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Burning sands By Amir Oren Tags: Yuval Diskin "We don't have a passion to fight, we have a passion to defend," Brigadier-General Aviv Kochavi waxed poetic as he wound up his command of the Gaza Division, in an article published under the division's symbol - the fox of the Southern Command. "And for the sake of defense, we will be able to break through gates that were closed and take over every hilltop and neighborhood and defeat the enemy." Kochavi was referring to the gate that closed behind him at the Kissufim Crossing on September 12, 2005, at the completion of the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip. After a year in Washington, D.C., Kochavi returned to the Israel Defense Forces to head the Operations Branch in the General Staff, and found that Gaza had waited for him, with typical patience. As he himself had written, in his farewell letter to the division: "The Gaza Strip compresses within it the entire essence of the Israeli- Palestinian conflict, dictates the agenda of the conflict and determines its intensity; it is a violent and tough place." Kochavi returned six weeks after the abduction of Corporal Gilad Shalit, six weeks of failures and disappointments. Since then, the situation has only worsened. Shalit is still in captivity, and no good rescue opportunities have been created. Qassam and Grad rockets are being fired relentlessly at the western Negev and the Lachish region. Hamas' control of Gaza has become military as well as political. The final and mortal blow was the toppling of the Philadelphi wall on January 23. Since the disengagement, and especially since Hamas' rise to power, the intelligence community has been debating a fundamental question - which branch is responsible for Gaza, the IDF's Military Intelligence (MI), which deals with enemy states, or the Shin Bet security service, which continues to deal with the Palestinians in the West Bank? It is clear that the Shin Bet still has the upper hand, except when it comes to professional, military aspects. Advertisement The Shin Bet is fundamentally a counterterrorism organization that does not usually take an interest in anyone not involved in hostile activity. And so it missed the rise of radical Islam in the territories and especially in Gaza, so long as its adherents refrained from terror activity and focused on religious, ideological and social efforts. Before he was revealed to be a leader of Hamas, Dr. Mahmoud Zahar was considered relatively moderate, compared to the leaders of Fatah; in 1988 he was one of four important figures from Gaza who met with defense minister Yitzhak Rabin. In recent years, the Shin Bet has come to realize that it had neglected strategy in favor of tactics. Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin created a small, special team, Mateh Ma'amad, to examine events against the background of long-range trends. In IDF terms, this was akin to combining MI's research branch with the Planning Branch's strategic planning unit. The head of Mateh Ma'amad, Y., came from the field, and to the field he will return. He will soon be made head of the Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria district, the largest and most important in the Shin Bet. On January 24, Y. and the head of the Shin Bet's Southern District, G., rang the warning bells. The terror cells that had been at various stages of organization - recruiting suicide bombers, preparing explosive belts, planning the crossing into Egypt and from there to Israel - found before them a new horizon: free passage into Egypt. The dam had burst and terror was sure to find its way to the Negev and the Red Sea resort areas frequented by Israelis. Every warning about a planned terror attack translates in the Shin Bet into the creation of a forward command group assigned to monitor the cell and oversee its interception. G. immediately coordinated with his counterparts in Be'er Sheva, GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant, and Southern District Police Commander Uri Bar-Lev. Army, Border Police and police forces were reinforced (and will be further reinforced), the alert was raised, and roads and sites near the border were closed. But with all the measures that were taken, it's impossible to hermetically seal off the long roads and the wide open spaces of the Negev, which are fairly easy to reach from either the north or the east. If any proof of this was needed, it came this week with the Dimona attack by the Hamas Hebron cell. Fortunately for the South, both because of its distance from the center and the cooperation among the various security organizations, the situation there is better than in the West Bank. Two years ago, Colonel Erez Weiner wrote a troubling description of the tangled command situation in the West Bank. Weiner noted that the Central Command operated both the Judea and Samaria Division and Division 162, responsible for the Jordan Rift Valley. The former comprised seven territorial brigades, including one on rotation, usually an artillery support unit. The Civil Administration is subordinate not to the head of the command, but to the coordinator of activity in the territories, who answers to the defense minister. The Judea and Samaria District of the National Police includes four areas that have no connection to the operational sectors of the IDF, the Shin Bet or the Civil Administration. The different maps were drawn up separately in accordance with each organization's needs and history. Mayors and regional council heads in the West Bank are officially subordinate to the interior minister, but in practice they answer to the Yesha Council. The Samaria Regional Council includes parts of three IDF territorial brigades, Menashe, Ephraim and Samaria. Even worse, there is no coordination between the Shin Bet subdistricts and the brigades. There is one sector brigade commander for every two or three Shin Bet subdistricts. This not only results in administrative confusion, but can also compromise operational effectiveness, sometimes with lethal results. Weiner cites as an example the village of Lubn al-Sharqiyya, in the Binyamin Brigade's sector (where he served as commander of the Duchifat Infantry Battalion early on in the confrontations with the Palestinians). To the Shin Bet, the village is part of the Bik'ot subdistrict and the Shomron subterritory, but for the IDF, it is in the Judea subterritory and the Ramallah