Amos Harel :Revenge of the Rejects': The real reason young Palestinians commit lone-wolf attacks
The
resolution reached on the Temple Mount security measures last week
restored the situation in the West Bank and East Jerusalem to the
somewhat sleepy mid-summer mood that prevailed in the weeks preceding the escalation concerning the holy site. After the Palestinian victory celebrations last weekend when the metal detectors were removed,
the riots subsided. Prayers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque resumed as usual. The
lone-wolf terror attacks that became common over the past couple of
years are continuing off and on. On Wednesday, a Palestinian stabbed and critically wounded an Israeli
in the Tel Aviv suburb of Yavneh. At the Gush Etzion junction, soldiers
arrested a Palestinian woman with a knife who approached the
checkpoint.
The impact of the upheaval surrounding the Temple Mount and the crisis with Jordan
will likely be felt for some time to come. One of its many effects is
the emergence of a more realistic perspective on the part of the Trump
administration. Jared Kushner, U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law
and the man tasked by him with forging peace between Israel and the
Palestinians, was recorded admitting in a private conversation
that there currently doesn’t appear to be any way to resolve the
conflict. To be sure, very few people had any illusions about Trump’s
highly chaotic administration being able to deliver on this. Still,
Kushner’s remarks seem to signal that further American disengagement
from the Middle East is in the offing – not a positive development, from
Israel’s standpoint.
In the midst of the
Temple Mount crisis, the Palestinian Authority announced that it was
halting security cooperation with Israel. In reality, the coordination
continued via phone calls, while the heads of the security organizations
declined to hold any direct meetings. Among the Palestinian leadership,
there is concern over Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ health. Last
Saturday, Abbas was taken to the hospital in Ramallah, supposedly due
to exhaustion from dealing with the crisis, but Israeli officials
suspect his medical problems may be more serious. In his speech to the
Herzliya Conference last June, the Israeli army’s chief of staff spoke of the importance of security coordination with the PA.
The relationship is important to both sides. The reining in of
lone-wolf attacks, which reached a peak in late 2015, was attained in
part thanks to the counter-terrorism efforts of the Palestinian security
organizations. This happened when the security chiefs saw that the
young stabbers were sacrificing themselves to no real end and
endangering the PA’s stability at the same time.
Since October 2015, there
have been more than 300 lone-wolf terror attacks and copycat attacks, as
they are termed by the intelligence organizations. The initial eruption
of these attacks caught the army and the Shin Bet security service
unprepared. “We were having five attacks a day,” says one official who
was heavily involved in combating the wave of stabbings and car-ramming
attacks. “And all we could come up with was the most basic information
about where the terrorist came from and how old he was. We had zero
information about the terrorists’ background – and zero warnings, of
course.” It was at this point that that Israel began to develop a
response based on deep and comprehensive intelligence monitoring of
Palestinian social media.
For this purpose,
major data analysis was required. It started with an Excel sheet in
which all the available information on the first 80 terrorists was
entered. Clear patterns were spotted, with imitation the most prominent:
40 percent of the terrorists who struck in those first months came from
the same seven West Bank villages and neighborhoods. Half of the
attacks occurred at a small number of locations, with one attacker
following in the footsteps of another. Based on this information, the
Central Command tailored special security arrangements for the
attack-prone sites, with the Gush Etzion junction being number one.
The
analysis of these 80 terrorists’ backgrounds revealed a number of key
differences compared to the terrorists of the previous generation. The
new attackers were not very religiously devout, most had no history of
active involvement in a terrorist organization and they mostly fell in
the middle of the socioeconomic spectrum, with only a few coming from
refugee camps. Another noticeable common denominator was that many
suffered from personal problems: Young men and, especially, young women,
who suffered abuse at home, family crises, or were relative outsiders
in their society. They viewed attacking Israelis, and possibly dying as a
shahid, as a way to escape their plight. Many of the terrorists who
were arrested told interrogators that they set out to commit the attack
on a sudden impulse. In one case, the stabber went out to attack after
getting into a big fight with his father, who broke his iPad. In another
case, the son of a wealthy businessman set out to run over Israelis
with his father’s Mercedes after learning that his parents meant to hand
the reins of the family business to his brother and not him.
When
it was asked to profile the terrorists, the Central Command
intelligence team described the phenomenon as “Revenge of the Rejects.”
