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Hard Questions, Tough Answers with Yossi Alpher - December 1, 2008

Q's re: Lessons from the terrorist attack on Mumbai, and the infrastructure of Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations.
Q. What can Israel learn from the terrorist attack on Mumbai last week? Where can it help?

A. Beginning with the second question, we Israelis have a dangerous
"know-it-all" tendency in situations like this that we have to be careful to suppress. This is not India's first experience with large-scale urban terrorism carried out by Muslim extremists. Moreover, the differences in scale between the Indian and Israeli experiences are so large as to preclude facile comparisons. Mumbai's population alone is two and a half times the size of Israel's. The length of coastline India has to guard makes Israel's look like child's play. Nor has Israel (or for that matter just about anyone else) ever experienced a simultaneous attack on eight urban objectives, including huge multi-story hotels, by well-trained terrorists possessing good intelligence. Besides, Israeli anti-terrorist intelligence and operations have also failed spectacularly at times, and at a heavy cost in civilian and military deaths. Remember Maalot, the coast road bus and the Savoy hotel in Tel Aviv, all in the mid-1970s--not to mention the Second Lebanon War in the summer of 2006.

Of course, Israeli experience should and will be made available if Indian security institutions request it. Israel has successfully sealed off its coastline against terrorist attacks for around two decades now, invoking fairly modest means. And it has developed elite units that specialize in the kind of urban anti-terrorist operations that we witnessed in Mumbai. Israel and India have in any case developed an impressive infrastructure of security cooperation. But it is generally downplayed in Delhi in view of regional and domestic Muslim sensitivities.

On the other hand, one impressive aspect of the official Indian response to the Mumbai attacks that Israel can learn from is accountability. The resignation of Indian Home Minister Shivraj Patil following Mumbai reminds us of how our prime minister, defense minister and IDF chief of staff refused to step down after the Second Lebanon War debacle. (Indeed, our prime minister still refuses to step down today, after being informed he will be indicted on criminal charges, but that is a different affair and a different national scandal.)

Clearly, the resignation in Delhi points also to an understanding in India that serious intelligence and operational mistakes enabled this attack to take place. And precisely because the Mumbai attackers singled out a Jewish target, Chabad House, a large degree not only of solidarity but of cooperation appears to be mandated.

At the broadest strategic level, Israel and Jews have now been dragged into the militant Muslim offensive against India and, indirectly, the India-Pakistan conflict. By the same token, the terrorists' decision to expand their targets to include westerners, Israelis and Jews places India in the same camp with the latter. This is the "global jihadi" aspect of these attacks and what distinguishes them from many earlier terrorist atrocities in India that focused solely on Indians. Israel must also assume from herein that terrorists closer to home, like Hezbollah and Hamas, will seek to emulate the Mumbai model of multiple simultaneous terrorist attacks aimed at killing large numbers of civilians in an urban center.

Another immediate lesson Israel must draw is the need to upgrade security for Israeli and Jewish institutions and offices in India, on the assumption that they will be targeted again. Israel cannot protect non-Israeli Jewish institutions like Chabad, but it certainly can advise them regarding the minimal security precautions they now must take. Whether additional non-western countries should be included in this effort is another issue; Chabad, for example, has centers like the one in Mumbai all over the third world, wherever Israeli backpackers are found.

In a way, the situation we witnessed in Mumbai last week is reminiscent of Europe in the 1970s, when Black September and Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine attacks on both Israeli and Jewish targets mandated a sweeping Israeli security response. Whether the India attack should also be seen by Israel as requiring direct Israeli retaliation against the perpetrators or preemptive strikes on their training camps in an attempt to deter them from future attacks--as was the case in the 1970s--is a very different question. Certainly the perpetrators of the Mumbai attack must now be included in some way in Israeli anti-terrorism intelligence coverage, thereby at least indirectly linking Israel to the India-Pakistan conflict.

These considerations also once again highlight Pakistan's crucial role in both nurturing and combating global Islamic terror. President-elect Obama was right to prioritize the Afghanistan-Pakistan complex over Iraq in terms of America's global anti-terrorist interests.

