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29/04/2005 | The fire the next time

Amos Harel

About once a week, the Israel Defense Forces' Central Command receives a report about yet another explosive device that has gone off somewhere in the West Bank. In almost every case, there are no casualties. The Central Command staff asks one usual question: Was the bomb made of standard-issue explosives? Until now, the reply was uniformly negative.

 

The bombs in the West Bank are usually made of a makeshift mixture of triacetone (TATP, or um al-abed, as the Palestinians call it). This is a lethal compound when activated by a suicide bomber on a bus (as has occurred dozens of times in the past decade); however, used against a vehicle in an open space, its effect is less severe.

The introduction of standard explosives and antitank rockets in the West Bank will radically change the rules of the game there. The General Staff is convinced that it is only a matter of time before these combat materials, perhaps along with anti-aircraft missiles and Qassam rockets, will start to be used in the West Bank. Intelligence information shows that the Palestinians understand their importance and are making every effort to obtain them.

From Gaza to the West Bank

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In the past few years the IDF has invested millions of shekels in the struggle against the tunnels through which weapons are smuggled into the Gaza Strip (and with very limited success, as Amir Oren reported in these pages last Friday). The General Staff held dozens of meetings and dispatched large forces to carry out operations along the Philadelphi route in Rafah, with the goal of stopping the large-scale smuggling. Much attention is also being paid to blocking arms smuggling through the checkpoints in the West Bank. This month the IDF Spokesman's Office reported 11 cases in which soldiers' alertness led to the arrests of Palestinians who were hiding light ammunition in their bags. The final destination of the smuggling efforts is identical: the Gaza Strip. Weapons and ammunition enter from Egypt via Sinai. The smugglers from the West Bank carry mainly ammunition, in order to meet the great demand in Gaza, where the price of a 5.56-mm bullet (for the M-16 rifle) has recently soared to NIS 30.

However, in the West Bank, where there is a relative surplus of ammunition, there is a certain shortage of weapons. Many of the rifles of the Palestinian police and Fatah activists were taken from them by the IDF during Operation Defensive Shield, in the spring of 2002, and afterward. At the same time, there is a demand in the West Bank for more sophisticated weapons. And where need exists, there will be someone to answer it. In the past few months the smuggling networks in Sinai have been working intensively; much of their activity is now being channeled northward, toward the West Bank.

The smugglers from Egypt link up with Israeli Bedouin along the border and the latter transport the goods through the Arava desert and the Jordan Rift Valley to Palestinian merchants in Hebron, Bethlehem and Nablus. Compared to the task of the Rafah smugglers, the risk entailed in smuggling combat materiel into the West Bank is far lower. Along the Philadelphi route, the IDF opens fire at anyone who dares cross the border on land, and the tunnels below are difficult to dig and prone to collapse on anyone who tries to pass through them. In contrast, the southern sector of Israel, between Kerem Shalom and Eilat, is wide open. There is no fence, there are very few electronic surveillance devices, and the presence of the IDF in the area is appallingly thin. All a smuggler has to do is ensure that he gets to the meeting place with his Israeli associate at the appointed time.

Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai, who was the commander of the Arava Division in 2002-2003, was the first to identify the full acuity of the problem, and he began to develop an initial response to the smuggling in the south. Border Police forces carried out frequent patrols along the border - and dramatically increased the number of drug smugglers and human traffickers who were caught. The struggle against arms smuggling was less successful, the more so because the Southern Command focused on the Rafah sector - as was probably natural. After all, the weapons smuggled through the Philadelphi tunnels were used immediately for attacks on IDF soldiers in the Gaza Strip. And the fact that antitank missiles and standard-issue explosives went through the tunnels had an effect on the balance of forces in the Gaza Strip.

Now, at a late stage, the West Bank has been identified as the next critical destination of the smuggling operations. In a stormy meeting with the major generals two weeks ago, the chief of staff, Lieutenant General Moshe Ya'alon, ordered a considerable beefing up of forces along the southern border. The reconnaissance patrols of the Golani and Givati brigades were shifted from the sectors in the West Bank and Gaza, where they were scheduled to operate, and deployed for the first time between Kerem Shalom and Eilat, together with an elite unit. Concurrently, a decision was made to install electronic detection means in the sector. The IDF is also renewing the pressure on the political level to authorize budgets to build a new fence along the border. In addition, the possibility is being examined of declaring a strip on the Israeli side of the border a closed military area, thus enabling the army and the police to remove suspicious vehicles whose passengers are awaiting smugglers from the Egyptian side.

The Israel Air Force (IAF) is mobilizing for the effort as well. Recently, unusual cooperation began between the IAF and the Border Police. Border Police teams are stationed at an IAF base in the south on permanent alert. As soon as information is received that a smuggling attempt is underway, helicopters fly the Border Police to the area and they launch a hot pursuit of the smugglers. There are about 20 such incidents a month, and a number of smuggling attempts have been foiled in this way.

