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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - August 8, 2005

Q. ...intel failures re: recent killing of Palestinian Israelis by an IDF soldier? Q. How will Binyamin Netanyahu's resignation affect disengagement and its immediate aftermath?

Q. In what ways did the security establishment fail to prevent the massacre of Palestinian citizens of Israel in Shfaram by an IDF soldier on August 4? What lessons can be learned?

A. Any successful terrorist act against Israelis, whether perpetrated by an Arab or (as in this case) a Jew, has to be considered a security failure. This one was particularly painful because it was so predictable. Responsibility is spread among a number of organizations and institutions.

First, at least some IDF authorities understood early on that the army had drafted a soldier, Eden Natan-Zada, with Kahanist leanings and psychological problems. Yet despite his repeated unauthorized absences from service, his residence in Tapuach, a settlement with a pro-Kahanist population, and even his own parents' request that the army disarm him, he was not detained.

Secondly, the Shabak or General Security Service (Shin Bet) inexplicably failed to recognize that Natan-Zada fit perfectly its profile of a right wing assassin or terrorist: a young loner, newly religious, living in an extremist settlement yet hovering socially on the fringes of extremist settler society, and armed. The Shabak's failure to discover and apprehend Natan-Zada prior to his crime is amplified by the fact of his residence in Tapuach, a settlement under close scrutiny due to its extremist population. There were also apparent failures of communication between the IDF and the Shabak that are uncharacteristic of what is usually a closely coordinated security network.

Third, even had Natan-Zada been apprehended in time and disarmed, it is doubtful he could have been detained for long. The Shabak has a list of some 500 settler and settler-oriented extremist youth who are deemed potentially violent, not to mention some of the rabbis who incite them. Yet Attorney General Menachem Mazuz has insisted on maintaining a very liberal standard of freedom of speech and a high standard of evidence, thereby making it difficult to prosecute potential offenders or place them under administrative or other detention.

Fourth, one additional reason that Natan-Zada was able to carry out his attack--an armed, kipa-wearing soldier in a bus full of Arabs and Druze in the heart of their Galilee village--was that the Israel Police were busy at the time dealing with settler protests in the south and were too short-handed to patrol all other potential trouble spots. (One interpretation of Natan-Zada's choice of a target in the north is precisely that he wanted to draw large numbers of police away from the south--to control rioting among Galilee Arabs following the Shfaram massacre--and thereby to thin out the police forces keeping protesters in the south from infiltrating the Gaza Strip prior to disengagement.) This points once again to the security establishment's failure to create a police force adequate to the huge anti-terrorist, anti-crime and public order tasks that have been thrust upon it.

The Natan-Zada terrorist attack in Shfaram will not delay disengagement. To put it bluntly, he didn't kill enough people, and he chose the wrong target. Had he attacked and murdered a much larger number of Arabs, and inside Palestine rather than Israel--say, something along the lines of the Goldstein massacre in the Machpelah Cave in February 1994--he might have succeeded in reigniting the intifada and at least delaying disengagement.

What can we learn from this incident? Even the best security forces inevitably make mistakes. In this case, the lessons seem clear:

· The IDF needs to remove from its ranks soldiers with extremist and violent political philosophies. This is not an easy step for an army that has traditionally served as an instrument of social absorption for nearly all sectors of Israeli society that serve under universal conscription.
· The attorney general and the minister of defense need to relax the criteria for administrative detention. The present situation is precisely the circumstance of danger to Israeli democracy and stability that this essentially undemocratic measure was designed to deal with. The judicial system must also begin to aggressively pursue prosecution of rabbis and other leaders who incite to mutiny and violence. Initial detentions of a few Kahana followers reportedly have already taken place.
· The Israel Police must be enlarged, even at the expense of IDF manpower. This reflects Israel's changing security priorities: very low threat of conventional warfare; high threat of low level warfare; and high threat of sedition against Israeli democracy and national institutions.
· Inter-service coordination to track down potential terrorists like Natan-Zada must be tightened.
· After disengagement from Gaza and the northern West Bank, and even before discussion of the next phase in disengagement or a peace process, extremist settlements like Tapuach, Yitzhar, and Bracha should be targeted for quick evacuation along with the outposts Sharon has pledged to remove. And mainstream settler leaders will have to begin to take a far tougher stance toward the extremists in their midst if they want to retain any credibility with the security and judicial authorities.
· Finally, it would be a mistake for law-enforcement agencies to ignore the lynch perpetrated on Natan-Zada by residents of Shfaram after he had been subdued and handcuffed by the few police on hand. While he undoubtedly deserved his fate, and though the grief of the residents of Shfaram deserves every consideration and gesture, this is not the time to allow laws to be broken so blatantly in any sector of Israeli society, whether the settlements or "minorities".


