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A junkie and a martyr By Avi Issacharoff and Amos Harel Tags: bulldozer attack  Sur Baher. The home of bulldozer driver Hussam Duwiyat, who killed three Jerusalem residents and injured dozens more in the heart of the capital on Wednesday, is located opposite the Jewish neighborhood of Armon Hanatziv. On the slope of the adjacent hill lies Jabel Mukaber, the hometown of yet another terrorist, Ala Abu-Dahim, who murdered eight students at Jerusalem's Merkaz Harav Yeshiva just four months ago. The reactions of the residents were very subdued; no flags of any organizations were flown. One neighbor said softly that the killer had had a serious drug problem. "A drug addict, you know. He'd shoot up all the time." One of the neighbor's friends scolded him: "Why don't you keep quiet? He's dead, may Allah have mercy on his soul." But the neighbor continued. "Had they checked his blood, they would have found drugs, he was doing that all day. Now they'll turn him into a 'shahid' [martyr] and a hero. The whole world will support him, although he was really just a junkie." A few other residents mentioned that Duwiyat got into some sort of trouble with a Jewish girl, and ended up spending about a year and a half in an Israeli prison. A few hours after the attack, the Shin Bet security service and the police brought several of Duwiyat's relatives in for questioning. It is widely believed that he acted on his own, so expectations weren't very high for the investigation. According to the Shin Bet, in terms of intelligence-gathering, it's usually better to keep the terrorist alive after an attack since an investigation afterward will yield more significant information. But there was no alternative here: The bulldozer driver appeared determined to continue his rampage up until the moment he was shot to death at close range. Advertisement One of the first phone calls made by the soldier in the Egoz unit who ultimately killed Duwiyat - after he was wounded by a policewoman - was to the soldier's brother-in-law, David Shapira - the army officer that killed the terrorist who infiltrated Merkaz Harav. Shapira, now an officer in the Paratroops Brigade, was in the midst of an exercise in the Golan Heights this week. At the same time, an initial report about the attack in Jerusalem was passed along the chain of command, from Egoz to the Golani Brigade and onward. "That's the Egoz mentality," said one senior officer. "They're taught to be that way from their first week of basic training." And it was, in fact, such a soldier, who had just completed his basic training and was on his first regular furlough, who knew how to establish contact, storm the terrorist and finally end the rampage, although a large number of older police officers were also around. Shapira had one piece of advice for his brother-in-law: "Stay away from reporters." The Egoz soldier followed these orders. He wrote a brief description of the event, read it into the Israel Defense Forces spokesperson's tape recorder, and avoided any further contact (which didn't stop some media outlets from presenting his comments as if made in an interview). Later, just to be certain, the soldier requested a gag order be put on his name and his photo, although they had already appeared extensively in Israel and abroad following the attack. Rafah is closed Last weekend, Hamas forces in the Gaza Strip arrested one of the spokesmen for Fatah's Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, because of his organization's involvement in firing Qassam rockets at Israel. Also, when Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, was asked about the bulldozer attack in Jerusalem, he was careful not to praise it, saying only that "it was a natural response to the crimes of the Zionists." These two incidents reflect a new policy, which can be attributed to Hamas' decision to uphold the tahadiyeh (temporary cease-fire) at almost any price. But contrary to Israeli expectations that Hamas will soften its demands concerning the release of "serious" prisoners - i.e., those serving life sentences - Hamas representative Ismail Radwan this week asserted: "We will not compromise. These are sacred demands and even if [kidnapped soldier Gilad] Shalit has to remain captive for another 100 years we won't free him unless the enemy complies with our demands." The negotiations with Hamas are still nowhere near a resolution. The organization was hoping this week that the Egyptians would open the Rafah border crossing to allow the passage of sick patients and "humanitarian cases" from Egypt into Gaza and vice versa. But the masses of Palestinians who stormed the crossing to get to the Egyptian side early in the week scuttled Hamas' plan and angered Cairo. Israel is linking the opening of Rafah to Shalit's release, but the Egyptian mediators appear to have little interest in opening it. They are quite fearful of a mass Palestinian influx into Sinai - something Hamas' police force is not likely to make a serious effort to prevent. Cairo is also aware of the outcome of a recent survey of Gaza residents, indicating that 45 percent of them would leave if possible. Their preferred destination: Egypt, of course. This is not what President Hosni Mubarak has in mind, even when he promises to accelerate the negotiations for Shalit's release. Goldwasser, Regev, Arad When Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah spoke two days ago about the anticipated prisoner swap with Israel, he spoke from his bunker. One journalist asked whether Nasrallah would be the last Lebanese prisoner left once the deal was completed. He evaded the question. Israeli officials deny that the arrangement includes any guarantees whatsoever for Nasrallah's safety. The balance of power in the cabinet's vote - a large majority in favor of the deal - was known from the outset. After the fact, sources in the security establishment said that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert had decided to agree to the deal several days before the vote and that his agonizing over it was mostly aimed at the media. With all the focus on Olmert, the whole business with the chief military rabbi over Eldad Regev and Udi Goldwasser was nearly forgotten. Just two weeks ago, the process of deciding whether to declare the two captured soldiers dead was seen as urgent and vital. Now, it has been frozen, in anticipation of the deal - although