Once a month I met with Jibril and Dahlan to coordinate activities. Our efforts were paying off: We had considerably reduced the frequency of suicide bombings. While we deepened our intelligence penetration into Palestinian terrorist organizations, we had to build out our intelligence and counterterrorism efforts against Jewish terrorism, and we took on Jewish terrorism by recruiting settler informants. The most extreme of ideological settlers, those who had offered up prayers of thanksgiving at the assassination of Rabin, developed counterespionage in an effort to identify our agents in the settlements.
Targeting fellow Jews only compounded the cognitive dissonance of veteran Shabak agents who now had to listen to our former Palestinian foes, take their opinions into account, and even rely on them, which required unlearning what they had been indoctrinated to believe about the PLO since nursery school.
One day I encountered a very different sort of moral quandary. In developing a Shabak code of ethics, I asked the head of interrogations to make sure the language we came up with wasn’t some incomprehensible jargon written by philosophers or poets but would make perfect sense to agents in the interrogation rooms. This fellow, let’s call him “X,” came to my office and told my secretary he wanted to discuss something important.
“Sure. Let him in.” I had an open-door policy.
The interrogator, jug-eared with cropped dark hair, entered my office. I knew from his file that he was the grandson of a Yemenite Torah scholar and had been raised in a religious home. “Sir,” he began, “you’ve been talking to us about what we do to the prisoners” — referring to the committee I had set up to propose guidelines for interrogations. “What I haven’t heard from you is what you are doing to us.”
“What are you talking about? I’m not doing anything to you!” With so much at stake, I had no patience for self-pity.
The interrogator shook his head because, clearly, I misunderstood him.
He explained. “Growing up, our house was full of books. They were everywhere, lining every wall. Books, music, ideas, that’s what I was surrounded by. But since I joined the Service, I’ve been living around stench, screams, and violence. I don’t know how I can keep doing this.”
He might have been referring to one of our prisons, a former Russian Orthodox monastery variously called Tomb of God, Dark Night, and Slaughterhouse. One prisoner, the son of a Hamas leader, described it as “black and stained and dark, like the rat-infested medieval dungeons you see in the movies.”25 Or perhaps what he had in mind were techniques used by interrogators to squeeze out information to prevent the murder of our civilians, such as sleep deprivation or forcing people to maintain painful positions like the “frog crouch” for hours on end. (Though we applied such techniques far less often than in the past, there were still “ticking bombs” that required some physical persuasion.) Maybe he was thinking about our use of blackmail — sometimes we pressured members of Hamas to spy on their fellow militants in exchange for medical care they or their loved ones couldn’t live without.
The very power he had over prisoners created an atmosphere of violence. It wasn’t that he had empathy for our enemies; he didn’t. It was his own humanity, the very thing I wanted him most to keep, that he was afraid of losing.
“Then why do you keep working with us?” I asked.
“Because I’m saving lives,” he responded, his eyes moist.
I reached out and put my hand on his shoulder. “The minute you stop asking these questions, take your things and leave. I wouldn’t want you interrogating terrorists.” I then gave him a version of my talk to Jibril and Dahlan: Those of us down in the sewer were doing the dirty work so the peacekeepers could strike a lasting deal. We were, so to speak, the bridge across the Rubicon the politicians would have to cross to seal a political agreement. The other point I made was that, more than any law or regulation, what should help us draw the line between the permissible and the forbidden in the interrogation room was the daily reminder that the prisoner was a fellow human being.
The bridge across the Rubicon was sometimes wobbly.
One day several months into the job a former commando in my Flotilla unit called on an unsecured line to congratulate me on a targeted killing of a suicide bomber in Jerusalem who had played a role in the Dizengoff Center bombing. My friend had become a Labor politician and was at that time the chairman of the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.26 We had received information on an attack planned for the Jerusalem neighborhood of Gilo, which Palestinians consider a settlement because we built it on lands we conquered in 1967. The kill succeeded without injuring innocent civilians. While we were happy that the terrorist was no longer a threat, we certainly didn’t brag about having a hand in it.
“What!” I clutched the receiver. “Who told you about the operation?” It turns out Peres himself had shared the information with him. With the body count eating away at his popularity, he couldn’t pass up the opportunity to gloat over such a significant security success. “Don’t say a word to anyone,” I demanded.
