Friday, July 26, 2002 Av 17, 5762
The long and imbecilic arm of Israel
By Yoel Marcus
The robbery of the safe deposit boxes at the Israel Discount Bank arouses professional awe. That was brilliant planning, flawless inside information, skillful execution, a right choice of timing, and scrupulous attention to detail to the point of using a vacuum cleaner to remove all traces of evidence.
What has the State of Israel come to, if the only thing that goes right is a bank robbery?
Where are the days before the IDF word-laundry turned "assassination" into "preventive strike"? The days when missions of this type were carried out in secret, most of them successfully? When an operative dressed as a woman and bumped off a wanted Palestinian in Beirut without harming his family? When today's chief of staff oversaw the liquidation of Abu Jihad at his home in Tunis and departed without a hair falling from the head of his wife and children?
Where are the days when the perpetrators of the massacre of our athletes in Munich were struck down with surgical precision, one by one, and no one would have been the wiser if not for a little identification mix-up in Lillehammer? Where are the tweezer operations, like the capture of Eichmann, who was brought to Israel to stand trial? Some liquidations have never been reported or spoken about, but at least they were all the product of an orderly decision making process, and not the whim of one man.
Israel's long arm had become a trademark. But not everything that could be done in the past can still be done today, because of our diplomatic relations and because the rules have changed. And not everything that was effective and served as a deterrent in the past does those things equally well today. Expulsions, house demolition, andcollective punishments, do more harm than good. Times and circumstances have changed. Our long, legendary arm has gone from smart to imbecilic.
"We used to catch elephants with tweezers," says Avi Gil. "Today, we catch tweezers with elephants." Yossi Sarid, who once sat on secret committees that decided matters of life and death, says that there are times when you don't have to be a military expert - you just have to be an expert in the brains department. When 180 people, including women and children, are killed or wounded in a "surgical strike," it's clear they weren't in bed with Salah Shehadeh. They are among the hundreds of people who live in tin shanties nearby.
It is hard to believe that no one knew they existed. Dropping a bomb that weighs a ton in such a teeming place is either an intelligence failure, a case of bad judgment, or the work of an evil mind, and God only knows which is worse.
I shed no tears for Shehadeh, but for the timing of this operation and the outcome. What kind of clever idea is it to do the right thing but have the whole world, including the United States, denounce you for it? Hamas needs no excuses to carry out suicide bombings.
But when babies and just plain innocent people are killed, Hamas will get free propaganda and public sympathy it doesn't deserve when it takes revenge with a mega-bombing. Just the sort of bombing that will drag us, sooner or later, into the last thing we need: an invasion of Gaza.
Which takes us back to the government decision making process. These days, when there is zero tolerance for assassinations, and cease-fire talks are on the horizon, it is intolerable that a decision to knock someone off is made before you can blink, with no consideration for what's happening around us.
In view of Shehadeh's murderous past, no one would have had any complaints if Israel had got rid of him in a pinpointed strike at a different time. But Sharon can't get up and decide such a thing on his own, while Ben-Eliezer is informed long distance and doesn't ask too many questions. Peres (the same who is foreign minister, we assume) is not told at all, or even consulted, about an assassination that is strategic in character, has the whole world down our throats, and in hindsight, could have been done some other time. The operation was a triple-loser, a combination of intelligence failure, military clumsiness and political obtuseness.
Sharon says this is one of the most successful operations Israel has ever pulled off. He used a similar expression to describe the Lebanon War. Here is a baker who praises his spoiled dough. He has brought us to the point where the number of Israelis who have died in the Intifada is fast approaching the number of fallen in Israel's most glorious military triumph, the Six-Day War. Without peace, without security, Sharon is dragging us into an existential and moral abyss, just so he can achieve his goals of staying in the territories and staying in power.
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