Picking up a knife temporarily transformed these shunned youths into
superheroes, into Palestinian Supermen and Superwomen. By committing an
attack, the lone wolf connected to a narrative larger than himself or
herself, one that imbued the attacker with bravery, with no need for any
kind of organizational umbrella. Terrorists killed in the course of
their attacks were especially lauded on social media, regardless of how
much damage they managed to inflict. A flattering Facebook profile photo
was enough.
These kinds of
personal issues as motivators became wedded to the very powerful engine
of incitement. The formal Palestinian media is less relevant here than
the social networks and online news sites. The PA, which had softened
the tone of some of its media during 2016, let loose once more in recent
weeks against the backdrop of the fury surrounding the Temple Mount.
The claim that “Al-Aqsa is in danger,” pushed by the Northern Branch of
the Islamic Movement in Israel, also took hold in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem. This has been the main motivation cited by all the
terrorists of the last few weeks. Israeli intelligence has also found
that the number of declarations of readiness to commit terror attacks
has risen by hundreds of percentage points. The Israeli response relies
to a large extent on monitoring the internet and requires close
coordination with the forces in the field, who are responsible for
making arrests. Recently, a new record was set: Just 24 minutes passed
between the time an alert was declared and when the terrorist was
arrested en route to the attack. In many other cases, arrests are made
within an hour or two. This method necessitates that the intelligence
services streamline the usual processes so as to relay the alert right
away to the force at the vanguard, to the commander of the company
assigned to carry out the arrest. Other times, the alert is relayed to
the PA security organizations, which call the young person in for a
cautionary talk. The bottom line is that these moves have helped to
intercept 90 percent of the lone wolf attacks.
Pension for prison
What will deter a
young person who’s fed up with life and wants to die or be arrested?
Israel believes the terrorists hesitate when they think their family
will pay a price. Hence, the return to the policy of home demolitions
(still a subject of fierce debate among security professionals), but
also to a wider effort to confiscate funds and illegal vehicles – cars
that were stolen or taken off the road in Israel due to technical
faults. At the same time, however, there are tremendous economic
incentives for the terrorists’ families. A junior Palestinian police
officer earns an average of 1,700-2,000 shekels (around $500) per month;
a young terrorist will receive a little more than that from the PA,
from the very first day of his arrest in Israel. A long-term prisoner
can receive about 12,000 shekels (around $3400) a month, a fortune in
West Bank terms. Anyone who serves five years in prison is also eligible
for a pension – and the army has already arrested some Palestinians who
showed up at checkpoints with knives, and later explained that they
were six months of prison time away from obtaining the coveted pension.
The United States is pressing the PA leadership to cease paying out this
money, and the PA is searching for less direct ways to make the
payments in order to more easily rebuff the Americans.
As sometimes happened
in the days when suicide bombings were rampant, there have been cases
in the last months in which relatives or others who transported a
terrorist hastened to report them to the PA and even to Israel, for fear
that they would be punished too. The improvement in soldiers’ training
and their preparedness to deal with stabbing attacks has also led to
fewer people being wounded at checkpoints. Consequently, Palestinians
have been looking for alternative modes of attack, such as small local
cells armed with rudimentary “Carlo” (Carl Gustav) submachine guns. The
three terrorists who killed four Israelis at Tel Aviv’s Sarona Market in
June of last year purchased their three weapons and accompanying gear
for a total of just 6,000 shekels (around $1700). The nice suits they
wore cost them more. This was the incident which belatedly prompted the
army and Shin Bet to try to tackle the Carlo epidemic. Since then, more
than 70 small factories producing the weapons have been shut down and
hundreds of the guns have been confiscated. The price of a Carlo
submachine gun has jumped accordingly, with a single weapon now selling
for close to 8,000 shekels (around $2300).
The planning and
execution of these att : acks are still somewhat amateur, and display a
lack of experience. The terrorist who wounded several Israelis when he
blew himself up in a bus in Jerusalem during Passover 2016 set out with a
bomb whose materials cost just 70 shekels ($20). Given the intensity of
their motivation, the results achieved by these scattered terrorist
cells have been fairly modest. But the second intifada taught us that
such gaps can be rapidly closed. Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials in
Gaza are prepared to deliver large sums of money to the West Bank cells
to aid them in carrying out major attacks. And as happened sometimes
during the early part of the last decade, when Hezbollah in Lebanon
propped up similar cells in the territories, today, too, there are cases
where Palestinians dupe their would-be financers and collect money for
attacks they have no intention of committing.
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