The only faulty intelligence apparent belonged to those same Israeli leaders committing the bleatings. The combination of the Hamas threat and the Israeli self-recriminations served to legitimate the next few Hamas attacks in the eyes of the world, despite the fact that those attacks would have been carried out anyway.
Today, the first of those attacks came. 7 people were killed and 84 injured when a bomb exploded at a Hebrew University cafeteria.
Hamas didn't need the justification. Terrorism by definition is unjustified, an act committed by people who hate other humans. Yet the attack did not serve to stem the flow of excuses coming from Israeli authorities. A short time after the attack, while the bodies were still warm and the wounded still being transported to hospital, Israel Police Inspector General Shlomo Aharonishky went on national radio to repeat the mantra that has become de rigueur among security chiefs: "We can't protect all places at all times. We can't stop all the terrorists all the time."
Such statements do nothing to put the Israeli public at ease, nothing to deter other terrorists from perpetrating their acts of murder, and nothing to show that the Israeli security establishment is at all interested in doing their jobs. What they do accomplish is to show the entire world the true cowardice of Israel's security leaders when faced with the need to do their jobs properly.
I recently spent two weeks in the US, including a number of days in New York City. I had not been there since before September 11, and what I saw on this trip was very educational, especially to someone who has been living in Israel for more than five years. Every store in lower Manhattan that I entered had an armed security guard at the door checking each customer who entered. Bags were inspected thoroughly. In some office buildings a detailed examination was carried out of personal identification apers for anyone wishing to enter. This included taking photographs of visitors and performing identification by way of a contraption that reads a person's cornea through the eyeball.
It is understood why New York City feels the need for such elaborate security measures. It is the typical human reaction to violence. But New York City experience one day of horror - a day on which about 3000 people were killed. Israel has experienced 54 years of it. The past 22 months have claimed close to 600 lives in a country whose total population is less than one-third that of Greater New York.
In Israel, it is entirely possible for a person to carry a 100-pound bomb into virtually any public building in the country. Security personnel are generally lax in their attitudes to the situation, believing that security alerts are routine, rather than necessary, and that there is little they can do to prevent attacks anyway. Sounds an awful lot like the leaders of Israel's security establishment have very attentive subordinates.
Paying attention to the boss is a very good thing in most cases. But when what the boss says damages national security rather than reinforce it, when human lives are at stake, such bosses should be very careful of what they say.
When the security forces prevent a terrorist attack, they are quick to take full credit for their heroism. Such credit is richly deserved, and it says here that the security forces are not given enough of it - particularly by the Israeli left. But shirking responsibility like Aharonishky did today is the height of hypocrisy.
There are ways to deter and prevent terrorism. First among them is to kill off the terrorists. These people have no respect for human life, and therefore forfeit their own right to life. Salah Shehadeh was perhaps the best example of this. He made sure that he was surrounded at all times by enough civilians, and enough children, to deter an attack by the IDF - easily the most humane of all armed forces in the world. In fact, according to an Israeli intelligence officer, seven previous attempts to kill Shehadeh were aborted because he was surrounded by civilians.
But if civilians are killed in the process of eliminating terrorist masterminds, the fault lies first with the terrorist himself, who cares little if at all whether his victims are Jewish or Arab, and second with the civilians themselves for allowing the terrorist into their midst. The IDF did its job in preventing terrorism by killing Shehadeh. There was no loss of innocent life in the attack, since had those surrounding him been spared, they would have lived on to protect more terrorists in the future.
But killing individual terrorists will not stop the terrorism. Israel must reconquer the Occupied Territories - those currently occupied by the Palestinian terrorist entity. Not only the "terrorist infrastructure" but also the people responsible for building and maintaining it should be destroyed or deported. Israel must actively rid itself not just of the terrorists, but of terrorism in all its incarnations.
There are other means that will help in deterring and preventing terrorism. They must be used together in concert with the elimination of the terrorists. These include not providing any encouragement to remaining terrorists. Israel's political leaders must refrain from self-flagellation every time there are unexpected results of an IDF attack. In war, civilians die. If it were really a problem for those civilians, they would not have launched the war in the first place, and they would not now support those who prosecute it.
There must be no apologetics and no recriminations. Israel is protecting the security of its citizens, and this is the first requirement of any sovereign government.
There must be no security lapses. There is no reason on Earth that is good enough to explain why security guards are lax in their duties while hundreds of civilians are killed by the terrorists they are meant to stop.
And when there are lapses, like in today's attack at Hebrew University, there must be no excuses. If Shlomo Aharonishky or others in the security establishment are so prepared to admit that they cannot do their job properly, they should resign and allow someone else to take their place who can protect Israelis properly.
Copyright 2002. All rights reserved. Yehuda Poch is a journalist living in Israel. Reproduction in electronic or print format by permission of the author only.
