but that at no point in time did the political leadership ask the high command to draw up plans to avoid a conf lict.43 The army certainly didn’t make things easier for the prime minister, but the latter did not show the necessary determination to impose modus operandi on it that were compatible with his political line. A politically weakened Barak whose popularity was on a downward spiral was unable to make up his mind and strike the right balance between the two objectives: security and peace. As a result, he achieved neither. It was a serious failure of political leadership at a crucial moment in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict. Barak appears to have almost purposely put himself in jeopardy, sawing off the branch his authority

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sat on, by trying to lay the blame on Yasser Arafat for the failure of the Camp David summit when he declared that Israel no longer had a partner with whom to negotiate peace.44 The prime minister helped to erode Israeli public support for these talks. The sight of footage of repeated attacks against the army and settlers radicalized public opinion in both the Israeli and Palestinian camps. How in this case could the Israeli population have been made to accept the idea that the IDF should show consideration for the Palestinians and the Palestinian Authority? Gilead Sher, Ehud Barak’s chief of staff, would say: “What we really want is a Palestinian partner and when you dismiss him off handedly, people may understand things differently from you.”45 Shlomo BenAmi, Foreign Affairs minister in Barak’s government, would write, “It’s probably this duality that explains the political echelon’s inability to make the military implement an effective containment policy.”46 The rule that warfare was subjected to politics and not the opposite was violated. This disjunction between the political and the military gave the impression, wrongly, that “it was the army that decided,” whereas it was the political echelon that was unable to make up its mind. This is how a frustrated army lacking a sophisticated analysis of the use of armed force in an irregular conf lict and a hesitant political authority engaged in the Intifada in a rather disastrous manner. Old Ref lexes Take Over The army, for its part, once again reacted in an impassioned, excessive fashion, obsessed with the risk of tarnishing its image. It did not attempt to employ a blend of coercive measures and incentives to restore calm and quell the uprising. The early stage of the conf lict with the Palestinians was a relative failure for the IDF. The army was unable to strike a balance, however imperfect, between the fight against armed combatants and mindfulness of the lives of noncombatants. Killing the former and sparing the latter is certainly no easy task when gunmen shoot from within crowds of demonstrators. In good military logic, the objective is a difficult one to attain, as Sergeant N. points out: “A soldier cannot do both things at once: use his nonlethal arsenal and his lethal weapons. It’s one or the other. If he is shot at, he uses only one weapon, the lethal one.”47 For an order-keeping force, the only solution in that case is to shoot in self-defense, at the risk of killing unarmed demonstrators. However, in many other circumstances, they have made use of their weapons in a disproportionate manner.

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The IDF had no ad hoc strategy for combating armed groups at the start of the Intifada. It had no serious strategic thinking about anti– guerrilla warfare. The old ref lexes of “disproportionate response” once again gained the upper hand. The army settled for a cursory, impromptu reaction, drawn from an old repertoire of action, except that this time they were not improvising. The army was ready. But for what? For the previous confrontation, which was in 1996! Mofaz applied to a new situation modus operandi developed to suppress a short-lived outbreak of violence such as the Western Wall Tunnel incident in 1996. This attitude complicated diplomatic negotiations. According to MK Israel Hasson, a close aid to Ehud Barak, who was part of the Israeli delegation to Camp David, “there was a very strong reaction from the army which made them [the Palestinians] refuse to calm down because it would look like an act of surrender.”48 In the space of three months, General Mofaz, who had been trying to secure a “decisive victory,” did not achieve his objectives and had to face a much-deteriorated situation. Some generals even wondered whether in the months preceding the Intifada the IDF hadn’t voluntarily or not, due to its excessive wariness, helped to create a climate of suspicion between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian security forces. This same idea was expressed by General Tzvi Fogel, second in command of Southern Command: “I wonder if it was Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount that sparked off these events or if it wasn’t instead our preparations that led to the point of non-return. [ . . . ] since December 1999, all we talked about at Southern Command was preparing for a confrontation. We were headed straight for a conf lict, eyes wide open, with the experience of the Western Wall Tunnel and Lebanon in the background. In the eyes of the IDF, the withdrawal from Lebanon represented the absolute trauma.”49 The Palestinian police, which made joint patrols with the Israeli military in certain areas such as the Gaza Strip by virtue of the Oslo Accords, viewed these preparations with suspicion. They “sent a clear and aggressive message to the Palestinian security services.”50 The Israeli military received orders to cease the patrols. Several outposts were built in the Gaza Strip with checkpoints all around them to protect them from anyone approaching. All this complicated movement for Palestinian civilians. The Palestinians saw land that was supposed to be returned to them transformed into Israeli military installations. “Before the events [of September 2000], they say they cannot control their people. They say, ‘We cannot ignore everything you are doing in the Gaza Strip, in the outposts, which show that you are preparing for war,’ ” recounts General Fogel. That activity,

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which began in early 2000 and intensified over the summer, had “a decisive impact [ . . . ] on the Palestinian inhabitants and the Palestinian Authority.” The “very fact of our preparations [ . . . ] created the conditions for a confrontation.” It was clear, this former senior military official adds, that it was “a self-fulfilling prophecy.”51 From the start, the military officials had set themselves the goal of eradicating terrorism and defeating the armed groups without taking into consideration the overall aspirations of the people subjected to over 30 years of occupation and frustrated by the meager results of the Oslo Accords. In the very first months, the army’s disproportionate response fueled a cycle of violence that it could not control. The least one can say is that the army bungled its engagement in the second Intifada. And “errors made at the outset are virtually irretrievable,” as remarks Gérard Chaliand.52 It went into the Intifada with no foresight because it was not expecting such a large-scale conf lict. During this initial period it made no attempt to show consideration for the population in order to encourage it to distance itself from the armed groups. This strategy had another disadvantage: it allowed for no other exit from terrorism than by an armed victory and left the combatants no other choice than a humiliating surrender or a continuation of hostilities. The IDF was unable to contain the explosion of violence. Its overly harsh repression of demonstrations, far from deterring their spread, almost always provoked a surge of energy and aggressiveness on the Palestinian side. The army believed that swift and brutal retaliation against the armed groups would be enough to stop the uprising. Not only was this expectation not met, but such a cursory strategy also led to a spiral of violence and contributed to transforming a conf lict limited to the West Bank into a war involving the Israeli civilian population within the Green Line. The armed groups, on the other hand, committed a major error of appreciation in believing the Israelis were “tired” of making war and that, as in Lebanon, Israeli society would not hold out in the face of their battering. On February 6 Ehud Barak lost his bid for reelection to Ariel Sharon, who became prime minister. The violence resumed with renewed vigor.

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CH A P T E R

SI X

Tightening the Screws

The arrival of Ariel Sharon as head of the Israeli government in February 2001 ended the vacillation between pursuing negotiations with the Palestinian Authority and crushing the uprising. The policy conducted from that point on, in agreement with the army high command, was devoid of ambiguity: negotiations would not be renewed until the violence had ceased. In fact, neither the new prime minister nor the chief of the general staff had much faith in peace talks. Arafat—whom Ariel Sharon had loathed for years and whose political career he had tried to end in 1982 by launching Operation Peace in Galilee—was pinpointed as the main instigator for the start of the Intifada.1 In the eyes of both the new prime minister and his army, Israel no longer had a “partner for peace.” It was all the easier to convince Israeli public opinion of this fact since on October 30, after the failure of the Camp David summit, Ehud Barak, who had been in favor of negotiations, himself stated “we no longer have a partner willing to assume difficult decisions.”2 Sharon, one of the main architects behind the Israeli settlements in the Occupied Territories, believed that the only way to put an end to the armed revolt was by using force. In an attempt to put together a stable political majority, Ariel Sharon opened his cabinet to moderate Labor Party figures such as Shimon Peres and Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, but he was still the one who held the reins of decision-making power in matters of war and peace. For him as well as many generals, Arafat was in league with the terrorists and had never abandoned the idea of a Greater Palestine that would stretch from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. For the civil and military leadership, very clearly dominated by the new prime minister’s

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strong personality, the president of the Palestinian Authority was perceived as an obstacle to peace and his replacement by more moderate party cadres was a prerequisite to the next round of talks with the Palestinian Authority. Israel hoped for a leadership that would combat terrorism. A situation had to be created in which “Arafat and the people around him [would] lose their legitimacy, which was gained mainly after Oslo,” as remarked reserve General Jacob Amidror, former commander of the National Security College and quite representative of the hardliners’ state of mind at the time.3 The political goal had been clearly spelled out: “a decisive military victory” over the armed groups. Both the military leadership and the new prime minister were sure that such victory was within reach. The rare voices that tried to reason to the contrary were drowned out. The Israeli and the Palestinian locomotives were now on a head-on collision course. The left, which believed in a negotiated settlement, was politically weakened by the bombings. Many Palestinians who had campaigned alongside it for the creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel had turned to terrorism. It remains to be seen whether this tightening of the screws has led to a better outcome in the fight against terrorism. The Army’s Disarray Starting in March 2001, hundreds of suicide attacks were committed in urban centers in the heart of Israel. The attacks occurred in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Hedera, Netanya, Beer Sheva, and other cities. They targeted crowded places: discotheques, restaurants, shopping centers, cafés, and city buses. On June 1 an attack against the Dolphinarium discotheque by the seaside in Tel Aviv killed 21 teenage girls, most of them young immigrants from the former Soviet Union, and wounded over 80. In August a suicide bomber blew himself up in a restaurant in downtown Jerusalem, the Sbarro pizzeria, killing 15 people, including 7 children, and leaving hundreds wounded. Between March and December 2001, 185 Israelis were killed in various attacks.4 Few dared go out or dally in the street. The economy was on the verge of collapse. Tourism had taken a plunge. The generals, who thought they could easily put down the uprising, discovered how difficult it was to combat an invisible, elusive, and destabilizing guerilla. Mofaz, who had prepared the army for a short and decisive confrontation with the armed groups, was caught off guard. He had not devised a strategy adapted to this type of conf lict and

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had underestimated the combative capacity of armed groups. Attacks against soldiers and settlers on road in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip intensified. Unable to stop them, the IDF experienced a long period of disarray. The army was discovering at its own expense that Palestinian combatants would not “play fair,” using women and children as suicide attackers at checkpoints. Soldiers faced surprise attacks at a number of them. In less than three weeks, in February 2002, 3 roadblocks were attacked, leaving 14 Israeli soldiers and 3 civilians dead. In the Gaza Strip, Palestinian activists showed greater audacity and aggressiveness, and the IDF suffered heavy losses. Attacks against IDF outposts and armored vehicles were fairly frequent and claimed many lives. In July 2001 three soldiers of the Givati unit were killed in armed attacks. Both army outposts and Israeli settlements were increasingly infiltrated. Tunnels were dug, enabling combatants to launch surprise attacks on IDF forces. In December 2001 an attack resulted in the death of four Bedouin trackers at the Africa outpost near the Kerem Shalom kibbutz. In February 2002 Hamas militants managed to blow up two Merkava 3s, one of the best tanks in the world at the time, near Netzarim. The IDF launched periodic offensives, such as the night raid on Jabalya, aiming to destroy the workshops where Qassam mortar shells and rockets were manufactured, without ever managing to put an end to the rocket fire into Israeli territory. On other occasions, the IDF provoked the armed groups by using armored vehicles as bait to coax men out of their hideouts so that prepositioned snipers could shoot them. The army discovered how ineffectual its imposing war machine was in the context of asymmetric warfare. The deployment of tanks, F-15 fighter planes, and attack helicopters did not perturb the armed groups. It gave Israel a very negative image in the media, one of a military power putting down a civilian uprising using disproportionate means. “Burn into the Palestinian Consciousness . . .” In the face of these difficulties, the prime minister and the army initiated a new policy alternately labeled “continuous pressure” and “leverage” (minuf ) in army jargon. It continued to exert pressure on the Palestinian Authority to put an end to the acts of violence and to induce it to combat terrorist groups, which neither the army nor the Shabak was yet in a position to do. This pressure was accompanied by attacks against Palestinian Authority infrastructure and command posts, though

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without calling into question its sovereignty in Area A, except for very brief raids lasting less than a day.5 The policy of continuous pressure was also applied to the civilian population. In an attempt to reduce terrorist groups’ room to maneuver, the IDF increased the number of checkpoints, encirclements, and curfews. Houses that sheltered activists were frequently demolished, and trees that serve as cover for them uprooted. All the measures devised under Barak were tightened. Targeted killings increased and caused considerable collateral damage, despite the army’s attempts to limit it. The economic situation in areas under Israeli occupation deteriorated rapidly, and nothing was organized to offset the hardship inf licted on the population. No civilian relief was set up to aid the population, which was supposed to understand that it was its duty to put pressure on the armed groups to make attacks cease. The civil administration of the Occupied Territories was run by a military official who took his orders from the army general staff. Moshe Yaalon, who had in turn been made chief of staff, later theorized this strategy by declaring in the carefully worded jargon of the military high command, laden with innuendo and circumlocutions: “This conf lict must be won in a way that the Palestinian side will burn into its consciousness that there is no chance of gaining achievements with terror. [ . . . ] [and that] makes it clear to every Palestinian that terrorism does not lead to agreements.”6 The attitude was consistent with declarations he had already made from the start of the Intifada: pressure from the Israeli army would be continuous as long as the Palestinians had not forsworn violence. There would be no alleviation of antiterrorist measures to make the population’s lives easier. At the same time, Ariel Sharon exercised intense pressure on the military to galvanize them. He would visit field units, short-circuiting the military high command, and discuss with brigade commanders, pressing them to act. He berated the IDF for being “cumbersome, slow, fearful, devoid of initiative.” 7 After each attack, the prime minister would explode: “Tear down their homes.” “Why are those houses still standing?” “You have no legal restrictions. Demolish! [the houses],” he would order after an attack against settlers.8 Many officers had the impression that the prime minister was disconnected from the realities of the twenty-first century. He seemed eager for battle and yet the new techniques of warfare escaped him. He would tell them how to “vanquish terrorism,” drawing on his experience in the 1950s or in the 1970s, when he was commanded units in the Gaza strip. He “[didn’t] know how to manage a complex conf lict like this one in the

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modern era. He didn’t understand what the Chief Military Prosecutor’s International Law Department was all about and why its authorization was needed for a bulldozer to demolish houses.”9 A rift ran between Sharon and more moderate army elements such as General Yitzhak Eitan, head of Central Command, responsible for security in the West Bank. “At that time, the army was totally confused about how to address terrorism. The political leadership did not give any clear guidelines in order not to find itself in an embarrassing situation. We had to act with great finesse to avoid being exposed to criticism from the world over. Sharon would tell us: ‘Hit them hard and you’ll see the Arabs cut down to size.’ It wasn’t easy for people like us to find ourselves confronted with that sort of directive.”10 When some officers expressed their fear of a possible negative reaction from the United States, the prime minister rebuked them for clutching at political considerations that were none of their business.11 Unit commanders were divided between their determination to restore the IDF’s image, which had been tarnished by the war in South Lebanon, and a desire not to mishandle a confrontation that might turn to their disadvantage. But “moderates” such as General Eitan were few and far between at that time and moreover would not be encouraged to pursue their military careers. General Mofaz approved the hard line recommended by Ariel Sharon. In a meeting with battalion commanders on May 6, 2001, he urged them to show more aggressiveness in the fight against the Palestinians and especially members of its security forces. Each exchange with them, he said, should finish with “ten dead bodies per day.”12 No one dared protest, particularly to say that the order was illegal and contrary to the regulations for opening fire. But General Eitan, who attended the meeting, took the officers present aside, asked them not to take these guidelines literally, saying that the general order was for the moment not to provoke incidents with the Palestinian police. This rectification, however, did not prevent Mofaz’s order from circulating and even spreading like wildfire. A few days later, soldiers in the unit commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Yehuda Albek, who was present at the meeting with Mofaz, entered Area A and provoked the Palestinian police. The incident ended with the death of one police officer. Disappointed by the army’s dismal performance, Sharon increasingly relied on the Shabak. This organization would become the main artisan of the targeted killing policy. The prime minister ordered all necessary funds to be transferred to the Shabak to carry it out. “We must attack the Palestinians wherever they are, at any time,” he told them. “They

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should wake up in the morning and find out a dozen of them have been killed, by whatever method, without realizing what hit them.” To Mofaz and Yaalon, he said, “This war is your war. Don’t keep your special units for war with Syria. You will be judged by your victory against the Palestinians.”13 Lieutenant Colonel G., who fought in South Lebanon and would later fight in the Balata refugee camp during Operation Defensive Shield, claimed, “No one is putting restrictions on you, Sharon told us. If you have an operational issue, it’s up to you to solve it as you see fit. We had ‘mental barriers’ (‘mahsomim todaati’im’). Up to now we were told that there was no way we’d go into a refugee camp. Too risky. There was a ‘zero casualty’ policy. We had no room to maneuver. But the change came from the political authorities. We took more risks. We were given more leeway. We regained assurance. And we went into what were reputed to be the most awful places.”14 Permissive Rules of Engagement The officers gradually absorbed the state of mind instilled by the prime minister and General Mofaz. Guidelines for opening fire were relaxed. Field commanders were given greater freedom of action. Until the year 2000, orders were based on Israeli penal code. Soldiers were allowed to open fire in two cases: if someone’s life was in “real danger” and if there was no other means of defense, and in the course of apprehending a suspect having committed a dangerous offense. But in the second case, the procedure to follow—“Procedure for Apprehending a Suspect” (Nohal Maatsar Hashoud)—was to start with a warning shot that avoided putting other lives in danger, first by firing in the air, then at the legs, and only afterward at the upper part of the body. Furthermore, the regulations for opening fire and what behavior to use with Palestinian civilians were given in writing to each soldier, who received a booklet that laid out precise guidelines.15 Around the year 2000 the guidelines became more f lexible and the booklets disappeared. Circumstances in which soldiers could open fire became more numerous: they could shoot without warning at any armed Palestinian and in the event of a curfew violation. Any Palestinian on the lookout was also to be shot, since the army considered here again that such behavior implied that the individual belonged to an armed group preparing an attack against its soldiers. This measure has been sharply criticized by not only B’Tselem but also many soldiers as well, for it paves the way to confusion between activists and a person

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who happens to be on the roof of his house or at his window with no intent to cause harm. The same measure was to be applied to any man who was preparing to throw a stone from the rooftop of his house with two hands. This measure, revealed by the NGO Breaking the Silence, has been corroborated by soldiers in elite units who do not belong to this association: “Yes, it’s true, if we see a man preparing to throw a block of stone from the top of a building, that means there has to be someone in the armed forces below. It’s totally forbidden to shoot in this case, it’s absurd, but we do it.”16 Any shot fired from a dwelling is met with often disproportionate and indiscriminate retaliation. Disproportionate retaliation is always the preferred solution when faced with an enemy that soldiers have trouble neutralizing. The spirit is, “too bad if civilians are hit. We have to show that the IDF can be cruel and that the ‘lefties’ can’t stop us,” explains Sergeant Y., who served in the West Bank between 2001 and 2004 in a Nahal unit.17 In some sectors, soldiers have orders to shoot regularly in the air “to scare people, so that the activists don’t come near, to dissuade them from attacking us, to manifest our presence, indicate that ‘we are everywhere.’ ”18 The army has never confirmed or denied the existence of such guidelines, pointing out that they were secret. But soldiers’ accounts hint at what could be construed as the emergence of a de facto doctrine, confirming the shift in practices toward more of a carte blanche. Arrests That End in Executions The rules in effect for arrest operations of suspects also became more lax. In the case of activists that the IDF considers particularly dangerous, the units that come to apprehend them tend to take shortcuts with the regulatory warning procedures so as not to take any risks. The NGO B’Tselem even suspects the security forces of carrying out executions under the guise of arrest operations. It claims there is reason to believe that on several occasions, security forces have acted inappropriately, without complying with procedure, behaving more as if they were carrying out a liquidation operation instead. According to several testimonies collected by Breaking the Silence, warnings have become less frequent and the time given between the moment the warning is shouted and the shot is fired virtually disappeared. According to the account of one soldier recorded by B’Tselem, “The procedure for the arrest of suspects during a house-siege was shortened. If someone escaped from the house, we had to shout at them to stop. We never shouted out everything according to

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the procedure [ . . . ]. It was always a shout to stop and then immediately we would fire at their legs. At some stage they cut it back further, and then the procedure was to shout out while firing. They would tell us that—simply not to give them time to escape. Toward the end of my service, the procedure was cut back even further and we were to shoot at anyone who came out of the house.”19 In a report published in May 2005, the human rights organization noted that for the year 2004 alone, 89 Palestinians were killed during operations that the army defined as arrest operations. Seventeen of them were not on the IDF wanted list, but were civilians against whom no accusation had been made. Forty-three of the “wanted” people killed had not attempted to make use of their weapon against the Israeli security forces or were unarmed.20 This case cannot be considered exceptional.21 The rule for “dangerous” activists is to take no risk. In their book, Harel and Isacharoff claim, “In many cases, wanted men were killed as they were about to be apprehended in the West Bank whereas the soldiers had orders to arrest them. The reason is that it is the field officer who ultimately makes the decision, and for obvious reasons prefers to minimize the risks to his soldiers. The officer often chooses to shoot the armed suspect without taking the trouble to find out if he intends to surrender. The elite border guard units are particularly reluctant to take that sort of risk; [ . . . ] many of their operations end with casualties.”22 Many errors have been committed due to these overly cautious procedures. People have been shot trying to f lee, panicking at the sight of the impressive elite units that have come to arrest a suspect.23 The behavior of soldiers toward Palestinian activists who have been wounded during arrest operations has also been sharply criticized by soldiers and human rights activists alike. NGOs such as B’Tselem have often accused the army of infringing its own ethical norms regarding wounded prisoners and their obligation to administer first aid. Micha Kurtz, member of the group of soldiers from the Nahal unit who organized a photo exhibit in Tel Aviv in conjunction with Breaking the Silence after being released from military duty, narrates that his unit had captured and wounded two Palestinian terrorists in the little town of Tobas. No one tended to them or administered first aid.24 Others are purely and simply finished off. This practice is known in army parlance as vidu hariga.25 It involves making sure, by shooting a bullet at close range, that the activist wounded during an exchange of gunfire has indeed been killed. The army time and time again has stated that this practice is strictly forbidden and is acceptable only when the wounded man is still in possession of his weapon or an explosive

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device, thus presenting a danger for the soldiers. In fact, according to several accounts, it is a practice taught in all the combat units in the Occupied Territories: “We were trained to use vidu hariga. We did use it. Legally it’s forbidden. The army doesn’t want to take responsibility for it.”26 Soldiers in elite units often point out that a wounded man on the ground doesn’t mean to them that he is “a soldier who has finished his war.” He remains a dangerous combatant who will do anything, “down to his terminal breath, to avoid capture and to die as a martyr while causing the heaviest possible losses for his enemies.” Sergeant N. recounts, “In Tulkarm last year, my group chased a man from the Islamic Jihad all night long. A drone taking part in the operation detected a man sleeping in the fields. The intelligence service was convinced he was the man we were after. That night there was a curfew. The procedure is not to get any closer than 50 yards to the suspect. We let the soldiers come closer than 12 yards because they couldn’t tell if the man was armed. The Palestinian lifted the blanket covering him and opened fire, injuring an officer and killing a soldier. The soldier’s mother accused us of not opening fire right away.”27 Many of them believe, contrary to what human rights NGOs accuse them of, that they behave in ways that show that they don’t look out enough for their own safety, that in the name of the IDF ethos their commander makes them take pointless risks: “In my unit, soldiers who believed we pointlessly put their lives in danger practically revolted two years ago. Some of them even went to see the brigade commander to protest against the rather cavalier way they were treated. To their mind, orders were far too strict. We came near dwellings that we knew in advance that we were going to arrest someone very dangerous. The soldiers wanted more f lexible orders: to start by shooting at the wall to show we weren’t there to pay a courtesy call. We know the people we came to arrest, we’ve been after them for years. These people are very determined. One of the soldiers in my unit who had been wounded by an explosive device in Nablus, said, ‘I’m not going back there unless I can open fire as quickly as possible.’ He found the orders too restrictive. The issue was resolved with understanding. The commander told him he would henceforth be given other duties.”28 “Crazy Situations” and Indiscriminate Fire A new framework of norms and written as well as oral guidelines were thus set up that was far more permissive than in the past. It has resulted in numerous attacks against civilians. In many cases, these are

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involuntary errors arising from unpredictable, “crazy” situations, to use the words of one of the soldiers interviewed. For soldiers who have little training in counter–guerilla tactics, terrorism has completely altered combat conditions. The classic notion of battlefield has disappeared, giving way to microcombats in confined areas such as camp alleyways that have become exceedingly treacherous, against an invisible enemy that can emerge at any moment in the form of an apparently harmless woman or adolescent. Soldiers assigned to checkpoints or urban patrols live with this permanent dread. Women and adolescents are used either to test the Israeli defense system, often unbeknownst to them, or for suicide bombings. In January 2004 a young Palestinian woman, Reem Saleh al-Riachi, arrived at the Erez checkpoint at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel. She asked the soldiers to excuse her from going through the electronic gate due to an artificial leg. They honored her request. Four of them were killed moments later in the detonation caused by the explosives belt worn by this suicide bomber.29 In this context, all Palestinians become suspects. The tension puts the soldiers terribly on edge and often leads them to shoot without thinking. Everyday life is a bit like in the “Wild West”: the fastest draw wins. It’s “one life for another,” according to the expression used by Sergeant E., a combat that leaves no time to think. “In my unit we try not to be trigger-happy, to use good judgment. We often discuss what we’d do in such and such a situation, but sometimes soldiers make mistakes. For instance, a Palestinian shoots at us from a building in which he has taken cover. He shoots from the window and then hides. You think you see him reappear at another window, and you shoot. But it’s not him, it’s a neighbor who was trying to see what was happening outside. They’re crazy situations.”30 These soldiers display an aggressiveness that is merely a mirror of their own fear in situations in which their own lives are played out in a matter of seconds. On several occasions, soldiers have mistaken youngsters playing with toy guns for activists and killed them. Such toys have a striking resemblance to real ones. On January 20, 2005, the day of the Festival of Sacrifice, the population of a small village east of Jenin, Taisir, was in the streets. A Jeep from a battalion of religious soldiers, Nahal Haredi, drove through the village and was attacked by young Palestinians throwing stones. The adults, thinking it was a raid, quickly dispersed. The soldiers noticed a young Palestinian pointing his gun at them. They shot and killed him. This 12-year-old boy was pointing a plastic rif le that the soldiers took for an M-16. Other similar incidents have taken place. On November 19, 2005, while playing with a

