As Head of the Shin Bet,
you learn that politicians prefer binary options.
They don't like having three or four options.
They want you to tell them, "Zero or one."
"Do it. Don't do it."
As a commander, I find myself
in situations that are different shades of gray.
Let's say you're hunting a terrorist.
You can get him,
but there are one or two people in the car.
You're not sure if they're part of his gang or not.
What do you do? Do you fire or not?
There's no time.
These situations last seconds, minutes at most.
People expect a decision,
and by decision they usually mean "to act."
That's a decision.
"Don't do it" seems easier, but it's often harder.
Sometimes it's a super-clean operation.
No one was hurt except the terrorists.
Even then, later, life stops,
at night, in the day, when you're shaving.
We all have our moments. On vacation...
You say, "Okay,
"I made a decision
"and X number of people were killed.
"They were definitely about to launch a big attack."
No one near them was hurt. It was as sterile as possible.
Yet you still say,
"There's something unnatural about it."
What's unnatural is the power you have
to take three people, terrorists,
and take their lives in an instant.
How old were you during the Six Day War?
I was 11.
I remember thinking, "What is war?"
It's hard to say if I really understood,
but I remember the feeling
of fear, because our situation was bad.
Most of all I remember a book.
I read it a lot, If Israel Lost the War.
It described a very unpleasant scenario
of us losing the war
and the Arabs conquering Israel.
It had a profound impact on me.
I thought about it a lot as a boy.
In the Six Day War, I was in Operations.
The Arabs surrendered
and we were suddenly left without an enemy.
You're like a dog in a race, looking for the rabbit.
The rabbit goes underground, and the dog can't find it.
We were like that.
Then we started working in the West Bank and Gaza
in anti-terrorism, without knowing exactly what it was
because terrorism hadn't developed.
We decided to conduct a census in the Territories
to find out how many people lived in the refugee camps.
It was important. We used the information for years.
But you know how it is.
They called up the reserves and trained them quickly.
What do I mean by quickly? You knock on the door.
They ask, "Who's there?" You say, "Soldiers."
"What do you want?" "We came to count you."
That's it. How many words?
It's nothing. Ten words.
The reservist unit comes and knocks on the door.
They ask, "Who's there?" What do the soldiers say?
"Soldiers," like they learned.
"What do you want?"
But they made a mistake.
Instead of saying nehsikum with an unaccented
they used an accented
What's the difference?
"Jinna nehsikum" means "We came to count you."
"Jinna nekhsikum" with an accent is "We came to castrate you."
We took intensive courses in spoken and literary Arabic,
reading articles and manuscripts.
Anyone who took the Shin Bet's Arabic program seriously
knows Arabic.
He can listen to Arabic and read between the lines.
He can read notes from agents...
The Shin Bet looked for people to talk to
to understand what motivated the Palestinians.
For the first time, some Jews raised
the idea of a Palestinian state.
I loved the idea,
so I went to the Territories with people
who dealt with the Palestinians.
We didn't know what we wanted to achieve.
We received no direction about our objectives.
When you don't get direction from the politicians,
you are... just like with the rabbit... searching.
I started as a coordinator in the Nablus district.
It was a very pretty area, full of olive trees.
I liked to get out of my car and wander
in the field, refugee camps, alleyways,
visit homes, sit in cafés, talk...
I really loved the interaction with the people.
From that exotic encounter with olive trees,
landscapes, and peasants,
I found myself at the center of the Palestinian problem.
I was working in the refugee camps.
Suddenly you see what refugees are.
Once you look more deeply, you say, "Wait.
"I'm not an observer, here to take photos and leave.
"I'm an active participant."
At first, your security role is all you care about.
It's easier to be on that side.
A curfew was placed on the casbah of Hebron,
where one Israeli soldier was killed and another wounded.
The two were on patrol when shots were heard.
One was wounded. The other chased after the shooters.
He was later found murdered here.
Gradually there was an increase... To put it cynically,
luckily for us, terrorism increased.
Why do I say that?
Because now we had work
and we stopped dealing with the Palestinian state.
- Understand? - Of course.
As soon as we stopped dealing with the Palestinian state
and started dealing with terrorism,
terror became more sophisticated. So did we.
Suddenly we had a lot of work in Gaza and the West Bank,
and overseas, too,
so we forgot about the Palestinian issue.
In Nablus then, wherever you threw a rock,
there was either a cat or a terrorist.
Some nights we arrested hundreds of people.
We'd take over a village
and gather all the men in the square,
usually by the mosque or in a schoolyard.
We used the "identifier" technique.
Terrorists who confessed would be put in a vehicle.
The windows had curtains and they wore masks.
We'd sit them there, and the villagers passed
beside the vehicle, and they'd tell us,
"He's a terrorist who trained in Syria,"
"He's a terrorist who got back from Jordan."
Not everyone cooperated,
but we usually had a good catch.
Back then, most intelligence was based on HUMINT,
HUMan INTelligence we got in two ways.
Either from our agents or the interrogation of prisoners.
