NYT : Israel’s Tactics Thwart Attacks, With Trade-Off

Israel’s Tactics Thwart Attacks, With Trade-Off

By ISABEL KERSHNER | May 3, 2008

NETANYA, Israel — Suicide bombings in Israel have dropped off so significantly that the nation’s security officials now dare to speak openly of success. But the very steps they are taking to thwart bombers appear to collide head-on with the government’s agenda of achieving peace with the Palestinians.

It is a classic military-political dilemma. The progress in stopping suicide bombers, the vast majority of whom cross into Israel from the West Bank, has brought enough quiet for Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinian leadership there.

But the current calm is fragile, and to maintain it Israeli security officials say they must continue their nightly arrests and sometimes deadly raids in the heart of the West Bank — tactics at odds with a peace effort that envisions a separate Palestinian state, an eventual Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank and, in the meantime, a gradual transfer of authority to the Palestinian police.

“The price of staying out” of the West Bank, said one senior Israeli military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of military restrictions, “might be one that we don’t want to pay.”

The military’s faith in its efforts comes across in its charts showing a steep decline in suicide bombings — from a high of 59 in 2002 to only one in 2007, and one so far this year.

“It is far from a coincidence,” said Col. Herzi Halevi, commander of the Israeli Army’s Paratroops Brigade, which is at the forefront of the military campaign in the West Bank, where the borders are longer and more permeable than those in the Gaza Strip, the other Palestinian territory. “It is not that the terrorists did not try enough. They did. We know.”

The military’s change in policy came after a particularly bloody spring in 2002, when a Palestinian from the West Bank traveled nine short miles across Israel and walked into the modest Park Hotel here in Netanya, a coastal resort town, blowing himself up in the dining hall during a Passover seder.

The Park Hotel massacre, as it became known, was the climax of a bloody month in which 130 Israelis died in suicide bombings and other attacks. Within days Israeli forces invaded most of the Palestinian cities of the West Bank in an operation named Defensive Shield, wresting back control from the Palestinian Authority security forces who were supposed to be laying the foundations for a nascent Palestinian state.

Six years later, the glass doors at the entrance of the Park Hotel were flung wide open to catch the slightest breeze. In the lobby, a teenager casually played a video game while a tourist collected a hair dryer from the reception desk. Scores of guests were booked for the Passover meal.

Still, Israel is taking nothing for granted. The country will soon be going on heightened alert in the days leading to the 60th anniversary celebrations beginning Wednesday, and security officials are loath to surrender the option of striking at suicide bombers and their dispatchers at any time, on Palestinian turf.

“You cannot play from the touchdown line,” Colonel Halevi said.

Israel also started building the West Bank separation barrier in 2002, describing it as an answer to the suicide bombers. Made up mostly of fences and some sections of wall, the barrier is now about two-thirds complete. Security officials say it has proved effective, but they do not rely on it alone.

Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, has managed to straddle the seeming contradictions between the peace process and the military’s continued campaign in the West Bank largely by putting off the matter until a later date.

Despite the Bush administration’s urgings to reach a peace deal by the end of the year, Mr. Olmert has said that his goal in talks with the Palestinians is to try to define the basic parameters for a Palestinian state, not to reach a comprehensive agreement that will be put in place any time soon.

Instead, Israeli security officials point to what they call the basic conditions for safeguarding the country. According to a new study published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, a policy research institute with conservative leanings, those include a willingness to bear the political costs of military offensives, good intelligence and control of the territory from which militants operate.

In theory, Palestinian security forces would assume the responsibility of preventing such attacks, and a test of that approach will come this summer when a 600-member battalion of the Palestinian National Security Force completes an American-financed training program in Jordan. The Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, has stated that the recruits will be deployed in the northern West Bank city of Jenin, once considered the capital of the suicide bombers. Additional Palestinian forces are already due to start deploying in the city in order to prepare the ground.

But leading Israeli security figures, past and present, seriously doubt that the Palestinian police will have the capacity or the will to fight terrorism in the foreseeable future.

“It is an old naïveté that nobody believes anymore,” said Yaakov Amidror, a major general in the reserves who wrote the study.

Nor has the precedent in Gaza inspired confidence. After Israel unilaterally pulled out its troops and Jewish settlers in 2005, some hoped that with Western support, the tiny coastal strip might become a model for a future Palestinian state.

Instead the Islamic militant group Hamas took over and the rockets from Gaza went from hitting Sderot, a small Israeli border town plagued for years by rocket fire, to the major city of Ashkelon about 10 miles up the coast.

In recent months the army has been back in Gaza on an almost daily basis, searching for the militants and carrying out arrests. The security hawks fear that losing control of the West Bank would turn the Israeli cities of Netanya and Tel Aviv into Sderot.

But the resurgence of suicide bombings is still seen as the primary threat. “They are the most dangerous type of terrorist,” said Maj. Gen. Shachar Ayalon, deputy commissioner of the Israeli police, whose special units also operate in the West Bank. “Human bombs can change direction, can change targets. They are not easy to stop.”

General Ayalon speaks of “building circles of security” in and around Israel to slow the bombers’ advance. Among them he lists the West Bank separation barrier and the hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that dot the West Bank, which the Palestinians and the international community want to see removed.

Even more important, he said, is to seek out those who send the bombers “and put a threat on their life.”

There appears to be little disagreement within the security establishment, and the government seems to be acting largely in line with its recommendations. Still, there are Israelis who differ. Some attribute at least part of the reduction in suicide bombing to fatigue and self-interest on the part of the terrorist organizations. The suicide bombing in the desert town of Dimona in February, in which one woman was killed, was the first claimed by Hamas in more than three years.

Some former officials advocate relying more on the pragmatic Palestinian leadership in the West Bank. “We have to take a risk,” said Ilan Paz, a retired brigadier general at the Economic Cooperation Foundation, a research institute in Tel Aviv that supports the peace effort. “Otherwise we will have Hamas later, and we will have an even bigger risk to take.” The alternative to controlling all the territory, he said, was to reach an agreement with a partner, namely President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, who wants to keep the peace.

A few weeks ago the Palestinian Authority interior minister, Abdel Razak al-Yahya, visited the training camp in Jordan and told the trainees that their mission was to go after “the thugs and gangs and all those who would damage the Palestinian national project,” according to a senior Western official who was there.

Israel sees some value in the Palestinian policing efforts against local criminals, but has made it clear that when it comes to fighting terrorism, overall security responsibility will remain in Israel’s hands.

“First they have to prove themselves, and then we can pull out,” one senior Israeli military officer said.

Palestinian officials have accused Israel of trying to thwart and belittle their security efforts by continuing with army raids in areas where the Palestinian security forces are active, as in Nablus. “Because if we succeed there will be no need for Israeli troops to stay in the occupied territories,” said the Palestinian Authority’s foreign minister, Riad Malki.

Those wanting to advance the peace process, including the American backers, hope that Israel will gradually wind in its security net in the West Bank while the Palestinians spread theirs out.

Nobody knows how long that will take. The battalion now training in Jordan is meant to be the first of five. But for now there are no more dollars allocated for the program, and the money has run out.