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plastic pistol, a 17-year-old Palestinian boy was wounded in the leg by soldiers near the village of Siwad, north of Ramallah. On November 20, 2006, another 17-year-old adolescent was killed at the checkpoint located north of the city of Jericho for having pointed a plastic pistol at soldiers. According to B’Tselem, a total of five Palestinian children were killed playing with this type of toy between 2000 and 2006. On December 27 the Israeli NGO as well as the Palestinian organization al-Haq called on the army, which was subject to very strict orders regarding any Palestinian in possession of a firearm, to exercise greater caution. They also asked the Palestinian Authority to ban imports of these types of toys and urged parents to be more vigilant.31 But this sort of blunder does not occur in the fight against terrorism alone. In many other cases, the military has shown ruthlessness to an extent that security considerations did not justify, or employed measures that needlessly endangered the Palestinian population. Not many civilians have been killed just “by mistake.” Aside from targeted arrest operations, in which the army has shown restraint, there have been very aggressive modus operandi that display a lack of good judgment. This overaggressiveness generally occurs in sectors where the army feels vulnerable or against armed militants who cannot be arrested or display a threatening posture, or again when the high command decides to “teach activists a lesson” to dissuade them from resuming their activities. The brutalization of the army’s modus operandi is more palpable in sectors such as the Gaza Strip where Palestinian activists have shown greater audacity and aggressiveness and where the IDF has suffered heavy losses. Each attack the army suffers is followed by retributive action, such as the “exposure” (hissuf ) of the land along the road or beside the attacked outposts, since the trees and houses may have served to hide or shelter activists. In the area of Rafah, where most of the tunnels linking the Gaza Strip to Egyptian territory come out, the IDF destroyed the first rows of houses along the route. “Each time that armed Palestinians, most of them members of clans involved in contraband, open fire from houses, the IDF hits these houses with a barrage of fire until their occupants desert them; the houses are then declared vacant and bulldozers go in to demolish them.”32 These demolitions never fail to arouse a wave of worldwide indignation, which does nothing to stop them, however. According to soldiers and young officers who have taken part in these operations, uprooting trees or demolishing houses is not always motivated by security considerations but ref lects a desire for revenge or aims to pressure the population into

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turning against the armed groups.33 Dozens of houses were razed along the Philadelphi Route after an attack against the army in 2004 during Operation Rainbow, which left more than 40 dead and hundreds homeless. Another system developed by the army that has prompted severe criticism even within Israel are the special security zones. The army is authorized to shoot at anyone entering these areas, which are declared off limits. Anyone who ventures there, child or adult, is shot on sight. The soldier must use his best judgment, which he rarely does, given that these areas are considered extremely dangerous and have already been the target of attacks from armed groups. “Dozens of innocent Palestinians have been shot down for having been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”34 This practice has been severely criticized within the army itself due to the lack of judgment used in applying these guidelines. Contempt for the lives of Palestinians has developed in the Gaza Strip. “We have even shot for no reason. When we see someone running at night toward the barrier, it is obvious that it’s a 16-year-old boy going to find work in Israel and not a terrorist carrying a heavy explosive device on his back. And yet we shoot—because why take risks and anyway, we’re only called to account when a Jew is killed. [ . . . ] This is the approach: if we kill them this time, the next time their friends will be afraid to get as far as the barrier.”35 These remarks are striking in their resemblance with those made by Moshe Dayan during the 1950s. In La Septième Guerre d’Israël, Amos Harel and Avi Isacharoff quote the testimony of an Israeli general according to whom these guidelines “bordered on war crimes.” “The message to ordinary soldiers is clear: everyone does what he wants to. You feel your life is in danger? Shoot! Gaza is becoming a black hole and the high command doesn’t care. You can’t just shoot at someone simply because he’s in a certain area.”36 Hostile reactions to these instructions have been expressed within the army. Brigadier General Gadi Eisenkot, former commander of an armored division, ordered his troops to ignore the instructions regarding special security zones and not to shoot automatically. These instructions are, however, not always obeyed. The Case of Captain R. The case of Captain R. provides a good illustration of the issue. On the morning of October 5, 2004, a 13-year-old schoolgirl, Iman alHams, entered one of these forbidden areas at daybreak. The soldiers on

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watch at the Girit outpost opened fire. The girl was still 75 yards away from the soldiers, but authorization to shoot any person who comes closer than 300 yards is “automatic,” it was explained in the media. The girl, seized with fear, threw down her satchel and f led, a move the soldiers interpreted as a confirmation of their concerns. They fired several rounds. The young girl collapsed on the ground. The army stated that the incident was “regrettable” but that terrorist organizations commonly sent out children to test Israeli defenses before launching an attack. Yet given the highly sophisticated sights these units are equipped with, this unit should have demonstrated greater discrimination. Captain R. then apparently neared the body of the girl on the ground, together with a few soldiers, and emptied his entire magazine into her to perform vidu hariga. Soldiers in Captain R.’s unit reported this act to the media and he was subsequently put on trial. But when the proceedings began against R., it turned out that the accusation of shooting at close range was entirely invented by soldiers who wanted to settle scores with the head of their company, with whom relations were terrible. The trial, which ended in November 2005, acquitted Captain R. The military court for Southern Command considered that the testimonies supplied by the soldiers were contradictory and that vidu hariga had not taken place. It accepted the captain’s explanation that the shots fired by his soldiers had aimed to “neutralize a threat.” A few days earlier, an attack had taken place against one of the guard posts of the nearby settlement of Morag, causing the death of an Israeli officer and two soldiers. When the young girl entered the forbidden area, the captain was asleep. He was awakened by his soldiers: “I thought of nothing else than to stave off a terrorist attack and dispel the threat,” he explained.37 In this case, the trial focused exclusively on the accusation of shooting at close range. The initial shot that hit the girl was not examined because the captain was supposed to have acted legally, in compliance with instructions received. The al-Hams family brought the case before the High Court of Justice, which in January handed down an instructive decision to say the least. Judge Edmond Levy asserted in his opinion made public that “the facts of this affair has left me with a heavy heart, because al-Hams’ death could have been prevented had all the parties involved in the affair simply behaved as required.”38 The judge’s verdict, handed down on the consent of Justices Aharon Barak, incumbent president of the High Court, and Salim Joubran, mentions several “secret” documents drawn up by the army. One of them, entitled “Guidelines for opening fire in the Gaza Strip,” was drafted in January 2004 by the operations branch of Southern Command. It emphasizes the “need to avoid endangering

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innocent lives and particularly women and children.” This document stipulates that it is the brigade commander’s responsibility to inform the inhabitants of the region concerning the perimeter defined as a special security zone, and that it is his responsibility to verify regularly that this area is fenced in and signposted. But it stresses especially that “a [Palestinian] person’s mere presence within this security zone does not testify to his being dangerous.”39 Finally, it was up to unit commanders to supply their soldiers with “clear and detailed information about the rules of engagement using explanations and examples.” But according to testimony taken from this unit recorded by the military police, these guidelines were not followed. Several officers and soldiers state that in their minds the guidelines pertaining to shots fired in the dark of the night were “with the intent to kill.”40 Many other soldiers quoted in the High Court judge’s decision acknowledged that they believed any person entering this area should be shot down. That means that there can be a considerable hiatus between the written guidelines and those given to the soldiers verbally. Grey areas end up being created in which the military hierarchy leaves it up to the discretion of field units to decide how to follow guidelines for opening fire, depending on their own assessment of the situation, and refrains from sanctioning behavior that clearly contravenes written orders. The case of the young al-Hams girl and the soldiers at the Girit outpost does not seem to be exceptional. “In Gaza there have been dozens of Captain Rs.”41 Well after the IDF withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, incidents of the same sort have taken place but have not alerted Israeli public opinion the way the Iman al-Hams case did. Shots are regularly fired without warning at any Palestinian who approaches the security barrier. Some of the victims were preparing to set an explosive charge, but others simply wanted to cross the border to find work in Israel and were not carrying any weapon or explosive. These are not disorderly or “savage” acts. They are the natural result of a policy defined by the high command. The dominant logic is that if the IDF is attacked, that is proof that deterrence no longer works, in which case there is no greater national emergency than to reestablish it by striking the Palestinian combatants very hard to restore a tarnished image. Reoccupation of Area A Sharon and his generals quickly realized that the “leverage” policy was ineffectual. Pressure on the Palestinian Authority did not prevent the

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continuation of suicide bombings; they even increased. As mentioned earlier in this chapter, between the months of March and December 2001, 185 Israelis were killed, among them Tourism Minister Rehavam Zeevi.42 The January 2002 seizing of the Karine A, a ship carrying weapons for the Palestinians, heightened animosity toward Arafat, even if the high command found no concrete proof of his involvement in this affair.43 The IDF, urged by the prime minister, began reorganizing for a larger-scale operation at the same time as the Shabak was improving its intelligence capabilities and penetration of armed groups. In little time it managed to enlist thousands of collaborators in the Occupied Territories.44 In the course of the first three months of 2002, 173 more Israelis lost their lives in bombings, a record figure for so short a time. It now seemed inevitable that the army would reenter Area A where the activists took refuge. The political leadership lost all hope in Arafat and began to wonder if Israel shouldn’t directly take charge of the fight against terrorism. The military declared Arafat an accomplice to terrorism. They accused him of using his security services to carry out terrorist operations and began to devise a plan for “dismantling terrorist infrastructure,” which implied getting ready to invade Area A for a vast cleanup operation of the armed groups’ hideouts. The IDF was preparing for it. Unhurriedly. Most of the high-ranking officers dreaded combat in populated areas. Aman (military intelligence) foresaw heavy losses due to the resistance that was organizing in the camps. The IDF managed to arrest activists on the fringes of Area A. It advanced gradually, paralyzed by the fear of heavy losses. Night raids began in September 2001 aiming to attack Palestinian Authority command posts. The army was gaining the experience necessary for a raid into the refugee camps, but the operation deployed in the West Bank was still poorly prepared for a large-scale combat with armed groups. In February 2002 incursions were made into Jenin and Nablus to test the resistance of the armed groups. Several dozen of their members were killed. A few days later, the IDF attacked Tulkarm, arresting several hundred activists who were filmed shirtless by television cameras. This “victory” restored troop moral. On March 27, 2002, the eve of Passover, a suicide bombing took place at the Park Hotel in the seaside resort town of Netanya. A Palestinian from the Occupied Territories entered the hotel dining room where he blew himself up in the middle of families celebrating the Seder: 29 Israelis were killed and 140 seriously wounded. For Ariel Sharon this was the last straw. He ordered a major call-up of reservists.

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The IDF reinvaded cities in Area A, entering Nablus and Jenin. This marked the beginning of Operation Defensive Shield. It was the largest battle against armed groups they were to conduct. The worst-case scenario—a bloodbath—was avoided, but a considerable number of houses were destroyed. The operation was accompanied by attacks against the Palestinian Authority. Tanks entered Ramallah and laid siege to the Muqata, Yasser Arafat’s headquarters. Government offices were sacked. General Mofaz urged the prime minister to expel the aging Palestinian leader, but under pressure from the president of the United States, Sharon settled for placing him under house arrest. Arafat lived there in confinement for two and a half years. Marwan Barghouti45 was arrested on April 15. Avi Dichter, director of the Shabak, declared, “A whole generation of Palestinians, those born after the Six-Day War, is getting a feel for Israel’s real military power for the first time.”46 But none of that made the cycle of bombings and targeted killings cease. In July 2002 the prime minister decided to have a security barrier erected around the West Bank, which posed a number of problems. Even if nearly 80% of the Israeli population approved this decision, its route extended beyond the Green Line, encroaching on Palestinian land and restricting the movements of many Palestinians. In the three months that followed the operation, 130 Israelis were killed (a statistic that includes soldiers who died during the operation itself ). On July 22 Salah Shehada, one of the most wanted terrorists, was hit, along with 14 civilians, including 8 children. The wave of emotion was great, even in Israel.47 Hamas retaliated with an attack on the Hebrew University of Jerusalem one week later. On August 19, 2003, a suicide bomber detonated his charge on a bus in Jerusalem, killing 23 people. Israel no longer targeted only activists. It also went after the political leaders of terrorist organizations. On March 22, 2004, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, leader of Hamas, was killed by a missile. On April 17 his successor, Abdel Aziz Rantissi, was also killed. The number of suicide bombings declined after 2003, dropping from “a peak of 450 victims [ . . . ] in 2002, [ . . . ] to 213 in 2003 and 66 in the first half of 2004.”48 The next chapter will examine the main factors explaining this outcome and in particular the role targeted killings played in it.

CH A P T E R

SE V E N

The Counterproductive Virtuosity of Targeted Killings

Targeted killings are not specific to the second Intifada. The first Israeli operations of this sort were carried out by Haganah ( Jewish paramilitary organization) during the 1948 Independence War. Just after the UN passed the Partition Plan for Palestine in November 1947 and hostilities ensued, Palmach, Haganah’s strike force, received orders to eliminate prominent Arab figures.1 The original list included 23 political figures and high-ranking military officials.2 These eliminations were to be carried out with great caution so as to suggest they were the result of inter-Arab feuds. They were to take place far from any Muslim holy sites or hospitals so as not to arouse extreme Arab reaction. Operation Zarzir (“Starling”) terminated with the end of the Arab-Israeli War and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. In the summer of 1956 Israel eliminated Colonel Mustafa Hafez, head of Egyptian military intelligence in the Gaza Strip, accused in this capacity of having organized fedayeen raids against Israeli farms. On June 11, 1956, an Israeli agent, simultaneously working for Egypt, delivered him a booby-trapped envelope packed with explosives that killed him as well as the double agent. The Egyptian military attaché in Amman, Jordan, met the same fate a few days later.3 In the early 1960s Israel went after German scientists, former Nazis who were employed by the Egyptian government to build long-range missiles. But David Ben-Gurion decided fairly quickly to halt these operations in order to preserve his good relations with the Federal Republic of Germany. This type of attack drew worldwide attention in 1972 following the murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics by a Black September

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commando. All but a few who managed to escape were slaughtered on the tarmac of the Munich airport. Golda Meir, then Israeli prime minister, charged the Mossad with eliminating all the members of the commando who had taken part in this bloody operation and as well as its organizers. Due to a Mossad error in July 1973 in Lillehammer, Norway, a Moroccan busboy, Ahmed Bouchiki, was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, one of the most wanted Black September members, and killed. Despite the objections stirred in Europe by Israeli operations against Black September at the time, they came to be considered a success in the fight against terrorism. Other leaders of Palestinian organizations were liquidated, especially in Beirut, in April 1973, by Israeli night commandos. In 1988, Israel slayed Abu Jihad (Khalil el Wazir), Yasser Arafat’s second in command during an operation carried out in the heart of the PLO headquarters in Tunis. Abu Jihad was held to be responsible for several terrorist attacks in Israel, particularly against a bus in March 1988 in Tel Aviv. During the first Intifada, the IDF mounted Mista’aravim, a special unit created within the border police. Its mission was to enter Palestinian cities disguised as Palestinian civilians (male or female) to arrest militants they believed dangerous. But according to B’Tselem, these forces killed many activists who could have been arrested.4 In 1992, during hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah, the secretarygeneral of the Party of God in southern Lebanon, Sheikh Abbas Musawi, was killed along with his wife and son. In October 1995, Fathi Shiqaqi, head of the Islamic Jihad, was slayed in Malta. The elimination of this leader, whom the group’s members believed irreplaceable, left this organization paralyzed and in disarray for many years. In 1996 Israel went after Yahya Ayyash, known as “the engineer” for his skill in making powerful bombs using chemical ingredients freely available in pharmacies and chemical fertilizers. The Shabak had sent him a booby-trapped mobile phone via one of his close associates. What makes the targeted killings in the second Intifada different is their systematic nature, the fairly high number of Palestinian civilian casualties and finally Israel’s claim to the right to undertake this type of operation, which it maintains falls into the category of self-defense. They were first carried out in the West Bank and then with increasing frequency in the Gaza Strip. These operations were initially limited to notorious activists, but were later broadened to target political leaders such as Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantissi, two successive Hamas leaders. Various methods have been used: missiles fired from

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attack helicopters or drones, snipers and bombs. The tactic has sparked huge controversy regarding the legality and legitimacy of this modus operandi with respect to international humanitarian law. Disputed Legitimacy Many Western governments, including that of the United States, as well as prominent figures such as UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, have harshly condemned such operations. Heated debate has developed within Israel as well. For the Israeli NGO Public Committee against Torture in Israel, as well as for most human rights NGOs, these are extrajudicial executions during which “the victims are killed without the chance of a fair legal process designed to examine the allegations brought forward against them.”5 Another recurrent criticism concerns the problem of “collateral damage” and the high number of civilians killed during “not-so-targeted” operations, to quote Matti Steinberg, an adviser on Palestinian questions to three successive Shabak chiefs.6 According to the NGO B’Tselem, 386 Palestinian activists were victims of targeted killings between the start of the Intifada and December 2007, causing the death of 152 noncombatants.7 The operation that claimed the most civilian victims was the July 2002 killing of Salah Shehada, senior Hamas official in Gaza, accused by Israel of having organized 52 operations that cost the lives of 200 Israeli civilians and 16 soldiers. The one-ton bomb that killed him crushed the neighboring house, killing 14 innocents, including 8 children, his own daughter among them. The Shabak acknowledged it was mistaken in its assessment, having believed the house next door, which bore the brunt of the damage, to be empty. This blunder provoked sharp disapproval from many other countries. It shocked the Israeli public, which otherwise remains largely in favor of the sort of reprisal.8 Twenty-seven Air Force pilots, including Brigadier General (reserve) Yftah Spector, sent a petition to General Dan Halutz, commander of the Air Force, declaring that they refused to take part in air force operations over civilian population centers. The day after dropping the bomb, the daily newspaper Haaretz asked Dan Halutz what he felt as a pilot when he dropped a bomb. He replied, “I sleep well [ . . . ] and if you want to know what I feel when I drop a bomb [ . . . ] a slight thump in the airplane, it passes after a second.” This reply, totally lacking empathy for civilian victims, helped to strengthen criticism of these operations and to give the army a negative image.

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A work group led by Israeli philosopher Asa Kasher and MajorGeneral Amos Yadlin later came up with the moral justification for these operations, which it preferred to call “killings,” rather than “assassinations,” due to the fact that assassination is “an act of killing a prominent person selectively, intentionally, and for political (including religious) purposes,” whereas in the case of “killings,” it is rather an act of self-defense.9 The two authors develop the idea that “targeted killings” are legitimate as long as they are not out of “revenge” but an act that is meant to thwart “ticking bombs” (a term for people on the verge of perpetrating an attack).10 They later enlarged the definition of “ticking bombs” to include not only the person who is supposed to blow himself up, but also all those who take part in planning an attack, from the organization leader to actors having a more marginal role.11 According to Kasher and Yadlin, the Israeli army should do its utmost to minimize collateral damage, the aim not being to kill innocents. But the notion that all collateral damage is “morally reprehensible” should be discarded. “Under certain conditions,” they write, “it is morally justified to perform an act of targeted prevention of terror that involves killing terrorists even if collateral damage is expected.”12 In January 2001 a human rights NGO petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice to prohibit the use of this modus operandi. Chief Justice Aharon Barak did not make the Court’s ruling public until December 14, 2006, on the eve of his retirement; in other words five years after the case was filed. This belated reaction is indicative of the trouble the High Court has in ruling on a modus operandi that enjoys widespread support among the Israeli public. In its 50-page decision, the High Court delivered an opinion imbued with caution. It rejected the army’s demand to consider members of Palestinian armed groups as “unlawful combatants,” a category that does not exist in international law. It holds that they are civilians who take part in hostilities who must be treated in accordance with the rules of international humanitarian law, respecting the principle of proportionality. That does not mean it condemns the principle of targeted killings, but sets fairly lenient limits on the government. According to the Court, “one cannot determine in advance that targeted killing is always illegal, just as one cannot determine in advance that under any circumstances it is legal and permissible. [ . . . ] One must proceed case by case.” Among the conditions set by the Court is the thorough verification of information regarding the identity of the targeted person “who takes direct part in the hostilities” systematically and not only sporadically. A suspect is a legitimate target

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only if his arrest is impossible or if it might endanger soldiers’ lives. All precaution must be taken to avoid killing innocent civilians. Any harm to innocent civilians requires an ex post examination done by an “objective” commission.13 A Double-Edged Sword The focus here is not on these legal and ethical debates, which have already been amply discussed elsewhere,14 but instead on the effectiveness of targeted killings. Are they a success or a failure in terms of fighting terror? There are several conf licting schools of thought. For some, they have never deterred suicide bombings and have done nothing but feed the cycle of violence. This theory is fairly well represented by the work of Anglo-Saxon academics Mia Bloom and Scott Atran. According to Mia Bloom, the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict and its cycle of killings and suicide bombings is a “deadlocked battle.” In the long run, this policy “will encourage rather than deter future attacks.”15 According to Scott Atran, “Repeated suicide actions show that massive counterforce alone does not diminish the frequency or intensity of suicide attack.”16 Others, however, such as Hillel Frisch, professor at Bar-Ilan University, argue that this modus operandi is effective.17 If these operations lead to more violence and further motivate the Palestinian insurgents, he wonders, why has the number of attempted suicide bombings declined by more than a third since 2003–2004 and the number of successful attacks dropped by over 40 percent? He claims the number of Israeli victims of suicide bombings and other types of Palestinian attacks dropped by 75 percent since the attacks peaked in 2002. This analyst argues that it is not so much the degree of militant “motivation” that is the decisive factor for the safety of Israelis, but rather their capability of planning and executing large-scale attacks. According to him, Israel’s offensive measures have seriously damaged their capabilities and have proven more effective in fighting terrorism than defensive measures such as the security barrier and checkpoints. This same argument has also been put forth by former Shabak director Avi Dichter and Daniel Byman:18 “The targeted killings did indeed damage the capabilities of the terrorist groups.”19 Although not devoid of interest, these explanatory models provide only incomplete and contradictory answers to the question of effectiveness. Mia Bloom and Scott Atran do not take into account the

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long term of history or cases of proven successes in the past. On the other hand, Hillel Frisch calculates only their benefits, not their cost. He does not examine their perverse effects or the political options that would have made it possible for both camps to avoid a bloody escalade. He does not prove the causal link between the practice of targeted killings and the decrease in the number of suicide bombings. Minute scrutiny of the events that occurred between 2001 and 2004 leads to considerably tempering this overly optimistic viewpoint. Targeted killings are in fact a double-edged sword. They can turn out to be effective or on the contrary counterproductive. Used with restraint, they have proven to be terribly effective in the past. That does not mean all these operations have been rewarded with success, far from it. The liquidation of the Black September members may have helped to end acts of terror against Israeli civilians living abroad, but the slaying of Sheikh Abbas Musawi was followed by harsh retaliation against the Israeli embassy and the Jewish community in Buenos Aires. Two buses exploded in the Argentine capital, killing over 100 people. In 1996 the targeted execution of Yahya Ayyash was followed by four simultaneous bombings of Israeli buses in which 48 Israeli civilians lost their lives. The September 1997 attempt to assassinate Khaled Mashal, 20 chief of the Hamas political bureau in Jordan, turned into a fiasco. The Mossad agents were captured. In exchange for their release, King Hussein of Jordan demanded delivery of the antidote that would save the Hamas leader’s life and the release of Sheikh Ahmed Yassin from the Israeli prison where he was being held. This “boomerang effect” has occurred also in the second Intifada. Instead of acting as a preventive measure, targeted killings between 2001 and 2003 had the effect of heightening indiscriminate radical Palestinian violence. During the first two years of the second Intifada, acts of this sort cost the lives of hundreds of Israelis who were killed in the course of Palestinian reprisals, which themselves were subsequent to the targeted elimination of leaders of radical organization.21 The elimination of the head of Palestinian Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), Mustafa Zibri, in August 2001 led to the assassination of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam Zeevi two months later. The most counterproductive of all killings, however, was Israel’s elimination of Raed Karmi—a local leader of the Tanzim movement—in January 2002, which triggered the dispatch of dozens of suicide bombers into Israeli cities.

