Tit for Tat

Israel is getting some new neighbors. According to American Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, “We know Iran is actively sending terrorists down through Damascus into the Bekaa Valley (Lebanon,) where they train as terrorists, then engage in acts against countries in the region (Israel) and elsewhere." Iran appears to be backing the Palestinians militarily, having supplied the weapons for the Karine-A weapons ship, and now, according to the German newspaper Die Welt, Iran is assisting in the transfer of Al Quaida personnel from Afghanistan to Lebanon and Gaza. They are apparently brought to Pakistan and then smuggled into Saudi Arabia as pilgrims to Mecca, and afterwards transferred to Lebanon. Saudi Arabia is supposedly cooperating. Saudi millionaires, including members of the royal family, supplied the funds for the Karine A weapons ship. Yassir Arafat is offering $5,000 for every Al Quaida fighter who relocates to the Palestinian Authority areas, and a few have already apparently been spotted in Gaza. The rest are heading to the Bekaa Valley to link up with Hezbollah, the terrorist organization which is supplied by Iran controlled from Syria.

In order to keep all of these bad neighbors out of Israel’s yard, the government is planning to fence off Jerusalem. The plan calls for a 33-mile long fence to be built around municipal Jerusalem, including an 11-mile solid wall along its southern periphery. The fence will enclose several Arab neighborhoods including Abu Dis and Silwhan within Jerusalem, as well as the outlying settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, and not redivide the city. Both right wingers and left wingers are opposed to the plan because they fear it will eventually become a permanent border; the left are in opposition because they are eventually going to demand a withdrawal to the 1967 border and the annexation includes too much of the West Bank, and the right is opposed because it doesn’t include enough. However, the almost daily attacks in downtown Jerusalem are proving too much, and a solution had to be reached immediately. All traffic from Palestinian areas will be funneled to a few checkpoints, which are hoped will provide a serious deterrent to terror. The success or failure of this plan will likely prove or disprove the effectiveness of the “Great Wall of Israel” proposal, whereby Israel will make a giant wall to keep the invading terrorist hordes out.

Meanwhile, Gaza Security Chief Muhammed Dahlan, who planned and executed the bombing of a school bus in Kfar Darom at the beginning of the Intifada, and Yassir Arafat are both trying to circumvent their diplomatic isolation by appealing to the public. Dahlan came out in the left-wing Israeli paper Ha’aretz with an article calling for coexistence, an end to terrorism, and solving problems through negotiations, conditional on Israel’s complete and total abandonment of the West Bank and Gaza. Arafat did much the same in an editorial in the New York Times. The statements are, however, falling on deaf ears. Israeli ears have been deafened to Palestinian calls in English for coexistence which are followed up within hours with calls in Arabic with calls for “Jihad!” and more martyrs. The Bush Administration as well, while taking a year to finally come to the conclusion that Arafat is directly and personally involved in terrorism, is no longer swayed by Arafat and Dahlan’s continued condemnations of the terrorist acts which they themselves perpetrate.

While the Bush Administration’s opinion and actions have gradually come around to embrace Israel’s point of view, there are still the calls for Israel to break the “cycle of violence” from most of the newspaper editorials, the Europeans, and even many in America. These calls are based on their picture of the conflict, in which they see each attack as retaliation for a previous attack from the other side. Indeed, there is an element of revenge. After most major attacks in Israel, Israeli helicopters will usually be in the air within a few hours mercilessly rocketing empty Palestinian buildings for the cameras, thus sating the anger of most Israelis. Likewise, every suicide attack is declared as revenge for the previous “assassination” as the Palestinians like to call them, or “removal from society” as Sharon likes to call them, of Palestinian terrorist masterminds. If there were no “removals from society” at the time of the suicide bombing, then the attack is declared as revenge for another recent event. In January, four Israeli soldiers were killed by Hamas in the middle of Arafat’s cease-fire as revenge for Israel’s seizure of the Karine A weapons ship. According to this logic, by stopping the weapons shipment, Israel violated the cease fire.

Because the terrorism and Israeli counter attacks are linked together and seen as “tit for tat,” the solution is obvious. One of the parties must simply exercise restraint and break the cycle of violence. Since the Palestinians claim to be completely unable to control themselves, and Islamic terrorist organizations have no interest in catering to western sensibilities, calls for restraint fall on Israel. According to the “tit for tat” theory, if Israel would exercise restraint and simply allow Islamic terrorist organizations to exhaust their murderous rage upon Israeli citizens, then quiet will return, everybody can go back to negotiations, and peace will reign supreme. In fact, both the Barak’s Labor government and Sharon’s Likkud government have, at times, acceded to international pressure and done exactly that. After the bombing of the Dolphinarium disco, in which 21 young people were killed, there was no Israeli retaliation and Arafat declared a temporary cease fire. Of course, the shooting continued, Palestinian rage was not exhausted, and the fighting is still going strong.

Exercising restraint is not an effective means of dealing with terrorism because the terrorism is not motivated by revenge. That’s not to say that the people who strap on bombs and blow themselves up in crowded marketplaces are not angry people. In fact, a suicide bomber has to be a person filled with such rage that he hates his enemies more than he values his life. His criteria for success is not achieving an end but simply inflicting pain on others. However, it takes more than one extremely angry Palestinian to make a suicide bomb. Suicide bombers require transportation, materials, backing, and a huge amount of support. Even most educated engineers don’t know how to make C4, the plastic explosives used by the bombers. It takes a highly educated and trained mind to make the bomb, plus money and infrastructure (such as the Karine A weapons ship) to supply the components. It also requires transportation and assistance to pass Israeli security, and money to care for the surviving members of the bomber’s family. All this implies organization, and organizations cannot function on revenge and blind rage alone. Immediately after PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa was snuffed by an Israeli missile strike in Ramallah a series of bombs went off throughout Jerusalem in what the PFLP claimed as retaliation. According to the “tit for tat” subscribers, if Israel had not killed Mustafa, then the bombs would not have gone off. This is obviously untrue. The fact that Mustaffa had just been killed had no effect on a terrorist operation which had been put into motion long beforehand. According to an interview in The New Yorker, suicide bombers have to go through a rigorous selection and brainwashing course that takes at least a month. When Israel kills a terrorist leader, and the next day a bomb goes off in “revenge,” the bombing was actually planned long before. Suicide bombings may be executed by fanatics, but they are planned by cold, calculating political minds.

Likewise, when Israel carries out “removals from society,” this is not an act of revenge. Guidelines passed by the Israeli JAG (military justice system) clearly state that targeted killings can only be carried out on those who are planning to carry out an attack in the future, not those who have carried out attacks in the past but no longer pose a threat. All this is lost on those small minds which need easy characterizations, cliches, and sound bytes like “tit for tat” and “cycle of violence.” The idea that this is just some back-and-forth tribal conflict and not about something deeper is uncomplicated, easy to understand, and dead wrong.