BOOK DATA Fighting Terrorism
English Title: Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorists
Author: Benjamin Netanyahu
ISBN: 978-0374524975
Language: English
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2nd edition
(January 1, 2001)
The guru of international counterterrorism is undoubtedly Bibi and the advanced democracy in the Middle East, Israel. Bibi is now practicing his counter-terrorist theory depicted in this book on the Gaza and Lebanon war successfully. In short, they’re consciously reversing the fatal and suicidal policy adopted in the past by Israeli governments after Oslo, the land-for-peace policy. Also, another point they’re facing is the jailed terrorist-for-innocent hostages’ exchange. As Bibi reflected in the 1990s and at the time 911, both polices backfired, and resulted in more terrorist threats and attacks after their implementation. This is the shortest sum of the essence of this book.
On the international level, anti-Israeli, anti-Semite, anti-Zionist propaganda continue. They can only be defeated by military victories of Israel on the battlefield. And it also repeatedly proved that, as we can see in the global hatred and hysteria instigated by Hamas-Hezbollah-Iran against Jews via biased, populist, clickbait media reports, global Jews need Israel as a haven. The existence of Israel is in the public interest of all Jews. Both Israelis / Zionists and diaspora Jews.
Ironically, the first Jews who were assaulted by Hamas on October 7, 2023, were pro-Hamas Jews - easier targets for Hamas - in the territory of Israel because Hamas wanted to prove there is no haven where all Jews, no matter, they’re sympathetic to so-called Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank (the two strips of Israeli land were given to terrorists via the Oslo Accords in 1993). From 1918 to 1948, there were only Jews and Arabs who held Palestinian passports under British rule. There weren’t and aren’t so-called ‘Palestinians’ as any kind of ethnic group. This is a propaganda rhetoric successful in China and beyond. There are several points that must be mentioned in the propaganda:
a. IRGC-QF, Hamas (Gaza), Hizballah (Lebanon), the Houthis (Yemen) and other terrorist proxies of the Arab countries are surrounding and attacking one country, Israel, yet Israel is demonized as ‘the aggressor.
b. Although anti-Semitic agitators in Hong Kong, China and the globe are depicting the Israeli-Hamas War as a racial or religious contradiction, it is a war between counterterrorism (Israel) and terrorism (Hamas and other terror proxies of terror states).
c. It’s still automatically depicted as ‘Gaza health authority’ (The Gaza Health Ministry) that their death toll and even the whole footage are provided and authorized by Hamas. It’s from Hamas. They are Hamas. The media, Hong Kong media and Chinese media are just transferring the Hamas propaganda footage to the viewers without clearly reviewing or marking it as Hamas-side materials. This biased news approach is, of course, maintained in Hong Kong.
d. Their aim of propaganda – the maximum political pressure - is to paralyze, isolate Israel internationally and make it defenseless voluntarily against terrorist threats and attacks. The notorious result is the ‘land-for-peace’ policy. The recent example of this tendency is the UN vote on September 18, 2024. The UN voted 124-14 to strip Israel of the right to self-defense in Gaza, the West Bank.
e. The UN is knowingly supporting the Hamas terrorists via UNRWA. Read the report, ‘The interview comes only a few days after Israel struck a UNRWA school, killing at least 18, according to Hamas, of which six were UNRWA workers.’ Lazzarini said that first, they fired staff that were involved in the use of UNRWA property on October 7, but also that they had opened an investigation into Hamas membership in UNRWA and that that investigation was inconclusive, but that no fired staff member had been rehired.
f. A defender (Israel) is condemned as an aggressor while the Arab terrorists, the real aggressors, are treated as victims. Everything is reversed in the anti-Semitic propaganda. For instance, anti-Semitic terrorists whose aim, total annihilation of Israel in the Jewish land is true and real genocide against Jews, yet the demagogues still depict Israel as Nazi Germany. Even Judaism, an officially admitted religion in Hong Kong, is depicted by the racist media, on.cc’s op-eds, as a theocratic primitive religion equal with the Middle Age religious rule. Moses is also distorted as a colonialist in Canaan. Furthermore, the entire Canaan and the Ancient Near East are mixed up into a colonialist or neo-colonialist goal of Israel and Zionists. This kind of reverse of the ‘black-and-white’ model of propaganda, continues. This is an apparent fabrication, while no Israelis claimed such an Arab ambition. 80 % of Palestine – the name was coined by the Romans to deprive the Jewish nativity of Jewish land - today is occupied by Arabs, while Jews only control 20% of the Jewish land. Who are the real colonialists? Even the Oslo Accords indicate that Jews are natives, not occupiers / colonialists. Again, Jews have been ethnically original natives of Palestine for more than four thousand years in history. China’s state media and private media are all aligned in this pro-Hamas, pro-terrorist propaganda. China is not neutral on the Israeli-Palestine issue. Only two things are maintaining the tie with Israel. One is trade; the other is their recognition of the existence of Israel. Importantly, Israel doesn’t want to engage in any political confrontation with China because trade is the priority. Thus, even if a conflict in the Taiwan Strait happens, Israel will maintain its neutrality. Ongoing disputes about the Israeli-Hamas War with China are well-contained at some level without damaging economic ties. There is no tendency or crisis to break the ties between Israel and China.