and Binyamin subdistricts. On August 5, 2002, a warning about terrorists coming from Salfit did not reach the Judea subdistrict and the Binyamin Brigade on time, resulting in an attack on Route 60 in which a couple was killed and their children wounded. Weiner complained about the absence of an intelligence "top executive" who could set priorities, define threats and warnings and ensure that information was accessible to those who need it. The dissemination of vital intelligence information depends on the Shin Bet passing everything on to the IDF, but in practice the Shin Bet decides what to keep to itself. And no one has been definitively charged with addressing this issue. If this is the situation with areas controlled by Israel, the coordination with outside agents is even more complicated. Coordination with Jordan is enabled by the fact that it is not a regional power that is in competion with Israel. The situation on the Egyptian front is different. As long as the IDF controlled the Philadelphi corridor, it isolated the battlefield with the Palestinians from friction with Egypt. The decision to withdraw from the Philadelphi corridor, made in 2005 by Ariel Sharon, Shaul Mofaz, Ehud Olmert, Tzipi Livni and the rest of their cabinet colleagues, in defiance of forecasts of disaster, created not only a direct axis of Palestinian-Egyptian contact but a volatile blend. Whither Egypt? Until the breaching of the wall, Israel's defense establishment assumed, according to internal documents, that Egypt "was dedicated to the peace with Israel, and views it as a vital strategic asset for preserving internal stability and its special relations with Washington. Only a profound change - a change of regime, or the much less likely possibility of a change in the outlook of the present regime - could turn it into a strategic threat again. In the event of a regional crisis, in the Palestinian or the Syrian-Lebanese arena, it's likely that Egypt would choose to conduct a diplomatic crisis accompanied by military signals that do not violate the military addendum to the peace agreement." In the long term, especially looking ahead to the post-Mubarak era, the strengthening of Egypt with advanced Western weapons, in almost a mirror-image of the IDF, could make it "a possible primary military risk." The Egyptian army is not concealing its efforts to develop offensive capabilities, to improve its emergency preparedness and to ready the Sinai for the possibility of a military confrontation. The difference between this type of confrontation and one that is one grade below it - a serious but reversible Egyptian violation of the agreements on the demilitarization and reduction of forces in Sinai - depends on the existence of another factor that would stir up tension between the two countries. In May 1967, it was Syria's fear of an Israeli attack. Now it could be the Palestinian terror passing through Sinai on its way to the Negev. Israel has no satisfactory answer at hand. A fence has yet to be built. Egypt's demand that it be permitted to increase the size of the forces stipulated in the security addendum is justified only in its less important aspect: They need reinforcements in order to repel a rioting mob at Rafah. Israel turned its head when the 750 Egyptian border police sent to replace the local officers were instead added to them, doubling their number. What the Egyptians mainly need along the Israeli border are radar systems and troop transport helicopters (Israel agreed to let them into the "reduced-forces zone"), as well as the systematic recruitment of human resources - agents from among the local Bedouin. Cairo has so neglected Sinai that the peninsula has come to resemble the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan, which have eluded central control from Islamabad. So as not to put the fragile Israeli-Egyptian agreement to the test, one option would be to amend a less problematic section, the one stipulating the size and authorities of the international force. This force has an American director, a Norwegian commander and an infantry brigade made up of three battalions and other auxiliary units from 11 countries. For 25 years, this force has been employed solely in a supervisory and reportorial capacity. It could also be assigned to seal the border, but it would be hard to find countries that would agree to contribute battalions to this, to kill and be killed in a confrontation with Palestinians. NATO's experience in Afghanistan, both in terms of the size of the units and their rules of engagement, is not an encouraging precedent. Israel could find itself in a serious dilemma, if the sometimes productive intelligence cooperation with Egypt is insufficient to stop terror cells that are about to cross the border. Restraint would endanger lives in Dimona and Be'er Sheva - in fact, throughout Israel. But the violation of Egyptian sovereignty, which has been ruled out as illegal - would create a crisis in Jerusalem-Cairo relations. The emerging consequence of this situation is that the option that was most rejected in recent months - a ground assault in the Gaza Strip - will become the lesser of evils. The decision-makers in the government and the IDF - headed by those whose shortsighted policy led to the army's withdrawal from the Philadelphi corridor, brought Hamas to power and laid the groundwork for the breach of the Palestinian-Egyptian border - will be pushed into returning the IDF to the Qassam launch sites in the northern Strip and encircling the dozen or so kilometers between Kerem Shalom and the sea in order to trap the terror activists and recover their weapons in meticulous house-to-house searches. If they decide against reoccupying the entire Strip, they may make do with the Rafah and Khan Yunis area, up to the Gaza river. In that case, about 700,000 Gazans would be cut off from their livelihood in the north. This would be bad, very bad. Only an end to the peace with Egypt, in the event that this scenario does not take place, would be worse. Bookmark to del.icio.us   What's up, doc? Hamas airs television show featuring 'Jew-eating' Bugs Bunny look-alike. Gaza Trip Livni takes 70 ambassadors on a visit to the Gaza Strip as part of diplomatic campaign.   1.   Israel has no good options 15:28  |  spyguy 08/02/08   2.   Strategic thinking - Solution is searching expanded and more invo 20:36  |  saaackkk 08/02/08

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