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“Israel’s Biggest Mistake . . .” This latter case, largely ignored by the public, is worth considering in detail. Israeli Defense Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer would call it “the biggest mistake Israel made during the Intifada,” belying the optimism displayed by Hillel Frisch and Avi Dichter.22 Sharon made the decision to authorize Karmi’s assassination at a time when relative calm reigned over the Occupied Territories after Yasser Arafat’s announcement of a general ceasefire on December 16, 2001. But the plan to eliminate Karmi, considered to be an extremely dangerous militant who had perpetrated several bloody attacks, had been devised prior to the Palestinian Authority leader’s speech. An initial attempt made on September 6, 2001, had failed. Although wounded, Karmi managed to escape the Israeli secret services. A few months later, the Shabak, which had once again spotted him, again presented the case to the prime minister, arguing that a new opportunity had arisen to slay him. The plan did not meet with unanimous approval among Israelis officials. Raed Karmi was a popular, highly respected figure among the Tanzim and in Tulkarm, his territory. Generals such as Giora Eiland, head of the IDF’s Planning and Policy Directorate, and General Yitzhak Eitan, chief of the Central Command Centre, expressed doubts about the wisdom of the operation.23 As for Defense Minister Ben-Eliezer, he felt that eliminating Karmi at that particular time was likely to rekindle the violence. Yet when the decision came up for discussion, he did not dare oppose the prime minister. And so the hardliners, especially Mofaz and Dichter, won out. Attracted by the ingenuity of the operation, Sharon gave it the green light. The Shabak had in fact identified Karmi’s achille’s heel: every day at the same time he walked over to the home of his mistress, the wife of a Fatah activist. The attack was carried out on January 14, 2002, by hiding an explosive device in a wall bordering the alley that Karmi took. The operation was not to “leave fingerprints” so that Israel would not be accused of violating the ceasefire. But the secret soon got out. The elimination of Karmi marked a decisive turning point in the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict. Up until then, only the Islamist organizations Hamas and the Islamic Jihad launched suicide bombings beyond the Green Line. After al-Karmi’s death, Fatah also lapsed into suicide tactics, thus considerably increasing the terrorist potential against civilian Israelis (see figure 7.1). From that point on, as Raviv Drucker and

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90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20 10

Figure 7.1

2004(4)

2004(3)

2004(2)

2004(1)

2003(')

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2002(4)

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0

Number of Deaths by Suicide Attacks (2001–2004)

Source: Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. www.mfa.gov.il (retrieved August 15, 2009)

Ofer Shelah state, Israel found itself faced with the “popular, sizeable and powerful forces of the Palestinian people. In the two following months, this war cost the lives of 200 Israelis.”24 Some may argue that in any event, given the circumstances at the time, Fatah was bound to join in with Hamas: “The abundant supply of volunteers [for suicide bombings] demonstrated the unprecedented intensity of the popular commitment to Palestinian liberation. Nonreligious movements like the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and particularly Fatah were forced to resort to suicide operations themselves or risk being marginalized,” notes Gilles Kepel.25 This sort of argument is highly deterministic in nature (the ineluctability of Fatah’s radicalization) and is not demonstrable. One can just as well, and even better, demonstrate that if the Israeli side had respected the ceasefire and gone back to the bargaining table with a view to reaching a lasting solution for the Palestinian problem, Fatah would have had no reason to sabotage an undertaking approved by its leader. At that time, Arafat and his circle were convinced that armed Intifada had reached an impasse. Marwan Barghouti for instance, one of the most popular Fatah leaders in the West Bank, was in favor of respecting the ceasefire agreement. He had even convinced Raed Karmi to abandon the idea of committing an attack because “the old man was against it.”26

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The Infernal Machine of Targeted Killings Karmi’s elimination and the targeted killings policy in general make it worth examining the rationale behind the choices made and how the decision-making process worked during Ariel Sharon’s stint as prime minister. Each operation was initially planned by the Shabak. This organization assembled the evidence against the militant it wanted to hit. The proposal was brought before a higher operational level including the director of the Shabak, the chief of military intelligence (Aman), and the head of the IDF Operations Directorate. The case then went up to the chief of staff who submitted it to the defense minister and then the prime minister.27 The opinion of the army’s legal advisors was also sought. For the most sensitive cases, such as for Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, the Security Cabinet was convened. Operations were coordinated by the deputy chief of staff and the deputy director of the Shabak. In all cases, a final green light had to be given either by the prime minister or by defense minister before any liquidation could be carried out. But this bottom-up procedure was not exclusive. The procedure could also work in the opposite direction, starting with the top of the Shabak’s hierarchy. In that case, its director would bring a plan for a targeted attack before the prime minister and the defense minister as well as the senior military officials involved without necessarily going through the regional commander. In certain circumstances, “block” political approval was given, instead of on a case-by-case basis.28 Thus, in the last months of its struggle to halt Qassam rocket fire from the Gaza Strip into southern Israeli villages (2007–2008), the army was granted permission to carry out preventive targeted killings against any group of shooters.29 Even if they required approval from the political authorities, this in no way implies that rigorous assessment was made of the possible medium and long-term consequences from a security perspective as well as a political, diplomatic, human, and psychological standpoint. In his analysis of the Israeli decision-making process, Charles F. Freilich, a member of the National Security Council until 2005, described a system in which improvisation, short-term considerations, and highly reactive policymaking prevailed.30 “I suggested setting up a team,” says Matti Steinberg, “to consider the not-so-targeted assassinations which, in addition to examining the immediate expected results, would also look at the strategic implications. The proposal was rejected, and then came the assassination of Raed Karmi [on January 14, 2002], who was not at the time a ‘ticking bomb’ and was obeying the cease-fire.”31 The Shabak thus managed to impose its rationale thanks to the prime minister’s support. Avi Dichter believed any danger must be

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systematically averted: “A terrorist is a terrorist and if he doesn’t commit an attack today, he will commit one tomorrow.”32 This perfunctory approach, based on the conviction that Palestinian hostility toward Israel was irreversible, was shared by General Mofaz: “In the fight against terrorism, the only way is war to the end. You always have to keep your foot on the accelerator.”33 Keeping perfectly in line with the Israeli army’s organizational culture, both men moreover abide by the motto, “What cannot be achieved by force can be achieved with more force.”34 Despite repeated setbacks, this conception, which emerged with the creation of the state of Israel, remains as present as ever. All the senior officials I have interviewed in Israel have stressed the decisive inf luence the Shabak has taken on in fighting terror. This service holds a monopoly over investigating suspected terrorist cases and gives its opinion on an operation’s feasibility. It has the most up-todate operational elements on the “target’s” activities and movements. “Avi Dichter knew everything down to the last detail. He was the one who suggested targets to eliminate to the ministers, outlined the operational procedures and their practical consequences. The decisionmaking process ran in a loop: he was the one who assessed the threat, examined the case and implemented the decision.”35 Having been one of the first people to sense the prime minister’s preference for this modus operandi, Dichter managed to convince him of his service’s capacity to carry out such operations. But he focused on “immediate visible results.”36 “Dichter had a purely operational conception of things, almost primitive, which was that of the ‘lawnmower’: as soon as the grass grows back, it has to be cut. He excelled at operational organization but he had no strategic vision. He never wondered whether in some circumstances it wouldn’t be preferable to refrain from taking action to give the lull in violence a chance to bear fruit.”37 In fact, this decision-making process functioned with no checks and balances. In the climate of dread that paralyzed Israeli society during the 2001–2004 period, any questioning of the wisdom of a targeted killing was frowned upon as an attempt to prevent security officials from “winning the war against terrorism.” None of the other intelligence services—Mossad or Aman—had sufficient counterexpertise to oppose the Shabak. When an army officer expressed doubts about the reliability of the intelligence gathered by this service, he was contradicted by Dichter, who enjoyed the prime minister’s complete trust.38 On July 31, 2001, in Nablus, a helicopter launched a missile on a building in which two Hamas leaders, Jamal Mansour and Jamal Salim Demoni, were located. This operation was executed against the advice

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of the Aman chief who felt that the slaying of these two political leaders risked giving Israel the image of a country that cannot tell the difference between those who choose the path of terrorism and those who refrain from it. Mansour and Demoni were of the latter brand, he believed. The case against Mansour, moreover, contained evidence that he had spoken out against the pursuit of suicide bombings.39 This execution caused an outburst of anger that brought over 150,000 people into the streets for the two leaders’ funeral. “It was operational capacity that dictated Israel’s liquidation policy, and more than once to the detriment of good political sense and the lives of innocents,” write Harel and Isacharoff.40 As soon as a militant was deemed a potential “target,” his case was no longer reexamined for any possible evolution, be it political or personal, with respect to his engagement in the armed conf lict or according to changes in the political context. The decisional rationale was not only one of “prevention”: “Once an account is open, it must be settled,” to use the expression common among internal security service officials. The Shabak accumulated errors, basing its action on the successful elimination of Black September members back in the 1970s following the massacre of Israelis athletes in Munich and the liquidation of Fathi Shiqaqi, Islamic Jihad leader in Malta. It underestimated the retaliatory capability of armed groups. At the time, these organizations did not carry out suicide operations. Similarly, the Shabak chose to ignore failures such as the attacks targeting Yahya Ayyash in 1996 and Sheikh Abbas Musawi, killed in 1992. The Shabak’s calculations in terms of cost-effectiveness were made on the basis of incomplete information and were inf luenced by a managerial method that bore the stamp of the organizational culture of the Israeli security services, which emphasizes performance and virtuosity to the detriment of long-term strategic planning. These very errors, induced by what form paratrooper brigade Colonel Yaakov Hasdai, now history professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, calls “bitsuism,”41 the ethos of those who act—“Doers,” as opposed to “Thinkers” who privilege long-term thinking to the detriment of urgent problems42—are what contributed to the bloody escalation during the whole period from September 2000 to 2005. The army immediately defended the legitimacy of these attacks, claiming that (1) the question was not to carry out reprisals but to prevent the explosion of a “ticking bomb”; (2) the army chose the option that was the least likely to cause collateral damage; (3) that these operations took place only in the event where arrest of the targeted person

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was not without significant risks to the soldiers.43 The army has indeed strived, without always succeeding, to limit the damage and confine the attacks to militants that it could not arrest without high risk for the soldiers and the civilian environment. The operation carried out against Salah Shehada was postponed a number of times to avoid harming his daughter (who was finally killed). Generally speaking, the Shabak and the army both preferred to arrest rather than kill a person likely to provide intelligence that might help prevent other attacks. But the information the Shabak holds is not always of the utmost reliability. Missiles sometimes miss their targets. It has happened that a missile fired at a wanted activist has strayed from its path and landed in the apartment of a family while they were eating. Pilots themselves make mistakes. Sometimes a helicopter pilot fires a first round against the wanted militant’s car and misses him. The combatant rushes out of his car to hide but a second round has already been fired that will explode in the middle of the crowd of passersby who have gathered after the first shot. Dozens of errors of this sort, drawn solely from reports supplied by the army, can be mentioned. Furthermore, since militants virtually always move from one place to another surrounded by civilians, there comes a moment when it is no longer possible to postpone the killing. Restraint ends up yielding to the quest for effectiveness. As a result, the efforts to spare civilians from harm go unrecognized and all that remain are images of civilian victims hit by Israeli missiles. The “ticking bomb” argument is far less convincing. The first targeted killings during the second Intifada took place in November and December 2000, long before the wave of suicide bombings that began in January 2001. The first such killing occurred on November 9, 2000, against Hussein Abbayat, a Tanzim activist accused by the army of having organized several attacks against Israeli security forces and the Jewish locality of Gilo. He was not a “ticking bomb.” Abbayat was killed by a missile fired from an attack helicopter at his car. Two women were also killed and three others were injured. Political leaders have also been assassinated. Finally, the distinction between “reprisals,” “retaliation,” “vengeance,” and “prevention” is an artificial one: reprisals intended to prevent further attacks are also acts of vengeance. Israeli officials have justified targeted killings by claiming that they are operations used as a “last resort.” However, contrary to what has been claimed, they have been practiced on a wide scale.44 Their systematic nature has harmed Israeli political interests by methodically eliminating a significant portion of the pragmatic Palestinian leadership, thus ruling out any possibility of negotiating with the leaders likely to

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accept compromises. Already in 1988, the assassination of Abu Jihad deprived Israel of a potential partner for negotiation.45 “Targeted killing . . . hurts Israeli interest by removing current adversaries who may prove to be useful negotiating partners in the future,” Steven R. David remarks.46 The frequency of these operations increased quite significantly after February 6, 2001, when Sharon came to power. That date also marks a rise in the number of suicide bombings in Israel. In 2001, 38 targeted killings were carried out, 13 of which took place during the month of July alone. In 2002, 37 killings took place, in 2003, 44, and in 2004, 41.47 Any offer of a respite or a ceasefire was seen as a trap that would be used to enable the armed groups to rebuild their forces. The failure of the Oslo Accords and the resumption of violence in the Occupied Territories convinced Israelis that the vast majority of Palestinians continued to be hostile toward Israel.48 They thus believed it necessary to pursue the fight against armed groups until more moderate and pragmatic leaders emerged. This policy, at least in the Gaza Strip, has had the opposite result. Every slayed Hamas leader has been replaced by a leader who is no less uncompromising. Both parties have thus fed the cycle of violence. The Effectiveness of Preventive Arrests The details discussed above call for a reassessment of the efficiency of targeted killing as well as of the wisdom of the decisions made. The decline in bombings since 2003–2004 is an undeniable fact. But many questions remain. The first one concerns the extent to which targeted killing has contributed to this decline and has worn down the operational capabilities of the armed groups. Until the slaying of Sheikh Yassin and his successor Abdel Aziz Rantissi in 2004, no one was in a position to answer this question. At that time, the military authorities predicted a retaliatory “mega-attack” and issued warnings of caution to the Israeli population. But to everyone’s surprise, the expected f lare-up never occurred. There were no massive reprisals. This was finally regarded as an indication that the Hamas operational capacity to carry out suicide bombings had been diminished. How had this come about? According to Dichter and Byman, the explanation lies in the effectiveness of the targeted killing policy: Hamas militants had to spend most of their time in hiding and were forced to move frequently. Communication between them became intermittent and dangerous.

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They could not visit their families without taking considerable risks. Radical cells were moreover having increasing trouble replacing their operatives killed in Israeli army attacks. Recruitment of volunteers for suicide operations is not a swift or simple task. Hamas demands in fact all insist on the end of targeted killing as a precondition for a truce.49 But Dichter and Byman’s explanation is not very convincing. It is rather unlikely that such a decisive role can be ascribed to targeted killings. Since Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, they have occurred primarily in the Gaza Strip (as can be clearly seen in figure 7.2). But suicide bombers do not depart from Gaza, which is sealed off, surrounded by a virtually impenetrable protection barrier and devoid of air and sea communications. They depart from the West Bank instead, aside from very few exceptions. The causal nexus between targeted killing and the decrease in suicide bombings is, therefore, impossible to prove. One might add that the many targeted killings committed between 2006 and 2008 against groups firing Qassam rockets from Gaza have never managed to stop the shelling. What is it, then, that prevents terrorist groups from launching suicide bombings from Judea and Samaria? It is clearly the very efficient system of preventive arrests devised by the Shabak and the army, and not the killings, which chokes

18

Gaza

16

West Bank

14 12 10 8 6 4

Figure 7.2

Number of Targeted Killings in Gaza and the West Bank

Source: B’Tselem. www.btselem.org (retrieved August 15, 2009)

2004(4)

2004(3)

2004(2)

2004(1)

2003(')

2003(3)

2003(2)

2003(1)

2002(4)

2002(3)

2002(2)

2002(1)

2001(4)

2001(3)

2001(2)

2001(1)

0

2000(4)

2

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terrorist groups and deprives them of their freedom of maneuver, movement, and communication. These very discrete operations usually go unnoticed. The press mentions them only when the army arrests an important leader of a Palestinian organization or when a slipup occurs, causing his death.50 Since Operation Defensive Shield, there has been a turning point in the fight against terrorism. Army mindsets and practices have evolved. When the IDF entered Palestinian cities and camps in the spring of 2002, it realized that this type of operation could be carried out with minimal loss of life for both the soldiers and the Palestinian civilian population. It shed its inhibitions. Fighting in populated areas to arrest militants and question them was no longer out of its reach, as long as the necessary precautions were taken. The IDF increased the number of elite units—sayarot (reconnaissance units)—the goal of which was to enter Palestinian cities to conduct such arrest operations. Day after day it arrested activists, dismantling their cells and their laboratories. The fight was taken to the heart of the cities and the refugee camps. Arrests were made first by the hundreds and then by the thousands. The army no longer waited for a bombing to occur in order to take action: “We literally plucked them from their beds or their hiding places,” remarked Moshe Yaalon, who became IDF chief of general staff in 2002.51 These units receive special training and rehearse operations down to the last detail. They are stationed close to Palestinian cities in order to intervene on short notice. They shift into action at the Shabak’s request. The IDF borrows from the methods of armed groups, including surprise attacks, close combat, and mobility.52 Arrests are generally carried out by night, by specially equipped teams, to exploit the advantage of surprise and to avoid any contact with the Palestinian population that might complicate their task. Instructions are not to respond to any provocation. When unit soldiers are caught in the midst of young Palestinians throwing stones, orders are to disengage as fast as possible and to call upon other units specialized in crowd control. When a suspect’s house is surrounded, he is urged through loudspeakers to surrender, which most of the activists do. Some of them, however, refuse, knowing that their active role in planning bombings will cost them at the very least 20 years in prison. They open fire or try to escape. In vain, because this type of reaction usually ends to their detriment. Another modus operandi involves entering a wanted person’s house and discretely waiting for him to return. If he has a family, the members are usually placed in another room to protect them from any exchange of fire.

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These arrests give rise to interrogations that lead to other arrests. The activists are compelled to be constantly on the move and they do not know whom they can trust. Their communications are wiretapped. The Shabak has even managed to intercept the “mailing system” created by the armed groups to minimize the risks of being identified by wiretaps.53 This preventive policy is supplemented by checkpoints scattered throughout the West Bank, which also enable them to arrest operatives on the way to commit an attack or seriously disrupt their freedom of movement. Several operations have been thwarted at the last moment due to the vigilance of guards at the control posts. The security barrier should also be taken into account. Its construction began in 2002, and it started to fulfill its role as of 2003, complicating the work of the organizations based in the West Bank’s northern cities. The previously mentioned Rand Corporation study (cf. chapter one) bears out the wisdom of this approach.54 Diminishing the “Capabilities” of Armed Groups: At What Price? Even if targeted killing has played a role in diminishing the capabilities of armed groups, another question arises: at what price? Dozens and even hundreds of Israeli civilians (not to mention Palestinian civilians) have perished due to a policy that is incapable of accurately assessing insurgents’ retaliatory capacity, giving systematic priority to force, technical exploits, and outcomes that are likely to reassure Israeli public opinion. This policy has been detrimental to a thorough ref lection on the nature and dangers of counterinsurgency warfare. Mohammed Hafez and Joseph Hatfield, two academics who have published an article entitled “Do Targeted Assassinations Work?” believe that although they serve to prove the government’s determination to fight terror and reassure an angry population traumatized by attacks and demanding forceful measures to stop them, targeted killings have neither negative nor positive effects.55 This author obviously does not share their point of view. Two questions ought to be raised in conclusion: the first relates to the relative effectiveness of targeted killings. Is it their principle as such that should be challenged or the systematic recourse to them during the second Intifada? The targeted killings of the past—from 1947 to 1970—were exceptional in nature and hence more terrifying. The second question is more forward-looking. Despite the problems they

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create, can a democracy such as Israel do without them? Targeted killings are not likely to cease any time in the near future as long as the IDF has not found another way to forestall attacks launched against Israeli villages. Targeted killings have an undeniable tactical value to preempt an imminent attack. They remain politically very useful in that they serve to reassure public opinion, which widely supports this type of reprisal. They send the message to the Israeli public that it is being defended and protected, that the army does not stand by passively in the face of its plights. In the context of terrorist attacks, moral support to the population is an important asset for the leadership. The population must be reassured at all costs. This imperative sometimes leads to highly dubious measures from the standpoint of effectiveness. One telling example is the shelling of empty fields in Gaza in 2005 and 2006 after the army withdrew in order to “harass and intimidate” militant groups firing Qassams. This shelling never succeeded in putting an end to the rocket attacks. It did to a certain extent reassure the population in southern Israel. But it caused the accidental death of dozens of Palestinian civilians, thus tarnishing further the image of Israel in the eyes of international public opinion and offering armed groups an opportunity to recruit yet a few more volunteers.

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CH A P T E R

EIGH T

The Resilience of Israeli Democracy

What conclusion can be drawn from the way the IDF has conducted war during the al-Aqsa Intifada, the starting point of which is known, although there is no telling whether it has ended? Did it handle the fight against terrorism in a satisfactory manner? Many specialists of Israel see it as an undeniable success and proof that a democracy can face up to such an ordeal. In an article that fairly well represents this viewpoint, Nadav Morag at the American Jewish University in Los Angeles holds up as evidence: the decrease in the number of attacks against Israeli civilians; the upturn in the Israeli economy after a period of being on the verge of collapse during the great wave of terrorist attacks in the years 2001–2004; the resilience Israeli society displayed at a time when there was a fear that it might founder; the victory of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in the 2003 elections, proof of the broad support his policies had earned among Israeli public opinion; the eroded status of the president of the Palestinian Authority; and, finally, the fact that “Israel’s international standing does not appear to have been significantly impaired by the ongoing conf lict with the Palestinians.”1 According to one of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s closest advisors, it has even been an “overall success,” given the virtual cessation of suicide bombings and the return to normal life for the Israelis, “which no other democratic state faced with terrorism has managed to achieve.”2 This positive assessment must nevertheless be qualified. The Failure of Terrorism Indeed, terrorist organizations have not managed to destabilize Israeli democracy. Many of those who embraced terrorism hoped to sway the

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balance of power between their organization and Israel, banking on the war-weariness of Israeli society. But their reckoning proved wrong. The Israeli public withstood the shock of suicide bombings. It did not fold and closed ranks around its prime minister. The effect of suicide attacks has primarily been to harden public opinion. They have caused it to swing to the right. A population that is subject to successive waves of attacks, that encounters dozens of deaths and hundreds of wounded each day, in which every family has a relative or a friend who has died in atrocious circumstances, wants only one thing: for the army to deploy all possible means to protect it, to make the terror stop, to end that feeling of not being able to live normally, even if it means using methods that are morally reprehensible and that civilians on the other side pay the price. Some Israelis have gone so far as to ask the army to behave in the way as the adversary: “Since they’re not human, let’s show them that we’re capable of doing the same thing as them and that as long as there is no letup for us, there will be none for their civilians either.” Compared to the time of the Oslo Accords, a regression has occurred on either side of the Green Line. Whereas in 1997, 53 percent of Israelis said they were prepared to trade the Occupied Territories for peace, in 2002, at the height of the suicide bombings the proportion dropped to 37 percent.3 Israel experienced the attacks as a war for the country’s survival. An adequate response was demanded of its leaders. In a political system that makes it difficult to secure a stable majority, they are constantly subject to pressure and outbidding on security issues from parties farther to the right as well as settlers on the religious and extreme right. This fear of terrorism that Israeli society has experienced since the big wave of bombings in the years 2001–2004 has produced overwhelming support for a hardline counterterrorism policy and the acceptance of drastic measures, even at the expense of Palestinian civilians. An opinion poll published in the daily newspaper Maariv in July 2001 showed that 90 percent of Israelis supported these operations. In April 2002, 90 percent said they were in favor of Operation Defensive Shield.4 A poll taken in July 2002 showed that only 29 percent of the Israelis interviewed stated that the IDF should consider the possibility of killing or wounding Palestinian civilians when planning military operations; 44.5 percent stated that this possibility should inf luence planning, though not as a supreme factor; and 24 percent believed that the possibility should not affect planning at all.5 Terrorism has undermined peace movements, removed the search for a political solution from the agenda, and driven to oblivion the

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hardships endured by the Palestinian population subject to the pressures of an occupying regime hardened by the attacks. It has produced a shift to the right among many left-wing activists and figures who have ended up loathing the lack of humanism of their Palestinian counterparts and their lack of protest against indiscriminate attacks and doubting not only the Palestinians’ desire to achieve peace but also their willingness to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East. Many peace activists have been astounded to see Palestinians alongside whom they had previously campaigned take part in attacks against Israelis. Terrorism and the fight against terror have led to dehumanization on both sides. This radicalization has occurred on several occasions since the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In Israel’s south, where farming villages near the border have been exposed to repeated shelling by Qassam rockets, ministers and Knesset members are subject to constant pressure from their inhabitants. Political leaders not only fear voter disaffection, but also and especially the abandoning of these villages, which would hail a victory for radical groups and put an end to the dream of settling the border regions. Knesset members have all visited the area to manifest their moral support and express their intention not to let these attacks go unpunished. Exasperated by the nearly daily rocket fire, many inhabitants demand reprisal without regard for the risks to the Palestinian population. The army in turn is subject to considerable pressure. It cannot do without support of the population, on which it relies to supply its ranks, as the IDF is not on the whole a professional army. This swing to the right has not, however, led to a complete breakdown of protest reactions. A dissenting trend in favor of peace and human rights has gradually reappeared. New soldiers movements emerged. The lethargic refusnik movement got a second wind. In January 2002, the Ha Ometz Lesarev (Courage to Refuse) association was formed; 51 soldiers, NCOs, and combat officers, most of them in the reserves, published an open letter in Haaretz in which they declared that they would not serve in the Occupied Territories.6 After three years, over 600 of them had signed it. Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) was founded in 2004 by soldiers just released from their military service to denounce illegal acts perpetrated by the army during this period.7 Mahsom Watch (Mahsom means “barrier”) was formed in January 2001 by a group of Israeli women to bear witness to the everyday hardships Palestinians experience at checkpoints.8 Soldiers in elite units such as Sayeret Matkal (the General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, elite combatants generally used for missions beyond Israel’s borders)

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also made their voices heard. Former Shabak director Ami Ayalon and president of al-Quds University Sari Nusseibeh launched a peace initiative. It collected more than 400,000 signatures in Israel and among the Palestinians. Personalities on the left of the political spectrum together with moderate Palestinian figures such as Yasser Abed Rabo organized the “Geneva Initiative,” a peace plan signed on December 1, 2003 in Calvin Switzerland. Despite attacks, half of the Israelis remained in favor of pursuing negotiations with the Palestinians.9 In November 2003, four former Shabak heads—Avraham Shalom, Yaakov Peri, Carmi Gilon, and Ami Ayalon—called on the government to reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians. The High Court of Justice: Its Role and Its Dilemmas Terrorism has not managed to jam all the mechanisms of checks and balances in Israeli democracy. Even weakened by the climate created by terrorist attacks, the High Court of Justice has not remained inactive, despite being faced with thorny dilemmas. The Court cannot hamper the actions of an army fighting to keep its people safe on the grounds that certain modus operandi violate international humanitarian law, without running the risk of public disavowal. The fight against terrorism is a highly sensitive issue. Yet the Court has more than once ruled against the army and the government. It should first be noted that it has agreed, as a matter of principle, to exercise “legal oversight” over the military authorities in the Occupied Territories, “a procedure for which no other example exists in comparative law,” according to legal scholar Claude Klein.10 It has thus banned the practice of human shields, to the IDF’s dismay. This method was first employed by the army in the course of Operation Defensive Shield in April 2002. Its purpose was to avoid endangering soldiers’ lives during arrest operations or operations to destroy the Palestinian Authority’s infrastructure. Soldiers picked a civilian at random and forced him to enter suspect houses ahead of them to demand that activists come out with their hands up. In rooms said to be vacant, the role of these civilians was limited to turning on lights and opening windows. Sometimes, soldiers dressed their hostages in Israeli army combat fatigues and made them precede IDF combatants.11 Elite units fitted civilians with cameras and microphones to better assess the danger of the situation. To prevent militants from shooting at them, the army used civilians as protection by keeping them close by in positions it occupied.