g. PRC made a political agreement under Jiang Zemin that the Chinese authorities exclude any anti-Semitic influences on its domestic policies. This is also in the case of Hong Kong. Thus, there have been only two apparent cases reported since October 7, 2023. One (10/13/2023) is in Mainland China; the other one (11/4/2023) is in Hong Kong. There have been only two cases broadly reported in the whole of China since October 7, 2023. And all of them were contained without further complications. This means that anti-Semitic agitation in both Hong Kong and entire China is a failure for the shameful anti-Semitic, racist pseudo-scholars and critics of the media like on.cc. Their anti-Israeli propaganda (limited in op-eds) is the same as Erdoğan or Hamas or Iran, nothing original or new. In other words, anti-Semitism in Hong Kong and entire China is still limited by the media and state propaganda without any actions like dogs barking on the street.
h. Some anti-Semitic agitators in Hong Kong often refer to the 2006 Lebanon War as a defeat of Israel, yet it’s not true as it’s inconclusive. Even the 2000 retreat of Israel was due to a political decision about the land-for-peace policy by a newly elected government, not a result of any military defeat of the IDF. The IDF is still invincible. Even simple facts are distorted to serve their pro-terrorist, anti-Semitic propaganda.
i. Another kind of propaganda is a religious one to try to provoke the peaceful order of nine religions of Hong Kong (Buddhism, Confucian, Taoism, Protestantism, The Catholic Church, Hinduism, Sikhism, Islam, and Judaism). Especially, targeting Christians, the Islamist community and the Jewish community. However, their main language is Chinese, not foreign languages used in these communities. Hence, depicting Judaism as a derailment of Christianity is ridiculous, while Christianity became the world religion via the hands of St. Paul, who was also a Jew himself. Christianity existed before Jesus, the Jew, and its origin is Judaism. It’s the same for Islam. If Judaism is problematic, it means that its variants, Christianity and Islam, are equally problematic according to their propaganda. The most insane thing is that, as a democracy, Israel is depicted as a theocracy by the Hong Kong media and others. Another propaganda is that Israel is trying to eliminate and exclude other religions in Jerusalem. It’s nonsense like a genocide claim, while Israel is a multi-religious, multi-racial democracy containing Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It even includes ‘Palestinian’ Arabs who were living in Israel with equal citizenship. First, Gaza’s devastation and encirclement are due to its Hamas terror on its citizens (a human shield) and Israelis. The Chinese media and agitators totally ignore this point in this piece of news.
j. The Jewish community in Hong Kong is not silent on the ongoing war, while there are Palestinian or pro-Palestinian NGOs in Hong Kong trying to stage demonstrations and gatherings to support Hamas terrorism. Soros-backed media, HKFP recently reported on September 15, 2024, such a situation in Hong Kong (BOOKED: Hong Kong Art Book Fair; James Frankel; Alison Tan’s The Visit Palestine Project exhibition; Mohammed Adnan, founder of United Front for Palestine, Hong Kong; “Is Israel justified in bombing Gaza’s hospitals?” an anti-Israeli talk show taken place at HKU on August 27, 2024, by Israeli bioethicist Zohar Lederman) even though all attempts were failures to provoke either the peaceful order of the different religions and seduce the Chinese to be proxies of ‘Palestinians’ in Hong Kong. Even though they continue the secret reading gatherings – the opposition and Soros are preparing future political events in Hong Kong by exploiting any international incidents - and occasional public lectures by either Palestinian or Israeli scholars who support Hamas. Nothing happened. Read: Hongkongers show solidarity with Palestine amid Israel-Hamas war, but keep efforts low-key
In the HKFP report, the most interesting part is about HKPF’s secret arrangement of the anti-Israeli event, which didn’t happen successfully.
Some groups in Hong Kong said the authorities were supportive of their organising efforts.
Mohammed Adnan, founder of United Front for Palestine, Hong Kong said that he had received a call from a police community liaison officer after the events of October 7, asking whether the group was planning any activities. When they met, he was even offered a venue for a press conference held by the group.
“They were surprisingly very supportive,” he said of the officer.