“No worries,” he assured me. “As a politician it’s my job to lie; your job is to tell the truth.”
The effectiveness of our security cooperation with Arafat and his men came too late to help Prime Minister Peres in the 1996 summer elections. Opinion polls had given Peres a clear edge over Likud’s Bibi Netanyahu, and on the night of the election most people went to sleep assuming Labor had won. But the Hamas bombing campaign had done its work on our national psyche. While the number of attacks had dropped, the impression many Israelis had was that Oslo had led to more terror and that each concession we made created the ideal environment for Hamas and Islamic Jihad to send in their bombers. Voters turned to the right. When fear took over because of terror, we voted in leaders who promised to kill the enemy, not those who promised a better, more just world.
Netanyahu was a new kind of Israeli leader: young, energetic, and media-savvy. He also painted himself as an expert in fighting terrorism. In his first book, International Terrorism: Challenge and Response, he opines, “The impact of terrorism, not merely on individual nations, but on humanity as a whole, is intrinsically evil, necessarily evil and wholly evil.” His follow-up, Terrorism: How the West Can Win, berates every shade of appeasement and accommodation as another 1938 Munich Agreement.
I was at the Likud victory rally on the day following Netanyahu’s upset victory because one of my jobs was to make sure our new leader escaped Rabin’s fate. Some of the settlers with whom I had been meeting, and secretly spying on, were at the rally. Thousands of black-robed Ultra-Orthodox joined the armed settler contingent.
Far from cameras and the scrutiny of public opinion, my brief was to tell the naked, unembellished truth to the prime minister. One thing I didn’t have to tell Netanyahu, an MIT graduate, was that his upset election would never have happened without the help of Hamas suicide bombers. He also knew that keeping his job would depend on the Shabak’s success at stopping terror. I therefore assumed he would listen when I told him that thwarting terror required continuing our security cooperation with the Palestinian Authority, which involved arming our former foes. Bibi would know better than I how to sell this to his right-wing base.
I had less confidence that he would adhere to the other terms of Oslo; namely, territorial withdrawals. The Hebron neighborhood Peres had promised Arafat remained under our control, and the new prime minister seemed in no rush to hand it over, which only stirred up Arafat’s paranoia. He was, after all, a man who thought there were Shin Bet bugs under every rock. The fact that Sharon, a man who had destroyed entire neighborhoods of Beirut in an effort to kill him, was a top minister in the Likud government made him wary of a trap.
My first meeting with Netanyahu was in the official prime minister’s office, designed in the graceful Bauhaus style of the 1930s, an architectural cousin of the Guggenheim Museum in New York. To enter, my driver passed through the beefed-up security wall we built following the assassination of Rabin, which made the residence feel like a bunker.
Upstairs in his office, I noticed Netanyahu’s antiterrorism books on a shelf behind his desk. He opened the discussion with an astute analysis of Oslo and indicated his support for making the political process contingent on security cooperation. But despite his stated willingness to continue peace talks, he seemed to flinch when I brought up Palestinian expectations of territorial withdrawals.
“Arafat will have to get something in return for working with us,” I said halfway into our meeting, explaining what Jibril repeated nearly every time we met: His boss was paying a political price for signing a peace deal with us and repressing Hamas. Syrian president Assad was calling Arafat the “prostitute of the Arab world.” For sticking out his neck the way he was, he’d better get repaid. It was vital to reassure the Palestinians, in word and in deed, that if they kept up their security cooperation and continued cracking down on terror, we would hand over the territories he’d been promised. Sending in more tractors and cranes would only reinforce the suspicion among Palestinians that Oslo was a sham. I warned him that if Arafat felt we were stringing him along, he and his men would stop packing his prisons with their neighbors.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, Netanyahu said.
I left his office that day in the dark as to what he thought about my counsel. But when I saw his cabinet ministers doing their very best to undermine Oslo, I understood that the settler faction inside his government and his political base among the Greater Israel right wing held a lot more sway over him than we in the Shabak did. During one cabinet meeting, Minister of National Infrastructure Ariel Sharon told phony stories of Jibril hanging out with me in a Jacuzzi drinking champagne. Even as he spoke, Sharon slipped me a note apologizing for the confection. It was politics, and I shouldn’t take it personally.