On my first day at work,
the person I was replacing picked me up at home.
He decided that the best place to train an inexperienced security guy like me was
the interrogation facility in Jerusalem.
I started learning intelligence there.
I don't know if you've ever been inside a prison,
but the one in Jerusalem is the worst that I know.
It's a very old building from the time of the Turks.
A normal person walks through the door and he's ready to admit to killing Jesus.
You need to make the suspect feel tense.
You need to make him understand
that when we are done, he will give up his information,
so the sooner the better.
The Shin Bet has interrogated
tens of thousands of people, if not hundreds of thousands.
The Shin Bet is a well-oiled system.
It's well-organized and effective. It's systematic.
You receive a territorial unit
and learn it, village by village, trail by trail,
whether by field trips
or lots of interviews with the masses of people who come
to military government HQ.
You sit with them and ask
them to tell you about the village, the clans,
from the number of people in the village
to what institutions it has...
You eventually reach a point
where you mark who you want to recruit.
In the end you know you want X
because X's connections,
his ability to infiltrate places that you want to watch over
are such that he's the agent you want to recruit.
Recruiting people means taking someone who
doesn't usually like you
and making him do things he never believed he could.
To convince someone to betray
his surroundings, his friends, sometimes his family
is no small thing.
All in all, we gained control over the war on terror.
We kept it on a low flame so the country could do what it wanted.
That's important,
but it didn't solve the problem of the Occupation.
What it did was
instead of 20 attacks a week, there were 20 a year.
All in all, no Israeli prime minister
took the Palestinians into consideration,
whether they lived within the '67 borders or not.
What's the difference between Golda Meir and Begin? Nothing.
He didn't visit the Arabs. She didn't either.
She called herself a Palestinian.
Begin didn't even say that because they weren't important to him.
In Peres's day, the atmosphere changed,
but he did the same things as his predecessors.
- Continuing the Occupation? - Yes!
Peri kept showing us this chart.
How many people were caught? How many informers were there?
How many attacks were prevented? How many weren't?
The picture was always rosy,
but it was point-specific. There was no strategy, just tactics.
1982. The Lebanon War.
The IDF entered Lebanon.
The Shin Bet recruited operatives.
In no time, the Shin Bet controlled Lebanon,
just like it controlled the West Bank.
Avraham Shalom was head of the Shin Bet.
After years as the most prominent intelligence agency,
the Mossad was replaced by the Shin Bet.
I think that he was
to Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and before him, Begin,
the most important person in their security circle.
I think what happened to him was that he felt he could do whatever he wanted.
People weren't in awe of Avraham Shalom. They were afraid of him.
They were scared of him.
He was strong, forceful, smart,
very stubborn, uncompromising and a bully.
If he didn't like something, heads would roll.
I was in Jerusalem when the 300 bus incident occurred.
The Chief of Central Command called me on the hotline.
A bus going south from Tel Aviv was hijacked
and headed to Gaza.
There was a chase with helicopters.
The bus stopped just outside my district.
They called that morning to say that they stormed the bus
and two terrorists were taken to interrogation.
I turned on the news and heard that all the terrorists were killed.
I told my wife that something stinks here.
Please describe what happened that evening.
You got a call and were told a bus was hijacked?
I don't remember.
- I was in Haifa. - Yes, and...
They said, "A bus was hijacked. Come." So I went.
"The Terrorist Beaten to Death by the Security Forces"
The army handled it.
During the operation,
they killed two, and two came out unharmed.
I didn't know that then.
They beat the daylights out of them,
the two of them.
So the Shin Bet took them...
I asked Ehud, the Head of Operations,
what state were they in.
He said they were almost dead. Maybe the soldiers said so.
So I said, "Hit them again and finish it."
He didn't do that.
He did what he described,
-which I found out a year later. - What did he do?
I think he took a rock and smashed their heads in,
but they were unconscious.
I don't know what state they were in.
The photo showed them before they were beaten up.
The army pounced on them.
The photo was taken before that.
It's not how they looked when we got them.
How did they look?
I don't know, but some thought they were dead.
They broke their bones. it was a lynching.
You didn't physically see them?
I didn't see them.
We killed a terrorist, whose hands were tied,
who no longer threatened us.
By What right?
But in the Shin Bet back then,
there was no such concept as an illegal order.
Not only did the Shin Bet fail.
The Cabinet and the Prime Minister failed,
and to some degree, they oversee the Shin Bet.
It's a tough question.
Did the Prime Minister know about the premeditated murder,
the plan to kill the terrorist caught on the 300 bus?
Did the head of Shin Bet have the authority to do that, to make those decisions?
Under what circumstances did Shamir give you permission to kill?
There were one or two cases, when I couldn't find him,
and it had to be done.
What had to be done?
We had to deal with Arabs who were about to launch an attack,
or that launched an attack.
He said, "if you can't find me, decide on your own."
When did you realize that you had to resign?
I offered my resignation to Shamir the next day.
He said, "Don't you dare."