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In May 2002 seven human rights organizations including B’Tselem and Adala—organizations started by Israeli Arabs—and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, petitioned the Israeli High Court of Justice to ban the use of human shields. Following the August 2002 death of Palestinian civilian Nidal Abu Mukhsan, who was used as a human shield, the High Court of Justice issued a temporary injunction forbidding this practice. In November of the same year, the army announced to the High Court that it had ended the practice of human shielding. But in fact, this modus operandi did not disappear entirely. At 4 a.m. on the morning of August 31, 2005, an IDF force of 17 soldiers gained entry to a building located in eastern Hebron. They broke into Mahmoud Rajabi’s fourth-f loor apartment. The goal of the operation was to occupy an observation post to ensure the safety of Jewish and Muslim worshippers who pray at the Cave of the Patriarchs at that time of year. The Rajabi family was evacuated, with the exception of three sons, who were forced to remain as protection against a possible attack. Interviewed by Haaretz, the troop commander said they “were using the family members ‘to prevent stone throwing and bomb hurling at the soldiers in the house.’ ” It was a normal procedure intended to “protect his soldiers’ lives,” he said.12 The IDF spokesman acknowledged the facts, saying that the practice was “in violation of procedures” and announced that an investigation would be conducted. The army circumvented the High Court ruling by setting up a new modus operandi, the “neighbor procedure.” IDF forces involved in arrest operations were authorized to “ask” a suspect’s neighbor to enter his house to ask him to surrender. They were prohibited from forcing the neighbor to cooperate and, if he or she refused, they did not have the right to put his or her life in danger. The army explained that this procedure was intended to avoid bloodshed. In October 2005, the High Court, again petitioned by civil rights associations, ruled that this practice was illegal, finding that the choice “given” to the “neighbor” was not really a free one, as he was not in a position to resist army pressure. According to the testimony of a paratrooper in an elite unit collected by B’Tselem in September 2005, the “neighbors” were not aware that they were entitled to refuse. “At no point in the preparation for operations in which I took part was reference made to the High Court injunctions. No one told us that the neighbor had to act of his own free will [ . . . ]. Usually they’re so afraid they don’t dare say anything.”13 President of the High Court Aharon Barak concluded that these practices were counter to the Geneva Conventions, which prohibit an occupation force from using civilians in combat operations.14

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Chief of Staff General Dan Halutz translated this decision into operational procedures ordering compliance with the High Court’s ruling. But this drew sharp criticism from within the armed forces, as many officers and simple soldiers felt that the “neighbor procedure” was a means of preventing loss of life on both sides, that “it was better than our ceramic bullet-proof vests.” It remained highly popular among elite units specialized in preventive arrests. Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz challenged the ruling and announced he would ask the High Court to reexamine its decision, which it refused to do. The armed forces then introduced the use of dogs fitted with cameras to f lush out suspects hidden in their houses. This new tactic, however, met with a few serious incidents, for instance, when a dog attacked a panic-stricken child hiding out in a house. Then the units replaced the neighbor procedure with the bulldozer procedure. In May 2006 a special unit went to the house of one of the most wanted activists, Sheikh Ibrahim Hamed, head of the Hamas military wing in the West Bank, believed to have masterminded several suicide bombings that cost the lives of 78 persons in 2000. After an initial warning that went unheeded, a bulldozer rammed his house, making it shake though without demolishing it. Sheikh Hamed came out immediately in his underclothes with his hands in the air. In several instances, the High Court has ruled against the route of the security barrier between the West Bank and Israel. In two judgments, one on June 30, 2004, and the other on September 5, 2005, it declared certain portions of the route contrary to international law. In other cases, it rejected the petitions filed.15 It also upheld the ban on torture. As regards targeted killings, it has taken a more measured stance, as discussed previously, authorizing the practice only in the event that it is impossible to arrest the suspected activist or if such arrest is likely to endanger soldiers’ lives. Moreover, utmost precaution is to be taken to avoid killing innocents. The army sometimes tries insidiously to get around these constraints. But NGOs and the media keep a watchful eye. In November 2008 Haaretz exposed the existence of confidential documents indicating that General Yair Naveh, commander of Central Command, authorized the execution of a member of the Islamic Jihad, Zyad Melisha, whom the elite unit was supposed to arrest, in the course of two meetings in his office on March 28 and April 21, 2007. This execution was authorized even if “two unknown persons at most” were found in the activist’s car, which in army parlance means that permission to kill is given even if the wanted activist is accompanied by civilians, as long as there are no more than two of them. This order violated

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the High Court judgment stipulating that a targeted killing is allowed only if the suspect who constitutes a danger cannot be arrested and that everything must be done to avoid jeopardizing civilians. On April 22, IDF Chief of Staff General Gaby Ashkenazy approved the operation, provided it did not jeopardize the life of more than one civilian. The suspect was slayed during an operation carried out on June 20. In an interview with the daily, General Naveh justified his decision by the fact that he did not want his soldiers to take risks apprehending dangerous individuals.16 Refusing the Strategy of Terror Terrorist groups have also failed to lead the IDF down the slope of perpetrating crimes on a large scale. Contrary to many oft-levied accusations, the IDF did not choose the worst possible strategy; it did not slide into terror, mass destruction, and atrocities. The security forces managed to bring about a decrease in terrorist attacks without having recourse to the methods used by the French army in the Algerian War or by the Russian army in Chechnya. In this type of war, Stanley Hoffmann claims, democracies have only “the choice between abstaining from war altogether or committing war crimes on a more or less massive scale.”17 In full agreement, Robert Jay Lifton also claims that anti-insurrectional wars and wars of occupation are particularly “prone to sustained atrocity.”18 The rule is not borne out, however, in the case of the IDF. During the second Intifada, the IDF did not commit massacres, according to the definition Jacques Semelin gives in his book Purify and Destroy: “A generally collective form of action, involving the destruction of non-combatants, men, women, children or disarmed soldiers,” “an organized process of destruction of civilians directed at persons and their property.”19 Contrary to what has been claimed countless times, there have not been crimes on a “large scale.” The army and the internal security service have managed to bring about a spectacular drop in the number of suicide bombings without resorting to the methods used by General Massu in Algiers. Villages have not been razed, nor has there been systematic recourse to torture,20 which was banned in 1999 by the High Court, nor cases of rape or mass deportation of civilians.21 In its fight against terrorist attacks during the second Intifada, the IDF has proven to be more temperate than the Israeli population. It has not succumbed to the most extremist demands exacting a high price

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from the Palestinian population. It has refused to let things get seriously out of hand. In the Occupied Territories, there have been no killings comparable to those committed, for instance, by the Russian army and secret services against the Chechens. Unlike them, the IDF has not bombarded villages with cannon fire. Nor have there been massacres similar to those perpetrated during the war in the Balkans. “Ethnic cleansing” is not among the IDF’s goals. Nor can the IDF be placed on an equal footing with the U.S. Army in Vietnam or in Iraq, where the bombing of civilian sites, however involuntary, have caused hundreds of casualties. In the Occupied Territories, no incident such as those in My Lai, Vietnam, or in Haditha, Iraq, where a unit of the American Army massacred 24 villagers in November 2005, has occurred. Operation Defensive Shield: The Battle of Algiers Did Not Take Place Contrary to certain preconceptions, Jenin was not the Battle of Algiers. Operation Defensive Shield, conducted in April 2002—the largest during this Intifada in terms of forces engaged—is an indication of the red line the IDF set for itself. The Palestinian Authority accused Israel of having perpetrated war crimes in the course of this operation. The figure of 500 civilians massacred given by Saeb Arakat and Jibril Rajoub, two spokesmen for the Palestinian Authority, was picked up by the Western media without checking facts. It was pure hype. Rony Brauman, former president of Doctors without Borders, added to the confusion by denouncing war crimes and requesting a commission of inquiry be set up on a par with the one created after the Srebrenica massacres in 1995 that cost the lives of over 7,000 Bosnian Muslim civilians killed by Bosnian Serb army units.22 When Operation Defensive Shield began, the IDF expected heavy losses and feared possible harm to the civilian population. Before entering Nablus, Lieutenant Colonel Baram gathered his soldiers from Brigade 890 and warned them with these words: “We are not fighting with revenge, but as professionals. I want as many terrorists as possible with a bullet between their eyes. But anyone who approaches or finds himself around women or children, I forbid you to touch them!”23 Hundreds of armed men were waiting for them in the casbah. The combats in Nablus turned out to be unproblematic. The IDF took

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control of the city in a matter of days. Some 70 armed militants were killed, as was a family of 8 when their house collapsed. In Jenin, however, the IDF met with fierce resistance. It was conducted by heterogeneous forces ill-prepared for combat in urban areas, not acquainted with each other and not accustomed to fighting together. Progress was slowed by heavy fire from Palestinian militants. According to their information, which turned out to be inaccurate, the units thought that most of the 14,000 inhabitants had stayed home. This put several ranking officers on edge, causing them to advise their soldiers to use the utmost caution. Chief of Staff Mofaz urged his troops to move forward with greater aggressiveness. He ordered them to fire “five anti-tank missiles at every house before entering.”24 General Eitan once again used his inf luence as a moderator. During an ambush, 13 soldiers were killed. At the most critical point for them, faced with the difficulty of advancing in trapped alleyways and in the crossfire of snipers, some field officers asked for F-16 planes to be sent to drop bombs. This request was denied by the military hierarchy despite army losses. It took the extensive use of bulldozers for the Israelis to finally gain control. The “Boukris” method, named after the officer who devised it, involved sending in a bulldozer to make a hole in the wall of a house. Armored fighting vehicles got as close as possible to deposit soldiers directly into the house, thus avoiding having to use the trapped alleyways loaded with Palestinian snipers. According to Human Rights Watch, 52 Palestinians were killed, among them 22 civilians. The UN investigation report published on July 31, 2002, also concluded that no massacre had taken place. The NGO did, on the other hand, criticize the IDF for engaging in the practice of “human shielding” and “the use of excessive and disproportionate force.”25 The operation cost the lives of some 20 Israeli soldiers. The IDF used only a tiny portion of its military capabilities. Although it deployed tanks, it did not make massive use of this type of weapon. NGOs wrongly gave the impression that the population was on the verge of being crushed beneath armored vehicles. This is partly due to the fact that journalists were barred from approaching the combat zone, leading them to believe that a bloodbath was about to occur. The operation did, however, result in the destruction of many houses. The most remarkable fact remains that the IDF fulfilled this mission in a fairly independent manner, without submitting to pressure either from the prime minister or public opinion. When Ehud Barak had held the reins of power, the army advocated a harder line toward

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the Palestinians. With the arrival of Ariel Sharon, the situation was inverted: the hardliners were the political authorities. There is no common measure between the IDF’s fight against the Palestinians and the attacks committed by suicide bombers in the center of Israeli cities, killing women, men, and children indiscriminately. Radical organizations such as Hamas that are in conf lict with the state of Israel believe that there is no such thing as an innocent Israeli. All are considered as enemies, and children as future oppressors to be eliminated. The radical groups are driven by not only motives of insurgency and a desire to recover sovereignty over Palestine in the framework of an agreement that would recognize the existence of two states, but also the clearly stated intention to destroy the state of Israel. There is no similar intention on the part of the Israeli army. Although acts of brutality and abuse have been committed, although many civilians have perished or lost their homes with no justification from the security standpoint, these acts have not been perpetrated with the aim to eradicate the other. Even if certain Palestinians make claims to the contrary, they know that the IDF does not intentionally shoot at the civilian population, that it is not easy for them to kill innocents. They are aware of the taboos and do not hesitate to take advantage of them. The radicals know there is no better way to safeguard their own life than to hide among demonstrators in order to shoot; that there is no better protection against a targeted shooting than to get a child to accompany them. One of them, the Hamas member in Qalqilya who had organized the attack, carried out against the Dolphinarium discotheque in Tel Aviv on June 1, 2001, surrounded himself with children whenever he left the house, making it impossible for Apache helicopters on the lookout for him to shoot. Snipers finally brought him down.26 Dozens of women voluntarily acted as human shields on November 3, 2006, to draw several activists out of the Beit-Hanoun mosque, besieged by the Israeli army. They knew the soldiers would not shoot them down. The same procedure was again used on November 19 in the Jabalya refugee camp in Gaza, when hundreds of villagers gathered around the home of Ahmed Fuad Barud, a local People’s Resistance Committee leader. The army had sent a messenger to warn the inhabitants of the building where the Palestinian militant was located that it would be destroyed. In reaction to this warning, the activist mobilized his neighbors to form a shield around his house. The army decided to cancel the attack. The bloodshed caused at a farm near Beit-Hanoun by a cannon malfunction on November 8, which claimed the lives of

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19 civilians, prompted apologies from Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, a significant decrease in operations against armed militants in the Gaza Strip and greater care to avoid slipups. The IDF of the 2000s is not an army cut off from the rest of the world or insensitive to international pressure. For the past several years, it has employed legal consultants at practically all levels of the politicalmilitary hierarchy who supply legal assistance concerning the international obligations contracted by the state.27 The General Staff is afraid of being accused of perpetrating massacres. It is afraid that a major blunder such as in Qana, southern Lebanon (a targeting error in the Israeli bombing of the Hezbollah during Operation Grapes of Wrath that claimed some 100 civilian lives) could force it to suspend its operations. The armed conf lict in the Occupied Territories takes place before television cameras. The generals are aware of this and are on their guard. They know they are under surveillance from Israeli civil society organizations that have proliferated since the first Intifada. Israeli courts, which at the start of the second Intifada proved very indulgent toward the army, not wanting to hamper its efforts to eradicate terrorism, has since demonstrated greater independence.28 The generals also fear, perhaps more than anything else, an unfavorable reaction from Israel’s American ally. They dread the international outcry a blunder would provoke, leading the United States to pressure the Israeli government to put an end to operations underway, as happened during the attack against the Muqata, Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah in 2002, or following the occupation of Jenin. The policy of preventive arrests has also reduced the number of attacks significantly, thus causing less disruption to civilians’ everyday lives. The IDF in this case has managed to deploy a less simplistic, more imaginative strategy than what it used during the first two years of the second Intifada, and which takes more into account the problem of the mixture of armed groups and civilian populations. A “Brutalization” of the IDF? The use of the term “brutalization” to define the Israeli army’s conduct during this second Intifada is not appropriate. “Brutalization” compared to when? To what? During the first Intifada, the behavior of certain units bordered on savagery, whereas the soldiers were at little risk of losing their lives. Beatings, abuse, and acts of torture were committed with no other goal than to bring a halt to an uprising that humiliated

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the army and Israel’s authority over the Occupied Territories. However paradoxical it may seem, the military officials responsible for handling the second Intifada have shown relatively more restraint than those who were confronted with the first one. They have also displayed greater moderation than those who fought in Operation Peace in Galilee.

CH A P T E R

N I N E

Strategic Inconsistencies

Radical Palestinians may not have managed to destabilize Israeli democracy, but it would be nevertheless excessive to talk about an “overall success” in the fight against terrorism during the years 2001–2005. Careful scrutiny reveals a more mixed and less optimistic appraisal. It appears clearly that the prime minister and the high command engaged Israel in this fight in an inappropriate manner, imbued with Israel’s military superiority and having no other goal than to achieve armed victory without having the means to handle it properly. The army and the prime minister once again underestimated the adversary and ignored the rules of asymmetrical warfare. It was not until the end of 2002 and then only in the West Bank that a structured response to large-scale terrorist attacks began to take shape. In the Gaza Strip, it was the armed groups that dictated the course of the fight, without the IDF managing the slightest effective riposte. IDF reactions were never anything but ad hoc, often very brutal, which did nothing to improve the safety of settlers in the Gaza Strip. The strategy deployed was a mixture of pressure on the population and the Palestinian Authority and often poorly planned attacks against armed militants. The civilian and military leadership persisted in the same erroneous belief that terrorism could be defeated only by armed force. The old adage “the more things change, the more things remain the same” could not be more apt. The failure was so obvious that in 2002 it led the prime minister to accept, although with some hesitation, the building of a security barrier and later, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, after claiming “Netzarim is as important as Tel Aviv.”1

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The Palestinian groups certainly endured extensive losses, but their motivation has never weakened—which in itself is a failure for the Israeli army—and this for two reasons. The first is that irregular groups do not need to achieve a military victory, which is virtually impossible, to be able to boast of having pulled off a dazzling feat. They merely need to stand their ground, to continue to harass the stronger party, to endure. That alone is a snub to a powerful army. The IDF has always loathed finding itself in a situation where it does not clearly come off as victorious. Hezbollah’s or Hamas’ sneers about the Israeli army’s inability to defeat them are taken very badly in the army. Second, in an asymmetrical war, two possible types of “success” should be distinguished. First, there are “tactical successes,” which are gained in a particular sector of the occupied or disputed territory, by military means alone. They are of short duration, affect only some of the combatants and the population and do not put an end to the demands of armed groups. Then there are “strategic successes,” which are more overreaching and lasting. It is these successes that affect the “hearts and minds” not only of the combatants but also the population that supports them and can convince them to forswear violence over the long term. Israeli security forces have achieved only tactical successes, at least in the West Bank. The motivation of armed groups has thus not been worn down. According to Yitzhak Ben-Israel, professor at Tel Aviv University, although the number of suicide bombings dropped beginning in the second and third quarters of 2002 following Operation Defensive Shield, attempted attacks continue to rise during the two years that followed that operation.2 Even if few volunteers manage to pass through the net, terrorism is not a thing of the past.3 As long as the motivation of armed groups is sustained, Israeli security services will be condemned to a Sisyphean task, an everyday, routine struggle that may reduce terrorism to endurable proportions but cannot hope to end it in the absence of a political solution. The only way a democracy can put an end to this type of insurrection is through the combined use of defensive and coercive measures against the combatants and incentives for the population to stop supporting the armed groups. But the fight against terrorism has been conducted without any political compensation being envisaged at any point. It was not until the resumption of negotiations between Ehud Olmert and Mahmoud Abbas in 2008 that the possibility of a renewal of political dialogue emerged.

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In Gaza, the failure is patent. Radical Palestinian groups have not ceased their Qassam rocket or mortar fire against the villages in the southern part of the country. These weapons claim relatively few civilian lives but they are highly destabilizing for the population. The political danger is such that it prompted Ehud Olmert’s government to sign a Hamas-initiated temporary six-month truce (hudna) in July 2008, whereas he had declared time after time that he would never negotiate with a terrorist organization. Hamas made the gesture, however, less out of fear of targeted killings than to bolster its political legitimacy by trying to improve the fate of the Palestinian people. This accord did in fact lead to lifting the Israeli embargo.4 But it lasted less than six months and was peppered with several episodes of Qassam rocket fire, to which the Israeli government responded each time by temporarily closing crossing points. The Palestinian people did not yield to the injunctions issued by the IDF. The army did not manage to “burn into the Palestinian consciousness” that their goals would not be served by violence. Its major weakness has been to consider them as a homogenous bloc, whereas rifts were evident between those in favor of violent methods and those such as Mahmoud Abbas, Ahmed Qorei, and many others who believed it was the wrong path. The IDF did not attempt to exploit these divergences. Colonel Itamar Yaar, successively commander of an armored brigade in 1988 in the West Bank, head of the army general staff Planning Branch and then member of the National Security Council from 2003 to 2008, offers a viewpoint rarely expressed openly by high-ranking military officials: “The biggest failure of Israel’s response to terrorism is to have put the notions of ‘terrorism’ and ‘guerilla warfare’ in the same bag. People [the military] never talk about guerilla warfare but about terrorism. They are two different things that require a specific response. Guerillas attack soldiers, terrorists attack civilians. Terrorism can be dealt with using measures such as night arrests. Guerilla warfare requires more time and goes by different rules. The ethical basis is also different. For the average Israeli, it is more convenient to say that all it’s all the same thing. All Palestinians are allegedly terrorists or support terrorism. That’s not true and it doesn’t do us any good. If we refuse this confusion, then we’re in a better position to understand that attacks on civilians are not legitimate. Sometimes you hear, ‘a soldier has just been assassinated.’ That’s ridiculous. He is a combatant ‘killed’ at war. There is discussion on the subject in the army, but there is no clear, formal doctrine that acknowledges this complexity. The IDF is not open to criticism. It is not open to contact with the population. It works

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on its own. There’s a certain provincialism about it.”5 For Lieutenant Colonel Moshe Madar in the civilian administration of the Occupied Territories, the IDF “has not learned to distinguish between the public at large and perpetrators of terrorism [ . . . ]. We have the means, which we have not used, to make the population’s life easier. [ . . . ] Throughout the entire conf lict, we have not found a way to go over the head of the Authority and directly dialogue with the population.”6 The Palestinian Authority has not buckled. Arafat did not fall into the trap that Ariel Sharon tried to lay for him—to take very unpopular measures in a context of confrontation and arrest operations targeting activists in his camp with nothing in return. One cannot help but be struck by the incoherence of the strategy of “continuous pressure.” The three objectives—to break the armed groups, “make the population pay on a daily basis” and oblige the Palestinian Authority to fight terrorism—were not compatible. Israeli leaders rarely ask themselves what they would do if they were in their adversary’s position or what they can realistically ask of it. What Sharon demanded was not realistic and held no incentive for Arafat. It was fairly naive to believe that Arafat would make the gross error of appearing to be in league with that “cruel enemy that was strangling the population.” He quickly would have lost the remaining legitimacy he had among his people. The Palestinian Authority was offered no advantage. No concession was made in exchange for the cooperation it was asked to provide: no promise of a viable Palestinian state, no improvement in the population’s standard of living, no social welfare aid. The prime minister held steadfastly to positions defined by the army before he came to power, that is that the Palestinians had to be made to pay a high price not only from the military standpoint but also on an economic level as well.7 This strategy managed to galvanize many Palestinians, who preferred to join the ranks of radical groups, viewed as the only recourse against the occupation.8 Talking about Arafat, Israeli leaders often make reference to David Ben-Gurion, who in 1948 had the courage to impose his rule over the Irgun Tzvai-Leumi commanded by Menachem Begin by sinking their weapon-laden ship Altalena to establish the authority of the new Israeli government. But this comparison has little relevance. Ben-Gurion was fighting from a position of strength. He had obtained a state for his people. His legitimacy and popularity in Israel were enormous. That was not the case of Arafat and the Palestinian Authority, at the time weakened, divided, and accused of corruption. Arafat, though he doubtless enjoyed huge popularity, still did not have control over the multitude

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of armed groups that had developed within his movement, Fatah, itself. Sharon stretched his demands to outright contradiction. While asking the Palestinian Authority to demonstrate firmness, he never missed an opportunity to weaken it and never concealed his desire to put Arafat out of the game. Following the rise in suicide attacks, and then with Operation Defensive Shield, the IDF continued to strip Arafat of all his means of action, methodically destroying his infrastructures and threatening to kill him or send him into exile. Israeli leaders were systematically suspicious of Arafat, branding him as “a congenital liar” and being wary of any ceasefire offer that had his support, as was the case in December 2001. The major incoherence, it should be stressed, was to believe it was possible to maintain “continuous pressure” on the civilian population and at the same time obtain cooperation from the Palestinian Authority in security matters. Israel’s strategy has been based on the postulate that each blow had to be returned, that it was “an eye for an eye,” discarding a more nuanced, complex approach such as wielding the carrot and the stick.9 Any peace overture or offering such as the Saudi peace initiative in March 2002 and the Geneva Initiative in 2003 has been turned down. “Our Greatest Failure . . .” The IDF’s counterterrorism strategy has led to the almost complete collapse of the only organization capable of negotiating with Israel. Attacks against forces loyal to the Palestinian Authority deprived Palestinian society of an indisputable leadership, helping to shatter it into countless small groups that are often impossible to control and determined to torpedo any attempt at a negotiated settlement. The void created by the virtual liquidation of the Palestinian Authority has enabled radical organizations such as Hamas and the Islamic Jihad to gain strength and independence from it, hugely complicating any attempt at negotiations. “Our greatest failure has been the fragmentation of Palestinian society,” explains a former director of the National Security Council and former senior official of the Mossad.10 “Israel’s strategy did not take into consideration the need to maintain open contacts with the most pragmatic Palestinians. Through its unilateral dimension, it has seriously jeopardized the future of relations between the two parties. It has taken them to a level of suspicion and hatred never before reached, complicating any resumption of a political process.”11