In a public visit to Ariel, a settlement in the middle of the West Bank, Bibi declared to a singing and dancing crowd: “We will be here permanently forever,” while promising the settlers he’d push for new construction on lands where Palestinians planned to build their future state.27
During our next meeting Jibril raised the alarm: “Your prime minister says he wants an agreement, and then he promises more settlements.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But it’s also not easy for Israelis to forget the exploding buses. We still have a lot of work to do before you can claim that the Israeli government is not fulfilling its promises.”
In his first weeks in office Bibi sought my advice on another delicate policy issue. Having campaigned on the promise never to hand over parts of “liberated” Jerusalem to the Palestinian Authority, he needed to show his supporters that he was the man for whom they voted.
He sought symbolically to reinforce Israeli sovereignty over the Muslim Quarter in the Old City by opening an entrance to an ancient tunnel first dug during the Hasmonean dynasty, before the Romans destroyed Jewish sovereignty over the Land of Israel. Once part of a water system, the tunnel had been excavated during the British Mandate, and until 1996 it was a popular Jewish Quarter tourist attraction because it ran along the Western Wall. Standing in the ancient drainage ditch gave believers the sensation of being close to the Holy of Holies. Bibi wanted to create a second opening so tourists could enter the tunnel in the Jewish Quarter, walk the full length of the tunnel, and exit again in the Muslim Quarter.
I was very familiar with the area because, knowing Jerusalem’s apocalyptic potential, I made a habit of regularly touring the Omar Mosque, Al Aqsa Mosque, Solomon’s Stables, and other holy sites. Like all Israelis of my generation, I read about the Temple Mount in Josephus, and when there I had the sensation of returning to the time of the Second Temple, or even further back to when Abraham prepared to sacrifice his son Isaac.
Sometimes I went on these tours with the Mufti of Jerusalem, a man who, like so many others, harbored some bizarre conspiracy theories. On a tour of the ruins under the Temple Mount, upon seeing a pillar mentioned in Josephus as a feature of the Second Temple, I turned to the mufti and said, “As a kid I read about this place.” I really did feel like I was next to a piece of ancient Jewish history.
“You Jews are strange,” he said. “You’re always inventing history and then you start to believe in the invention.” He truly thought we had conjured our historical connection to the Holy Land out of thin air.
Because the holy sites had a way of driving everyone mad, I cautioned the prime minister to cover his bases. There was nothing inherently objectionable about opening up the tunnel in the Muslim Quarter. Peres, like Rabin before him, had considered opening the tunnel before deciding against acting unilaterally, which would have jeopardized peace talks with the Palestinians. If Netanyahu was serious about opening the tunnel, I told him he would need to coordinate with our relevant partners: with the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf, the Muslim religious trust run by the mufti that manages the Haram esh-Sharif mosques; with Arafat; and with Jordan’s King Hussein. If everyone was on board, why not? Archaeology didn’t have to be political. So long what you do was coordinated and not unilateral, I repeated for emphasis, what was the problem?
Netanyahu seemed satisfied with my counsel, and I didn’t give the issue any more thought until September 24, the day after Yom Kippur, when my top man in Jerusalem rang me up with the surprising news that, under heavy guard, the extension to the tunnel would be opened later that day. I couldn’t believe my ears.
Netanyahu was in Germany meeting with the chancellor. I phoned up his deputy prime minister and figured out quickly that he could do nothing about it. In another telephone call, the minister of defense told me that Jerusalem wasn’t the responsibility of the Ministry of Defense. His hands were tied.
Within an hour of the opening, the people at the waqf heard the thumping of the hammers in the Muslim Quarter. Rumors spread like wildfire that we were digging a tunnel under the Mosque of Omar, to attack Islam and, with it, Palestinian national aspirations.
The next morning Netanyahu, still in Germany on an official visit, issued a statement calling the tunnel “the bedrock of our existence.” Arafat, as surprised by the opening as the waqf officials, seized upon the incident as a desecration of Haram esh-Sharif and called upon Palestinians to respond. “We cannot accept the Judaization of Jerusalem. East Jerusalem is our capital!” The slogans unfurled by both leaders incited more violence and undermined the kind of coordination I had recommended to the prime minister.
