Ami Ayalon led the Shin Bet, the Israeli interior 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 the reserve, Ayalon (Tiberias, 1945) is a legend in Israel. He received the Valor medal (only forty people have it) at the age of 24, for his heroic action in a mission against Egypt, during which half of the commando fell. He became commander of the Navy, a position he left in 1996 to join the Shin Bet, an experience that, he says, changed his view of Israeli society but also of the Palestinians and the conflict. He entered politics for a few years, in the ranks of 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 settlements in the West Bank and, in recent months, with the controversial judicial reform.
The interview took place on Friday in Barcelona, ??where Ayalon participated in an event by Keren Hayesod, the Jewish Agency fund that collects money for humanitarian purposes. After Saturday’s brutal attack by Hamas, Israel is a different country. However, the voice of Ayalon (who has authorized the publication of the interview) and his reflections on the conflict are more pertinent than ever.
Why did leading the Shin Bet transform his vision?
I learned two lessons. First, that my enemies, in this case the Palestinian terrorists, are human beings. When you’re trained in the military, you only see targets. You civilians don’t 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 the person is. When you’re fighting terrorists, it’s different. It’s personal. You need to know everything about him: who are his parents, his wife, who he prays with, what school he sends his children to. Without that, you won’t be able to answer the most important question: why does it do it? The thing is, once you know so much about him, he becomes a human being. And the first impact is that you are not afraid of him. Even if you know that as soon as he is released he will continue to kill Israelis, you understand why he does it. You don’t agree, but you empathize, which is different from sympathizing. You understand the reasons. And the way you understand 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 no person or group of people can be deterred if they believe they have nothing to lose. I thought we were liberators, but I understood that they see us as oppressors. I met them, I became friends with Jibril Rajub, with Muhammad 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 one day the occupation will end and we will be able to create a Palestinian State. The moment we stop dreaming, that our people don’t see us as liberators, forget about us’.
Are there no more reasons for hope?
They lost it. In the 1990s, the Oslo agreement was accepted by the vast majority of Palestinians. They came to believe that they would not achieve freedom through violence. Arafat led them to give up what they believe is 75% of their land. And day by day, they expected to see freedom closer. Instead, what they saw were more settlements, more settlers, more violence, more military sites. 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 narrative of the Israelis is: ‘We gave them everything and they responded with terror’. We don’t see their narrative and they don’t see ours. And we’ll keep killing each other as long as we don’t see each other. It’s empathy. Robert McNamara, the US Secretary of Defense 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 didn’t 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. We failed empathy, says McNamara. Like us
