Wednesday, July 16, 2008

Halting Terror

I recently participated in a panel, moderated by Linda Gradstein of NPR, with Yariv Oppenheimmer of Peace Now, for the beneift of some 15 Hillel professionals.

One question that came up was the security barrier, the "Wall", as our Leftists prefer, and its advantages. As I am against it, I was pressed on the security issue. I insisted that beyond the zero effectiveness of a wall against mortars and rockets, the real reason for the relatively high prevention success level was hard intelligence work.

Today, I stumbled across an article which provided support:-

As we walked through the streets of Jerusalem on our final day, we wondered why Israel had been so quiet over the last year. This question went to the very heart of our counterterrorism tour: the notion that Israel has somehow figured out how to win, or at least hold at bay, the "war on terror." Over the course of the week, we had heard many explanations for the lull in attacks: the wall, the layers of security that protect key sites, and the legal system, which allows Israel to quickly lock up suspected terrorists.

But Roni Shaked, a former commander in Israel's Shin Bet, gave us what he felt was the real explanation behind Israel's success. "The main, main reason why it's quiet, I think, it's just because of the Israeli security service," Shaked had told us on the first day of the tour. "Because during those years, we understood how to fight against the new kind of terrorism, how to fight against the new phenomenon of terror, the suicide bombers who are in Israel."

According to Shaked, Israel's success rests on several decades' worth of experience infiltrating Palestinian society.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

But the vaunteted Intelligence Services couldn't even determine if the captives 'returned' today were even alive?

Peter Drubetskoy said...

Yes, we can agree on this one. The wall has nothing to do with security and everything with land grab and the "benign" ethnic cleansing of Palestinians.
It is one of those issues where the settlers are at odds with the "more mainstream" racist forces in Israel, since the wall leaves them out of what those forces try to establish as the future border of Israel.

Peter Drubetskoy said...

I forgot to mention, of course, the hundreds of millions of dollars made by corrupt contractors and their cronies-politicians from tax money of the duped Israelis.