He was afraid that if I resigned, he'd have to resign, too.
He went to Shimon Peres. Rabin was Defense Minister.
He said, "You gave similar permission to kill,
"so if you leave us to the wolves,
"we'll drag you down with us."
They kept telling me what to do and how to respond.
I didn't do anything without coordinating it.
I never imagined that after a year of coordinating,
they'd drop the issue and say, "We didn't know."
I don't take politicians seriously anymore.
- Because? - Because I saw that they couldn't be trusted.
They abandon the wounded in the field. That's not for me.
You are the wounded?
Notjust me. The whole Shin Bet.
The Shin Bet's operatives said, "We're sent on missions 24/7.
"Some are of questionable legality. Some are barely legal.
"Some are legal.
"No one gives us any backing.
"As soon as the press finds out about an operation,
"if we don't get any support from the politicians,
"it's a sign that they abandoned us."
"Deal reached: Head of Shin Bet to resign..."
The Shin Bet's exposure as a result of the 300 bus incident
and the sense that, "Guys, we're not omnipotent.
"There's a legal system above us" began to sink in.
Why did you give the order to kill them?
I didn't want any more live terrorists in court.
It would only increase terrorism. It increased it anyways.
Was it right to kill the terrorists on the 300 bus?
Based on the results, no.
- Only because of the results? - Only because of the results.
So, if there was no reporter, it would be okay?
Are you asking me, or are you telling me?
I'm asking you.
If he hadn't come, no one would have known.
What about the morality of it?
With terrorism there are no morals. Find morals in terrorists first.
And if he surrendered?
- It's not a moral problem. - Then what is it?
It's a tactical problem, not strategic.
So for you, the decision to kill the two terrorists...
You keep painting it black and white. There are decisions that...
Two captured terrorists were killed.
Why are you caught up on that?
I'm trying to understand the morality of it.
There is no morality in a case like that.
In the war against terror, forget about morality.
When there's a one-ton bomb, forget about morality.
The First Intifada was the charge that blew up this room,
with all the explosives,
because it occurred spontaneously.
A nation rose up and tried to launch a revolution,
to kick us out.
I was second in command here in the Southern District.
A wave of mass protests erupted, bigger than anything we'd seen.
Hundreds and thousands of people took to the street.
Only live fire could stop them.
The number of people on the Shin Bet's wanted list
may have been the largest of any intelligence agency anywhere.
Dozens in every region, hundreds, thousands...
Explain how the Shin Bet, which controlled the territory,
didn't foresee an insurrection of this magnitude.
What intelligence agency foresaw the fall of the Berlin Wall?
To complain that the Shin Bet should have foreseen it...
Formally, in principle, yes, it should have.
That was the expectation.
That's why you operate systems,
maintain enormous intelligence factories... Correct.
But you have to tell the truth.
Almost all the intelligence agencies in the world
failed to foresee major historical events.
You ask yourself, "Where did I go wrong?"
Not in the sense that I rule over them,
but should I have let this happen,
or should I have left before they said, "Get out."
But those questions are more philosophical than practical.
They're the most interesting.
Yes, but listen. You can't...
Most of them don't have definitive answers.
I don't need definitive answers.
There were plenty of instances since 1967, when, in my opinion,
and I thought it then, too,
we should have reached an agreement and got out.
Why didn't you say so?
We all have our criticisms,
but it's not within my mandate
to convince the Prime Minister to go to the Palestinians or not.
It also depends on who's dealing with the issue.
Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir never believed
that an agreement with the Arabs was possible.
Yitzhak Rabin really did believe it.
If we ever want a serious chance
at solving the Palestinian-Israeli problem,
the time is now, and the partner is the PLO,
which rid itself of the principles that I despised them for.
For us, the Oslo Accords erupted in a single day.
Peri was head of the Shin Bet then.
He updated me about Oslo.
He said, "Avi, listen. We have to act quickly,
"to speak to the PLO's representatives in the field
"and deal with all the suspects
"because we can't keep going after PLO suspects
"after we sign an agreement in Washington."
It was amazing. The first meeting was in Geneva.
Sitting in the lobby was Jibril Rajoub,
and I, not me personally but the Shin Bet,
put him in prison when he was 16.
He sat in prison for 18-20 years.
You see that you are meeting people
whose desire for peace and quiet,
whose desire for an agreement
is no less ambitious than yours.
It was very hard for me.
I felt like I was doing something that...
I couldn't be doing this. I chased after those people.
How could I sit with terrorists?
They killed people.
Could I sit down with them?
To them, by the way, I was also a terrorist.
As a Palestinian, he looks at you and says, "You're a terrorist, too."
How can that be?
Then you realize that...
"One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter."
The number one terrorist enemy of Israel
until the day that Arafat entered Gaza
was Fatah, the PLO.
All at once, the PLO left the circle of terror.
Hamas and Islamic Jihad filled that vacuum.
We wondered how the Palestinians will function.
How committed are they to fighting terrorism
in those areas that they control.
We also asked how we could prevent terrorism
if we no longer control the Territories.