Although this PR event plot is still not confirmed by evidence, we can’t exclude the possibility that the PR department of HKPF is arranging political events with registered NGOs (Societies) in the interest of the local ruling class. Adnan could have provided us with a tip of the iceberg behind the whole political theater of Hong Kong. If that pro-terrorist event happened, it could have provoked the religious and ethnic communities of Hong Kong for nothing. As a result, there could have been a political avalanche that both China, Israel, and even the pro-Hamas terror countries in the Middle East don’t want. Why don't we even want any bloodshed regarding the Middle East conflicts in Hong Kong or any territory of China? Because, like any host country, China doesn’t want such a crush on the soil of China. No state actors can gain any profit from such an event.
k. Bibi’s book is about counterterrorism, but we can find that those counterterrorism tactics are the same as countermeasures and sanctions against rogue states today. Thus, we are treating rogue states as terror states in practice. Readers will feel as if this book is written today in 2024, not the 1990s!
There is no international terrorism without the support of sovereign states. International terrorism simply cannot be sustained for long without the regimes that aid and abet it. Terrorists are not suspended in midair. They train, arm, and indoctrinate their killers from within safe havens on territory provided by terrorist states. Often, these regimes provide the terrorists with intelligence, money, and operational assistance, dispatching them to serve as deadly proxies to wage a hidden war against more powerful enemies.
The international terrorist network is thus based on regimes – Iran, Iraq, Syria, Taliban Afghanistan, Yasir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, and several other Arab regimes, such as Sudan. These regimes are the ones that harbor the terrorist groups: Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan; Hizballah and others in Syria-controlled Lebanon; Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the recently mobilized Fatah and Tanzim factions in the Palestinian territories; and other terror organizations based in such capitals as Damascus, Baghdad, and Khartoum. (pp. xiii-xiv)
Here is what Arafat’s government-controlled newspaper, Al-Hayat-Al-Jadida, said on September 11, a few hours before the suicide bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon: ‘The suicide bombers of today are the noble successors of the Lebanese suicide bombers, who taught the U.S. Marines a tough lesson in Lebanon…These suicide bombers are the salt of the earth, the engines of history…They are the most honorable people among us.’
A simple rule prevails here: The success of terrorists in one part of the terror network emboldens terrorists throughout the network. (p. xv)
Although its separate parts may have local objectives and take part in local conflicts, the main motivation driving the terror network is an anti-Western hostility that seeks to achieve nothing more or less than a reversal of history. It seeks to roll back the West and install an extremist form of Islam as the dominant power in the world. And it seeks to do this not by means of its own advancement and progress, but by destroying the enemy. (p. xvi)
No cause, no grievance, no apology can ever justify terrorism. Terrorists do not unintentionally harm civilians. They deliberately murder, maim, and menace civilians – as many as possible. (p. xxi)
They know the West well and have developed strategies designated to take advantage of all its weaknesses. (p. 5)
While the violence of traditional or organized crime is directed to achieving financial gains, terrorist violence, regardless of the specific identity and goals of its perpetrators, is always directed toward achieving political goals. (p.7)
In fact, the methods reveal the totalitarian strain that runs through all terrorist groups. Those who deliberately bomb babies are not interested in freedom, and those who trample on human rights are not interested in defending such rights. (p. 9)
Organized crime does not deal with the advancement of political ideas; it deals with the advancement of corruption, assisted by intimidation. It has many thousands of people on its payroll, and in some countries, most notably Italy, it penetrated all level of society, up to members of the Cabinet. (pp. 10-11)
While the Western democracies are thankfully nowhere near the condition of such countries (Bosnia, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia, and Algeria), they, like all societies, have their frayed edges of unsolved grievances and violent alienation, which, if unattended, can serve as fertile soil for the growth of extremism and terrorism. The continual cultivation of democratic values throughout all levels of society is thus not a luxury or an abstract exercise but a crucial instrument for the survival and well-being of democratic countries. (p. 21)
The unequivocal and unrelenting moral condemnation of terrorism must therefore constitute the first line of defense against its most insidious effect. (p. 22)
To understand why, it is important to recognize that there are two kinds of strategies for fighting domestic terror. The first is a system of passive security, in which, many of the potential attack, both for deterrence and to blunt the effects of a possible assault. This involves the extensive use of watchmen and undercover security personnel, careful use of watchmen and undercover security personnel, scrutiny of all individuals approaching likely targets such as government facilities and the public transportation system, on-site security system, and heightened alertness of the civilian population. (p. 27)
