Israel's Secret War

By Tim McGirk/Jerusalem

Shortly before Ala' Abu Dhaim picked up a semiautomatic rifle, two pistols and lots of ammunition, he called his 17-year-old fiancee and made plans to go shopping the next day in Jerusalem. They were getting married in the summer and hoped to honeymoon in Turkey before moving into a house near olive groves. But Abu Dhaim, 25, was wrestling with darker forces. After hanging up the phone, he gathered his weapons in a cardboard television box and drove to the Mercaz Harav seminary in the heart of Jerusalem. Abu Dhaim climbed the stairs to a library, where he killed eight students and wounded an additional 10 before he was himself shot dead.

Abu Dhaim doesn't fit the typical profile of a suicide terrorist. His East Jerusalem family had money and education, and his fiancee describes him as cheerful, gentle and apolitical. His behavior not only fooled her but shook Israelis who had been lulled into thinking that the specter of Palestinian bombers and gunmen was a distant nightmare (the last suicide bombing in Jerusalem was in September 2004).

Alas, violence is all too present. Abu Dhaim's killing spree--along with a suicide bombing in the Negev town of Dimona last month--highlights Israel's continued vulnerability to terrorist attacks. Just because fewer Palestinian terrorists are slipping into Israel from the Palestinian West Bank doesn't mean that they have stopped trying. Says an officer in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF): "Our people sleep comfortably in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv because the IDF is putting in a huge effort, day and night, in the West Bank to prevent terror."

Israel's secret war inside the West Bank is no less deadly--but a good deal less visible--than its fight in Gaza. In the West Bank, Israel relies on a network of Palestinian collaborators and wide-scale arrests. Last year more than 6,650 suspected Palestinian militants were rounded up, among them, claim Israeli intelligence officers, 279 potential suicide bombers. (IDF troops perform another function in the West Bank. In effect, they prop up Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Without the presence of Israeli troops, his advisers concede, the West Bank would soon fall to Hamas militants, just as Gaza did last June.)

For Israel--and especially for those who live in settlements speckled throughout the West Bank--the looming danger is from militants who want to emulate their comrades in Gaza and launch rocket attacks. The IDF says it has uncovered clandestine explosives factories, which are said to prove that Hamas and other militant groups, such as Islamic Jihad and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, are trying to learn rocket technology.

But as the Jerusalem seminary massacre shows, the main threat to Israel still comes not from rockets but from Palestinian suicide missions launched from the West Bank. Police say Abu Dhaim's weapons almost certainly came from inside the Palestinian territories. Suicide attacks peaked in March 2002, prompting Israel to launch a massive counterterrorism offensive in which Israeli troops set up checkpoints on all major roads, imposed curfews and fought their way into militant strongholds in refugee camps and in the cities of Jenin, Bethlehem, Nablus and Ramallah. Israeli troops stayed on. A security barrier was hastily built, and hundreds of roadblocks were erected. Commando teams carry out search-and-arrest missions nearly every night. Palestinians consider themselves the victims of an occupying army. Israelis retort that statistics prove the validity of their methods: Last year there was only a single attack, in the Red Sea resort of Eilat.

It has not been for lack of trying. Israel's domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet, claims that in 2007 it foiled 29 suicide attacks. Some were near misses: last March, for example, a truck loaded with 220 lbs. (100 kg) of explosives crossed from the West Bank and reached Tel Aviv, but the driver lost his nerve and turned back. Hamas officials concede that Israeli operations have crushed many underground cells but insist that after Hamas won the Palestinian election in January 2006, its political wing abandoned suicide bombings in a fruitless effort to gain international recognition. Retired Brigadier Shalom Harari, now an expert on Palestinian affairs at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism in Herzliya, disputes the claim. "Suicide bombings lessened because of 70% prevention by the Israeli forces, 10% by the Palestinian Authority and 20% because of luck," he says.

For Israelis, the West Bank's main battlefield is Nablus. An ancient city of 134,000 people boxed in by tall hills and scores of Israeli checkpoints, Nablus is dubbed by Israelis the "Capital of Terror." One officer says, "If I gave my men so much as a 15 minute break from their duties, there would be a bomb leaving Nablus on its way to Tel Aviv." No kidding: the IDF says that at the Nablus checkpoints last year, soldiers discovered 31 bombs, four guns and six grenades. And the Israelis claim that they destroyed 14 explosives labs in Nablus alone last year. One of them, hidden in the catacombs beneath the Casbah, was also used to make short-range rockets.

At the Nablus battalion headquarters of the IDF, the senior officer has a display case with bottles of champagne and wine, each a gift from his superiors, each tagged with the name of a terrorist captured or killed. The Israelis rely on a web of informers for information. Saleh Abdul Jawad, a political science professor at Birzeit University, says Israel has "tens of thousands" of Palestinian informers on its payroll. Some keep tabs on who prays at mosques, while others burrow into militant cells, planting bugs and betraying planned actions to their controllers. "Every small part of Palestinian life is under Shin Bet control," says Abdul Jawad. "You need their permission to travel from one town to another, to study, to drive a car, even to sell your goods, and you can only get these permits if you collaborate."

Israel's success, however, is far from total. "Every time we cross one off [the list of wanted men], a new replacement pops up," says an officer in Nablus, wearily. For the IDF, the catch is this: because of Israel's tough tactics and the daily humiliations Palestinians must endure, anger at the occupier gets continually restoked, which makes the job of the militant ideologues that much easier.

And that of the Palestinian Authority harder. Under agreements made with Israel, the P.A. is supposed to crack down on militants threatening Israel. When it has suited Abbas to arrest his political foes in Hamas, he has been only too happy to oblige the Israelis (more than 500 Hamas and Islamic Jihad militants are now in Palestinian jails). But Abbas cannot crack down on militants when Israel is showing its mailed fist, as it has done of late in Gaza. So at the height of the Israeli assault, Abbas was unable to stop one of his lieutenants from releasing 20 Hamas prisoners from Tulkaram jail in solidarity with the Gaza fighters.

Popular sympathy for the militants means that they cannot yet be written off. A source close to Hamas commanders in the West Bank points out that Israelis have not caught the masterminds behind the Jerusalem yeshiva massacre and the Dimona cafe blast. "The Israelis are fools if they think we're going to keep fighting them with stones," this source says. "The Israelis update their weapons, and so do we." For now, Israelis have put a lid on militancy. But if that success breeds a new generation of terrorists, such as Abu Dhaim, who are willing to sacrifice life, marriage and a family for revenge, it will be a hollow victory.

With reporting by Jamil Hamad/Ramallah, Aaron J. Klein/Nablus, Irris Makler/Jabal Mukabar