Q. How will Binyamin Netanyahu's resignation from the ministry of finance and the government on August 7 affect disengagement and its immediate aftermath?

A. Netanyahu himself acknowledged in his resignation statement that disengagement would proceed unimpeded. Had he wished his resignation to affect disengagement, he would have resigned months ago, then devoted his energies to leading the anti-disengagement camp while it still had a chance to thwart Sharon's design.

Rather, Netanyahu appears genuinely to believe that, with hindsight a few months from now, disengagement will look like a mistake, and that this will energize his now certain campaign to replace Ariel Sharon as leader of the Likud and its candidate for prime minister. Hence, despite his protestations that his resignation is a matter of conscience and that he delayed it as long as possible in order to shepherd his economic reform plan, the timing appears to be completely political: by reinforcing the split over disengagement within the Likud, claiming the leadership of the anti-disengagement lobby, and almost ensuring that the 2006 budget will fail to gain Knesset approval, Netanyahu is at one and the same time precipitating early elections sometime in the next six months, and beginning his own campaign.

The resignation and its timing also reflect internal Likud polls that show a steady drift within the party (but not in the population at large) away from Sharon and toward the anti-disengagement camp. Netanyahu could not afford to remain in the government and be left behind, particularly when Uzi Landau, until now the leader of the anti-Sharon Likud camp, has been gaining in popularity and raising campaign funds in the US. Netanyahu was also apparently under pressure from his immediate family: his father, the historian Ben Zion Netanyahu, his brother Ido, and his wife Sarah (whose brother is an extremist settler leader) all reportedly pressured him to disassociate himself from Sharon's government and from disengagement.

Netanyahu's resignation will almost certainly have a slow-down effect on the economic reform plan and perhaps on economic recovery in general. His replacement, Deputy Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, will simply not be operating in an atmosphere of sufficient political stability to proceed smoothly. If, on the other hand, Netanyahu succeeds after disengagement in unseating Sharon as Likud leader, his resignation could conceivably precipitate a dramatic revolution in Israeli politics.

If Sharon, rather than retiring at age 77, chooses to remain in politics, his only remaining option might be to team up with Labor's Shimon Peres and Shinui leader Tommy Lapid in what is termed the "big bang": creating a large secular center party in which the three leaders--average age nearly 80--combine their parties, or those portions that choose to follow them, and run on a platform that somehow spans the gap between Peres' preference for a negotiated peace process and Sharon's presumed desire to continue disengaging unilaterally. Sharon's popularity among the general electorate is calculated to place him in the leadership position of this new alignment, even though most of the Likud rank and file would almost certainly stick with Netanyahu.

Netanyahu's resignation has moved this almost surrealistic (even by Israeli political standards) scenario a little closer to fruition. Meanwhile, assuming that elections in around six months are indeed likely, Peres will no longer be able to postpone his Labor Party primary contest with Ehud Barak and Amir Peretz. Assuming there is no big bang, any one of these three would stand a far better chance of defeating Netanyahu than defeating Sharon.

Time will tell whether Netanyahu made a smart move. His political judgment in recent years has been poor: he could have defeated Sharon handily in Likud primaries in 2000 and gone on to become prime minister but instead bowed out of that contest; and he led an abortive "coup" attempt against Sharon in 2004 and emerged with egg on his face. Nor, to say the least, was he an impressive prime minister during the years 1996-1999. On the other hand, he made his mark as a decisive finance minister who turned the economy around since 2002, albeit at a heavy price in impoverishment of the lower socio-economic classes.

Now Netanyahu has chosen to take on Sharon over disengagement, a program that has won the support of most Israelis as well as most of the international community. Netanyahu might just end up as head of the Likud--and nothing else.