Former Shin Bet head Nachman Tal. "The service consistently and constantly demanded from every government ministry: Don't ignore the problem." Nir Keidar
In addition to its close supervision of Israel's Arab population, the Shin Bet has repeatedly warned all of Israel's governments against the neglect of this large minority and called for their integration into society. But some in the service are convinced that the Shin Bet has been far too conservative and adapted too slowly to change
In 1989, at the height of the first intifada, a senior officer in France's intelligence community came to Israel on a secret visit. It was seemingly a routine visit in the context of the ties that have existed for many years between Israel's intelligence services and its counterparts in other countries. Nevertheless, the meeting Nachman Tal held with the French intelligence officer is deeply engraved on his memory. "He took an interest in our relations with Israeli Arabs and Palestinians," recalls Tal, "and he said to me, `Learn from our experience in Algeria.'" The officer had served under the command of General Jacques Massu, a decorated paratrooper who participated in the attempt to put down the rebellion in Algeria. He told Tal, "In Algeria, we made a lot of mistakes. We failed to keep an eye on the temperature. You have to pay attention to the heat. When the temperature goes up, the whole business is lost."
Advertisement
Dr. Tal, 73, is one the chief designers of the Shin Bet Security Service's policy toward the Arabs in Israel. He says, "While the French officer was referring mainly to the importance of learning from their experience in our attitude toward the Palestinians, his approach is also valid regarding Israeli Arabs. That was the approach I always believed in and which I always recommended to the service. Even if Israeli Arabs achieve complete equality, they will never be completely satisfied and will not change their identity or political preference. It is difficult, almost impossible, for a national minority to live in a majority nation, and consequently, there is no comprehensive solution to the problem. You just have to make sure to keep an eye on the temperature."
This approach, which could be termed "practical moderation," was adopted by the Shin Bet, which recommended it to all the governments. Credit for its formulation goes mainly to Avraham Ahituv, who served as Shin Bet chief in 1972-1980, and Tal, who served under him. Both spent most of their professional careers from the 1950s on in the Arab division of the Shin Bet. Now, as then, and despite the changes in the emphases and goals of the department over the years, this department remains the largest one in the organization.
Israel is not South Africa
Tal joined the Shin Bet in 1955 and was a case officer in the northern district. His principal task was to collect information about what was going on among the Arabs in the area he oversaw in the Galilee. Those were the years of the military administration, which was in place from the end of the War of Independence until its abolition in 1966, at the recommendation of the Shin Bet.
After filling a number of jobs in the Israel Defense Forces and the Mossad, Tal headed the southern district of the Shin Bet from 1974 on; and from 1982, he headed the service's Arab division. In 1999, he served as the Shin Bet's representative in the Israeli delegation to the peace talks with the Palestinians and with Jordan. In 1995, he left the service after 40 years, but Shin Bet chiefs since have consulted with him as an expert on Israeli Arab affairs.
After Tal's retirement, then Shin Bet head Ami Ayalon allowed him to carry out a study on Israeli Arabs under the military government. The study ripened into a doctoral thesis that was submitted to the University of Haifa, but is still considered confidential because Tal used Shin Bet documents and other secret materials.
"Due to the nature of its mission, the service is the only body in Israel that has constantly been in the field and has ongoing and better contact with the Arab community than any other governmental body," said Tal in an interview. "The service consistently and constantly demanded from every government ministry: Don't ignore the problem. The service heads went to the prime ministers and governments time after time and asked them to set out guidelines for a strategic, long-term program regarding Israel's Arabs: Give them budgets, close the gaps - they deserve equal rights - and in return, demand civil loyalty."
This approach took shape as far back as the early 1960s, when Mossad chief Isser Harel, whom Ben-Gurion had appointed to be in charge of the security services, demanded that the military government be abolished. Harel, along with others, such as Shmuel Toledano (a former Mossad officer and at the time an adviser to the prime minister on Arab affairs), managed to convince prime minister Levi Eshkol to bring about its abolition. Harel maintained that the military government was an anachronistic institution that was being exploited for the needs of the Mapai ruling party. From a security viewpoint, maintained Harel, the Shin Bet and the Israel Defense Forces were sufficient and it was not necessary to have the manipulative mechanism of the military administration, which forced its authority on the Arab citizens and penetrated every area of their lives.
"Over the years," adds Tal, "I helped outline 15 programs to reduce the discrimination against Israeli Arabs. We wrote in our reports about the neglect and about how Israel's Arabs were being ignored. We proposed that they receive budgets to solve the housing problems of young couples, land for housing, education. At the same time, I do not accept the claim put forward by some Arab leaders that there was a deliberate policy of discrimination and deprivation. The discrimination was an outcome, not a calculated policy. Israel is not South Africa."
Herzog granted legitimacy
Unlike Tal, another former Shin Bet officer is convinced that the service's policy was not quite that moderate and liberal. "The Shin Bet was for the most part a conservative organization, which adapted very slowly to changes on the ground," says Dr. Reuven Paz. He began his career in the organization as a desk officer in 1971, and in 1982, established the research department, a small section in the Arab division that has grown into an entire department.