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The erosion of Yasser Arafat’s status was a failure, not a success. It in fact considerably weakened the leader of the faction most receptive to dialogue and contributed at the same time to strengthening Hamas, the most inf lexible radical clan and among the most hostile Israel’s existence as a state. “We keep saying we no longer have a partner. But we’re the ones who created this situation and let anarchy set in. It’s a strategic failure.”12 The counterterrorist struggle has sapped the Palestinian economy, encouraging a radicalization of the population, whereas Israel should have encouraged it to dialogue and offered its support. Lack of Control over Field Units One of the greatest errors in Israeli strategy is to have failed in its duty to control field units. In many cases, such units have indulged in abuse and ill treatment of civilians. Neither the army high command nor the political authorities have paid close enough attention to their soldiers’ repeated blunders in the Occupied Territories. By their often brutal conduct, they have contributed to damaging the relational fabric between Israelis and Palestinians and also impaired the fight against terrorism. The “black sheep” or “bad apple” theory put forth by army spokesmen each time an incident implicates soldier misconduct toward the Palestinian population is not credible, as soldiers’ testimonies collected by organizations such as B’Tselem and Shovrim Shtika, or again Mahsom Watch demonstrate. Every young officer who decides to punish a Palestinian without consulting his superiors, every soldier who inf licts a reprimand in the absence of a security imperative, increases the population’s hatred toward the occupying force. Such behavior has occurred time and again. One evening in October 2005, a lieutenant in a paratrooper unit burst into the home of the imam from Dir Nizam, a West Bank village, ordered him out of his house, handcuffed him and made him get into a vehicle, dropping him off 10 miles away. The imam had to walk back home handcuffed in the dark. The officer warned him not to continue fanning hatred for Israel among his congregation as was his habit. Palestinian solidarity organizations were informed and filed a complaint. An investigation was opened and—a rare occurrence indeed—the lieutenant was indicted. Even more exceptional, the officer’s battalion commander testified against his subordinate. At checkpoints, some soldiers show no consideration for the Palestinians. Poorly trained for policing tasks, speaking little or no

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Arabic, many of them have a tendency to behave as despots with the population. Pregnant women have been delayed and lost their child. Soldiers have been known to confiscate the keys to a car belonging to a Palestinian driver only because they crossed into forbidden zones or because the drivers didn’t stop in time.13 Others have reportedly asked them to sing. Magav border guards have not hesitated to throw an offensive grenade at a car that did not stop in time or to simply shatter the windshield. Some send Palestinian civilians to check on suspicious packages, contravening the Geneva Conventions that prohibit putting the civilian population in danger in an occupied country, instead of calling the demining team.14 Checkpoints are places of daily friction with the Palestinian population. The soldiers manning them are responsible for preventing terrorists from getting through. The inconvenience to the population matters little to them as long as they cannot be criticized for having let a suicide bomber through due to a lack of vigilance. Left to their own devices, these soldiers often act like little local lords. According to some commanders, this sort of brutal behavior is due to the lack of discipline that reigns at these checkpoints: “There is no iron discipline at the checkpoints,” notes General Yitzhak Eitan, former head of Central Command. “Everyone does as he pleases. The commanders behave like the Tanzim.”15 The sheer number of checkpoints (60 permanent checkpoints inside the West Bank according to B’Tselem)16 allegedly makes them very difficult to supervise. This sort of explanation, however, is questionable. It seems more like the political leadership and the military high command long lost interest in the problem, believing that such pressure on the population was the price it had to pay as long as the attacks continued. It thus took them quite a long time to become aware of the consequences that such behavior could have on the army’s image. Ill treatment is, of course, not systematic. But testimonies from a number of Palestinians show that their fate depends a great deal on the personality of the checkpoint supervisors and the type of unit. Some commanders are more accommodating and strictly prohibit humiliating behavior,17 whereas the members of Magav, the border police, remain true to their reputation for brutality. The soldiers’ attitude also tends to depend on the security context. After an attack resulting in Israeli civilian casualties, angry soldiers tend to take revenge on the population, subjecting them to longer waiting periods. Some incidents have been blown out of proportion, such as the case of the fiddler at the Beit-Iba checkpoint in the West Bank. The photograph showing a Palestinian playing the violin in front of an army

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officer prompted outrage because it was reminiscent of humiliations the Jews were subjected to during the Second World War. It was used as a symbol of Palestinians being martyrized by the Jews, compared to the Germans. The picture was taken by a Mahsom Watch activist, herself the daughter of a Holocaust survivor.18 This scandal gave rise to an army investigation. It turns out that the officer had asked the Palestinian to open his case, but that the violinist had played on his own initiative. The Israeli activist, moreover, could not confirm having heard the officer ask the Palestinian to play. A few weeks earlier, the same Palestinian had arrived at the same checkpoint, this time with a guitar, took it out of its case at the soldiers’ request and also played, but without anyone being bothered by it. Numerous acts of vandalism also have been committed. This is a fairly frequent phenomenon that “has affected several units.”19 Less well-off soldiers, for instance, took advantage of Operation Defensive Shield to round out their meager pay. A noncommissioned officer distributed looted objects to needy soldiers. Here again, the scope of such acts must be put in perspective, for many unit commanders severely punish these attempts to help oneself from people’s homes. Shooting as a Release The phenomenon involving cases in which young soldiers fire their weapons “to let off steam” has also affected the IDF. Houses have been fired at indiscriminately simply out of boredom or to avenge a recent attack on the Israeli population or fellow soldiers. Soldiers in some sectors have instructions to manifest military presence by opening sporadic “deterrence fire.” Some of them, left to themselves, admit shooting at houses. In an armored unit, for instance, C., who served in the Gaza Strip between November 2000 and November 2003, recounts, “For three years, I enjoyed what I did. In Gaza, I was the first to volunteer to demolish houses. I didn’t like to shoot in mid-air, but shooting at houses or people, yes, that was exciting [ . . . ]. In the evening, the guys would talk a little bit about our day, asking each other stuff like: ‘So, how may did you get today?’ ”20 There is nothing exceptional about such remarks. Many similar testimonies are often given to soldiers’ associations or Israeli human rights organizations and picked up in the press. Sergeant E. did his three-year military service with the Givati unit in the Gaza Strip from 1999 to 2002: “We sometimes have to fire our weapons to adjust them. We have to. Some of us have not

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hesitated to aim at the roofs of houses. We could shoot into the sand. But some people find it makes more sense to aim at an object sticking out in an area where the terrain is f lat as far as the eye can see: a rooftop, an antenna, anything set on top of a house. We don’t do it to harm anyone. But it really degrades our means of action.”21 These soldiers, left to their own devices, who admit to trying to relieve the boredom of long hours on watch near inhabited areas, are rarely reprimanded and when an investigation is opened, most of them tend to give false reports of “enemy fire” or invent imaginary threats.22 Rank and file soldiers are not the only ones who shoot to let off steam. Unit commanders also indulge in such acts. Returning from training in the south of the Gaza Strip, a battalion of recruits marched back to base along a road bordering the towns of Rafah and Khan Yunis. On the way, their commander, Lieutenant Colonel Adam Zusman, pleased to have fulfilled his mission, ordered them to open “deterrence fire” in the direction of Palestinian civilian homes. Hundreds of cartridges were fired. A 15-year-old Palestinian boy was killed by gunshot. The battalion commander was convicted two years later, in early July 2005, in a disciplinary hearing and received a mere reprimand for having ordered the “illegal” use of weapons and needlessly exposing his soldiers to danger. The military police claimed it was unable to connect the shooting conclusively with the death of the young Palestinian, considering that the testimony given by the Palestinian population was too contradictory to indict the lieutenant colonel. The latter’s behavior was sharply criticized by his peers. The military judge did not, however, recommend delaying the officer’s career advancement and indeed, Chief of Staff Dan Halutz approved his promotion to the rank of colonel.23 This attitude is indicative of the state of mind prevailing within the army high command and the latitude certain officers take with the code of ethics. On July 26, 2007, a Kfir brigade patrol had itself dropped off by helicopter near the village of Daharya in the West Bank. Its leader, Lieutenant Kobi Guigui, gave orders to stop a Palestinian taxi and requisitioned it. They went off on a joyride. On their way back, they stopped in front of an 18-year-old Palestinian youth who worked in a ceramics factory. One of the soldiers shot and wounded him. The patrol took f light. News of the incident quickly made the rounds of the village. The brigade commander went to the scene immediately. An investigation was opened. The soldiers, prompted by their lieutenant, made up a story about an imaginary aggression. But the investigation soon brought the truth to light. The lieutenant, the main person

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accused, claimed he wanted to make an “arrest operation” similar to those conducted by elite units. He was sentenced to 15 months in prison without parole. Journalist Ilana Dayan’s report on this brigade for her documentary program Uvda on Channel 2 television made it plain that this type of abuse is not perpetrated only by “bad apples.” On July 7, 2008, near the West Bank village of Nilin, during a demonstration against the security barrier, a Palestinian protestor, Ashraf Abu Rahma, 27 years old, was arrested by soldiers in the Seventy-First Armored Battalion. Lieutenant Colonel Omri Borberg, commander of the battalion, wanted to punish the Palestinian for taking part in the demonstration. He asked one of his soldiers, “What do you say we shoot him with a rubber bullet?” They took him off to one side. The soldier shot a rubber bullet at a range of one and a half yards into the foot of the protestor who was bound and held by the commander. A Palestinian girl filmed the scene using a video camera loaned to the villagers by B’Tselem to record acts of violence against them committed by soldiers or settlers. The Palestinian escaped with a wound to his big toe.24 Defense Minister Ehud Barak condemned the incident. The military general prosecutor ordered an investigation. After much negotiation, Chief of Staff Gaby Ashkenazy removed the officer from his post. Military General Prosecutor Brigadier-General Avichai Mandelblit claimed that there was no reason to launch a criminal investigation, that it was only an offense of “unworthy conduct” .25 Following a petition filed by several human rights organizations, the High Court of Justice ordered the prosecutor general to revise the charges, deemed to be too lenient. It qualified the act as a “brutal and serious offense” that called for criminal and not merely disciplinary proceedings.26 On July 21, 2009, the prosecutor revised the charges in accordance with the order of the High Court.27 Some crimes have been committed in cold blood. This phenomenon is, in the current state of knowledge, relatively rare and those who have perpetrated such acts have been punished. One of the most serious cases took place on December 30, 2002. Four members of Magav (border police), nearly all age 20, stationed near Hebron, made a young 17-yearold Palestinian get into their Jeep. They beat him up and pushed him out of the vehicle as it was moving at 45 miles per hour. The young Palestinian was killed instantly. His family filed a complaint. The investigation conducted by the Metzah (military police criminal investigations division) found the four policemen guilty. The accused admitted having acted out of revenge after their unit had sustained an attack leaving four of their fellow men dead. In 2005 a civilian criminal court

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condemned the driver of the Jeep to four and a half years in prison for having taken part in the act, though he was not accused of instigating it.28 Another was sentenced to six and a half years in prison. The trial of the remaining two accused took place in September 2008. One was sentenced to five and a half years in prison and the one considered the “living soul” of the crime to eight and a half years.29 Court Action and Inaction These abuses—unjustified shootings and acts of brutality—have given rise to a number of indictments. But the number of soldiers sanctioned appears fairly small. From September 2000 to February 2007, 239 cases were investigated by the military police following exchanges of fire; 30 gave rise to bills of indictment, 16 of which led to convictions; 427 cases were examined by the military police following acts of violence on Palestinian civilians; 35 of them gave rise to bills of indictment, 33 of which led to convictions.30 Up until the year 2000, the death of any noncombatant Palestinian civilian automatically triggered the opening of a Metzah investigation. At the start of the second Intifada, IDF General Military Prosecutor Brigadier-General Menachem Finkelstein stated that due to the change in situation, which had become one of an “armed conf lict on a lesser scale than war,” investigations would be opened only by decision of the General Military Prosecutor, who would determine whether such action was appropriate depending on the command’s investigation.31 But according to many testimonies collected within the army itself, these internal investigations are far from constituting a model of impartiality. Commanders, except for a small minority, usually cover soldiers liable to be indicted on the grounds “that soldiers who put their lives on the line in combat to prevent attacks should be protected.” Solidarity has considerable impact. A soldier is generally not left to face judicial proceedings on his own, especially when he was only acting in accordance with the guidelines he was given. This protective ref lex is not specific to the Israeli army. It can be observed in the armies of all democratic countries. Acts of violence are punished only when they have been brought to the attention of the media or are particularly shocking. Investigations conducted by the military police themselves must be regarded with caution. They are usually opened with considerable delay. The investigators, few of whom speak Arabic, have trouble locating witnesses. In many cases,

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the population is reluctant to cooperate, either out of fear or because families do not want to exhume their relative’s body. This situation has prompted Knesset members to request that army investigations be subject to greater scrutiny. In 2005 the problem was brought before the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Security Commission. Its president, Yuval Steinitz, Likud MK, Ariel Sharon’s party at the time, sharply criticized the way in which army investigations were conducted. The commission castigated the failure of the IDF’s “culture of investigation” and its great tolerance toward those who conceal facts to prevent investigations from being completed.32 Yossi Sarid, Meretz MK at the time, argued that civilian rather than military officials should carry out such investigations. More sympathetic toward the army, Ran Cohen, an MK for the same party and reserve colonel, recommended that the army form a commission made up of military officials who do not belong to the same unit as the soldier suspected of violating the code of ethics. These recommendations have come to naught. *

*

*

All things considered, assessments are made with respect to the goals pursued, the expectations, and hopes. Over the course of the second Intifada, both parties seriously underestimated each other. The armed groups believed that Israeli society would crumble with the first blow, that it would not bear to sustain any losses, that it would not want to take the risk of seeing its children die. As for the Israeli civil and military leadership, they believed that Palestinian society and its leaders were on the verge of collapsing under military and economic pressure. The second Intifada produced no single victor or vanquished, but indeed two vanquished, Israel and the Palestinian Authority. The only group to benefit from this conf lict is Hamas, whose inf luence has grown in Palestinian society.

CONC LU SION

The Only Enemy That Can Defeat the IDF . . .

In over 60 years of counterterrorism warfare, little seems to have changed in the Israeli army mindset since the foundation of the state of Israel. In response to a terrorist threat or an insurgency, be it armed or unarmed, the IDF employs the same sort of response—disproportionate response—striking both combatants and noncombatants at once when it is impossible to strike one without hitting the other, with a certain degree of intentional excess, while trying to refrain from spilling over into mass crime. Contrary to what was believed momentarily, this sort of reaction is not specific to the second Intifada. Naturally, the way it is implemented depends on the context, the prime minister in office, the personality of army officials. But these variations generally have little incidence on the type of reaction. Virtually all prime ministers and ministers of defense, whether on the left or right, have backed the principle of a brutal and disproportionate reaction to any insurgency or terrorist attack: Ben-Gurion in the 1950s, Begin during the Lebanon War, Rabin during the first Intifada, Sharon during the second. Barak, who was involved in negotiations with the Palestinian Authority, was the most reluctant to use it but was unable to impose his will on the army. Only the discriminating nature of the preventive arrests policy in the West Bank during the second Intifada departs from this principle and, in addition, constitutes an undeniable tactical success. Disproportionate response is, as we have seen, an essential component of Israeli strategic culture. It is a set of beliefs, attitudes, and practices regarding the use of force to which nearly all Israeli civil and

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military leaders have subscribed. It is what Pierre Bourdieu would call a habitus.1 It refers to the identity that the Israelis have forged for themselves, their way of situating themselves within a geographical space that is basically hostile to them, to their perception of the threat, their anxiety about their existence, their fear of being able to count only on themselves. It is the ref lection of this blend of a feeling of power and of great vulnerability that has led the army to use means that are out of proportion to the actual threat. It is a way both of existing and of defending itself against outside aggression. It is a ref lexive reaction that enjoys a wide consensus in the country: “If we’re attacked, our aggressors must be aware that they will pay a high price for the aggression.” Everything else falls by the wayside: the effectiveness of such a vision, the price to pay for this reaction in terms of harm to civilians on the other side, the damage done to their relations with the Arab world and with their Western allies, the deterioration of their image in the world, and, finally, the delegitimation of their own struggle. The IDF has not realized, or does not wish to realize, that such strategy may be effective in a conventional conf lict, but not in an asymmetric war against irregular forces. It has never acknowledged the shortcomings of such strategy in conf licts that its experts call “low intensity.” Contrary to other armies—the United States, British, and French—it has not really sought to adapt to the constraints of asymmetric warfare, except to improve its intelligence and military capabilities. The IDF has never devised a doctrine for “war among the population.” It seems a little disconnected from the debates about doctrine that have triggered discussion among the general staffs of Western countries in recent years. Does it even have a counterinsurgency strategy, in fact? At a conference held in early 2003, Brigadier General Aviv Kohavi, commander of the paratroopers at the start of the second Intifada, claimed when it broke out that “there was no relevant doctrine and techniques for LIC [Low Intensity Conf lict] combat in urban populated areas.”2 There has been no organized thinking about the complex mechanisms of asymmetric war or on the pursuit of goals that may prove to be contradictory. There has been no rigorous ref lection on the articulation between objectives and modus operandi, no structured thought on the consequences of one weapon or another, or the effects of one type of operation or another. According to a one-time senior official of the National Security Council Counter-Terrorism Bureau “there is no written strategy for counterterrorism in Israel. The strategy is neither clear nor consistent. It depends too much on the ideological positions of decision-makers and the political situation in Israel. Too

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much importance is given to what is said, to the spoken word. Strategy worries about what happened yesterday and what will happen tomorrow. We need an organized strategy, and political leaders have trouble making far-reaching decisions due to the domestic balance of power in Israel which is not conducive to such an approach.”3 The persistence of these ref lexes contrasts with the f lexibility and adaptability the army has shown when faced with a classic conf lict situation pitting one army against another, such as in the Six-Day War. In the face of an asymmetric conf lict, it has not demonstrated very much imagination. No lesson seems to have been drawn from others’ past experience— from the Algerian War, the Vietnam War, the war in Afghanistan, or from all those wars Israel itself has been involved in, and not even from the British mandate when the Yishuv (the Jewish settlement that preceded the state of Israel) was in the role of the weak that vanquished the strong by inducing the strong to make terrible blunders.4 No one seems to have read or reread the writings of Menachem Begin whose description of the fight against the British in the years 1946–1948 remains highly relevant. He explained that the crushing of a revolt “must, in the end, undermine the prestige of a colonial regime that lives by the legend of its omnipotence. Every attack which it fails to prevent is a blow at its standing. Even if the attack does not succeed, it makes a dent in that prestige, and that dent widens into a crack which is extended with every succeeding attack.”5 The generals have not pondered the writings of David Galula who states that “A soldier fired upon in conventional war who does not fire back with every available weapon would be guilty of a dereliction of his duty; the reverse would be the case in counterinsurgency warfare, where the rule is to apply the minimum of fire.”6 Underestimated Dangers of Asymmetric Conf lict One thing that is striking is the countless number of errors and blunders accumulated each time the IDF has engaged its forces against irregular armed groups. It has not always managed to resist provocation from guerillas, either in the Occupied Territories, in Lebanon, or more recently in the Gaza Strip. Armed groups have often managed to put Israel in a difficult situation with respect to world public opinion. The IDF’s deterrence capability in the face of these groups has gradually worn down a little more with each major antiguerilla operation, having been overused and not always advisedly. Disproportionate response

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can be effective in a classic conf lict, not in an asymmetric war. It has never been instrumental in defeating armed groups. Such strategy has led the entire country into a situation that is each time a little more inextricable. The fight against “infiltrators” produced a continual degradation of the situation along the Israeli-Egyptian border, finally leading to the Sinai Campaign; Operation Peace for Galilee helped install in Lebanon one of the most fiercely opposed forces to Israel’s existence, Hezbollah; the first Intifada resulted in the serious deterioration of “little Israel fighting against the giant Goliath” image, one of the original symbols of Israel, and the creation of Hamas; the second Intifada turned out to be a great opportunity for this group to increase its strength to the detriment of the PLO. Each of its reactions to a terrorist attack or an uprising has heightened Arab hatred toward Israel and provoked a hostile reaction in many Western countries. A lack of understanding of the mechanisms of asymmetric warfare is even more patent outside the territories controlled by the army, that is, in Lebanon or in the Gaza Strip since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005. Retaliation is even more disproportionate and misguided. Less concern for civilian lives is shown than in territories under its direct responsibility. Already with regard to Operation Peace for Galilee, James Ron emphasized the “paradox” between the “intense” violence employed by the IDF to punish the PLO and persuade Lebanese villagers to reject the Palestinian presence, and the sense of “responsibility” toward the Palestinian civilians placed under its “sovereignty” in the Occupied Territories.7 This observation remains as relevant as ever today. During the second Lebanon War in July 2006, or again in Operation Cast Lead that began on December 27, 2008, in the Gaza Strip, the attacks were particularly devastating. The dominant idea both in the army and among the political leadership was that it was up to the regime in power to prevent attacks against the territory of the sovereign state that is Israel. Failing that, those in power and the population it ruled would lay themselves open to severe reprisals. There were about one thousand civilian casualties in Lebanon in 2006.8 The Israeli attack on the Gaza Strip allegedly caused 1,387 deaths, among them 773 civilians, according to Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem.9 In the IDF report made public on April 21, 2009, the army claims that the number of people killed “who did not take part in the hostilities,” to use the military’s terminology, was 295 to which it says 261 men not identified as having taken part in terrorist activities must be added.10 The exact figure here matters little. The fact is that such violence had never before been unleashed in the Occupied Territories,

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where the desire to avoid harming Palestinians and their homes was more manifest. Many strategy experts such as Ephraim Inbar or Shai Feldman have argued that Israeli deterrence was restored after the clash with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006, thus qualifying it as a success.11 But in a democracy, an assessment cannot be made according to security criteria alone. It must be more thorough, and especially take into consideration international political issues. On July 12 on the Israeli side of the Blue Line (the Israeli-Lebanese border), Hezbollah had attacked an IDF patrol. The outcome of the operation was the death of several soldiers and the capture of two others. This offensive action is what triggered the Israeli decision to bomb Hezbollah infrastructure. General Dan Halutz promised to “set Lebanon back twenty years.” Hezbollah retaliated by firing hundreds of Katyusha rockets at Israel. The Israeli government and the IDF claimed right from the start of hostilities that civilians were not intentionally targeted but that if they sheltered Hezbollah combatants, they would not be spared by army and air force counterattacks. The air force developed a system by which it could fire at Katyusha rocket launchers in a relatively short time span. Many civilians were harmed in this way, as Hezbollah had chosen to take shelter among the population and provoke fire on it. In Le Nouvel Observateur, a weekly magazine known for its critical stance toward Israel, Jean-Paul Mari wrote in early August, “Hezbollah continually shifts its rocket launch ramps from the countryside to in between houses and even right in the middle of villages from which it has fired 1,900 rockets on towns in northern Israel. Near Bint Djbeil, one of its strongholds, inhabitants heard Hezbollah combatants set missiles up on their roofs in the middle of the night. In the time it took to fire and f lee, the Israeli response crushed four houses. The inhabitants of Rmeich, a fairly spared Christian area, infuriated by the use of the village as a Hezbollah refuge, have organized night patrols to dissuade the Islamic combatants from fighting their war from among their houses. Others claim that the Party of God also tries to prevent the inhabitants from f leeing so as not to find themselves alone to face Israeli aircraft in a deserted area.”12 The correspondent for La Voix du Nord reported a similar account: rockets were fired from the roofs of Lebanese civilian homes without their occupants being previously informed.13 Hezbollah also fired from hospitals and mosques. When the Israeli attack began, most Western countries as well as, more discreetly, some Arab countries, expressed delight that Israel had undertaken to vanquish a force that claimed allegiance to radical

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Islamist ideology and was backed by Syria and Iran. But the violence of its attacks and the loss of Lebanese civilian lives eroded this support. The bombing of a building in the village of Qana on July 30, in which according to the International Committee of the Red Cross, 28 people were killed and not the 60 the Lebanese government announced, was a turning point in the way the West perceived the conf lict. The IDF apologized for the incident and added that it was unaware that civilians, who had been warned of the imminence of an attack, still occupied the building. It found itself in an awkward position with respect to its closest ally, the United States. Its room to maneuver was considerably narrowed. It had to cease hostilities sooner than expected with the feeling of not having been able to accomplish its mission, which was to secure a wide strip of territory in southern Lebanon and push back Hezbollah. Under international pressure, Ehud Olmert’s government was obliged to agree to a ceasefire that did not come at the best time for its army. Israel lost the broad international support it had enjoyed at the beginning of hostilities. From a purely military standpoint, even if it had obtained from the Lebanese government and the UN that they take their responsibilities in southern Lebanon, even if Hezbollah now hesitated to resume its provocation, the feeling in the IDF was one of a serious setback; 117 soldiers were killed in combat. The IDF poorly proportioned its use of force. “Israel once again is not distinguishing between a justified war against Hezbollah and an unjust and unwise war against the Lebanese nation,” wrote Gideon Levy in Haaretz.14 War against a guerilla decidedly requires more tactical finesse and skill. In the Gaza Strip in the month of December 2008, the army intervened against armed groups to put an end to rocket and mortar shell fire into the villages and towns in the country’s south. The IDF engaged considerable forces: 10,000 troops, 200 tanks and armored personnel carriers, 100 bulldozers, cannons and mortars, and some of its aviation.15 The political aim was to put an end to Qassam rocket fire and “restore deterrence” that had withered in 2006. The aim was to show obvious brutality. Tzipi Livni, Foreign Affairs minister at the time, declared, “Israel is not a country upon which you fire missiles and it does not respond. It is a country that when you fire on its citizens it responds by going wild—and this is a good thing.”16 Minister of Defense Ehud Barak suggested a “humanitarian” cessation of hostilities after a few days, but Prime Minister Ehud Olmert rejected the idea. The air force made an initial surgical strike on buildings and institutions belonging to Hamas. The new class of police recruits was decimated during its graduation ceremony. The first three days of attacks