The first bus bombing I saw was the 5 bus in 1994.
It was the first suicide bombing in Tel Aviv.
I'll never forget it.
It was the first time I felt I couldn't isolate myself
from that sight, from the stench of burning bodies.
I'll never forget it.
Later it passed. I saw many other bus attacks.
It continued with the horrible attack at the Beit Lid Junction
and the Stock Exchange and the 18 bus in Jerusalem.
The feeling in the Shin Bet whenever there's an attack
that we couldn't prevent
is a horrible sense of failure, disappointment,
especially if the attack is a large one.
There's a real sense of disappointment.
How did we fail to prevent it?
It was the lowest point in the Shin Bet
that I remember in my 32-33 years in the organization.
As the suicide attacks increased,
as long as Hamas played the main role in these attacks,
the need to use moderate physical pressure in interrogations increased.
Interrogating Hamas and Islamic Jihad is much more difficult.
Anyone willing to sacrifice his life,
whether it's for the virgins in paradise or not,
has nothing to lose.
Things get more complicated with a "ticking time bomb."
it basically means that you have information or a lead
about a possible terrorist attack,
whether suicide or other.
In any event, people will die
and the way to find out, "Yes, no, if so, where?"
lies with the person you're interrogating.
You use all sorts of techniques
that reduce his ability to resist.
The interrogation techniques we were allowed were
sleep deprivation
sitting handcuffed in a painful, degrading, exhausting position.
What do you get out of covering their heads?
It's pitch black, and you lose your sense of where you are.
You don't know what's around you.
You can hear, but you don't know what's there.
And shaking?
Shaking is used to establish presence.
It's threatening. It doesn't hurt.
What it does is intimidate you.
An interrogator picks you up and shakes you. You feel threatened.
What happened was that someone named Harizat,
from Hamas, was a small man and he was shaken.
It was a case of shaken baby syndrome.
His brain hit his skull and he died as a result.
This resulted in bitter arguments
between me as head of Shin Bet and Attorney General Michael Ben-Yair,
who thought it was immoral and unethical.
In response, I said that if we don't use it,
if we prevent 90 percent of suicide attacks now,
we'll prevent 70 percent instead,
which means dead Israelis.
Prime Minister Rabin had to decide.
He once got out of his chair furiously
and shouted at Ben-Y a“,
"You keep telling me what I can't do!
"Tell me once what I can do!"
it was a very contentious issue.
Rabin was a security man in every bone in his body,
not someone we have to explain to when we said,
"We don't have the tools to provide security."
He understood it perfectly.
You saw that he was torn up over it,
but he made a decision that said,
"We will fight terror as if there is no peace process
"and continue the peace process as if there is no terror."
As the attacks increased,
the Right, and not just the extremists,
took to the streets against the Oslo Accords.
It was exactly what Hamas wanted, and they succeeded.
With blood and fire, we'll throw Rabin out!
Most opposition to the peace process was from the religious camp.
Their leaders targeted Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
The incitement was focused on him.
As a young army recruit in 1974, they took us
to stop the first Jewish settlers in the West Bank.
We stood there, rows of soldiers gripping each other's arms.
The settlers started hitting us in anger.
I remember that I really didn't like that.
The illegal settlements were built despite
or in opposition to, government decisions,
but there was no Israeli government
that didn't accept them, or come to accept them.
The fact that most Israeli governments
did nothing gave the settlers
the sense that they're slowly becoming the masters,
that they're gaining the freedom to act
because the government looks away.
If they do that with an illegal settlement,
it can extend into illegal activity.
In 1980, a Fatah cell
attacked worshippers leaving the synagogue in Hebron.
A revenge attack occurred 30 days later.
They attacked Palestinian mayors Bassam Shaka 'a in Nab/us
and Karim Halaf in Ramallah.
Another bomb blinded someone from the bomb squad
in the home of Ibrahim Tawil, mayor of al-Bireh.
We knew Jews did it.
We didn't think it was some rival Palestinian group.
You check the Jewish files and find no clues.
At some point you realize that you have a problem,
that it's an intelligence failure.
We put our entire Operations Unit into action.
Operations put in tens of thousands of hours,
until, 6 months later, we were in the right direction.
We knew who did it.
They were a very ideological group, really top quality.
Moreover, some of them were even leaders of the communities in which they lived.
That gave them access to the Prime Minister.
They had access to the Knesset.
They had access to ministries.
They were friends with ministers.
They're part of the Israeli establishment,
the respectable establishment of the State of Israel.
We said, "if we don't catch them in the act, we'll never catch them."
The decision came when they planned to put bombs
in Palestinian buses in a parking lot in Jerusalem.
The attack they planned on the buses was insane.
They intended to kill 250 Arabs all at once.
We followed them all night.
I commanded the operation in Jerusalem.
It was another night I'll never forget.
We arrested them at 4:30 a.m., putting bombs on the buses.
We got out of our cars and said, "Come, join us.
"If you don't want anything to happen to our bomb squad,
"dismantle the bombs."
