Ami Ayalon directed the Shin Bet, the Israeli internal secret service, for four and a half years, and it was not exactly an easy time. He came to office in 1996, after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin at the hands of a Jewish radical who considered him a traitor for negotiating with the Palestinians.
Admiral in reserve, Ayalon (Tiberias, 1945) is a legend in Israel. He received the Medal of Valor (only 40 people have it) at the age of 24, for his heroic action on a mission against Egypt, during which he fell half of the command. He became commander of the Navy, a position he left in 1996 to go to the Shin Bet, an experience that, he says, changed his vision of Israeli society, but also of the Palestinians and the conflict. He entered politics for a while, in the Labor Party, and came second in the 2007 primaries, behind Ehud Barak, who later appointed him minister.
A tireless defender of dialogue with the Palestinians, he has been one of the most critical voices of Netanyahu’s far-right government, both with its policy of expanding colonies in the West Bank and, in recent months, the controversial judicial reform.
The interview was last Friday in Barcelona, ??where he participated in an event by Keren Hayesod, the Jewish Agency fund that raises money for humanitarian purposes. After the brutal Hamas attack on Saturday, Israel is a different country. However, Ayalon’s voice (who has authorized the publication of the interview) and his reflections on the conflict are more pertinent than ever.
Why did running the Shin Bet transform your vision?
I learned two lessons. Firstly, that my enemies, in this case the Palestinian terrorists, are human beings. When you are trained as a military man, you only see targets. You civilians do not send us to war to negotiate. You send us to kill and that’s what we do. With knife, rifle or missiles. It is technique, technology, strategy. When you kill someone as a soldier, it doesn’t matter who that person is. When you fight terrorists, it’s different. You must know everything about him: who his parents are, his wife, who he prays with, what school he sends his children to. Without it, you won’t be able to answer the most important question: why does he do it? What happens is, once you know so much about him, he becomes a human being. And the first shock is that you don’t fear him. Even if you know that as soon as he is free he will continue killing Israelis, you understand why he does it. You disagree, but you empathize, which is different from sympathizing. You understand his motives. And your way of understanding this conflict, this war, this battle, changes.
And the second lesson?
Well, once you understand him, them as a people, you understand that the equation between them and us is very simple: we will have security when they have hope. The military knows that you cannot deter a person or group of people if they believe they have nothing to lose. I used to believe that we were liberators, but I understood that they see us as oppressors. I met them, I became friends with Jibril Rayoub, Mohamed Dahlan, the commanders of the Palestinian security apparatus, and they told me: ‘Look Ami, we are fighting against our brothers, Hamas. We put them in jail, we interrogate them. Not because we owe you anything, we don’t owe you anything, we do it only as long as we believe that the occupation will end and we will create a Palestinian State. The moment we stop dreaming, that our people do not see us as liberators, forget about us.’
Are there no more reasons for hope?
They have lost it. In the 1990s, the Oslo agreement was accepted by the vast majority of Palestinians. They came to believe that with violence they would not achieve their freedom. Arafat led them to give up what they believe to be 75% of their land. And day by day, they hoped to see freedom closer. Instead, what they saw were more settlements, more settlers, more violence, more military outposts. So they stopped dreaming and started supporting terror. The tragedy of the Middle East is that there are two narratives that collide. The Palestinian narrative is: ‘we gave up our dream and what we got was more occupation.’ The Israelis’ narrative is: ‘we gave them everything and they responded with terror.’ We don’t see their narrative and they don’t see ours. And we will continue killing each other as long as we don’t see each other. It’s empathy. Robert McNamara, the American defense minister during Vietnam, wrote a great book, In Retrospect, in which he lists the eleven lessons of that war. The first is empathy. The big mistake, he says, was that they did not understand their enemies. They did not understand that the Vietnamese hated the Chinese, that they did not see themselves as part of the Soviet space, all they wanted was their freedom, after years of colonialism. Empathy failed us, says McNamara. Like us.