From the cities to the roads

The struggle against arms smuggling to the West Bank is part of the IDF's pessimistic forecasts for the post-disengagement period. Whereas Israel wants to view the rise to power of Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who rejects the use of terrorism, as its victory over Palestinian violence, many Palestinians view the disengagement plan as exactly the opposite: as Israel fleeing from the area.

Just as the IDF's withdrawal from Lebanon, in May 2000, encouraged the argument that Israel understands only force and helped generate the outbreak of the second intifada in September of that year, so the West Bank can view the Gaza Strip as a role model. (This would take place on two levels: both the launching of a new violent campaign and the understanding that the most effective war is not terrorism against civilians inside Israel, but attacks on soldiers and settlers, thus triggering an internal debate in Israel over the usefulness of continuing to hold on to the controversial area.)

It is here that the standard-issue explosives that are worrying the Central Command enter the picture. Lethal explosive devices and antitank missiles will endanger Israeli civilian traffic in the West Bank. The introduction of improved explosives will accelerate the manufacture of Qassam rockets in the northern West Bank, which will pose a threat to the Afula area. (Several previous attempts to manufacture Qassams in Jenin were foiled in the past year.) The trouble is that the West Bank is not the Gaza Strip. In the Gaza Strip there are only four main roads. The IDF defended them aggressively, destroying the farmlands along the sides of the roads, and overcoming much of the threat to traffic along them. The West Bank has 1,500 kilometers of roads, which are spread across dozens of settlements in a way that makes them nearly indefensible. The Palestinians might decide that this is the right place to put military pressure on Israel - just where it hurts most.

The IDF and the Shin Bet security service assume that the Palestinian Authority will wish to preserve quiet in the Gaza Strip after the Israeli withdrawal, to prove to Israel and the international community that the Palestinians are living up to their word. Terrorism will be channeled into the West Bank, just as happened under Yasser Arafat after the Oslo 2 agreement, when Hamas sent suicide bombers into Israel from Areas B and C, which were under Israeli responsibility, and not from the cities of Area A, which the Palestinians controlled.

This is the background to the General Staff's assessment that a third round in the Palestinian struggle will begin shortly after the disengagement plan is executed. Speaking at a conference held by the Israel Democracy Institute last week, Ya'alon warned about those who view the disengagement according to the motto of "Messiah now!" and outlined, in very general terms, a possible scenario of political tension with the PA (in the wake of Prime Minister Sharon's refusal to discuss additional withdrawals), which will erupt in the form of serious Palestinian violence in the West Bank. Some of his colleagues put it in stronger terms. "We have to take it as a working assumption that a quarter of an hour after disengagement, the West Bank will start to burn," says a senior officer. "We must not arrive at that situation with the other side in possession of antitank missiles and Qassams."

From officers to statesmen

Is there not a danger here of a self-fulfilling prophecy? The army's preparations for another round are not confined to the acquisition of more protective gear for the soldiers. The IDF is also carrying out exercises based on possible scenarios. Since the outbreak of the war with the Palestinians, the Israeli contribution to the fanning of the flames has gradually been exposed. Brigadier General (res.) Zvi Fogel, who was chief of staff of the Southern Command, said about a year ago that "our level of preparedness [in September 2000] was tremendous ... We created a network of expectations that was so high and a reaction threshold that was so low among the soldiers and officers that it almost sounds as though we were just waiting for an excuse."

The impression one gets is that Ya'alon does not think the process is irreversible yet. The IDF is recommending more good-will gestures vis-a-vis the Palestinians, in an attempt to bolster Abu Mazen's standing and, further down the line, a search for formulas that will make possible a long-term political process instead of a concentrated effort to achieve a final-status settlement, which is liable to end in a violent deterioration. Until the disengagement plan is implemented, the army is showing greater restraint and caution in the West Bank than it did during the first hudna (cease-fire), which collapsed in summer 2003. But the pursuit of terrorist activists, notably the awakening network of Islamic Jihad in Jenin and Tul Karm, could easily ignite a new conflagration if it ends in the death of the wanted men.

Another question relates to the IDF's duty to warn about what can be expected after disengagement. What, exactly, is the role of the army officer in a democracy? Must he issue warnings, publicly, about the danger of a new flare-up without the continuation of the political process, when political adviser Dov Weissglas and Sharon are portraying the disengagement as the answer to all the troubles? When the IDF's senior officers are asked about this, they tend to squirm uneasily. Some among them believe that it is enough to present a sober opinion to the political level alone, as the chief of staff did when he objected to the withdrawal from Lebanon and to Prime Minister Ehud Barak's positive reply to U.S. President Bill Clinton's blueprint of December 2000. The public will likely have to wait for Ya'alon's farewell interviews, in another month, in order to hear a public reaction of the highest military level to Sharon's move. Ya'alon's subordinates will remain silent. Everyone saw what happened to the careers of Ya'alon and of Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter from the moment they began to express cautious pessimism about the results of the move.

Haaretz (Israel)

 


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