Brigadier General Eli Yaffe in Ha'aretz: Israel is winning its war on terrorism
April 13, 2004

We are so often forced to hear and re-hear the tiresome campus discourse on the origins of terrorism, about how it is the product of unrelieved suffering at the hands of oppressors, a savage act of retribution, but an act of retribution nonetheless. This is not so. Terrorism is a tactic, used to advance political interests. In the United States, our culture and institutions ensure that political warring never goes further than invective. In poorer countries, an AK-47 most effectively gets the point across. An international organization like Greenpeace works towards its ends by lobbying a government; an international organization like al Qaeda does so by bombing them. Within the borders of unbroken Arab despotisms that sweep from Morocco to Qatar, all politics are illegal, and therefore anyone engaged in them is a priori revolutionary. The result is that words can only bring arrest, and so politics become raw, physical and violent. In our troubled age, this Middle Eastern form of politics has scorched nations across the globe, from Spain to Kenya to Indonesia.

Furthermore, terrorism is a tactic of opportunity. When you recall that the tens of billions of dollars in losses and thousands of victims inflicted by 9-11 were financed by a sum less than that of a single tank, then you understand terrorism’s malefic pragmatism. A bloody suicide bombing against Israel costs $150 and one stupid teenager. In order to take advantage of terror’s cheapness all you have to do is dispense with a few universal principles about the sanctity of human life that it took civilization two World Wars to discover. Ignore the separation between politics and murder, or, rather, see them as one and the same. Deny that a state and its citizens are in any way dissociated. Then insist that crime is actually a punishment. If hopelessness and immiseration led to terrorism, armies of the homeless in San Francisco would be waging war on everyone north of California Street. If brutalization always saw its counterpart in retaliation, Holocaust survivors would be the most fearsome people on earth. If it were war, poverty and underdevelopment that produced terrorism, the people that frighten would be from Africa. No, the transnational terror movement has its roots not in these things but in the modern political failings of Arab governments. It is no coincidence that the region that leads in the world in non-democracy also leads the world in production of terrorists.

The arguments used to justify Palestinian suicide bombing are tenuous, mostly because the sequence leading from occupation to desperation to systematic slaughter is unclear. But moreover, the rationalizations are unprovable because there is no frame for comparison: Palestinian society is the only one to have so diligently constructed such an extravagant cult of suicide martyrdom, its youth inculcated into the joys of detonation, now so intimately intertwined within its illiberal social fabric that it leeches on its children like a parasite. Some students groups and individuals will always see justice in Palestinian terror. My only wish would be that they at least be consistent about it. If you support Hamas, you support al Qaeda. You can’t be picky about which anti-Western Islamic revolutionaries you choose to admire.

The article below from Ha’aretz offers insight into the day-to-day battles between Palestinian terrorists and Israeli counter-terrorists. The creation of a suicide bomber is a complex process, beginning with recruitment and fundraising, nurtured by cultural indoctrination, and necessitating surveillance, planning, operational support, bomb manufacture and post-operation publicity. A campaign of suicide bombing requires organized hierarchical networks, popular support and lots of cash. Last August, after a double suicide attack, the head of UC Santa Barbara’s pro-Palestinian group sent us a letter that we published on this listserv, in which he lamented how the peace process could be so damaged by the actions “two shithead, indoctrinated teenagers…two fanatical punk kids.” We replied that common sense would indicate that it is more complicated than that: “Those two kids didn't build their own bomb, indoctrinate themselves, train themselves, pay for the explosives and then drive themselves to Jerusalem. Nor are the big-money checks their families are sure to receive previously set aside by the punk kids in escrow accounts from money they'd saved pumping gas.” Spider web-like networks of terror exist in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. As long as the Palestinian Authority fails to clean these up, either out of concerns for their own safety, fears of civil war or concealed support their actions, Israel must build a wall to seal itself off.

Brigadier General Eli Yaffe, retiring as head of the General Staff's Operations Branch, reveals below that for every one or two successful attacks, ten are stopped, which means that Israeli police are stopping 80-90% of attempted attacks. Because we did not hear of a suicide bombing in the news today does not mean it was for lack of trying. Yaffe also says that every week around 100-150 terror suspects are arrested. Israel could not make these critical arrests, nor conduct its weapons and bomb factory raids, without troops in the West Bank. If Israel ends its occupation and withdraws these soldiers, it will most certainly need a long tall wall to keep the waves of bombers at bay.

Israel’s success in its antiterror campaign in the face off an onslaught unprecedented in the annals of terrorism should be praised. According to Ha’aretz’s Ehud Ya’ari, “Today there is no effective Hamas military apparatus between Hebron and Jenin, but only a handful of isolated cells that have great difficulty launching ‘quality attacks,’ as they call them. The West Bank Hamas leadership has been wiped out in targeted killings.” Perhaps this is the reason why the terrorists are sinking to new lows, even for them. Arrested members of the Tanzim militia – a branch of Arafat’s army – revealed plans to attach containers of AIDS-infected blood to bombers. These are sick people, and these bombers made up just one of the ten suicide bombings attempts foiled over the Passover weekend. It must be enraging for Hamas that they not been able to avenge Sheikh Yassin, a project on which they have surely been working around the clock. A day of death is a day of victory for Hamas. For the Israeli army, a day of victory is a day of peace, and a day of life.

Read "Victory in Israel-Palestinian war is determined by the other side's mistakes," by Amos Harel, in Ha'aretz.