We did our first wave of arrests, of 17 members.
Then we investigated and found out that since 1978-9,
they were planning an attack on the Temple Mount
to blow up the Dome of the Rock.
At first, the idea was based on the belief that
as long as the "abomination" stood over the site of the Jewish Temple,
there will be no Redemption
and therefore, they have to get rid of that Dome.
They prepared the bombs.
They used a very sensitive type of explosive, Semtex.
It was planned by Menachem Livni,
who was a demolitions genius.
The charges would be placed so that the entire force of the explosion
would be directed at the support structure.
This would result in the collapse of the Dome.
The consequence of blowing up the Dome of the Rock, even today,
is that it could lead to total war by all the Islamic states,
not just the Arab states,
not just Iran, Indonesia, too,
against the State of Israel.
I'm not talking about the risk to the Jewish minority around the world.
These people decided to do it
out of some mystical belief that this would be the War of Armageddon
that would usher in the Messiah and a Jewish kingdom.
After we exposed the Jewish Underground,
Prime Minister Shamir called my unit the "diamond in the crown."
We received compliments and support from everywhere.
Then the lobbying on their behalf began.
They were put on trial. Three of them got life in prison,
different sentences. They all got out of prison very quickly.
They went home as if nothing happened.
They went back to their previous positions,
some to even higher positions.
The main question is how history will judge us
in the annals of the Jewish People.
I am sure that the Dome of the Rock
will not remain on the Temple Mount
and the Temple Mount will return to us,
just as I am sure that those same murderers,
whose legs I took part in removing,
deserved their fate.
The entire Underground was released by the Knesset.
The Clemency Law for the Jewish Underground is signed by
Yitzhak Shamir as Prime Minister of Israel.
It wasn't just a few members of the Opposition.
At first it was, "Oh, no! They broke the law.
"They killed people. They wanted to blow up the country," etc.
Later they said, "They are our own flesh and blood."
Then, the delegitimization process was transferred to the Shin Bet.
The story of the Jewish Underground is an episode
that really shook up the Shin Bet intelligence-wise.
It established the intelligence mechanism that, since then,
keeps an eye on those Jewish suspects worth watching,
in our opinion, in the West Bank.
You watch it closely. You work hard
and up comes Yigal Amir, who was never on any list of suspects.
He gets up one morning and shoots the Prime Minister.
Around July-August 1995,
I started to feel that we were faced with an increase
in the potential for the assassination of the Prime Minister.
Rabin's a traitor! Rabin's a traitor!
We're fighting against a government that's leading us into a chasm!
The Right's activity in Israel was no secret.
You don't need the head of the Shin Bet to explain
what Bibi Netanyahu or Arik Sharon said
to the demonstrators in Jerusalem.
You don't need the head of the Shin Bet to explain
to the Israeli public and especially the Prime Minister
the significance of Rabin's coffin at a mock funeral.
With blood and fire, we'll throw Rabin out!
Things started heating up more and more.
There was an attempted attack at the Wingate Institute.
After that, I went over to him and said,
"Listen, Yitzhak, it doesn't work like that.
"They'll hurt you in the end.
"I'm asking you to start wearing a bulletproof vest
"and to drive in the armored car. We'll increase your security detail."
He slammed me down.
"I was a soldier before the State. I won't wear a bulletproof vest."
Did you speak to the rabbis and the settlers' leaders?
Yes. I met with rabbis. I met with the leaders of the settlers.
We spoke about incitement and insurrection.
The government has no right to force people to do
anything that runs counter to the Torah and Jewish Law.
All of you here,
by your presence at this gathering,
prove
that the people really do want peace
and oppose violence.
I went to Paris on Thursday, maybe Wednesday,
on an assignment that was forced on me by Rabin.
I got a call from my bureau chief,
who told me that Rabin was wounded.
I was in shock, of course, but I was surrounded by people,
so I had to function.
On a personal level, until I sat on the plane in the dark at night,
on the flight to Tel Aviv, I think it was the first time
that I started to feel in my heart what I knew in my head.
Thank God for those four hours
because it gave me a chance to absorb the loss
of a man who really was extraordinary.
"I am ashamed."
In retrospect, I can say that it changed my whole world.
I suddenly saw a different Israel.
I wasn't aware of the intensity of the chasms and hatred,
of the rifts that exist between us.
How do we see our future?
What do we have in common?
Why did we come here? What do we want to become?
All that was self-evident, and it all fell apart.
Rabin's assassination shattered all hope.
It showed very clearly that some punk of an assassin,
with a pistol that could barely shoot,
could eliminate hope, an entire peace process.
He could change everything.
First of all, I decided, after consulting with my wife,
that I would take ministerial responsibility,
and submit my resignation.
I did that immediately.
What does she tell you?
She... tries to keep me alive.
It was a very difficult period.
Yigal Amir succeeded. He changed history.
He changed history. He succeeded big time.
- Until today. - Until today.
On the contrary, it's only getting worse.
