Katz - The ghost warriors : inside Israels undercover war against suicide terrorism

The seventh of the eight Arab-Israeli wars was fought between October 1, 2000, and April 30, 2008. It was the longest protracted conflict in Israels brief and bloodstained history, and it was waged inside the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as inside most of Israels towns and cities. The battlefields werent barren stretches of no-mans-land where two armies clashed. They were cafs and city buses, shopping malls, and even childrens bedrooms. Palestinian terrorist groupsHamas and the Islamic Jihad, together with forces allied with the Palestinian Authorityperpetrated hundreds of suicide bombings and active shooter attacks against Israels population centers; thousands more attacks were foiled before the terrorists could reach their targets. The bloodshed resulted in 1,053 Israeli dead and nearly 5,000 wounded. The majority of Israels casualties were civilians. There were 4,789 Palestinians killed during the war. The vast majority of the Palestinian casualties were combatants.

The seventh of the eight Arab-Israeli wars was the third bloodiest in Israels brief but all too bloody historyonly the 1948 War of Independence and the 1973 Yom Kippur War resulted in more killed and wounded in action. Yet these years of carnage were never actually called a war. The tense and terrifying reality that was those horrible eight years was known simply as the intifada, the Palestinian colloquial term for uprising or shaking something off. This, the second such uprising, eventually earned a name: the al-Aqsa intifada.

Wars are generally fought to achieve political objectives or to conquer swaths of territories held by others. Yet there was no realistic Palestinian end game to the violence; there was no master plan, either by Palestinian Authority president Yasir Arafat or the Hamas leadership, to achieve political concessions from Israel or to create new fact-on-the-ground territorial realities as a result of the endless killing. The only tangible Palestinian military objective of the intifada, it appeared, was to make Israel bleed.

The suicide bombings and massacres were never going to force Israel into making political concessions. The opposite, in fact, occurred. The intifada emboldened Israels right wing and all but diluted the political strength of the left wing in Israel, who believed that peaceful coexistence with the Palestinians was achievable. The intifada also destroyed Yasir Arafats post-Oslo political legitimacy as a responsible peacemaker in the eyes of the West and many Arab states who, following the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, found themselves on the right side of history in the global war on terror.

The intifada was by no means a spontaneous eruption of violence. For months, throughout peace negotiations with Israel, Arafat had planned for it as the means to support his political standings. He positioned his resources accordingly. Yet the eruption of the violence caught Israel by surprise. The two Israeli intelligence services responsible for counterintelligence and counterterrorist operations against the PalestiniansAman, or Military Intelligence, and primarily the Shin Bet, the internal security and counterterrorist agencyhad misjudged Palestinian intentions, underestimated their capabilities and rage, and dismissed the level of outside moneyprimarily from Iran and Hezbollahthat would ultimately fuel the bloodshed. But Israeli intelligence was operating in the dark for several years: when Israel withdrew from the West Bank cities and from the Gaza Strip as part of the Oslo Accords, Israeli intelligence services had lost their traditional bases of operations and day-to-day access with their agents and sources in the field. Israeli intelligence agents could no longer overtly run human intelligence sources inside the Gaza Strip and in the West Bank. Both Aman and the Shin Bet were forced to rely on electronic and signals intelligence and cooperation with their U.S.-funded and CIA-trained Palestinian counterparts in Arafats numerous security services; all of these sources had great limitations. Exacerbating the situation, Israels security apparatusprimarily its citizen army, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF)was not ready, nor was it mobilized for a war inside cities and villages that it had once controlled.

Peace, perhaps, was never really a possibility between Israel and the Palestinians: two enemies so entrenched in unimpeachable stances. Four different Israeli prime ministers from four different political camps were voted in and out of office during the span of this intifada. Political debate in Israel, as fractious and opinionated as can be found in any democracy, was always a mix of surviving today and thriving tomorrow, and thoughts of survival were difficult to think of on days when buses were being ripped apart at the frame by suicide bombers. Survival meant destroying the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure by any and all means.

To Israel this intifada was nothing short of total warthere were no rules in this war, no invisible lines in the sand that the Palestinians wouldnt cross out of the fear of international condemnation. There were never any calculations by the Palestinians to call off operations in order to spare civilian casualties: the Palestinian groups purposely mounted attacks that would result in catastrophic loss of life, and they were incredibly effective and relentless in perpetrating this campaign. In its fight against the Palestinian terror campaign, the State of Israel mustered all of its military, intelligence, technological, and law enforcement capabilities in a singular mission. The campaign was driven by intelligence and directed by two parallel paths: preventative deterrencethe nonstop law enforcement effort to buttress Israels cities with layer upon layer of security, making it difficult for the bombers to reach their targets; and proactive deterrencethe dynamic effort of Israels aerial and military might and counterterrorist forces to capture, kill, and destroy the Palestinian commanders who directed the intifada and dispatched the terrorists into Israel. Ultimately, much of the proactive deterrence fell on the shoulders of Israels special operations units.