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killed over 300. The leadership believed that this devastating strike, which was in short punitive and dissuasive, would weaken Hamas and make it cease its rocket fire on Israel. It achieved the opposite result. Hundreds of Qassam, Graad (longer-range rockets supplied by Iran) and mortar shells were fired in the week following the start of Cast Lead. Towns such as Beer-Sheva, located deeper into Israeli territory, were hit. After a week, the Israeli government decided to shift into Phase II, a ground attack with air support to increase pressure on Hamas. But fighting in such cramped territory as the Gaza Strip, with a population of a million and a half for a density of over 8,000 inhabitants per square mile, cannot occur without heavy losses of civilian lives. Here, too, irregular combatants used the same tactic. Hamas militants, like those of Hezbollah, fired rockets from civilian sites to provoke retaliation against these same sites. The trap laid would function once more. Phase II proved to be as damaging as ever. The offensive was conducted with the memory of Operation Defensive Shield in the background, along with the July 2006 war in southern Lebanon. The army wanted to minimize the loss of soldiers’ lives and spare them the likes of boobytrapped alleys and houses in Jenin. It also wanted to erase the humiliation inf licted by Hezbollah. Soldiers were instructed to take no risks with their lives. They opened fire on any house that might be trapped, on any suspicious movement. “When we suspect a Palestinian combatant is hiding in a house, we fire a missile, then two tank shells and lastly a bulldozer knocks down the walls. It causes damage, but we avoid losses.”17 The implicit message is clear: “The IDF will not allow itself to be fettered by international law, it will not allow civilians to be used as human shields to protect Hamas fighters.” It purposely wanted to demonstrate brutality, show that “the owner of the place has gone mad,” to use a popular metaphor, meaning that the army is capable of showing itself to be fierce if overly provoked. “We are very violent,” says Lieutenant Colonel Amir, commander of a special engineering unit, “and we use very aggressive methods to detonate Hamas explosives.”18 From a strategic standpoint, Cast Lead was a relative failure. Israel, the attacked party, managed to appear to the international scene as the aggressor. Its image deteriorated even further. It was condemned in the same way as its foe. In a report published on September 15, 2009 (known as the Goldstone report), the UN Human Rights Council accused both Israel and Hamas of having committed acts that “would constitute war crimes and may amount to crimes against humanity.”19 Hamas continues to have a high nuisance potential. Most of its estimated 15,000 combatants are still alive and it has nearly 1,000 rockets at

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its disposal.20 Shabak chief Yuval Diskin declared that the Palestinians were in a position to rebuild the tunnels that were destroyed and smuggle more weapons into the Gaza Strip within a matter of months.21 The IDF proudly claimed to have “restored deterrence.” But the lack of any real confrontation does not justify such a conclusion. Moreover, the number of rockets fired against southern Israel decreased but has never totally ceased. The Israeli government did not allow Chief of Southern Command General Galant to shift into the next stage of Cast Lead, to strike a hard blow on the Gaza Strip, probably due to the risk of heavy losses of Israeli soldiers. An expansion of the operation might have provoked opposition from President Barack Obama. It should be remembered that the operation took place in an international and national context that was particularly well chosen for Israel. It was decided at a period of transition in American politics between the end of George Bush’s term and the inauguration of the newly elected president. It was not by chance that Israel suspended its operation on the eve of this inauguration. In Israel, the Israeli electorate was to go to the polls to renew its parliament on February 10. Although a display of strength against Hamas could improve the popularity of the two members of government, Ehud Barak, minister of Defense and Labor Party leader, and Tzipi Livni, minister of Foreign Affairs and head of the Kadima Party list, with respect to the right, which opinion polls placed in the lead, an operation conducted on too large a scale was likely to erode the benefits reaped during the first three weeks. On numerous occasions the army used weapons that were ill suited to fighting among the civilian population (such as mortar and tanks). This was the case in the strike against the UNRWA (UN Relief and Works Agency) compound. A unit fired shells at a Hamas armed group positioned right next to the building. The shell deviated from its path and fell on the UN building. A similar case occurred with Ezzeldine Abu al-Aish, a Palestinian doctor and peace activist who lost three daughters when shells fired from a tank landed on his house on January 16, 2009. The Israeli troops believed they had spotted a Hamas observer on the roof of the doctor’s house directing combatant fire. IDF units fired a tank shell whereas a sniper would have been enough to neutralize him. The consequences were devastating; many people were killed. At first the army acknowledged its responsibility and expressed its regret. It justified the mistake by the fact that “suspicious figures had been identified in the upper levels of the doctor’s building who were considered to be directing the sniper fire.”22 It then declared that the blame lay with the Palestinian doctor, claiming he had been informed

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of an imminent attack in his neighborhood and warned to evacuate the premises. Once again the “leverage strategy” had proven ineffective. The people of Gaza have not risen up against Hamas. It was rather Israel and its army that was deemed responsible for the destruction, fatalities, and injuries left in the wake of the operation. The strike against Dr. Ezzeldine Abu Al-Aish’s home did Hamas a great favor. Cast Lead further deteriorated the relation between Israelis and Palestinians. Hamas managed to make the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict even more complicated and further weaken Mahmoud Abbas, who cannot claim to represent the inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Israel at best obtained a new truce in exchange for the opening of border crossings. But this outcome could have been achieved without such a display of force. The Civilian Population: An Ill Perceived Strategic Challenge The military and civil establishment responsible for the country’s security has not been attentive enough to the challenge posed by the civilian population. It has perceived civilian welfare as being a problem to be dealt with from a humanitarian standpoint, not an essential strategic issue. It has not understood the dangerousness of this type of war in which military force can quickly prove to be counterproductive and in which what matters most of all is the ability to avert attacks, isolate the combatants, and prevent them from using the civilian population. Their management of the IDF’s “deterrence capability” has been conducted emotionally, driven by an obsessive need to safeguard it as one would one’s most precious belonging, thus fueling the cycle of violence and binding the combatants and the population. This same elite has not been any better at handling the problem of collateral damage. In many cases, it has been inevitable. But in an asymmetric conf lict an army must be attuned to the image it has among the adversary civilian population and with “international public opinion,” whose support is essential. It must strive to minimize this damage, explain the reasons for any blunders that may occur, and apologize for them. But the army and its civil leaders usually settle for casting the responsibility for civilian harm on the armed groups. In a few rare cases, they have tendered their apologies, as in 2006, when a tank shell decimated a family of 20 in Beit-Hanoun in the Gaza Strip following a

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radar malfunction. On the other hand, the arrogant attitude of General Dan Halutz after the death of 14 civilians, including several children, in July 2002 in the course of the operation against Salah Shehada caused considerable damage to Israel’s image and its relations with the Palestinian population. This lack of empathy reveals an inability to understand the real strategic undercurrents of this type of conf lict. In the Occupied Territories, the IDF should have persuaded the civilians that the fight was imposed on them by the armed groups and that despite the difficulties, it would do everything in its power to ease their everyday existence. The IDF never displayed such an attitude. It believed that by maintaining pressure on the population, by depriving it of freedom of movement, the civilian population would eventually inf luence the terrorist groups to make them cease their attacks against Israelis. The leadership placed great faith in this “leverage strategy.” Yet this selfsame strategy, implemented ever since the state was founded, has never proven itself effective either in the West Bank or in the Gaza Strip, or in Lebanon. Each time it has turned out to be counterproductive. The Israeli leadership has not realized that its right to self-defense is not justification enough. This right must also be exercised with a certain degree of restraint and factor in the complexity of asymmetric warfare. If a democracy is going to refrain from employing the same tactics as a dictatorship, it must understand that “moderate pressure” on a civilian population is not acceptable. Some forms can even constitute war crimes (i.e., collective punishment). If it wants to show itself to be “human” and distinguish itself from a totalitarian regime, a democracy cannot act this way without encountering international disapproval. The army has always protested against the use of human shields by Palestinian and Lebanese guerillas: “They hide their men in schools and shoot from there. That’s a war crime!” But that is what asymmetric warfare is all about—inducing countries that are reluctant to harm civilians to commit atrocities. An army should know that asymmetric warfare is above all psychological warfare. All guerilla forces behave the same way. The PLO in Lebanon hid weapons in schools, hoping to make the school a target for bombs and make Israel look like a monster. A terrorist group does not have the same sensitivity toward the loss of civilian lives as a democracy does. There is no point denouncing the illegality of the practice of human shielding by armed groups from the standpoint of international law if the chosen method of retaliation also produces civilian casualties, generally in greater proportion to those suffered by its own population. By killing civilians, a democracy

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discredits its own struggle and obscures the cause it defends. The elite in charge of Israel’s security has not really taken this pitfall on board. The faith it places in the virtues of armed force to vanquish terrorism is unshakable. The scenario is unchanging. It is Israel that international public opinion will condemn once again. In this type of conf lict, the Israeli generals—obsessed by the quest for an unlikely “overwhelming military victory”—have not displayed much resourcefulness. Certainly, the IDF asks the civilians potentially affected by an imminent attack to evacuate their homes. But to what extent do such measures have an effect on them? Dropping evacuation notices from the air or distributing them by other means does not automatically make people leave their homes. Many people have trouble moving about. Attacks on vehicles on the roads deter many civilians from leaving. A person’s attachment to his home is often stronger than the fear of losing it in a bombardment. An evacuation notice does not exempt soldiers from taking precautions with civilian populations. The value of such warnings indeed seems doubtful, since they eliminate the element of surprise and give armed militias plenty of time to take cover. Furthermore, how can one not question the sincerity of the IDF’s desire to spare civilian populations when it allows its artillery to launch cluster bombs, as it did in southern Lebanon in 2006? This type of weapon is designed to combat infantry by blanketing the ground with submunitions, thus impeding their movement. They usually explode when they hit the ground. But many of them that the IDF fired during the last Lebanon War in July 2006 did not detonate. As a result, the ground in areas populated with civilians remains strewn with these beer-can size munitions that explode as soon as they are touched. More than 15 fatalities and a dozens of injuries have been reported since the end of the war.23 The general staff finally admitted to having used them, after denying it at first. Chief of Staff Dan Halutz, however, denied having given the order to use them, whereas testimonials from artillerymen collected by Haaretz indicate that these munitions would not have been used without authorization from the high command.24 An inquiry was ordered by the chief of the general staff to get to the bottom of the issue. Underestimation of the Importance of the Media and World Public Opinion The Israeli officials have also improperly gauged the impact of the media and world public opinion. The world would have accepted IDF

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violations of international law if they had been a rare occurrence and if the army had no other available means of defense. In the 1970s, the public had ended up accepting, and perhaps even excusing, Israel for defending itself against Black September terrorism by systematically liquidating the members of the commando that had organized and carried out the slaughter of the Israeli athletes in Munich in 1972. But the repeated targeted liquidations, the use of tanks in heavily populated urban areas, and the deployment of F16 aircraft against a destitute population and invisible combatants throughout the second Intifada were perceived in a very negative light. International public opinion has not tolerated the excesses of the Israeli response. The Israelis have not realized that having the right to defend oneself is not enough to win favor with international public opinion. It must be exercised in acceptable proportions. They have also analyzed public opinion in an emotional way, accusing it of unfairness. This has indeed often been true. But instead of conducting a cool-headed analysis of the best way to handle this constraint, Israelis from the entire political spectrum point to Europe’s anti-Semitic past to explain the lack of sympathy toward Israel. In Israel there has been no attempt to analyze the international disapproval they have drawn upon themselves, which is condemned even by those in the left-wing opposition who contest the army’s methods. It is systematically viewed as an intolerable injustice. Compared to the shrewdness of armed groups, adept at manipulating images for public consumption, the Israelis are still back in the stone age of communication. On the strength of their conviction that they are the victims and confident of being in the right, they even hold the media and public opinion in contempt.25 The result is an inability to understand the undercurrents of public emotion. One striking example of this failing can be seen in the aftermath of the massacre of a Jewish family celebrating Passover in March 2002: The prime minister ordered the reserve to be called up and the army to occupy the Palestinian cities that had come under Palestinian Authority control. As a result, world public attention, which had been focused on the Netanya attack, turned to the West Bank. Instead of “capitalizing” on the results of the massacre to mobilize lasting support from the UN and the media in the wake of this tragic event, the government, in its haste to do battle with the Palestinian militants, caused the tragedy to be forgotten and turned world public opinion against it. “Anyway, the world is against us,” one often hears on the lips of leaders and simple citizens. It is foolish, to say the least, to expect worldwide support while accusing it of being biased.

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The Reasons for Obstinacy What is the reason behind this difficulty to change or this refusal to adapt? The first reason is that asymmetric war has never been a priority for the IDF. It has always focused primarily on a conventional war in which it would have to face a major threat from several Arab armies and fight for Israel’s existence, considered as “fundamental security” (bitahon yessodi). The threat from irregular groups, which comes under “ordinary security” (bitahon shotef ), has never been considered as jeopardizing the country’s existence.26 The military institution has never devoted any theoretical ref lection to asymmetric war as such. It has not given rise to any specific, innovative, ad hoc doctrine. It has never attempted to conceptualize this new threat, trusting in the improvisational and inventive qualities of its combat units and their officers without worrying about the coherence of the whole. Short-term constraints are what define the type of reaction as well as the degree of violence used by the armed groups, or the pressure exercised by Israeli public opinion, to which the political and military establishment is on the contrary highly attuned. The significance of the corporatist factor— meaning behavior resulting from a desire to restore the IDF’s image each time it believes it has been tainted—is not negligible either. But there is probably a second, more important reason, which has to do with the conviction that any other strategy would leave an impression of weakness and encourage terrorists to continue on their violent path. This is why many generals have rejected the strategy of minimum force, while ruling out the strategy of terror. In Maarachot, one of the main Defense Ministry publications, General (reserve) Yaacov Amidror clearly expresses his rejection, widely shared by the civil and military establishment, of the principle of restraint that other democracies— such as the United States in the wake of their experience in Iraq—have nevertheless ended up espousing: “I don’t believe it is necessary for Israel to add ‘restraint’ in the use of force as a principle of war. For Israel that would be a grave error. Sometimes the need for restraint might arise, but generally speaking, a small country like Israel can deal with terrorism and guerrilla organizations [ . . . ] only if it retains the ability to respond disproportionately.”27 Here again appears the problem of the army’s deterrence capability, which borders on obsession, even if it may be understandable from a country that lives with the fear of being someday “erased from the map.” This is a posthumous victory for the ideas of General Moshe Dayan over those of Moshe Sharett, for the “activists” over the “moderates.”28

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The Israeli civil and military establishment has always believed in the virtues of the IDF’s military capabilities and its overwhelming firepower compared to that of armed groups. The IDF would simply have to make “good use” of it by striking hard at armed militants and their sponsors and exerting pressure on the civilian populations who shelter them, be it voluntarily or against their will. Then “sit back and wait to see how things develop.”29 But “the notion that force in fact exacerbates anti-Israeli violence is not part of the strategic discourse in Israel,” as Zeev Maoz points out.30 They have not, however, gone so far as to use a doctrine of “maximum force,” which a strategist such as former army official Ygal Alon recommended.31 Israel’s strategy is an “in-between” strategy that rules out both pure and simple terror as well as minimal force, discarded as being “unsuited to the Israeli situation.”32 Despite the repeated failures of such a strategy, it has never been called into question. Such a process could indeed never be done painlessly. Accepting its failure would be tantamount to recognizing that the foundation on which Israel’s defense policy rests, “the IDF’s deterrence capability,” is not suited to this type of conf lict. It would amount to admitting the powerlessness of its power. That could produce a major—but beneficial—psychological shock, because the IDF would find itself obligated to find less traditional, more imaginative ways with which to confront terrorism than armed force, and it would have to cease playing into the enemy’s hands with its excessive reactions. This conviction also explains the army’s preference for offensive action, for which there is a veritable cult, over any other form of strategy, such as a defensive one.33 In February 2009 not long after Operation Cast Lead, the defense minister was harshly criticized in a report by the State Comptroller for having neglected the development of a missile shield program, “Iron Dome,” which he had nevertheless decided to have built and that could have protected villages in southern Israel from Qassam rocket attacks.34 Given that the plan was extremely costly and could be implemented only at the expense of offensive weapons systems preferred by the army, the defense minister neglected its development. Finally, commitment to this strategy is linked to the lack of any longterm vision on the part of the Israeli political leadership regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conf lict, the contours of the future Palestinian state, the future of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank, the final borders, and the status of Jerusalem. With the notable exception of the Oslo Accords, which quickly failed, no Israeli leader has ever put forward an overall political project regarding Israeli-Palestinian relations that was

The Only Enemy That Can Defeat the IDF . . .

165

liable to put an end to the conf lict. In the absence of clear political directives, the army has often stuck to ad hoc, improvised reactions. It can certainly not be held solely responsible for the strategy of disproportionate response, except for at the start of the second Intifada when the army chief of staff attempted to thwart the prime minister’s efforts to reach a negotiated solution with the leader of the Palestinian Authority. But nor has any high-ranking military official ever suggested a different, more novel approach comparable to the one Marshal Lyautey advocated, his deepest wish having been that the “separation [from the colonial rulers] take place painlessly,” or to the one General Petraeus has attempted to implement in Iraq with a certain degree of success. An Army Lacking “Schizophrenia” For a democracy, there is no miraculous answer to terrorism, but at least a few rules of common sense: opt for the “lesser evil” (this was not the case for Operation Cast Lead), use defensive rather than offensive tactics, try whenever possible to renew a truce such as the one concluded with Hamas in June 2008. But above all, offer a political horizon to the population in the Gaza Strip. Show it that it has everything to gain by taking its distance from Hamas combatants. Can terrorism really be vanquished without any consideration for the future of the people who live in a territory often described as “an open-air prison”? Not all Palestinians are potential terrorists, far from it. Putting pressure on the civilian population so that it turns its back on the rebels is hardly a realistic goal. Either the regular army takes to employing the methods of mass terror and it is likely to achieve its objective (but at what price?), or it abstains from such conduct, in which case it must agree to treat the population and its prisoners with a minimum of respect. Any middle-ground strategy that resorts to collective punishment and mistreatment of prisoners while offering positive incentives has little chance of achieving the desired objective: to “drain the swamp” that breeds combatants. If it cannot inspire “love” among the Palestinian population, the IDF must at least show it empathy and indicate that it is concerned with its fate day to day. The IDF has particularly lacked that dose of “schizophrenia” that would have enabled it to pursue both the eradication of armed groups and support to the civilian population. Michael Ignatieff has stated, “In a war on terror the only enemy that can defeat a democracy is itself.”35 Are we to conclude that the only enemy that can defeat the IDF . . . is the IDF itself?

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NOT E S

Introduction 1. “Little war” or guerrilla was the expression used during the war Napoleon waged in Spain from 1808 to 1814 to describe the tactics used to resist Bonaparte’s regime. See General Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 158. 2. Name given to the Palestinians who fought to reconquer Palestine. 3. Meridor and Fass, The Battle of the 21st Century. 4. See the army Web site: www1.idf.il/DOVER/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 5. Durkheim, Suicide. 6. David, La Guerre et la Paix, p. 113. 7. Sommier, Le Terrorisme, p. 78. 8. Aron, Peace and War, p. 170. 9. Shovrim Shtika is an organization that was founded in 2004 by former soldiers who were appalled by their own attitude and those of their fellow soldiers and who decided to pool together their stories and bear witness. 10. B’Tselem, established in 1989, is the Israeli information center for human rights in the Occupied Territories. The word B’Tselem means “in the image of ” and comes from verse 1:27 of Genesis “And God created Man in His own image.” 11. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël; Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang (in Hebrew). 12. Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked, p. 7.

One 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Asymmetric Warfare: A Challenge for Democracies

Klare and Kornbluh (eds.), Low-Intensity Wafare. Chaliand, Les Guerres irrégulières. Metz and Johnson II, Asymmetry and US Military Strategy. Terriff, Karp, and Karp, (eds.), Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict. La Grange and Balancie, Les Guerres bâtardes. Baud, La Guerre asymétrique ou la Défaite du vainqueur. Courmont, La Guerre, p. 55. Gross, The Struggle of Democracy against Terrorism, p. 1. Dinstein, War, Aggression and Self-Defence, p. 201. Regarding these conventions, see David, Principes de droit des conflits armés.

168

Notes

11. See Decaux, “The International Law of War and the Fight against Terrorism,” pp. 41–58. 12. Burette, Le Droit international humanitaire, La Découverte, coll. “Repères,” 1996, p. 61. 13. Jus in bello (law of war) covers the principles of proper conduct in armed conf licts, as distinguished from jus ad bellum (the right to make war) governing the conditions under which one is permitted to initiate an armed conf lict. 14. Articles 53, §1 Geneva Convention I; 45 Geneva Convention II; 37–39 Additional Protocol I. 15. Kob, Jus in bello, p. 150. 16. Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 59. 17. Van Creveld, The Transformation of War, p. 22; italics in the original. 18. Mack, “Why Big Nations Lose Small Wars,” pp. 175–200. 19. Chaliand, Les guerres irrégulières, p. 108. 20. Martinez, “Algeria: Is an Authoritarian Regime More Effective in Combating Terrorist Movements?” p. 247. 21. Ibid. 22. Le Monde, December 12–13, 2004. 23. Chaliand, Les guerres irrégulières, p. 122. 24. Martinez, “Algeria: Is an Authoritarian Regime More Effective in Combating Terrorist Movements?” p. 247. 25. Luttwak, “Les impasses de la contre-insurrection,” pp. 849–862. 26. Arreguin-Toft, “How the Weak Win Wars,” p. 122. 27. Tocqueville, Travail sur l’Algérie, pp. 226ff., quoted by Joffe, “L’état de guerre au xxie siècle,” p. 929. 28. See Olsson, “ ‘Guerre totale’ et/ou ‘force minimale’?” pp. 35–62. 29. Lyautey before the Native Policy Council, April 14, 1925. www.islam-maroc.gov.ma (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 30. Pervillé, “Quinze ans d’historiographie de la guerre d’Algérie”; Pahlavi, La Guerre révolutionnaire de l’armée française en Algérie. 31. Stubbs, “From Search and Destroy to Hearts and Minds,” pp. 113–130. 32. Finlan, “The British Way of Warfare and the Global War on Terror.” See also Thornton, “The British Army and the Origins of Its Minimum Force Philosophy,” pp. 83–106. The expression “winning hearts and minds” has been attributed to the British officer in charge of the counterinsurrectional campaign in Malaysia, Sir Gerard Templer. 33. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 8. This book became a favorite of General David Petraeus, former commander of Multinational Coalition Iraq. 34. Ibid., p. 34. 35. Ibid., p. 66. 36. Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–1960, p. 180. 37. Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, pp. xiii–xiv. 38. In 1945 the Nuremberg trials defined a war crime in the following terms: “murder, illtreatment or deportation of slave-labor or for any other purpose of the civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.” 39. Swidler, “Culture in Action; Symbols and Strategies,” pp. 273–286. 40. Lewy, America in Vietnam. 41. The expression, by the writer Arnold Zweig, was quoted by Mosse in Fallen Soldiers, p. 165. 42. Ibid. 43. Lifton, “Haditha: In an ‘Atrocity-Producing Situation.’ ” 44. David, Principes de droit des conflits armés, p. 869. 45. Winslow, “Canadian Society and Its Army,” pp. 11–24. 46. Winslow, “Le stress des soldats de la paix face à l’expérience de l’étrangeté: le cas du régiment aéroporté du Canada en Somalie,” pp. 135–153.

Notes 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60.

169

See Walzer, Arguing about War, p. 61. Bellamy, “No Pain, No Gain?” pp. 121–148. See Hathaway, “Do Human Rights Treaties Make a Difference?” pp. 1935–2042. See the book by Gordon and Trainor, Cobra II. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 46. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, p. x. Chaliand, Les guerres irrégulières, p. 106. See also Finlan, “The British Way of Warfare and the Global War on Terror,” p. 139. Petraeus, “Learning Counterinsurgency.” See Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, and Taillat, “Adoption et apprentissage. Les forces terrestres américaines et la contre-insurrection en Irak,” pp. 773–794. Gordon, “Break Point? Iraq and America’s Military Forces,” p. 72. See also the “Army/ Marines” manual, Department of the Army/Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, FM 3–24/ MCWP 3–33.5, Counterinsurgency, Washington, DC, Government Printing Office, December 15, 2006. De Durand, “Les relations civilo-militaires américaines à l’épreuve de l’Irak,” p. 110. Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 395. Machiavelli, The Prince, p. 52. Ibid., p. 11.