I believe that we'll see another political assassination
surrounding the withdrawal from the West Bank.
It will come from every direction, mainly from the rabbis,
because the rabbis have no reason to learn any lesson.
As far as the extremist rabbis are concerned, the system proved itself.
Rabin's assassination brought me to the Shin Bet.
A year earlier, I turned Rabin down,
when he asked me to be head of the Shin Bet.
After Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, I realized I had no choice.
It was obvious the Shin Bet faced a serious crisis
and everyone in the Shin Bet knew it.
Everything about the Shin Bet's operations collapsed.
Security surrounding the Prime Minister collapsed.
The intelligence that should have prevented the assassination collapsed.
The Shin Bet's strong suit,
preventing Palestinian and Islamic terror,
could no longer provide the goods.
The organization was down for the count.
The Shin Bet needed new tools and they had to be developed.
We also realized that we were relying on force,
rather than our brains.
We began to implement an organizational shift,
from field operations to people sitting in offices
in front of their computer monitors.
We prevented more attacks each year.
We achieved greater security every year.
How did it happen?
It had a lot to do with changes we made in the Shin Bet,
but the truth must be told.
The more significant achievement
was cooperation between us and the Palestinians.
I met with all the top Palestinian security officials,
all of them, once a month, to coordinate intelligence.
They always told me,
"We're not your agents.
"We don't put Hamas members in prison for your sake.
"We only do it because our people believe that,
"at the end of the day, we'll have a state beside Israel.
"When we no longer believe that, forget about us."
Just as there was a strong desire, a firm decision
and real intent by Peres and Rabin to reach an agreement
after Rabin was gone, the desire,
or Israel's intent to reach a real agreement dwindled,
to put it mildly.
There was no good faith.
There was no good faith from the Palestinian side
and not from the Israeli side.
We wanted security and got more terrorism.
They wanted a state and got more settlements.
When we started the Oslo process in 1993-1994,
100,000 settlers lived in the West Bank and Gaza,
not including the new Jerusalem suburbs.
At the end of the process,
6-7 years later,
in the summer of 2000, when the process collapsed,
there were over 220,000 settlers.
Ehud Barak is very proud
to have built more settlements than Bibi Netanyahu
or any other Prime Minister before him.
So the question isn't whether there's a partner.
Arafat doesn't have a partner. Barak doesn't have a partner.
The question is what both sides do to have a partner.
It was obvious we were heading toward another Intifada,
another round of violence by a group, a society, a nation
that felt that it had nothing to lose.
In 2002, I went to London.
The Intifada was raging. It was hell and we went to London,
a group of Israelis and a group of Palestinians,
in order to see if we could do anything.
At some point, I was making myself a cup of coffee
and I was approached by a Palestinian acquaintance
named wad Satay a Doctor of Psychiatry.
He said, "Ami, we finally defeated you."
I said to him, "Are you mad? What do you mean, defeated us?
"Hundreds of you are getting killed. At this rate thousands of you will get killed.
"You're about to lose whatever tiny bit of a state you have
"and you'll lose your dream of statehood. What kind of victory is that?"
He said to me, "Ami, I don't understand you.
"You still don't understand us.
"For us, victory is seeing you suffer.
"That's all we want.
"The more we suffer, the more you'll suffer.
"Finally, after 50 years, we've reached a balance of power,
"a balance,
"your F-16 versus our suicide bomber."
lyad Saraj's statement gave me a very clear insight.
I suddenly understood the suicide bomber phenomenon.
I suddenly understood our reaction very differently.
How many operations did we launch because we hurt,
because when they blow up buses it really hurts us and we want revenge?
How often have we done that?
Yahya Ayyash was the most senior terrorist
that ever operated against Israel,
certainly the most senior member of Hamas.
He was an engineer.
He knew how to make bombs out of improvised explosives.
Those were the bomb belts that blew up in buses.
Secondly, he knew how to convince someone to commit suicide.
Finally, he had survival skills that beggared description.
For years, every IDF soldier carried his picture.
He was undoubtedly our number one most wanted man.
Yahya A yyash moved from Samaria to Gaza.
It took some time to get that intelligence.
Then we started basic surveillance to see who was around him, where he might go.
Of course, everyone has his weak points.
Yahya Ayyash's weak point was his wife and son.
After a long time living alone in Gaza, he asked them to join him.
We knew the whole story, and I decided to let them into Gaza.
I thought, once they were in Gaza, he'll want to see them.
Maybe the mouse would come out of his hole.
Then we found out that he really misses his father.
How did you know that he wanted to talk to his father?
We heard.
- From a source? - We hear rumors.
He never used a cell phone. People made calls for him.
After weeks of persuasion,
he agreed to speak to his father for a few minutes.
At this point, we started laying the groundwork
for our cell phone to infiltrate his surroundings.
Then we started doing all the backup work,
making sure that an innocent cell phone had explosives in it.
The Shin Bet are technical experts,
experts at making small appliances with lots of power,
not so much broadcast power as explosive power.