To defend such as immense and complex society against terrorism – and the same must be said of other major democracies, such as Britain, France, Germany – there is little choice but to adopt an active posture against terror, taking the initiative to put into use the overwhelming technological and logistical advantages in the hands of law enforcement agencies. This means actively identifying the 'puddles' which terrorist activity is likely to emerge, monitoring the activities of groups and individuals which advocate violence, analyzing and pooling intelligence on their nature, goals, and technical capacity for violence, and employing preemptive surveillance, search and seizure, interrogations, detentions, and prosecutions when it becomes apparent that planning for terrorist violence is taking place. (pp. 28-29)
The idea of an anti-Western Nazism sympathetic to the Soviet Union eventually led to the identification of Hexel and Hepp as the leaders of a new terrorist group, which was eventually found to have been trained in Lebanon by the Soviet-sponsored PLO and to have mounted the attacks in collusion with Abul Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front faction. (p. 32)
The belief that freedom of speech and religion are absolutes that cannot be compromised even in the slightest way of out of very real security concern is merely tantamount to replacing one kind of violation of rights with another, even worse violation of those same rights. It is evident that such terror-inflicted violations of the civil rights of a people may, if attacks are an extraordinary action; but it is equally evident that there is some point at which terror becomes by far the bigger threat to citizens’ rights and the time comes to take unflinching action. In this regard, there is apparently a moment of truth in the life of many modern democracies when civil liberties has gone too far and impede the protection of life and liberty, and governments decide to adopt active measures against the forces that menace their societies. (p. 33)
International terrorism is the use of terrorist violence against a given nation by another state, which uses the terrorists to fight a proxy war as an alternative to conventional war. Sometimes the terror is imported at the initiative of a foreign movement which nevertheless enjoys the support of a sovereign state, at the very least in the form of a benign passivity which encourages the growth of such groups on its own soil. The reason that international terrorism is so persistent and so difficult to uproot is that the support of a modern state can provide the international terrorist with everything that the domestic terrorist usually lacks in the way of cultural and logistical assistance. (p. 52)
As has by now been revealed in the wake of the collapse of Soviet Communism in 1989, most of the international terror that plagued the world from the late 1960s through the mid-1980s was the product of an ad hoc alliance between the Soviet bloc and dictatorial Arab regimes. Together, these two groups of states sponsored or supported most of the international terrorist activities that took place during this period. (p. 53)
By the 1960s, the Soviets (KGB/GRU) had established recruitment centers for terrorists of both Marxist and non-Marxist varieties in Moscow – Communist Party members at the Lenin Institute and the non-Marxists at the Patrice Lumumba People’s Friendship University. Their ‘students’ were selected for training in a network of training camps in Odessa, Baku, Simferopol, and Tashkent, where they were taught propaganda, bomb making, urban warfare, and assassination techniques. The graduates of such courses were often sent to Cuba, Bulgaria, and North Korea. One of the best-known among them was the notorious arch terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as ‘Carlos the Jackal.’ (p. 55)
…the centrality of terrorism to Soviet foreign policy emerged only in the 1960s, with the stalemate in the Cold War and the emergence of independent Arab states willing to hitch their oil revenues and their war against Israel to the terrorist international. During the 1950s, it still appeared as though containment might fail, and the Communist juggernaut would continue its expansion into Southern Asia, Southern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and South America. But by the 1960s, the nuclear balance of terror between the superpowers had cooled any lingering Soviet interest in open confrontations with the West. The borders of the conflict had stabilized. The Soviet Union was shut out of any substantial influence in the democratic countries, and the Cold War had developed into a series of proxy confrontations in the Third World. (pp. 56-57)
Here, the carefully concealed, one-step-removed brand of Soviet-supported terrorism found a ready partner in the rabid anti-Western antipathies of the radical Arab regimes were established in mid-century, and they fulminated with rage over what they considered to be centuries of Western oppression of a humiliated Arab world. (p. 57)
Terror, of course, had been a staple crop of Middle Eastern politics for a thousand years, since the time of the eleventh-century Shiite Assassin sect, originally called hashishin, for the hashish with which they drugged themselves to better carry out their deadly attacks against their Seljuk Turkish rulers. But it was only with the emergence of independent Arab states that this tested weapon of subduing opponents was transformed into a habitual tool of foreign policy, rivaling oil as the Middle East’s chief export, and reaching practically every part of the world. (P. 57)