Two

The Roots of a Doctrine

1. This book will not discuss the period prior to the establishment of the state of Israel and the institution of a regular army. The subject has been amply dealt with in several books, including Van Creveld’s The Sword and the Olive, and Morris’ Righteous Victims. 2. Several definitions exist for the notion of “strategic culture.” I will borrow the one by K. Longhurst: “A distinctive body of beliefs, attitudes and practices regarding the use of force, which are held by a collective (usually nation) and arise gradually over time, through a unique protracted historical process.” See Sondhaus, Strategic Culture and Ways of War, p. 124. 3. On this subject, see the books by Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, and Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas. 4. Quoted by Dayan, Story of My Life, p. 369. 5. Ben-Gurion, Recollections, p. 73. 6. Drori, Israel’s Reprisal Policy 1953–1956, p. 41. 7. Rabin, The Rabin Memoirs, p. 102. 8. Regarding the war of 1956, see Oren, Origins of the Second Arab-Israeli War, and on the SixDay War, Oren, Six Days of War. 9. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, Chapter entitled “October Earthquake.” 10. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 9. 11. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 48. 12. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 269. They later fell to 6,000–7,000 each year between 1955 and 1956. 13. Ibid., p. 271. 14. Ibid., p. 273. 15. Ibid. 16. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956, p. 137. 17. Drori, Israel’s Reprisal Policy 1953–1956, p. 42. 18. Morris, Israel’s Border Wars, 1949–1956, p. 163. 19. Ibid., p. 177.

170

Notes

20. Figure given by Yahav in Purity of Arms, p. 235 (in Hebrew). 21. This was the official version, which Ariel Sharon confirmed in 1989. See Sharon and Chanoff, Warrior, pp. 89–90. 22. Yahav, Purity of Arms, p. 238. 23. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 278, as well as Drori, Israel’s Reprisal Policy 1953–1956, pp. 109–110. 24. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 134. 25. Quoted in Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 280. 26. Negbi, Coming Apart, p. 198 (in Hebrew). 27. Ibid. 28. Quoted in Dalia Karpel, “Do the Right Thing,” Haaretz, October 18, 2008. 29. Yahav, Purity of Arms, p. 244. 30. Bilsky, Transformative Justice, p. 193 and note 91 to Chapter Seven. 31. Yahav, Purity of Arms, p. 246. 32. Karpel, “Do the Right Thing.” 33. Ibid. 34. Negbi, Coming Apart, pp. 199–200. 35. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 240. 36. Van Creveld, “Israel’s Counterterrorism,” p. 160. 37. Author’s personal testimony. 38. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 327. 39. Ibid. 40. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 243. The term “Green Line” refers to the demarcation line drawn in the armistice of 1949 between Israel and neighboring Arab countries (Syria, Jordan, and Egypt) at the end of the Israeli-Arab war of 1948. 41. Van Creveld, “Israel’s Counterterrorism,” p. 164. 42. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 366–367. 43. Sharon and Chanoff, Warrior, pp. 247–262. 44. This reprisal operation provoked anger from General de Gaulle who decided to extend the weapons embargo on Israel. Cf. Cohen, De Gaulle, les Gaullistes et Israël, p. 132. 45. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 376. 46. More than 60 of them in the year 1973 alone, according to Benny Morris. See ibid., p. 379. 47. Ibid., p. 382. 48. Raviv and Melman, Every Spy a Prince, pp. 217–219. 49. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, Chapter Two: “The Sinai War. The Making of the Second Round.” 50. Rafael, Destination Peace, p. 31. 51. Drori, Israel’s Reprisal Policy 1953–1956, p. 69.

Three “Peace for Galilee” or the Making of a New Insurgency 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7.

Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 499. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 287. Ibid. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 501. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, p. 36. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 291. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, pp. 178–183.

Notes

171

8. Sharon and Chanoff, Warrior, pp. 425–426. 9. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 494–498. 10. Ronen Bergman, “Dismissal in the Mossad Leadership,” Haaretz, January 3, 1997, cited by Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 504. 11. Ibid., p. 505. 12. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, p. 51. 13. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 190. The testimony given by Arye Naor, cabinet secretary under Menachem Begin, confirms this. See Naor, Begin in Power. p. 268 (in Hebrew). See also Naor, Cabinet at War (in Hebrew). 14. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, pp. 199–200. 15. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 536. 16. Sharon and Chanoff, Warrior, p. 485. 17. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 541. 18. According to Kahan Commission Report, an Israeli intelligence report, The Beirut Massacre, pp. 44–45. 19. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, p. 253, and Naor, Cabinet at War, pp. 151–152. 20. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, p. 250. 21. Ibid., pp. 258–260. 22. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 203. 23. Morris, Righteous Victims, pp. 543. 24. In the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir, presented at the 2008 edition of the Cannes Film Festival, the Israeli Ari Folman describes a case, his own, in which a soldier tries to recover the repressed memory of the war in which he participated, and in particular the massacre of Sabra and Chatila. 25. Kahan Commission Report, The Beirut Massacre, p. 49. 26. Ibid., pp. 104–106. 27. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 558. 28. Avner Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, p. 103. 29. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, pp. 141–150. 30. Yermiyia, My War Diary, p. 27. 31. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 549. 32. Ibid., p. 551. 33. Ibid., p. 555. 34. Ibid. See also Fisk, Pity the Nation, Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen. 35. Al Hamishmar, March 14, 1987, quoted by Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars. p. 399. 36. Yaniv, Dilemmas of Security, pp. 278–279. 37. Morris, Righteous Victims, p. 553. 38. Razoux, Tsahal. Nouvelle histoire de l’armée israélienne, p. 396. 39. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 306. 40. According to Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 172. 41. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 288. 42. Jones, “Israeli Counter-insurgency Strategy and the War in South Lebanon. 1985–97,” p. 83. 43. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 303. 44. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 66, and Gabriel, Operation Peace for Galilee, p. 191. 45. Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom. See also Sirriyeh, “The Emergence of Hizbollah and the Beginnings of Resistance, 1982–1985,” pp. 39–48. 46. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 210. 47. Van Creveld, “Israel’s Counterterrorism,” p. 161. 48. It would be more accurate to date the start of the antiwar movement to the Yom Kippur War with the protest started by Captain Motti Ashkenazi, who had survived an Egyptian

172 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

Notes

army attack against the fort he commanded on the Suez Canal. See Samy Cohen, “Israel: forces et faiblesses du mouvement de contestation.” Gvul also means “border.” Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 299, and Linn, “Conscientious Objection in Israel during the War in Lebanon,” pp. 489–511. See Cohen, Israel and Its Army. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 65. Razoux, Tsahal. Nouvelle histoire de l’armée israélienne, p. 398.

Four How the IDF Popularized the First Intifada 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 75. Gazit, “Policies in the Administered Territories,” pp. 53–68. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 342. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 18. Ibid., p. 31. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 75. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, pp. 337–338. Benvenisti, 1987 Report, p. 11. See also Eldar and Zertal, Lords of the Land, p. 570ff. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, pp. 32. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 42–43. Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos. Chapter Seven. Shalev, The Intifada. Causes and Effects, p. 101. Razoux, Tsahal, p. 406, and Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 33. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 346. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 144. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 347. Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos, pp. 160–161. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 426. Shalev, The Intifada. p. 114. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 150. Ibid., p. 151. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 347. Negbi, Coming Apart, p. 202. Ibid., pp. 204–205. Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos, p. 152. Shabak, the Hebrew acronym for Sherut ha-Bitachon ha-Klali, literally general security service (often abbreviated GSS in the literature), was known for many years in Israel as Shin Bet, which remains its most common appellation in the English language press. Since the early 1980s, however, in Israel it has come to be known by its Hebrew acronym. From here on in this book, then, this is the term that will be used both to ref lect the current Israeli parlance and out of a concern for coherence, as the other Israeli intelligence agencies (Mossad, Aman) are also referred to by their Hebrew acronym. 28. http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/Public_Committee_ Against_Torture.pdf (Accessed on January 25, 2010). Regarding the problem of torture during the second Intifada, see part II. 29. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 149. 30. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 342.

Notes

173

31. B’Tselem Web site: http://www.btselem.org/Hebrew/Statistics/First_Intifada_Tables.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 32. Amram Mitzna headed the Labor Party in 2002 until his defeat in the Israeli elections of 2003. Shimon Peres replaced him as party leader in 2003. 33. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 133. 34. Ibid., p. 135. 35. Ibid., p. 153. 36. Ibid., p. 154. 37. Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 349. 38. Linn, “Soldiers with Conscience Never Die,” pp. 57–76. 39. Schiff and Yaari, Intifada, p. 156. 40. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 89. 41. Maoz, “The Violent Asymmetrical Encounter with the Other in an Army-Civilian Clash,” pp. 243–263. 42. Interview conducted with Captain A. on June 6, 2006. 43. Haaretz, April 4, 1997.

Five

Botched Engagement in the Intifada

1. For a chronology of the second Intifada, see Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël; Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang; Enderlin, The Lost Years. 2. Cypel, Les Emmurés, p. 355. 3. Quoted by Cypel, in ibid., p. 359. 4. See http://www.btselem.org/Hebrew/Statistics/Casualties.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 5. Levy, The Other Army of Israel (in Hebrew). 6. Ibid., p. 385. 7. Ibid., p. 387. 8. Eldar and Zertal, Lords of the Land, pp. 570ff. 9. Interview with Lieutenant Colonel G., head of a paratroop battalion, April 17, 2005. 10. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 59. 11. Ibid., p. 73. 12. Girardet, La Crise militaire française (1945–1962). 13. See Bar-Siman-Tov et al., “The Israeli-Palestinian Violent Confrontation,” p. 81. 14. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 25. 15. The France 2 report was challenged by many commentators, but the network’s journalists maintain their version. The televised image shows the boy hiding behind his father, who is crouching behind a low wall to take shelter from the exchange of fire between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers. The camera, operated by a Palestinian cameraman working for France 2, is trained on the father and son. The angle is so tight that it is impossible to know who is shooting. A lawsuit filed by France 2 and Charles Enderlin, the channel’s correspondent in Jerusalem, against Philippe Karsenty, director of the Media Ratings agency, has yet to be settled. 16. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 31. 17. Ibid., p. 32. 18. Ibid., p. 45. 19. Bar-Siman-Tov et al., “The Israeli-Palestinian Violent Confrontation,” p. 75. 20. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 32. See also Reuven Pedatzur, “More Than a Million Bullets,” Haaretz, June 29, 2004. 21. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 41. 22. Interview in Haaretz, December 2, 2007.

174 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52.

Notes

Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 32. The border between Gaza and Egypt. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 33. Ibid., p. 75. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 69. Enderlin, Le Rêve brisé, pp. 340–341. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 35. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 115. Sher, Just beyond Reach, p. 368 (in Hebrew). Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 83. Ibid. Ben-Ami, A Front without a Rearguard, p. 319 (in Hebrew). Interview given by Ephraim Sneh in the documentary film made by Moysh Goldberg, A Million Bullets in October, broadcast on Israeli television Channel 8 on December 8, 2007. Through interviews with some of Ehud Barak’s close advisors, the film retraces how the Israeli political authorities and army handled its engagement in the Intifada. Interview given by Shlomo Ben-Ami to Moysh Goldberg in A Million Bullets in October. Levy, The Other Army of Israel, pp. 236ff.; Van Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 362. Cohen, “Changing Civil-Military Relations in Israel,” pp. 769–788. Peri, Generals in the Cabinet Room, p. 25. Although Ami Gluska qualified this view somewhat in The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War. Cohen, “Civilian Control over the Army in Israel and France.” Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 113. “Collision Course,” interview given to Yotam Feldman, Haaretz, December 21, 2007. Enderlin, Le Rêve brisé, p. 317. Interview given by Gilead Sher to Moysh Goldberg, in A Million Bullets in October. Ben-Ami, A Front without a Rearguard, pp. 397, 402, and 468. Interview with Sergeant N., April 21, 2006. Interview given by Israel Hasson in A Million Bullets in October. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 91. Haaretz, December 21, 2007. Ibid. Chaliand, “Contre-insurrection ou stabilisation: quelles ‘leçons du passé’ pour aujourd’hui?” lecture given at the Institut Français des Relations Internationales (IFRI), March 13, 2008.

Six

Tightening the Screws

1. Although no proof for this allegation has been found. The president of the Palestinian Authority may not have initiated it, he did not attempt to stop the violence either. 2. Enderlin, Le Rêve brisé, p. 317. 3. Amidror, “Israel’s Strategy for Combating Palestinian Terror,” p. 120. 4. See the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Web site: http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/terrorism-%20 obstacle%20to%20peace/palestinian%20terror%20since%202000/ (Accessed on January 27, 2010). 5. Bar-Siman-Tov et al., “The Israeli-Palestinian Violent Confrontation,” pp. 84–85. 6. Interview with Moshe Yaalon, Haaretz, August 29, 2002. 7. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 142.

Notes 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

175

Ibid. According to one of his close advisors, ibid. Interview with a high-ranking officer of Central Command, March 7, 2006. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 144. Ibid., p. 152. In their book, Harel and Isacharoff note that General Mofaz allegedly spoke of “ten dead bodies,” but they add that according to other versions, he spoke of “seven dead bodies.” Ibid., p. 144. Interview with Lieutenant Colonel G., chief of a parachute battalion, April 17, 2005. See B’Tselem, “Take No Prisoners. The Fatal Shooting of Palestinians by Israeli Security Forces during ‘Arrest Operations.’ ” Interview conducted on April 21, 2006, with Sergeant N. of the Sayeret Tsanhanim (Paratroop Reconnaissance Unit) elite unit. Interview with Sergeant Y., April 10, 2005. Interview with Sergeant Y., April 25, 2006. B’Tselem, “Take No Prisoners.” Ibid. Haaretz, December 8, 2004. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 255. Ohana, Journal de guerre, pp. 182–183. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, pp. 429–430. Literally, vidu from the verb le vade, which means “make sure,” and hariga, “the act of killing.” Interview with Sergeant Y., April 10, 2005. Interview with Sergeant N., April 21, 2006. Interview conducted on May 17, 2006. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 184. Interview conducted on October 20, 2005. Ynet, Yediot Aharonot Web site retrieved on November 20, 2006, and B’Tselem: http://www. btselem.org/Hebrew/Statistics/Casualties.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 375. Testimony of Captain O., officer in the “Shaldag” (“kingfisher”) elite unit, released in 2005. Interview conducted on April 26, 2006. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 117. Testimony of an Israeli officer who long served in the Gaza Strip, quoted by Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 425. Ibid. Haaretz, November 15, 2005. Haaretz, January 8, 2007. Ibid. See the articles by Yuval Yoaz, in Haaretz, October 7 and 8, 2007. Interview with Amos Harel, June 8, 2006. Figures supplied by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/terrorism-%20obstacle%20to%20peace/palestinian%20terror%20since%202000/ (Accessed on January 27, 2010). Enderlin, The Lost Years, pp. 127–128. Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 113. Secretary-General of the Fatah and member of the National Palestinian Council. Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 340. See the following chapter on targeted killings. According to Harel and Isacharoff, La Septième Guerre d’Israël, p. 200.

176

Notes Seven

The Counterproductive Virtuosity of Targeted Killings

1. Schiff, “On the Origin of Targeted Assassination,” Haaretz, June 5, 2006. 2. Among the political figures to be eliminated, Zeev Schiff mentions Emile Ghouri and among the prominent military leaders, Hassan Salameh and Abdel Khader al-Husseini. 3. See Morris, Israel’s Border’s Wars, 1949–1956, p. 381. 4. http://www.btselem.org/English/Publications/Summaries/199205_Undercover_Units. asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 5. The Public Committee against Torture in Israel, “The Assassination Policy of the State of Israel. November 2000–January 2002,” May 2002. See also this NGO’s Web site: http:// www.stoptorture.org.il/eng/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 6. Matti Steinberg, “The Road to Hell,” interview published in the weekend supplement of Haaretz, June 18, 2008. 7. http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp (Accessed on January 27, 2010). 8. An opinion poll published in the daily newspaper Maariv in July 2001 showed that 90 percent of Israelis supported these operations. 9. Kasher and Yadlin, “Assassination and Preventive Killing,” p. 44. 10. “A Military Ethics of Fighting Terror,” pp. 3–32. 11. Ibid. 12. Kasher and Yadlin, “Assassination and Preventive Killing,” p. 52. 13. http://elyon1.court.gov.il/verdictssearch/englishverdictssearch.aspx (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 14. One of the best digests of these debates can be found in David Kretzmer’s article, “Targeted Killing of Suspected Terrorists. Extra-Judicial Executions or Legitimate Means of Defence?” pp. 171–212. 15. Bloom, “Palestinian Suicide Bombing,” pp. 61–88. 16. Atran, “Mishandling Suicide Terrorism,” p. 67. 17. Frisch, “Motivation or Capabilities?” pp. 843–869. 18. Byman and Dicter, “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists and Their Implications for the United States,” pp. 1–15, Avi Dichter was formerly the director of the Shabak (2000–2005) and one of the main architects of the targeted killing policy. 19. Ibid., p. 10. 20. Currently, the principal leader of Hamas living in exile in Damascus. See Yossi Melman, “Returning to the Scene of the Crime,” Haaretz, September 26, 2007. 21. David, “Fatal Choices,” pp. 111–126. 22. Cf. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 176. 23. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, pp. 233–236. 24. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 172. 25. Kepel, Beyond Terror and Martyrdom, p. 106. 26. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 166. 27. David, “Fatal Choices: Israel’s Policy of Targeted Killing,” pp. 111–126. 28. “There were sometimes so many decisions to be made that we didn’t have the time to undertake a case-by-case examination of them. [ . . . ] Block approval was granted.” Interview with a former National Security Council head on April 2, 2008. The National Security Council, established in 1999, is an organization that reports to the prime minister to advise him on national security issues. It is made up of high-ranking retired military officials and senior civilian officials. 29. Interview with senior National Security Council official on May 27, 2008. 30. Freilich, “National Security Decision-Making in Israel,” p. 643. 31. Steinberg, Haaretz, “The Road to Hell.”

Notes

177

32. This is what the Shabak director replied to his detractors. See Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, pp. 173–174. 33. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 236. 34. According to many senior national security officials interviewed in the course of this research. 35. Interview with former head of National Security Council, May 31, 2007. 36. Steinberg, Haaretz, “The Road to Hell.” 37. Interview with a senior National Security Council official, May 27, 2008. 38. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 163. 39. Ibid., p. 161. 40. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 239. 41. Bitsua in Hebrew means “implementation” or “execution.” 42. Hasdai, “ ‘Doers’ and ‘Thinkers’ in the IDF,” p. 14. 43. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 247. 44. Ibid., Chapter Eight: “Firing in Automatic Position.” 45. David, “Fatal Choices: Israel’s Policy of Targeted Killing,” p. 1. 46. Ibid., p. 10. 47. http://www.btselem.org/English/Statistics/Casualties.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 48. Freilich, “National Security Decision-Making in Israel,” p. 637. 49. Byman, “Do Targeted Killings Work?” pp. 104–105, and Byman and Dicter, “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists and Their Implications for the United States,” p. 10. 50. The book written by Noam Ohana, a former member of the paratroop reconnaissance unit, gives one of the rare accounts on these operations: Journal de Guerre. De Sciences Po aux unités d’élite de Tsahal (Paris, Denoël, 2007). 51. Yaalon, “Israël: terroriser les terrorists,” p. 69. 52. “Le siècle des guérillas,” Interview with Gérard Chaliand, Le Monde, February 18–19, 2007. 53. Byman and Dicter, “Israel’s Lessons for Fighting Terrorists . . .” 54. Jones and Libicki, How Terrorist Groups End, pp. xiii–xiv. 55. Hafez and Hatfield, “Do Targeted Assassinations Work?” pp. 359–382.

Eight 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

The Resilience of Israeli Democracy

Morag, “Measuring Success in Coping with Terrorism,” pp. 307–320. Interview with a former senior National Security Council official, April 2, 2008. Catignani, “The Security Imperative in Counterterror Operations,” p. 255. Hermann, “Changes in Israel’s Official Security Policy and in the Attitudes of the Israeli-Jewish Public toward the Management of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2000–2004),” p. 157. Merari, “Israel Facing Terrorism,” p. 229. The association Web site: http://www.seruv.org.il/english/default.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). Regarding conscientious objectors, see also Cohen, Israel and Its Army; Linn, “Soldiers with Conscience Never Die.” Web site: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). Web site: http://www.machsomwatch.org/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). Hermann, “Changes in Israel’s Official Security Policy,” p. 145. Klein, “La Cour suprême et le système judiciaire,” p. 64. See also Kretzmer, The Occupied Territories. Amir Bohbot, “Les transformations d’une procédure,” NRG Maariv, October 6, 2006 (in Hebrew). Arnon Regular, “IDF Still Uses Human Shields, in Violation of High Court Ruling, “ Haaretz, September 4, 2005.

178

Notes

13. B’Tselem Web site: http://www.btselem.org/hebrew/testimonies/20050913 (Accessed on November 7, 2005). 14. Haaretz, October 6, 2005. 15. Klein, “La Cour suprême et le système judiciaire,” p. 64. 16. Uri Blau, “IDF Killed Wanted Palestinians Despite Court Guidelines, Documents Show,” Haaretz, November 26, 2008. 17. Hoffmann, Duties beyond Borders, p. 87. 18. Lifton, “Haditha: In an ‘Atrocity-Producing Situation.’ ” 19. Semelin, Purify and Destroy, pp. 323 and 325. 20. According to B’Tselem, 500 complaints for torture have been filed since 2001. More recently, in May 2007, this NGO published 73 anonymous accounts by Palestinian prisoners claiming they had suffered violent abuse at the hands of Shabak. In his reply, the justice minister argued that anonymous testimonials did not enable the competent authorities to verify the accusations. B’Tselem, “Betakhlit Ha’issour” [Utterly Forbidden] May 2007, 76 pages. http://www.btselem.org/Download/200705_Utterly_Forbidden_eng.pdf (Accessed on January 25, 2010). The total number of complaints of torture has nevertheless decreased considerably compared to the First Intifada. 21. On the Algerian War, see Jauffret and Vaïsse (eds.), Militaires et Guérilla dans la guerre d’Algérie; Raphaëlle Branche, La Torture et l’Armée pendant la guerre d’Algérie. 22. Le Monde, April 19, 2002. 23. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 321. 24. Ibid., p. 326. 25. Human Rights Watch, Israel, the Occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. http://www.hrw.org/ legacy/reports/2002/israel3/index.htm#TopOf Page (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 26. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 260. 27. Neumann, “Hayeouts Hatsava’i Balehima.” 28. Gross, The Struggle of Democracy against Terrorism, Chapter Three.

Nine

Strategic Inconsistencies

1. Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 364. 2. Ben-Israel, “The Confrontation with Suicide Terror,” pp. 9–46 (in Hebrew). 3. Several attacks have taken place since 2006: on April 17, 2006, 6 people were killed by a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv; 3 others on January 29, 2007 in Eilat by a Palestinian who came from the Gaza Strip; on February 4, 2008 a 73-year-old woman was killed in an attack committed by a suicide bomber in a shopping center in Dimona; in March 2008, a Palestinian opened fire on students in a yeshiva in Jerusalem, killing 8 of them; on July 2, 2008, 3 people were killed in an attack with a backhoe committed in downtown Jerusalem and; another attack executed on July 21 caused injuries, without any causalities. According to information supplied by the current Shabak director, Yuval Diskin, 36 Israelis were killed by terrorist attacks during the year 2008, compared to 13 for the year 2007. Ynet, retrieved on December 31, 2008: www.Ynet.co.il/ext/comp/articleLayout/ 4. See the account by Colonel Nir Peres, in charge of civilian coordination and administration in the Gaza Strip from 2005 to 2008, Haaretz, August 4, 2008. 5. Interview conducted on April 2, 2008. 6. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, pp. 438–439. 7. According to Deputy Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, quoted in Drucker and Shelah, Boomerang, p. 83. 8. Bar-Siman-Tov et al., “The Israeli-Palestinian Violent Confrontation,” p. 90. 9. Ibid., p. 93.

Notes

179

10. Interview on April 2, 2008. 11. Ibid. 12. Interview with General (res.) Shlomo Brom, researcher with the Institute for National Security Studies at the University of Tel Aviv, April 2, 2008. 13. Breaking the Silence, http://www.shovrimshtika.org/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 14. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 339. 15. Ibid., p. 433. 16. http://www.btselem.org/English/Freedom_of_Movement/Statistics.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 17. Lieutenant Colonel G. for instance, head of a paratrooper unit, imposed regulatory punishment on two of his soldiers who shattered a car windshield because the driver didn’t stop at the right place. Interview conducted with Lieutenant Colonel G. on April 17, 2005. 18. Ginsburg, “Framing, Misframing, and Reframing,” pp. 91–105. 19. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 430. 20. Testimony published by Breaking the Silence and picked up by Le Monde, June 23, 2005. 21. Interview conducted with Sergeant E. on October 20, 2005. 22. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, Chapter Thirteen. 23. Amos Harel, Haaretz, July 31, 2005. 24. http://www.btselem.org/english/firearms/20080721_nilin_shooting.asp (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 25. Amos Harel, Haaretz, August 7, 2008. 26. Ynet, Yediot Aharonot, July 1, 2009. 27. The new charges, a page and a half long, were given to the author by The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (www.acri.org.il). 28. Haaretz, September 22, 2005. 29. Haaretz, April 27, 2009. 30. Statistics provided by IDF General Military Prosecutor Brigadier General Avichai Mandelbit to the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee, protocol no. 140, February 14, 2007. 31. His position was endorsed by the High Court of Justice, cf. Harel and Isacharoff, La septième guerre d’Israël, p. 427. 32. See the article by Gideon Alon, Haaretz, February 28, 2005.