Since it was difficult for us to make direct contact with Ayyash,
we used the services of a middleman.
He gave him the cell phone.
One Friday, everything was in place.
We set off the explosive charge in the phone
and nothing worked.
Everything we built up over eight months fell apart in front of us.
Everything worked perfectly.
Then we click to get the coffee and it doesn't come out.
Nothing happened.
Within days, the phone was back in its natural environment.
We saw that no one suspected anything,
that things went on as normal.
We all got together again.
On Friday morning, his father called him.
The wire tapper recognized Ayyash's voice and told us.
Someone hit a button
and the cell phone exploded
while it was right next to Yahya Ayyash's ear.
He was killed on the spot and no one around him was hurt.
More importantly, no one on the ground floor heard the explosion.
The operation was coordinated with the Air Force. It went very nicely.
It was very clean... elegant.
I like operations like that. They're nice and tidy.
To some people, the assassination of Yahya Ayyash,
at a time that seemed relatively free of attacks,
some said it was a mistake.
Sometimes it feels quiet
and you say, "Oh! We disturbed the calm."
Two months later, it seemed like the whole country was exploding.
- Yes. - Don't you see the connection?
Yes, we know for a fact,
after Ayyash's assassination a group crossed the fence
and left Gaza to organize attacks from the West Bank.
Of course I see the connection.
But if we make the equation,
if we assassinate them, they'll commit suicide attacks,
if we don't assassinate them, they won't.
The second part of the equation is false.
After we pulled out of Gaza,
we couldn't enter the Palestinian areas,
unexpectedly, with a small force, and exit safely.
How do you surprise a terrorist? From the air, from a distance.
He has no idea where the missile came from.
But to fire a missile from a distance,
you need very precise intel
and not for one split second, but for the entire operation.
What is targeted assassination?
Where do we break the chain?
Okay, we'll injure.
If necessary, we'll even kill whomever comes to kill us.
What happens to the people surrounding him?
What happens to the people who make the explosives,
who transport him, who make the plans,
who gather the intel, and who just preach the idea?
They don't kill.
They preach an ideology that, in the end,
creates jihad and leads to the death of Israelis.
Salah Shehadeh was what we called the "hairspring,"
that set Hamas's entire terror operation in Gaza into motion.
The hunt for him was very difficult,
with lots of intelligence tools invested in it.
At some stage, it was clear that he was home,
that his daughter wasn't,
and that only his wife was with him.
We agreed by phone,
the Chief of Staff, me, the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister.
The Air Force dropped a one-ton bomb on the house.
Unfortunately, because of inaccurate intelligence,
innocents were killed.
No one knows the final number, 9-14.
When you drop a one-ton bomb on a densely populated area,
like in the Shehadeh incident,
obviously bystanders will be hurt...
No, it's not obvious. No. You gather intelligence.
Where do people live?
How many? Who? What are the chances? Where do you shoot from?
The implications of this incident, in terms of collateral damage,
led to criticism of how we could drop a bomb
on a home in the middle of Gaza.
An American asked me about it.
I said, "We know about your methods in Afghanistan.
"You bombed a wedding and 70 people were killed
"and no one knows if the target was killed."
Overkill! It's security stupidity! It's military stupidity.
I don't know what to call it,
but it makes no sense that to kill the most important man in Gaza
you have to drop a one-ton bomb on a house
surrounded by homes with families and children.
That can't be moral,
it's ineffective militarily
and it's certainly not humane.
Is it just? Not that either.
There's a concept, "the banality of evil."
When you start doing it en masse, 200, 300 people die
because of the idea of "targeted assassinations."
Suddenly the processes become a kind of conveyor belt.
You ask yourself less and less where to stop.
September 6, 2003, was, for me, my toughest day as head of the Shin Bet.
On that day the State of Israel had
a chance to get rid of the biggest terrorist group
in a single blow.
We had very reliable and precise intel
that the Hamas leadership was going to hold a meeting
like they never had before, and probably never will.
I think there were ten or twelve people there,
but the créme de la créme, the merde de Ia merde.
Really... everyone was there.
Suddenly I was told, "Listen, the army is opposed.
"A one-ton bomb would cause collateral damage."
There was a bitter argument. Finally, after several hours,
the Prime Minister was convinced to cancel the attack.
I called the Prime Minister to convince him that it's unreasonable.
The compromise was a quarter-ton.
It was based on probabilities.
The house had two stories.
If they were on the second floor, it would kill them.
If they were on the first floor, it wouldn't kill anyone.
The bomb was dropped.
It was a direct hit.
The second story was destroyed
and the entire "Dream Team" fled the house on their own two feet.
Some people insist they saw crippled Sheikh Yassin running.
If there's a moment you realize,
not that we missed, but that we were mistaken,
because of what happened with Salah Shehadeh,
we paid the price with the "Dream Team."
it took a long time to get to some of the people there,
like Sheikh Yassin and others.
God knows how much damage they caused
until we managed to take out the ones we did.
Some of them were never taken out and are still active today.