the IDF has not officially acknowledged this fact. The debate over the declaration, much like the fear that a rejection of the agreement would mean losing any chance to get the soldiers home, has spawned frequent comparisons with the case of missing navigator Ron Arad. The Israeli consensus is that Arad has been abandoned; there was an opportunity to bring him home alive, at a reasonable price, shortly after the abduction, but Israel hesitated, tried to bargain and missed out. But that's only part of the story. The other part is the tremendous investment the state and the intelligence community have made in the case. Not only in terms of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of work hours, but also daring operations by Sayeret Matkal elite force and the Mossad that risked the lives of dozens of fighters. There are several senior reservists who believe that Israel lost its sense of proportion. The prime minister and defense minister are now talking about the need to redefine the procedures regarding negotiations for the return of abducted soldiers, after the two deals currently in the works are concluded. But this is unlikely to happen. It is even more unlikely that, once the next Israeli is kidnapped, the government will be able to withstand the pressure exerted by the captive's family, even if by then the rules have been changed. In his speech, Nasrallah promised to solve the mystery of Regev and Goldwasser, as well as that of Ron Arad, within a short time. But 30 years of civil war in Lebanon, open inter-ethnic strife, two wars with Israel and intense activity by intelligence personnel from numerous countries have left behind a lot of mystery. A typical example concerns the affair of the Iranian diplomats who disappeared north of Beirut in July 1982, at the height of the first Lebanon war with Israel. The four Iranians mistakenly arrived at a checkpoint manned by Phalangist Christians. The Israeli inquiry into their disappearance found that they were taken to Eli Hobeika, a Phalangist leader who gained notoriety for his part in the slaughter at the Sabra and Chatila refugee camps about two months later. Hobeika's people reportedly killed the four and tossed their bodies into a lime pit. Then the Phalangists built a house on the site. Twenty-six years later, who knows the exact location of the house? There is no one Israel can ask certainly not Hobeika himself, who met his maker in the most popular Lebanese fashion: an unsolved explosion of his Mercedes, in January 2002. Hezbollah is presently demanding, on Iran's behalf, a detailed Israeli answer as to what happened to the diplomats, in return for its report on Arad. The case of the missing diplomats also came up in the Elhanan Tennenbaum deal four years ago. Back then, Israel's findings were conveyed to the German mediator, although it appears they were not passed to Hezbollah in full, since the latter did not in turn deliver the expected goods - i.e., "substantial and concrete" information about Arad. In a sense, there are certain parallels between the cases: Israel is demanding answers from Hezbollah about Arad, even though it knows that the key lies somewhere else, in Tehran or with other Lebanese Shi'ite elements connected to it. Hezbollah and Iran accuse Israel of murdering the diplomats, knowing that the real culprit is the Phalangists. And as in the Iranian affair, in the case of Arad, too, Hezbollah has a few ideas about the diplomats' burial place, although it is unable to confirm them. Hezbollah's report won't surprise Israel, apparently. Three years ago, the organization relayed an indirect message to Israel, saying it believed that Arad was dead, though it could not locate the body. This time, it appears that a description of the search's findings, rather than a concrete result, will suffice for Samir Kuntar's release to go ahead. 'Pentagon analysts' The American media have been inundated lately with predictions and scenarios of a possible Israeli attack against Iranian nuclear facilities. Local media have reported extensively on these reports. The primary source of the leaks about Israeli preparations for an attack seems to be someone in the Bush administration. At least some of the reports have a basis in reality. The large Israel Air Force exercise a month ago illustrates that the IDF is preparing for the possibility that it will receive an order to attack. The American interest is also clear: An Israeli attack is the stick the United States is waving at Iran, to get it to agree to the carrot - the international aid it will receive in return for forgoing its nuclear ambitions. What's surprising is the change in Israel's official line. Up until a few months ago, the military censor enforced a strict policy with regard to the media, but lately it doesn't seem to be clamping down quite as much. Suddenly, the television networks and radio stations are not having any trouble lining up interviewees to talk about the chances of an attack on Iran. This week, the roster of retired generals speaking on the subject included, among others, former air force commander Major General (res.) Eitan Ben-Eliahu, and the former heads of the research department in military intelligence, Major General (res.) Yaakov Amidror and Brigadier General (res.) Yossi Kuperwasser. About a month ago, America was buzzing about the "Pentagon analysts" - former generals who appeared on the major networks voicing support for the administration's policy in Iraq. It was belatedly discovered that these analysts were systematically bombarded with "positive messages" from the Defense Department, and that some of them represented the business interests of major companies with Pentagon contracts. This is not the case in Israel, but one can assume that when the former generals are preparing to be interviewed on such a sensitive issue, they take the trouble to be updated and sometimes also to obtain a green light from their successors. The obvious conclusion is that the political echelon and the General Staff now take a positive view of public speculation concerning the possibility that Israel will try to repeat in Iran what in achieved with similar operations in Iraq and Syria. Bookmark to del.icio.us   A photoshopped launch Did Iran doctor an image of its provocative missile test launch? Local threat The Shin Bet arrests two Bedouin, accused of supplying information to al-Qaida.

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