State-sponsored terror of a more limited variety had in fact been a constant factor in the Arab war against Israel. The Jewish communities in mandatory Palestine were subjected to campaigns of terror from the 1920s on. After Israel’s independence in 1948, Egypt and Syria continued to encourage cross-border fedayeen attacks, which claimed hundreds of lives and resulted in Israeli counteractions on the Arab side of its borders. In 1964 and 1965, Egypt and Syria established rival ‘Palestinian Liberation’ groups modeled after the National liberation Front (FLN), whose eight-year insurgent war had succeeded in driving the French from Algeria only two years earlier. The avowed goal of both these organizations was the ‘liberation of Palestine,’ which in practice meant liberating it from both the Israel and the Jordanian states. The Egyptian group, called the Palestine Liberation Organization, was led by Ahmed Shukeiri, whom the diplomat and historian Conor Cruise O’Brien later referred to as a ‘windbag’s windbag.’ More deadly was the Fatah organization sponsored by Syria and headed by Yasir Arafat, which by 1967 had mounted a campaign of cross-border attacks primarily against Israeli civilian targets. After the defeat of the Arab armies in the Six-Day War of that year, Arafat dumped Shukeiri and became the head of a unified PLO structure. Early on, Arafat recognized that the support of various Arab states would be insufficient to produce any kind of sustained terrorist campaign against Israel. Egyptian President Nasser’s fulminations notwithstanding, Shukeiri had never been on a short leash in Syria, and his gunmen had run into trouble with Jordanian troops from the very first. (In September 1970, King Hussein expelled the PLO from Jordan in a bloody stroke that left ten thousand dead) Arafat therefore intensified PLO ties with the Soviet bloc, which would help him wage an unrelenting terrorist war against Israel. One of his first encounters was with Fidel Castro, who had repeatedly welcomed him to Havana from 1965 on. Later, the Soviets trained thousands of PLO operatives, awarded them special diplomatic status, and allowed them free movement throughout the countries of the Eastern bloc. (pp. 58-59)
Within short order, the Soviet-PLO axis had managed to transform an astonishing collection of domestic terrorist factions into a full-blown international movement devoted to anti-Western and anti-Israeli political violence. In time, the PLO’s newfound playground of horrors offered a base of operations and a haven for virtually every one of the most notorious terror groups ever to raise its head. The IRA, the German Baader- Meinhof, the Red Army Faction, and numerous neo-Nazi splinters, the Italian Red Brigades, the Japanese Red Army, the French Action Directe, the Sandinistas and a dozen other Latin American groups, the Turkish Liberation Army, the Armenian Asala, the Kurdish PKK, and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards – all came to the PLO camps in Lebanon, were trained and armed there, and dispatched to their targets. ……Arafat’s activities in Lebanon were replicated to different degrees by Libya, Syria, Iraq, and South Yemen. (pp. 60-61)
The Jonathan Institute in 1979: The idea that terrorism was not merely a random collection of violent acts by desperate individuals, but a means of purposeful warfare pursued by states and international organizations was at that time simply too much for many to believe. (p. 64)
The recognition of that the Arabs would not be able to defeat Israel within its new boundaries gave birth to two competing approaches toward Israel within Arab politics. The first approach maintained that since the Arabs lacked credible war option against Israel in its present boundaries, they had no choice but to gradually come to terms with Israel’s existence, and eventually to make formal peace with it. It was this line of thinking which, for example, led to the gradual reconciliation between Israel and Jordan, and to the eventual signing of a formal peace between them. Yet, simultaneously there developed a second approach, which started out from the same premise but reached a dramatically different conclusion: True, its proponents argued, Israel could not be defeated within its present boundaries; therefore, the proper policy would be to reduce it to its former indefensible frontiers and proceed to destroy it from there. Those who held this view believed that Israel could be made to return to the pre-1967 borders through a combination of relentless terrorist attacks and diplomatic pressure by the Arab states on the West to demand Israel’s withdrawal. (p. 100)
This second school of thought has been championed by the PLO for over twenty years. Indeed, since the PLO formally adopted what it calls the ‘Phased Plan’ at its 1974 Cairo Conference, it has consistently been the most outspoken exponent of this view in the Arab world. According to the Phased Plan, the PLO would at first establish its ‘state of Palestine’ on any territory which ‘would be evacuated by the Zionist enemy.’ This new Arab state would then align itself with the other ‘confrontation states’ and prepare for the second stage, the eradication of Israel in a renewed onslaught. Until 1992, all Israeli governments, whether led by the Labor Party or by the Likud, sought to strengthen the first approach in the Arab world while discouraging the second, striving to achieve peace with the Arab states while remaining within the improved defensive borders. Though there were differences as to what territorial concessions Israel might be prepared to make, there was a broad consensus against returning to the pre-1967 lines, which had been so fragile as to have provoked the Six-Day War, and against the establishment of a PLO state next to Israel. The collapse of the Soviet Union, the chief patron of the Arab dictatorships, and the Allied victory in the Gulf War created international conditions conducive to reaching an Arab-Israeli peace on this basis – and it was from this consensual position that Israel opened negotiations with all its neighbors at the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991. But the rise of the Labor government in Israel in June 1992 produced a drastic change in Israeli foreign policy. Naively dismissing the PLO’s professed ultimate aims as ‘propaganda for internal consumption,’ the Labor government attempted for the first time to grant many of the PLO’s demands – in the hope of being able to forge an alliance with it. At Oslo, Israel in effect accepted the first stage of the PLO’s Phased Plan: a gradual withdrawal to the pre-1967 border and the creation of the conditions for an independent PLO state on its borders (except for and the other Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, which were left for later negotiation). The first step in the Israeli withdrawal was the evacuation of the Israeli administration and military presence from Gaza. The Gaza district is a narrow strip of land along the Mediterranean some forty miles southwest of Tel Aviv, with a population of about 800,000 Palestinian Arabs, half of them refugees, and with a history of terrorism which competes with Lebanon. Egypt occupied Gaza during the Israeli War of Independence in 1948 and controlled the district for nineteen years. During this period, the Palestinian Arabs of Gaza were denied Egyptian citizenship – as compared with Palestinian Arabs living in lands captured by Israel and Jordan in 1948, who were immediately granted citizenship by those two countries. But this did not mean that Gaza was not useful to Nasserist Egypt. In the 1950s, Gaza became the foremost base for fedayeen, terrorists backed by the Egyptian government, who staged murderous cross-border raids into Israel resulting in hundreds of deaths and casualties. When Gaza fell into Israel’s hands during the 1967 Six-Day War, the city was in a state of appalling underdevelopment and continued to be one of the principal centers of terrorist activity until 1970, when a concerted action by Israel uprooted most of the active terrorist cells from the area. While Gaza’s economy grew over 400 percent in the subsequent years of Israeli administration, the most ambitious Israeli efforts to dismantle the refugee camps and move the residents into modern and permanent housing projects met with ferocious resistance from the PLO, which relied on the system of refugee camps to foster anti-Israeli hatred and provide the organization with a steady stream of recruits for its terrorist activities. In the end, only about 11,000 families were moved into the new apartment blocks. Over the years, Gaza has become a symbol to Israelis as a lair of some of the most rabid Jew-haters in the Middle East. Despite a rich Jewish history, Gaza has become a byword for a hostile and alien place, one of the few bits of land taken by Israel in the Six-Day War of which many Israelis would be pleased to rid themselves. For this reason, it was chosen by the Oslo negotiations as the most likely spot to be transferred to the hands of Yasir Arafat as an ‘empirical’ experiment to prove that a PLO state on Israel’s borders would be a step toward peace. (pp. 100-103)
Under these Oslo accords, Israel was to withdraw in stages from all the populated areas in the West Bank and Gaza, and the PLO would set up a regime ostensibly called ‘autonomy,’ but which in effect would have nearly all the trappings and attributes of a sovereign state: its own army (called a ‘police force’); its own executive, legislative, and judicial branches (all of them controlled by Arafat); its own flag, passports, stamps, and border authorities. The PLO in turn promised to annul the PLO Covenant, which calls for Israel’s destruction, and to act resolutely to quell terrorist attacks emanating from PLO-controlled areas. Shortly after Israel withdraw from Gaza, it became abundantly clear that the PLO had no intension of fulfilling any of its commitments under the Oslo agreement. Arafat refused to convene the Palestine National Council to annul the PLO Covenant, daily generating new excuses until the Israeli government even stopped asking. Equally, it became apparent that far from acting against terrorist organization in Gaza, the PLO presided over a fantastic explosion of anti-Israel terrorism from Gaza that threatened to turn its mini-state there into a replica of the PLO mini-state in the Lebanon of the 1970s. Within a year and a half after Oslo, the agreement heralded by the Labor government as ‘the end to terror,’ acts of terror against Israel had reached unprecedented dimensions. In the first eighteen months after Oslo, 123 Israelis were killed in terrorist attacks, many of them launched from Gaza, as compared to sixty-seven in the comparable period before Oslo. This was more than double the casualties in terrorist attacks during any comparable period in the preceding two decades – proportionately as if 6,000 Americans had died from terror attacks in a year and a half. One of the leaders of Arafat’s security services in Jericho, Abu al-Fahd, put it more simply: ‘We will continue the struggle for the liberation of Jerusalem, Haifa, and Beit She'an’ – in other words, all of Israel. With this kind of policy, it is no wonder that soon after Israel’s withdrawal the various terrorist groups headquartered in Gaza understood that the time had come for an unprecedented murder spree against