I've often said, "Terror is a barrel with a bottom."
You can reach the bottom. You don't need to reach the last terrorist.
You reach a critical mass, and that's enough of a deterrent.
I can prove to you that Hamas did not become more moderate
after Sheikh Yassin was eliminated.
I can prove to you
that when we killed Abbas Musawi and Nasrallah took over instead,
the security situation in Israel didn't really improve.
That's why, when we deal, not with the one coming to kill us immediately,
but with the person preaching,
we are headed toward a place, which is forbidden by international law
and basicjustice poses huge question marks as to its ethics,
but I'm talking to you as head of the Shin Bet.
It's ineffective.
I was born near the Sea of Galilee.
I grew up in a children's house,
like all children who lived on kibbutzim did back then.
I had a wonderful childhood.
I knew that there's a house in Jerusalem
and on the second floor there's a long corridor.
At the end of the corridor, there's a door
and behind the door is a wise man who makes decisions.
He thinks.
My parents called him the "Old Man," Ben-Gurlon.
Years later, after the Yom Kippur War,
I went to Jerusalem, and I went to that same building.
I was on the second floor
and found no door at the end of the corridor
and behind the missing door, no one was thinking for me.
You see that void, that lack of initiative,
that willingness to let things take their course,
without you stepping in and saying,
"This is as far as it goes, in this direction or that."
You can't make peace using military means.
Peace must be built on a system of trust,
after, or without using military means.
In the end you must build it on a system of trust.
As someone who knows the Palestinians well, I claim that
there should be no problem
building a system of trust with them, a genuine one.
For Israel, it's too much of a luxury not to speak with our enemies.
As long as they decide not to speak to us, I have no choice,
but when we decide not to speak, I think we're making a mistake.
Do you support speaking to anyone?
Anyone we can, even if they answer rudely, I'm for continuing.
There is no alternative.
- To what? - To talking.
- Hamas? Islamic Jihad... -including everyone.
I said everyone, so it includes...
Even Ahmadinejad, whoever. I'm always for it.
It's a trait of a professional intelligence operative to talk to everyone.
Things get clarified.
I see you don't eat glass. He sees I don't drink petrol.
That's how it is.
I want to read something that
Professor Leibowitz, a critic of the Occupation,
wrote a year after the Six Day War, in 1968.
"A state ruling over a hostile population of one million foreigners
"will necessarily become a Shin Bet state,
"with all that this implies for education,
"freedom of speech and thought
"and democracy.
"The corruption found in every colonial regime
"will affix itself to the State of Israel.
"The administration will have to suppress an Arab uprising on one hand
"and acquire Quislings, or Arab traitors, on the other."
What do you think about this prediction, given where Israel is today?
I agree with every word he wrote.
- Explain. - There's nothing to explain.
Every word he said is etched in stone.
Is that what Israeli society is like today?
I think it's an accurate depiction of the reality that emerged
from 1968 until today.
I wouldn't say that it became a Shin Bet state,
but no doubt, our current situation with the Palestinians
undoubtedly created a reality that is very similar
to what Leibowitz wrote.
You knock on doors in the middle of the night
and wake a sleeping family, all cuddled up in bed.
The mother's tears
or the last goodbyes of the suspect you take from his family's embrace...
It's not easy. You see the family suffering,
those difficult moments between parents and children,
between children and parents.
These moments end up etched deep inside you
and when you retire you become a bit of a leftist.
We are making the lives of millions unbearable,
into prolonged human suffering.
We leave the decision about what's appropriate
to a soldier who's spent a few months in the army.
A year earlier he finished high school, at best.
He's standing there facing a father holding his baby girl
deciding, does he search him or not, does he let him pass or not.
It kills me.
The future is bleak. It's dark, the future.
Where does it lead? To a change in the people's character
because if you put most of our young people in the army,
they'll see a paradox.
They'll see that it strives to be a people's army,
like the Nahal unit, involved in building up the country.
On the other hand, it's a brutal occupation force,
similar to the Germans in World War ll.
Similar, not identical.
And I'm not talking about their behavior toward the Jews.
That was exceptional, with its own particular characteristics.
I mean how they acted to the Poles, the Belgians, the Dutch...
To all of them... The Czechs.
It's a very negative trait that we acquired,
to be... I'm afraid to say it, so I won't.
We've become cruel,
to ourselves as well,
but mainly to the occupied population,
using the excuse of the war against terror.
Clausewitz, who was wise even though he wasn't Jewish,
or at least we haven't discovered his Jewish roots,
said almost 200 years ago...
I'm translating, but the essence of what he said is,
"Victory is simply the creation of a better political reality."
That's victory.
Victory doesn't dictate that we have to conquer Gaza
or Ramallah or Nablus or Hebron.
I think my son, who served for three years in the paratroopers,
participated in the conquest of Nablus at least two or three times.
Did it bring us victory? I don't think so.
Did it create a better political reality?
The tragedy of Israel's public security debate
is that we don't realize that we face a frustrating situation
in which we win every battle,
but we lose the war.