Finally, one domestic Israeli response to the Mumbai attacks warrants our attention. It is election time in Israel. Because the Foreign Ministry's situation room takes responsibility for the fate of Israelis abroad in situations like Mumbai, FM Tzipi Livni, whose leadership of the Kadima party is criticized by her political opponents due to her alleged lack of experience, had an unusual opportunity to display her leadership talents at a time when all Israelis were glued to their TV sets and neither PM Ehud Olmert nor Defense Minister Ehud Barak had any call to address the nation.

Accordingly Livni held a press conference late Friday afternoon, apparently with the idea of showing she was "in charge". The results were mixed: she dwelled too much on murky details that could have been left to her subordinates in the Foreign Ministry, and not enough on the strategic dimensions. Particularly missing was a declaration of solidarity with the citizens of Mumbai in their time of trial. On the other hand, she was able to reassure Israelis that their personal security abroad at times of crisis was being looked after fairly effectively.

Q. The Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations have been more or less suspended at least until after Israel's elections. Both the outgoing Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority appear anxious to ensure that the negotiations infrastructure they put into place survives those elections. What, in fact, does that infrastructure consist of?

A. I doubt any of the principals involved in the negotiations that commenced in Annapolis a year ago will now write a book about them, simply because not enough of substance appears to have happened to distinguish these negotiations from the preceding end-points of Camp David in 2000 and Taba in 2001. But the bureaucratic infrastructure created by the Israeli and Palestinian teams for the negotiations is interesting. Recently I've had the opportunity to hear several senior Palestinians describe it in some detail--perhaps because indeed there is not a lot of substantive progress to talk about.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Abu Ala (Ahmed Qurei) recently explained that the two sides began by agreeing on the following format: 1) their aim is a comprehensive agreement; 2) the agreement would cover all issues and
details, but "nothing would be agreed until everything is agreed;" 3) there would be no media access to the talks; and 4) the end product would be neither provisional borders nor a provisional state [as provided for by the roadmap] but rather an independent Palestinian state.

According to Abu Ala, the negotiations were structured at four levels. Abu Mazen (PLO leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas) and Israeli PM Ehud Olmert; Abu Ala and Israeli FM Tzipi Livni; a steering committee; and 13 negotiating teams. Two additional structural dimensions were a permanent trilateral ministerial team consisting of Abu Ala, Livni and US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and a ministerial security team consisting of Rice, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian Authority PM and Defense Minister Salam Fayyad.

The 13 negotiating teams were largely of a secondary nature, covering topics like economy, environment, water, state-to-state relations, agriculture, the private sector, etc. In other words, most issues of substance, such as refugees, the holy basin in Jerusalem and the fate of the settlements were dealt with at the Livni/Abu Ala and Olmert/Abu Mazen level. According to Abu Ala, he and Livni agreed that the refugee issue would be broken down into three agenda elements: who is responsible, how the "right of return" should be translated into practical terms and given meaning, and (once 1 and 2 were agreed) what sort of international mechanism would implement agreement. But apparently none of these issues was ever agreed.

Returning to the 13 teams, according to a Palestinian public figure who turned down the chairmanship of one of them, their creation was an Israeli idea. Many Palestinians saw them as little more than "make work". Moreover, many moderate Palestinians felt that the entire Palestinian negotiating side was illegitimate insofar as it was not backed by a recognized and effective delegating authority. The relevant PLO institutions (under Oslo, it is the PLO that negotiates with Israel) are weak and "out of the picture", while the Palestinian Authority has lacked legitimate authority to sponsor peace talks since Hamas, which opposes negotiations, won a majority in the 2006 parliamentary elections.

Thus the Palestinian negotiating teams suffered from a lack of direction and coordination. In this regard, for example, Abu Ala's assertion that the Arab League, under the Arab Peace Initiative, had authorized the PLO to agree on a refugee solution rings hollow.

In contrast, the security discussions supervised by Barak and Fayyad, with considerable US and other international involvement, did show some progress. Witness the success of newly trained and deployed Palestinian police battalions in Jenin, Nablus, Hebron and elsewhere. Presumably, then, one useful purpose the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations served over the past year was to provide "cover" for that progress.