Paz, who interrogated Palestinian prisoners identified with radical Islamic organizations, specialized in research on the Hamas and Islamic movements in Israel. As an example of the Shin Bet's conservatism shrouded in misgivings, he points to the attitude of the Shin Bet toward the Israeli Communist Party (Maki and afterward Rakah). For many years, the party was under tight surveillance by the Shin Bet. Until the early 1980s, its activists were considered a "danger to the state."
At the initiative of the Shin Bet in September 1980, Rakah was forbidden to organize a conference of representatives of all the movements active among Israeli Arabs. The leaders of the Shin Bet convinced then prime minister Menachem Begin to outlaw any attempt at organizing such a council headed by Rakah activist Emile Touma. A similar approach characterized the Shin Bet in its attitude toward the national committee of Arab heads of local authorities. "The Shin Bet believed then that any national organization of Arabs would be an undesirable development," explains Paz.
The attitude toward the communists changed in 1980 after then president Chaim Herzog honored the party's annual convention with his presence, as he did with the conventions of the Zionist parties, thereby granting it political legitimacy.
In recent years, the place of the communists as those likely to awaken subversive elements has been taken by the Islamic Movement, and to some extent, Balad, the party of MK Azmi Bishara. "In my opinion, the Islamic Movement today is like a cancer - and I am fully aware of the force of that expression - which is spreading among Israel's Arabs," says Hezi Kalo, who was head of the department for the prevention of political subversion in the Shin Bet's Arab division in the years 1978-1981, and following that headed the office of Shin Bet chief Avraham Shalom. From there, he moved on to serve as director of the northern district, and in 1998, retired from the service after serving as the head of the counter-espionage division (the non-Arab division). The Islamic Movement, he adds, "serves as an incubator for terror and it should be dealt with by means of arrests, investigations, trials and even by banning it. Yet I wish to emphasize that we do not have a war with Islam, only with the enemies of the state."
The ministers didn't listen
The Shin Bet has always feared the tightening of the ties between Israel's Arabs and the Palestinians in the territories. These contacts were based on family ties or cultural affinity, but they soon advanced to political identification, and in a few dozen cases, actual involvement of Israeli Arabs in acts of terror. Paz points to the fact that already in the early years after the Six-Day War, quite a few Israeli Arabs were discovered who had joined cells of the Palestinian organizations. Some had been active in the past in the Al-Ard movement, which had been outlawed in 1963 at the orders of the Shin Bet. Some of them were even involved in terror attacks. "All these discoveries were inevitable because of the intensity of the encounter between Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the wake of the Six-Day War," adds Paz.
For him, the deep involvement of the Shin Bet for so many years - and today too - in appointments in the Arab educational system is yet another aspect of its suspicious attitude. "The Shin Bet not only determined and intervened in the appointment of principals and teachers, but even decided who the custodians and janitors that clean the bathrooms in the Arab schools would be," relates a senior officer in the service.
But despite the surveillance and attempts to be plugged- in to Arab society, the Shin Bet was repeatedly surprised by the major events associated with Israel's Arabs. Kalo admits, "The strength of the response on Land Day in 1976 was a total surprise for us." Following a series of land expropriations in the Galilee, especially what was known as "firing zone nine," protest demonstrations were organized by the heads of the local councils and prominent public figures. Six demonstrators were killed, three near Sakhnin, as a result of the panic that overtook the police, due to their poor preparation and the complete surprise of the Shin Bet.
Similar factors were behind the violent response by police officers in October 2000, when 12 Israeli Arabs and one Palestinian were killed during demonstrations, deeply scarring the relations between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
"Already back in the 1980s, we said that Arabs should be integrated into all sectors of Israeli society, including most government corporations, such as the Israel Electric Corporation, with the exception of a small number of security-related institutions such as the Rafael Armaments Development Authority, the nuclear reactor, Israel Aircraft Industries, and so on," says Tal. "And what came out of that? Very little. I recently checked and found that out of the 13,000 permanent employees in the Israel Electric Corporation, only six are Arabs."
"In the years before October 2000," Tal believes, "the writing was on the wall. It was there in the form of the spraying of Bedouin crops in the Negev, the demolition of homes in the Galilee, more inequality, more neglect, more discrimination in the allocation of budgets. So why should anyone be surprised when the pressure cooker explodes?"
A former Shin Bet department head says, "The big problem is not what we said and what we recommended. So what if in all the annual reports of the Arab division we presented all the trends present among Israeli Arabs, their frustration, the discrimination and differential treatment, all of which encourage their drive toward autonomy, separatism and independence. Okay, so we wrote these things and we were even right. So what? Every discussion ends with recommendations and the heads of the services go to the prime ministers and ministers, and nothing is done. The responsibility for carrying out the recommendations belongs to others - the ministries of education and health and the interior, and above all the treasury and the prime minister. The service talks and recommends, but the government does far too little."
Haaretz.com, the online edition of Haaretz Newspaper in Israel, offers real-time breaking news, opinions and analysis from Israel and the Middle East. Haaretz.com provides extensive and in-depth coverage of Israel, the Jewish World and the Middle East, including defense, diplomacy, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the peace process, Israeli politics, Jerusalem affairs, international relations, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Palestinian Authority, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the Israeli business world and Jewish life in Israel and the Diaspora.