Conclusion: The Only Enemy That Can Defeat the IDF . . . 1. Pierre Bourdieu defines habitus as follows: “Produced by the work of inculcation and appropriation that is needed in order for objective structures, the products of collective history, to be reproduced in the form of the durable, adjusted dispositions that are the condition of their functioning, the habitus, which is constituted in the course of an individual history, imposing its particular logic on incorporation, and through which agents partake of the history objectified in institutions, is what makes it possible to inhabit institutions, to appropriate them practically, and so to keep them in activity . . . ” Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, p. 57. 2. Quoted by Catignani, Israeli Counter-insurgency and the Intifadas, p. 4. 3. Interview with Brigadier General D. at the Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the National Security Council headquarters in Ramat Hasharon, June 5, 2007. 4. Creveld, The Sword and the Olive, p. 342. 5. Begin, The Revolt, p. 92. 6. Galula, Counterinsurgency Warfare, p. 66. 7. Ron, Frontiers and Ghettos, p. 176.

180

Notes

8. According to the Israeli army, some of them were Hezbollah combatants dressed as civilians. 9. See the B’Tselem Web site (Accessed on January 25, 2010): http://www.btselem.org/ Download/200902_Operation_Cast_Lead_Position_paper_Heb.pdf 10. h t t p : / / w w w . m f a . g o v . i l / M F A / T e r r o r i s m - + O b s t a c l e + t o + P e a c e / Hamas+war+against+Israel/Operation_in_Gaza-Factual_and _Legal_ Aspects.htm (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 11. Ephraim Inbar, “How Israel Bungled the Second Lebanon War,” Middle East Quarterly, 2007, pp. 57–65; Shai Feldman, “ The Hezbollah-Israel War: A Preliminary Assessment,” Middle East Brief, no. 10, September 2006. 12. Le Nouvel Observateur, August 3, 2006. 13. La Voix du Nord, July 30–31, 2006. 14. Haaretz, July 16, 2006. 15. Amos Harel, “Cast Lead Expose/What Did the IDF Think Would Happen in Gaza?” Haaretz, March 27, 2009 16. See Aluf Benn’s article in Haaretz, October 18, 2009. 17. In the words of an officer interviewed by Amos Harel, quoted in Le Monde, January 8, 2009. 18. Haaretz, January 7, 2009. 19. United Nations Human Rights Council, “Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories.” 20. Haaretz, January 22, 2009. 21. Haaretz, January 18, 2009. 22. Haaretz, February 4, 2009. 23. http://www.amnesty.fr/index.php/amnesty/agir/ (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 24. Haaretz, July 12, 2006. 25. Daniel Bar-Tal, Living with the Conflict. 26. Maoz, “Evaluating Israel’s Strategy of Low-Intensity Warfare, 1946–2006,” p. 323. 27. Amidror, “The Principles of War in an Asymmetric Confrontation,” p. 11 (in Hebrew). 28. See chapter two. 29. Freilich, “National Security Decision-Making in Israel,” p. 643. 30. Maoz, Defending the Holy Land, p. 233. 31. Wagman, “ Limited Conf lict—The Failure,” p. 258 (in Hebrew). 32. See Amidror, “The Principles of War in an Asymmetric Confrontation.” 33. Ariel Levite, Offence and Defence in Israeli Military Doctrine, Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, no. 12, 1989, pp. 158–159. 34. http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Security-Industry/2009/03/12/Whats-wrongwith-Israels-Iron-Dome-A BM-defense-system/U PI-89401236886985/Retr ieved December 29, 2009 (Accessed on January 25, 2010). 35. Ignatieff, The Lesser Evil, p. 62.

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Web Sites Amnesty international: http://www.amnesty.fr/ B’Tselem: http://www.btselem.org/ Haaretz: http://www.haaretz.co.il/ Haometz Lesarev: http://www.seruv.org.il/defaulteng.asp High Court of Justice: http://elyon1.court.gov.il/eng/home/index.html Human Rights Watch: http://www.hrw.org Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs: http://www.mfa.gov.il/MFA/terrorism Israeli Army: www1.idf.il/DOVER/ NRG Maariv: http://www.nrg.co.il/online/HP_0.html Public Committee against Torture in Israel: http://www.stoptorture.org.il/en Shovrim Shtika: http://www.shovrimshtika.org/ Ynet, Yediot Aharonot: http://www.Ynet.co.il/

Documentary Films Asabim Shotim, directed by Ilana Dayan in 2007 for Israeli television Arutz 2. A Million Bullets in October, 2007, directed by Moish Goldberg for Israeli television Arutz 8. Waltz with Bashir, presented at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, directed by Ari Folman.

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I N DE X

101 (unit), 32–33, 42, 45 Abbas, Mahmoud, 140–141, 159 Abbayat, Hussein, 120 Abiat, Hussein, 88 Abu Ghraib (prison), 22–23 Adala (organization), 131 Afghanistan, 4, 14, 16, 18, 23, 153 Africa (outpost), 95 Albek, Yehuda (colonel), 97 Algeria, 14–16 Algerian War, 16–17, 133, 153 Algiers (battle of ), 17, 23, 134 Almog, Doron (general), 82 Al Qaeda, 4, 21, 40 Altalena (ship), 142 Aman (military intelligence), 81, 87, 107, 117–119, 172 Amidror, Yaacov (general), 94, 163 Amir, Ygal, 70 Amman, 39, 109 Annan, Kofi, 111 Al-Aqsa (mosque), 79 Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade, 81 Arafat, Yasser, 38–39, 41, 44, 45, 46–48, 54, 76–77, 80, 83, 87–89, 93–94, 107–108, 110, 115–116, 137, 142, 143–144 Arakat, Saeb, 134 Arava (desert), 31, 39 Arens, Moshe, 51

Argov, Shlomo, 43 Aron, Raymond, 6, 16 Arone, Shidane, 20 Arreguin-Toft, Ivan, 16 Ashkenazi, Motti (captain), 171 Ashkenazy, Gaby (general), 133, 148 Association for Civil Rights in Israel, 131 Athens, 40 Atran, Scott, 113 Awali (river), 52 Ayalon, Ami, 130 Ayyash, Yahya, 77, 110, 114, 119 B’Tselem, 7, 68, 73, 98–99, 100, 103, 110–111, 131, 144–145, 148, 154, 167, 178 Baader-Meinhof Gang, 44 Baghdad, 24 Balkans War, 134 Bani-Ouda, Ibrahim, 81 Bar Ilan (University), 113 Barak, Aharon, 105, 112, 131 Barak, Ehud, 53, 78, 80, 83, 84, 86–88, 89, 90–91, 93, 96, 135, 148, 151, 156, 158, 174 Baram, Amatzia (lieutenant colonel), 134 Barghouti, Marwan, 79, 108, 116 Bar-Lev, Haim (general), 86 Barud, Ahmed Fuad, 136 Beer Ora, 39

190

Index

Beer Sheva, 94, 157 Begin, Menachem, 32, 43–46, 48, 49–50, 51, 59, 86–87, 142, 151, 153, 171 Beilin, Yossi, 69 Beirut, 40–42, 44–45, 47–49, 51–52, 55, 110 Beit Hanoun, 136, 159 Beit Iba, 145 Beit Jallah, 87–88 Beit Nuba, 38 Beita, 65 Bekaa, 45, 47–48 Ben-Ami, Shlomo, 84, 89, 174 Ben-Eliezer, Binyamin (general), 86, 93, 115 Ben-Gurion, David, 28, 32–33, 35, 46, 109, 142, 151, 169 Ben-Israel, Yitzhak, 140 Ben-Yishai, Ron, 49 Ben-Zvi, Yitzhak, 36 Bethlehem, 32, 76 Big Pines (plan, operation), 47, 55 Al-Bireh, 81 Biro, Arye (general), 37 Black September (organization), 1, 39–42, 109–110, 114, 119, 162 Bloom, Mia, 113 Blue Line, 155 Borberg, Omri (lieutenant colonel), 148 Bouchiki, Ahmed, 110 Boukris (method), 135 Bourdieu, Pierre, 152 Brauman, Rony, 134 Buenos Aires, 114 Byman, Daniel, 113, 121, 122 Calley, William (lieutenant), 20 Calvin, 130 Camp David, 70, 83, 87, 89, 90, 93 Canada, 4, 20 Cast Lead (operation), 29, 157–159, 164–165 Chaliand, Gérard, 15, 91 Chechnya, 15, 133

Chouf (district), 52 Clinton, William J. (Bill), 70 Cohen, Ran, 150 Communist Party (French), 16 Communist Party (Israeli), 35 Czechoslovakia, 34 Dahan, Gabriel (lieutenant), 35–36 Daharya, 147 Damascus, 28, 176 David, Charles-Philippe, 6 David, Éric, 20 David, Steven R., 121 Dayan, Ilana, 148 Dayan, Moshe (general), 31, 32–33, 38, 41, 59, 86, 104, 163 Defensive Shield (operation), 73, 98, 108, 122–123, 128, 130, 134, 140, 143, 146, 157 Deir Aiyub, 38 Demoni, Jamal Salim, 118, 119 Dichter, Avi, 108, 113, 115, 117–118, 121–122, 176 Dimona, 36, 178 Dir Nizam, 144 Diskin, Yuval, 158, 178 Doctors without Borders, 134 Dolphinarium (discotheque), 94, 136 Draper, Morris, 49 Drori, Amir (general), 42, 47 Drori, Ze’ev, 28, 31, 42 Drucker, Raviv, 8, 82, 115 Durkheim, Emile, 6 Al-Durrah, Mohamed, 79 Duvdevan (unit), 63 Egypt, 1, 28–30, 34, 37–38, 41, 69, 87, 109, 170, 174 Eiland, Giora (general), 115 Eilat, 178 Ein Hilwe, 51 Eisenkot, Gadi (brigadier general), 104 Eitan, Raphael, 48, 49, 50, 55, 86 El Al, 40–41 El Assad, Hafez, 15

Index El Wazir, Khalil, 110 Enderlin, Charles, 173 Entebbe, 41 Erez (crossing point), 102 Eshkol, Levy, 86 Al-Fajr ( journal), 58 Fallujah, 23 Fatah, 38–42, 55, 77, 79, 80–81, 115–116, 143, 175 Fedayeen, 1, 30, 34, 39, 109 Finkelstein, Menachem (brigadier general), 149 FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front), 17 Fogel, Tzvi (general), 82, 88, 90 Folman, Ari, 171, 187 Foreign Affairs and Security Commission, 150 Four Mothers (movement), 56, 83 France, 2–4, 15–17, 33, 86 France 2 (television), 173 Frankenthal, Yehuda (captain), 36 Freilich, Charles F., 117 French Foreign Affairs Ministry, 2 Frisch, Hillel, 113–115 Galon, Zahava, 68 Galula, David (lieutenant colonel), 17–18, 23, 153 Gaulle, Charles (general De), 15, 170 Gaza Strip, 15, 27, 30, 34, 38, 46, 54, 57–60, 63, 70, 74–76, 79, 81–82, 84, 90, 95–96, 102–106, 109–110, 117, 121–122, 129, 137, 139, 146–147, 153–154, 156–160, 165, 175, 178, 184 Gazit, Shlomo (general), 57, 87 Gemayel, Amin, 51–52 Gemayel, Bashir, 46–47, 49 Gemayel, Pierre, 46 Geneva Conventions, 22, 131, 145 Geneva Initiative, 130, 143 Germany, 4, 41, 86, 109 Geva, Eli, 48

191

Ghouri, Emile, 176 Gilo (city of ), 120 Gilon, Carmi, 130 Girit (outpost), 105–106 Givati (brigade), 28, 31, 79, 95, 146 Goldstein, Barukh, 77 Goren, Schmuel (general), 57 Grapes of Wrath (operation), 54, 137 Great Britain, 4, 16, 33 Gross, Emanuel, 12, 65 Guantanamo, 22 Guigui, Kobi (lieutenant), 147 Gulf War, 69, 76 Gur, Mordechai (general), 86, 87 Gush Emunim (“Bloc of the Faithful”), 59 Ha Ometz Lesarev (“Courage to Refuse,” organization), 129 Haaretz, 37, 111, 129, 131–132, 156, 161 Habash, Georges, 38 Habib, Philippe, 45–46, 48 Haddad, Waddih, 41 Haditha, 20, 134 Hafez, Mohammed, 124 Hafez, Mustapha, 34, 109 Haganah, 109 Hague Conventions, 12 Haifa, 44, 46, 94 Halutz, Dan (general), 111, 132, 147, 155, 160–161 Hama, 15 Hamas (“Islamic Resistance Movement”), 27, 55, 69–70, 77, 81, 95, 108, 110–111, 114–116, 118, 121–122, 132, 136, 140–141, 143–144, 150, 154, 156–159, 165, 176 Hamed, Ibrahim (Sheikh), 132 Al-Hams, Iman, 104–106 Al-Haq (organization), 103 Harel, Amos, 8, 62, 79, 81, 100, 104, 119, 175 Hasdai, Yaakov, 119 Hasson, Israel, 90, 174

192

Index

Hatfield, Joseph, 124 Hathaway, Oona A., 22 Hebron, 77, 131, 148 Hedera, 94 Herut, 32 Herzog, Chaim, 68 Hezbollah (“Party of God”), 4, 51–55, 78, 110, 137, 140, 154–157, 180 Hirsch, Gal (colonel), 83 Hobeika, Elie, 49 Hoffmann, Stanley, 133 Hofi, Yitzhak (general), 47 Human Rights Watch, 62, 135 Hussein, Saddam, 15 Hussein of Jordan (king), 39, 40, 43, 114 Al-Husseini, Abdel Khader, 176 Ignatieff, Michael, 165 Imwas, 38 Independence (war), 1, 109 India, 4 Indian Kashmir, 4 Indochina, 14, 17, 78 International Committee of the Red Cross, 156 International Convention against Torture, 66 Intifada (first), 4, 29, 54, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65–67, 69, 73–74, 76, 79, 110, 137, 151, 154, 178 Intifada (second), 1, 2, 5, 8, 29, 42, 56, 66, 68, 70–71, 73, 75–77, 88, 91, 109–110, 114, 120, 124, 133, 137–138, 149–152, 154, 162, 165, 172–173 Iraq, 4, 15–16, 18, 20, 23–25, 134, 163, 165, 168 Irgun Tzvai Leumi, 142 Isacharoff, Avi, 8, 62, 79, 81, 100, 104, 119, 175 Italy, 4 Japan, 21 Japanese Red Army, 40, 44 Jebalya, 58–59

Jenin, 73, 76, 80, 102, 107–108, 134–135, 137, 157 Jericho, 70, 76, 103 Jerusalem (East), 58, 76 Jibril, Ahmed, 40 Jihad, Abu (v. Khalil el Wazir), 63, 110, 121 Jordan, 1, 29–30, 38–39, 46, 67, 109, 114, 170 Jordan (River), 39, 59, 93 Joubran, Salim, 105 Judea, 38, 46, 122 Justice Recovered (operation), 53–54 Kadesh (operation), 35 Kahan (commission), 50, 171 Kahan, Yitzhak, 50 Karameh, 39 Karine A (ship), 107 Karmi, Raed, 114–117 Karsenty, Philippe, 173 Kasher, Asa, 112 Katyusha, 45, 54, 155 Kepel, Gilles, 116 Kerem Shalom, 95 Kfar Kassem, 34–35 Kfir (brigade), 147 Khan Yunis, 147 Khartoum, 59 Kiryat Shmona, 1, 39, 45, 53–54 Klein, Claude, 130 Knesset, 35, 50, 67–68, 129, 150, 179 Kohavi, Aviv (brigadier general), 152 Kol, Binyamin (lieutenant), 36 Kurdistan, 14 Kurtz, Micha, 100 Labor Party, 61, 69, 93, 158, 173 Landau, Moshe, 66 Laskov, Haim (general), 36, 42 Latrun, 38 League of Arab States, 59 Lebanon, 1, 4, 22, 37, 39, 40, 42–54, 56, 68, 74, 78, 83, 86, 90–91, 151, 153–155, 160–161

Index Lebanon (south), 38–39, 43–45, 53, 55–56, 78, 87, 97–98, 110, 137, 154, 156–157, 161 Lempert, Nimrod (lieutenant), 36 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 8 Levy, David, 49 Levy, Edmond, 105 Levy, Yagil, 74 Lewis, Samuel, 49 Licorne (operation), 20 Lifton, Robert J., 20, 133 Likud, 45, 50–51, 58–59, 61, 67, 77, 150 Lillehammer, 110 Lipkin-Shahak, Amnon, 67, 84 Litani (operation), 44–46 Lod (airport), 40 Lyautey (method), 17 Maarachot, 163 Maariv, 128, 176 Machiavelli, 25–26 Mack, Andrew, 14 Madrid (conference), 69 Magav (“border guards”), 35, 63, 145, 148 Mahé, Firmin, 20 Mahsom Watch (association), 129, 144, 146 Malaya, 17, 24 Malinki, Shmuel (commander), 35–36 Malka, Rafi, 52 Malta, 110, 119 Man (city), 20 Manahat, 32 Mandelbit, Avichai (General), 179 Mansour, Jamal, 118–119 Maoz, Zeev, 47, 164 Mapai, 32–33 Mashal, Khaled, 114 Massu, Jacques (general), 15, 133 Media Ratings, 173 Meir, Golda, 41, 110 Meir, Yehuda (lieutenant colonel), 65 Melisha, Zyad, 132

193

Memorial (association), 15 Meretz, 68, 150 Meridor, Dan, 68 Metzah (military police criminal investigations), 148–149 Middle East, 43, 54–56, 65, 80, 129 Mista’arvim, 63 Mitzna, Amram (general), 67, 173 Moda’i, Yitzhak, 67 Mofaz, Shaul (general), 78, 82, 84, 86, 87–88, 90, 94, 97–98, 108, 115, 118, 132, 135, 175 Morag, Nadav, 127 Morag (settlement), 105 Morris, Benny, 30, 38, 50, 53, 170 Mosque Esplanade, 79 Mossad, 40–41, 46–47, 49, 85, 110, 114, 118, 143, 172 Mosse, George L., 168 Mukhsan, Nidal Abu, 131 Muqata, 108, 137 Musawi, Abbas (Sheikh), 110, 114, 119 Muslim Brotherhood, 69 My Lay (massacre), 20 Nablus, 76, 80, 101, 107–108, 134 Nahal (unit), 99–100 Nahal Haredi (unit), 102 Nahariya, 45, 49 Naor, Arye, 171 Naqba (Day), 77 Nasrallah, Hassan, 78 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 34 National Security College, 94 National Security Council, 117, 141, 143, 152, 176–177, 179 National Water Carrier, 38 NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization), 4 Naveh, Yair (general), 132–133 Negbi, Moshe, 65 Netanya, 81, 94, 107, 162 Netanyahu, Binyamin, 77, 87

194

Index

Netherlands (the), 4 Netzarim, 79, 95, 139 Nidal, Abu, 41, 43, 47, 131 Nigeria, 14 Nilin, 148 Northern Ireland, 14 Nuqeib, 37 Nuremberg (trial), 168 Nusseibeh, Sari, 130 Olmert, Ehud, 77, 127, 137, 140–141, 156 Oslo Accords, 1, 54, 69–70, 76–77, 79, 87, 90–91, 121, 128, 164 Pakistan, 4 Palestine, 76, 93, 109, 136, 167 Palestinian Authority, 54, 76–77, 80–81, 84, 87, 89, 91, 93–95, 103, 106–108, 115, 127, 130, 134, 139, 142–143, 150–151, 162, 165, 174, 184 Palmach (unit), 109 Pâris de Bollardière, Jacques (general), 16 Park Hotel, 107 Patriarchs (Cave of the), 77, 131 Peace for Galilee (operation), 43, 45, 52, 54, 56, 154 Peres, Shimon, 54, 69, 93, 173 Peri, Yaakov, 130 Petraeus, David (general), 24, 165, 168 PFLP (Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), 38–41, 114, 116 Phalange (Christian), 46, 49 Philadelphi (route), 82, 104 PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization), 4, 38–39, 41–48, 52, 54, 56, 58, 63, 69, 110, 154, 160 Psagot (settlement), 79, 81, 87 Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (The), 111 Qalqilya, 38, 76, 136 Qana, 54, 137, 156 Qibya (operation), 32–33

Qorei, Ahmed (Abu Alaa), 69, 141 Al-Quds (University), 130 Quran, 6 Rabin, Yitzhak, 46, 53, 58, 61–62, 64, 69–70, 77, 86–87, 151 Rabo, Yasser Abed, 130 Rafael, Gideon, 41 Rafah, 103, 147 Rahma, Ashraf Abu, 148 Rainbow (operation), 104 Rajabi, Mahmoud, 131 Rajoub, Jibril, 134 Ramallah, 76, 80, 83, 103, 108, 137 Ramleh, 36 Rand Corporation, 18, 124 Rantissi, Abdel Aziz, 108, 110, 121 Reagan, Ronald, 45, 48–49 Al-Riachi, Reem Saleh, 102 Route 443, 83 Sabena (airlines), 40 Sabra and Chatila (camps), 49, 171 Sadat, Anwar, 86 Saguy, Yehoshua (general), 47, 49–50 Al-Saiqa, 38 Salameh, Ali Hassan, 110 Salameh, Hassan, 176 Samaria, 38, 46, 122 Samya, Yom-Tov (general), 81–82 Sarid, Yossi, 150 Sarraut, Albert, 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 16 Sayeret Golani (reconnaissance unit), 37 Sayeret Matkal (reconnaissance unit), 129 Sayeret Tsanhanim (reconnaissance unit), 175 Sbarro (pizzeria), 94 Schiff, Zeev, 60, 64, 66, 176 Semelin, Jacques, 133 September 11 (attacks), 4, 21 Shabak (general security service), 66, 83, 85, 95, 97, 107–108, 110–111, 113, 115, 117–120, 122–124, 130, 158, 172, 176–178

Index Shadmi, Isachar (colonel), 35–36 Shalit, Gilad (corporal), 75 Shalom, Avraham, 130 Shamir, Yitzhak, 51, 58 Sharafat (village), 32 Sharett, Moshe, 31, 33–35, 45, 163 Sharir, Avraham, 67 Sharon, Ariel, 29, 32, 38, 45–50, 55, 59, 67, 73, 76, 79, 86, 91, 93, 96–97, 98, 106–108, 115, 117, 121, 127, 136, 142, 143, 150–151, 170 Shehada, Salah, 108, 111, 120, 160 Shelah, Ofer, 8, 82, 116 Sher, Gilead, 84, 89, 174 Shimshon (battle), 63, 68 Shin Bet (general security service, see also “Shabak”), 38, 52, 57, 60, 66, 172 Shiqaqi, Fathi, 110, 119 Shomron, Dan (general), 63, 65, 67 Shovrim Shtika (“Breaking the Silence”), 7, 129, 144, 167 Sinai (war), 1, 28, 35, 37, 86, 154 Siwad (village), 103 Six-Day War, 1, 15, 28, 38, 44, 57, 76, 108, 153, 169 Smith, Rupert (general), 25 Sneh, Ephraim, 83–84, 174 Somalia, 20 Sommier, Isabelle, 6 Sour, 52 South Lebanon Army (SLA), 53 Special security zone, 82, 104, 106 Spector, Yftah (brigadier general), 111 Srebrenica (massacres), 134 Sri Lanka, 14 Stalin, Joseph, 14 Steinberg, Matti, 111, 117 Steinitz, Yuval, 150 Sternhell, Zeev, 73, 75 Strashnov, Amnon, 65 Sudan, 14 Suez (war), 28, 34, 37, 41, 78, 172 Switzerland, 80, 130

195

Syria, 15, 39, 44–45, 47, 52, 56, 58, 67, 98, 156, 170 Taisir, 102 Tal, Wasfi, 40 Tanzim, 77–78, 88, 114–115, 120, 145 Tel Aviv, 40, 50, 61, 94, 100, 110, 136, 139–140, 178–179 Temple Mount, 73, 76, 90 Templer, Gerard (sir), 168 Tiberias (Lake), 37–38 Time Magazine, 33 Tiran Straits, 34 Tito, Josip Broz, 14 Tobas, 100 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 16 Triangle (region), 35 Trinquier, Roger (colonel), 17 Tsur, Tzvi, 42 Tulkarm, 76, 101, 107, 115 UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon), 45–46 United Nations, 12, 34 United Nations Security Council, 33 United States, 3, 4, 16, 18, 22, 23, 33, 48, 58, 69, 97, 108, 111, 137, 152, 156, 163 Uvda (television program), 148 Van Creveld, Martin, 14, 55, 62 Vidal-Naquet, Pierre, 16 Vietminh, 17 Vietnam, 4, 14, 17, 20, 134, 153 Wadi Hirmieh, 81 Wailing Wall, 79 Waltz with Bashir (film), 171 West Bank, 14, 30, 38, 42, 46, 54, 57–58, 60–63, 65, 67–68, 70, 74, 76, 79, 80–82, 91, 95, 97, 99, 100, 107–108, 110, 116, 122, 124, 132, 139–141, 144–145, 147–148, 151, 160, 162, 164

196

Index

Western Wall Tunnel (incident), 77, 83, 90 Yaalon, Moshe (general), 82, 84, 96, 98, 123, 178 Yaar, Itamar (colonel), 141 Yaari, Ehud, 60, 64, 66 Yadlin, Amos (major-general), 112 Yahav, Dan, 33, 35 Yalu, 38 Yaniv, Avner, 50 Yaron, Amos (general), 49, 50

Yassin, Ahmed (Sheikh), 108, 110, 114, 117, 121 Yediot Aharonot, 63 Yehud, 33 Yesh Gvul (movement), 56 Yom Kippur War, 1, 28, 44–45, 171 Zarzir (“Starling,” Operation), 109 Zeevi, Rehavam, 107, 114 Zibri, Mustafa, 114 Zurich, 40 Zusman, Adam (lieutenant colonel), 147 Zweig, Arnold, 168