Israel. Downtown Jerusalem and central Tel Aviv became the scenes of horrible carnage as buses exploded and crowds of pedestrians were mowed down by machine gun fire. The same happened in the Israeli towns of Hadera, Afula, and Ashdod, and at Beit Lid near Netanya. Virtually no part of the country was safe. Some of these murders were carried out by PLO operatives, whom Arafat did not discipline in any way. Most were conducted by two Islamic movements in Gaza, Hamas and the Islamic Jihad, which dramatically expanded their operations after the Israeli withdrawal. Here, finally, they had nothing to fear. They could hatch their plans, arm their killers, dispatch them to Israel, and receive those that came back with no fear whatso ever of Israeli reprisal or interception. For as part of the Oslo accords, the Israeli government agreed, incredibly, to give up on the right of ‘hot pursuit’ and preemptive attacks against terrorists, principles that had guided all previous Israeli governments and which Israel continues to apply against the bases of the militant Islamic organization, Hizballah Lebanon. Instead, Israel now relied on Arafat’s promise to act against terrorism – thereby creating the only place in the world in which Islamic terrorists would enjoy the promise of immunity from Israeli retaliation. (pp. 104-105)
If one needs a textbook case on how not to fight terrorism, Gaza is it. For if hitherto Israel had shown the world how terrorism could be fought, now it showed how terrorism could be facilitated. From 1993 on, the Israeli government committed many of the mistakes that a state could commit in the war against terror. Its most fundamental mistake, of course, was to capitulate to the terrorists’ political demands. Seeking relief from PLO terrorism by giving the PLO land, it directly encouraged and emboldened a renewed rash of Islamic terrorism under the PLO umbrella aimed at obtaining even more land. (Later it would negotiate the trading of additional tracts of strategic land for a temporary halt in terror, thereby practically ensuring this terror will reappear once the Palestine state is established and Israeli concessions are stopped) In Oslo, Israel demonstrated to the PLO and its imitators that terrorism does indeed pay. Equally, the Israeli government severely impaired its operational capacity to fight terrorism by committing no fewer than six classic blunders: 1. It had tried to subcontract the job of fighting terrorism to someone else – in this case to the terrorists themselves. 2. It tied the hands of its security forces by denying them the right to enter or strike at terrorist havens, thus creating inviolable domains for terrorist actions. 3. It released thousands of jailed terrorists into these domains, many of whom promptly took up their weapons and returned to ply their trade. 4. It armed the terrorists, by enabling the unrestricted flow of thousands of weapons into Gaza which soon found their way into the hands of the myriad militias and terrorist gangs. 5. It promised safe passage for terrorists by exempting PLO VIPs from inspection at the border crossings from Egypt and Jordan, thus enabling the smuggling of terrorists into Gaza and Jericho, and from there into Israel itself. 6. It betrayed its Palestinian Arab informants, many of whom were murdered by the PLO, leaving Israel without an invaluable source of intelligence against operations in the evacuated areas. (pp. 110-112)
As one of the PLO leaders explained, both the PLO and Hamas share the basic strategic goal of doing away with Israel, but they differed on the method of achieving the goal: Hamas says, all of Palestine is ours, and we want to liberate it from the river to the sea in one blow. But Yasir Arafat’s Fatah, which leads the PLO, feels that the Phased Plan must be pursued. Both sides agree on the final objective. The difference between them is on the way to get there. (p. 116)
First, a clear linkage was established early on between the Islamic terrorists in Gaza and the cadres of their co-religionists in the United States and Europe, who send money and directives to Gaza on a regular basis. (Such linkages could be reversed, of course, and Hamas could easily send operatives to the West) A second deadly linkage was unwittingly facilitated by the Israeli government itself, tying the Sunni and Shiite vintages of Islamic radicalism in a tight operational knot. In 1992, before Oslo, the government of Yitzhak Rabin expelled hundred Hamas Sunni activists from Gaza to south Lebanon. There they were met by their Hizballah Shiite counter parts, who gladly instructed them in the terrorist arts of car bombing, explosives manufacture, and suicide missions. A solid link was thus forged between the two movements, including the detailing of liaison officers. (p. 118)
The acquisition of nuclear weapons by the Islamic republic would dramatically realign the political forces of the Middle East toward heightened radicalism. It would be seen as the greatest of anti-Western weapons, even more powerful than the oil weapon at its height, and a providential sign that Allah had not abandoned his faithful. (p. 123)
The trouble with militant Islam is that it appears to be an irrational goal being pursed irrationally. (p. 126)