Arafat, who had been waiting for months to receive more territory, used the tunnel opening as his chance to remind Israelis of his powers of disruption. His office issued a statement calling on Palestinians “to express their anger before the continuing aggression on the Al Aqsa Mosque and the desecration of the holy places.” He ordered his men to orchestrate violent protests that caught our army flat-footed.
Rioting spread across the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem, overwhelming the IDF soldiers stationed there, who per our security arrangement with the PA were supposed to be conducting joint patrols with Palestinian security. A general strike was called, and Jibril and his men enforced it.
In Bethlehem and Ramallah mobs attacked our soldiers, and after they fired rubber bullets to drive back the protesters, Arafat’s police opened fire on us. Palestinians were killed in the firefight, prompting more incendiary statements from Arafat.
Behind the scenes, the Shin Bet in the West Bank and Gaza worked with Jibril, Dahlan, and their people to try to bring about a cease-fire. Eleven soldiers, six Israeli civilians, and a hundred Palestinians died in what amounted to open warfare between two sides supposed to be building trust and signing agreements. My every instinct wanted to push aside reason and make the Palestinians pay dearly. But it was Netanyahu, I had to remind myself, who had opened the tunnel and triggered the chaos.
The most dangerous result of the fighting, beyond the lives lost, was the rapid divergence of the narratives our peoples were telling themselves. For an increasing number of Israelis, including former supporters of Oslo, scenes of Palestinian police using weapons we had given them to kill our men were all the evidence they needed of Arafat’s supposed two-faced scheme of talking peace while pursuing his long-standing dream of driving the Jews into the sea. If it hadn’t been the tunnel, they said, he would have found some other excuse. The slogan “We gave the Arabs land, and they gave us terror” would have staying power.
The Palestinian narrative, meanwhile, was increasingly the Hamas line that Jews understood only force. Shooting, not talking, was what would prevent the takeover of their sacred sites.
When Netanyahu returned from his trip abroad, he summoned me to his office to discuss the violence. The two of us had such fundamental disagreements on the cause of the Western Wall tunnel riots, as the incident came to be known, that I considered handing in my resignation. And I would have, too, if not for my sense of duty — to the army of Shabak professionals wading through the sewer, and most of all to ordinary Israelis cautiously returning to their buses and cafés.
The prime minister was ashen-faced and smelled of sweat and cologne. His grip on power was contingent on his promise of security, and now the country was mourning the death of seventeen Israelis. Under intense pressure from all sides, he was about to head to Washington, where President Clinton would want to know how he was going to get the peace process back on track. He asked me for the Shabak’s assessment.
I began by pointing out the chasm between my recommendations for opening the tunnel and what he had done. Bibi blinked a few times, and I continued. “Mr. Prime Minister,” I began, “there was nothing premediated about Arafat’s order for his men to fire on us. He’s afraid of losing the support of his people. Hamas is robbing him of his title as revolutionary and fighter for Palestinian rights by making him out to be our stooge.”
His trip to Washington, I went on, was his moment of truth. If he didn’t believe in the Oslo process, as he said ad nauseum while he was in opposition, he should let Clinton know that the trust-building process that was at the heart of Oslo had failed. Instead of gradually withdrawing from territory, he could push for an agreement on the core issues, Jerusalem, settlements, security, and the right of return. Only after all these fundamental issues have been agreed would you be able to hand over land to the Palestinians.
“Would Arafat agree?” he asked.
I told him I didn’t know. But maybe, I said, “if you offer him something big, he will have something he can use to convince his people that the peace process is working. Then he might go for it.”
“Big? How big?”
“A complete settlement freeze. Such an announcement would weaken Hamas and give Arafat and his people the upper hand.” He just looked at me like he had a fish bone caught in his throat.
What I didn’t tell Netanyahu that day — since my brief was security and not politics — was what I was learning by spending so much time in Gaza and Judea and Samaria. I had begun to see that more bypass roads, military outposts, and settlements would eventually destroy any hope of a two-state solution. If we kept up the building, before too long the Palestinians would conclude we had no intention of ending the occupation and allowing a Palestinian state alongside Israel. This would inevitably lead to the loss of hope and the triumph of terror.
Bibi returned from Washington and, pushed by the Americans, announced the withdrawal from the Hebron neighborhood. The message he sent to the Palestinians was that violence works.
Four months later Bibi sent another message to the Palestinians by greenlighting a major new settlement, Har Homa, in occupied East Jerusalem.