The spate of attacks in Judea and Samaria, which culminated in the Bali attack, expresses the limitations of Israel’s counter-terrorism policy in the West. At the heart of the current strategy is a continuous and impressive intelligence and operational effort, manifested in short forays into cities under the control of the Palestinian Authority, in order to damage the terrorist infrastructure even before the terrorists set out to carry out their attacks. the acts of terrorism, and to catch the perpetrators of the attacks in the event that it occurred to them to carry out their plan.
In this way, since the beginning of 2022, about 150 terrorists have been eliminated, hundreds have been arrested, and dozens of terrorist attacks have been thwarted. On top of that, Israel persistently and carefully implements the policy of destroying the homes of terrorists, which is supposed to create deterrence. Despite this, the attacks do not stop, and some of them cause casualties. Since the beginning of the year, 29 Israelis have been murdered in attacks of this type.
In order to examine the possibility of adopting a different policy, one must understand the motives of the terrorist elements, the limitations of intelligence and how they can be overcome, and know the additional options for action that have not been used so far.
Beyond the basic commitment to a violent struggle against Zionism, as part of the concept of struggle rooted in the Palestinian youth through the education, media and culture systems and the leadership’s messages to all its components, the willingness to murder Jews also stems from the fact that the Palestinian leadership and society see this as an admirable act that justifies the payment of fat salaries to terrorists. The Palestinian leadership is interested in this, especially at the current time, as an expression of outrage at Israel’s policy and the international and Arab disregard for Palestinian claims. It is also evident that the distance from the frustration experienced by the Palestinians following their failure in the second intifada, removed a factor that until recently deterred young Palestinians from participating in terrorist activities.
Israel’s emphasis on intelligence-based activity is appropriate, but it ignores the fact that we will never have all the necessary intelligence. Because of this, there is a need for an extensive deterrence and defense activity that is not based on intelligence, i.e. the deployment of checkpoints and checkpoints and the concentration of forces (unfortunately, the decision on the concentration of forces was postponed until after the attack in Ali, although it should have been made at the latest after the attack in Harmesh). Second, it is necessary to create friction with the terrorist elements in their concentrations, in order to produce the missing intelligence to end them. This is the operational logic that may justify extensive action against terrorist hotspots, while on the other hand the fear is that such an action may involve harm to IDF soldiers and international scrutiny and will not prevent attacks from areas where extensive and continuous action will not be carried out. Beyond that, such operations may strengthen the deterrence dimension against the terrorist elements and their supporters.
Deploying barriers will harm the freedom of movement not only of the terrorists but also of the rest of the population, and this is contrary to the current policy which strictly separates activity against terrorists from activity against the leadership that supports and encourages them, and against the society that supports them. Although the Palestinian leadership does not miss an opportunity to back the terrorists and attack Israel blatantly in international forums, using slander and baseless lies, Israel continues to express its commitment to preserving and strengthening the PA. Israel even avoids marches against it, out of unfounded fear that they will harm its functioning and security cooperation with it, or even lead to its collapse. It is clear that in this way there is no chance of getting the Authority to re-examine its policy that encourages terrorism. The same goes for the support the terrorists receive from Palestinian society. As long as it does not recognize that there is a price for this support - it has no incentive to send a message of restraint to its citizens. Such a price could include the expansion of construction in the settlement, as the government has already decided, and a ban on Israeli Arabs entering the Authority’s territories for commercial purposes. in parallel,
Not all steps are required at the same time, and some of them - for example, continuous activity in the depth of the area - may be better avoided initially for operational reasons; However, it is clear that the remedies that have been tried so far for the scourge of terrorism from the Palestinian Authority are not sufficient, and Israel must use additional measures and not limit its freedom of action for fear that it will harm the Palestinian Authority.
Brig. Gen. (Res) Yossi Kuperwasser is an Israeli intelligence and security expert. Formerly, Kuperwasser served as the head of the research division in the Israel Defence Force Military Intelligence division and Director General of the Israel Ministry of Strategic Affairs. Kuperwasser is currently a Head of the Israeli Intelligence Methodology Research Institute and a Senior Project Manager at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs specializing in the security dimensions of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