True, the disintegration of the Soviet Union removed the ideological impetus of Communist domination, but it also lifted the staying hand that the Kremlin had exercised against the ambitions of many local clients and petty dictators. Further, the disappearance of Communist rule in the Kremlin opened up the spigot of nuclear technology that now flows from the impoverished remnants of the Soviet Union to anyone willing and able to pay for it; and the great spiritual and political void created by the evaporation of Communism has at least partly paved the way for the accelerating march of militant Islam in many parts of the Middle East and elsewhere that had previously toyed with Communism as a creed worthy of embracing. The second wave of international terrorism, that of the 1990s, is the direct result of all these developments. And the growth of militant Islamic terrorism, with independent states in the Middle East serving as its launching ground and bases of Islamic bridge heads, has already been felt in the West in more ways than one. Just as Soviet-Arab terrorism produced its imitators, so, too, the growth of this kind of chaos is bound to influence its would-be imitators. It may not be pure coincidence that the method used to bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City was a mimicry of the favorite type of Islamic fundamentalist car bombing. If this kind of domestic, international terrorism is not cut out at the root, it is bound to grow, with disastrous consequences. Undoubtedly, the two greatest obstacles to dealing with this problem are, first, recognizing the nature of the threat and, second, understanding that it can be defeated. My first intention in writing this book has been, accordingly, to alert the citizens and decision-makers of the West as to the nature of the new terrorist challenge which the democracies now face. (p. 129)
Obsta princioiis – oppose bad things when they are small – was the motto of Israel Zangwill, one of the first leaders of the modern Jewish national movement at the beginning of this century. Alas, many of his collogues did not heed this warning, and the Jewish people paid a horrendous price in the decades that followed. (pp. 130-131)
1. Impose sanctions on suppliers of nuclear technology to terrorist state. (p. 132)
2. Impose diplomatic, economic, and military sanctions on the terrorist states themselves. (p. 134)
3. Neutralize terrorist enclaves. (p. 136)
4. Freeze financial assets in the West of terrorist regimes and organizations. (p. 137)
5. Share intelligence. (p. 138)
What is not shared is basic data about terrorist organizations, their membership and their operational structure. These ‘cards’ are often withheld from the intelligence services of other countries (and sometimes even from a rival service in the same country) for two reasons: either to protect the source of the information or else, at least as often, out of a habitual organizational jealousy. (pp.138-139)
Revise legislation to enable greater surveillance and action against organizations inciting to violence, subject to periodic renewal. (p. 139)
Outlaw fund-raising and channeling of funds to terrorist groups. Permit investigation of groups preaching terror and planning the violent overthrow of the government. (p. 140)
Loosen warrant requirements in terrorist cases. Restrict ownership of weapons. (p. 141)
Tighten immigration laws. Require periodic legislative review to safeguard civil liberties. (p. 142)
Actively pursue terrorists. (p. 143)
Do not release jailed terrorists. Among the most important policies which must be adopted in the face of terrorism is the refusal to release convicted terrorists from prisons. This is a mistake that Israel, once the leader in anti-terror techniques, has made repeatedly. Release of convicted terrorists before they have served their full sentences seems like an easy and tempting way of defusing blackmail situations in which innocent people may lose their lives. But its utility is momentary at best. Prisoner releases only embolden terrorists to think such demands are likely to be met, they encourage precisely the kind of terrorist blackmail which they are supposed to defuse: All that Timothy McVeigh’s compatriots need to know is that the United States government is susceptible to releasing him in exchange for the lives of innocent hostages in order to get the terrorists to make just such a demand; only the most unrelenting refusal to ever give in to such blackmail can prevent most such situations from arising.
Train special forces to fight terrorism. Greater emphasis must be placed on the training of special units equipped for anti-terror operations. In anti-terror training, law enforcers learn to fight a completely different kind of gun battle, in which the goal is to hold their fire rather than to unleash it.
Operations against terrorists often involve the rescue of hostages or the possibly that innocent bystanders might be hurt. This necessarily means that the soldiers or policemen charged with fighting terrorism must learn to subdue the natural temptation to concentrate overwhelming fire on the enemy. Counter-terrorist operations usually require the barest minimum application of force necessary to overcome the terrorists, who often use hostages as a human shield. (pp. 144-145)
Educate the public. (p. 151)
The Phased Plan was adopted by the Palestine National Council (PNC), the parent body of the PLO, on June 8, 1974. It declares that ‘the PLO is fighting by every means…to free the Palestinian land and establish a national, independent, and fighting government over every part of the soil of Palestine to be freed.’ It continues: ‘After its establishment, the national Palestinian government will fight for the unity of the countries of confrontation, to complete the liberation of all the Palestinian land…’ The Phased Plan was entirely broadcast by Saut Falastin Radio, Egypt on the day of its adaptation and may be found reprinted in Netanyahu, A Place Among the Nations, pp. 433-434.
Copyright Disclaimer Under Section 107 of the Copyright Act 1976, allowance is made for "fair use" for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use.
Comentários