In March 2004, the sheikh was assassinated by an Israeli gunship as he left a mosque in Gaza City. His sermon had contained a familiar refrain: the need for more young men and women to sacrifice themselves.
There is no shortage of volunteers to follow Wafa’a Ali Idris.
Shortly after noon on that Sunday in March 2002, she blew herself up in a crowded Jerusalem street. She killed an eighty-one-year-old man and injured more than one hundred other men, women, and children. The explosives blew off her head and one arm and left a gaping hole in her abdomen. An hour later the radios in Ramallah proclaimed her to be “a true heroine of our people.”
Wafa’a had been manipulated in the name of religious extremism by the dark and dangerous world of Islamic fanaticism, which would ultimately lead to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and all the other suicide bomber attacks across the Middle East, in Pakistan, and in the Philippines.
Since Wafa’a died, more young women have experienced similar fates. Between them they have killed or injured close to 250 more Israelis.
Their actions are described as “sacred explosions.” The act of suicide is forbidden in Islam. But the spin doctors of the Martyrs are well versed in the black art of propaganda.
For families who have allowed their children to be sacrificed, the financial rewards are good. Each family receives a pension for life. While it varies, it is said to be a minimum of twice the income they received before their son or daughter died.
The money comes from Iran. It is laundered through the central banks from Damascus to Athens. From there it is electronically transferred to an account in Cairo. Then it is couriered to Gaza City for distribution by the Jihad Committee.
Meir Dagan made it a priority to trace the final destination of the money in the hope it could lead Mossad to the men who prepared the bombers. But it was a daunting task. The Martyrs operate on a small-cell basis. Often there are no more than two or three persons in a cell. In the closed world of the refugee camps, informers for Israeli intelligence are hard to recruit. Those discovered are executed. For them death can be agonizingly slow, preceded by unspeakable torture. For their families there is the odium of having bred a traitor to Islamic extremism.
But for the suicide bomber there was only glory. In the world they inhabited there was little enough of that. For them death was perhaps all too often a welcome relief.
After Wafa’a died, a leaflet with her photo was circulated throughout the West Bank. It read “We do not have tanks or rockets. But we have something superior—our Islamic human bombs. In place of a nuclear arsenal we are proud of our arsenal of believers.”
The one certainty is that other young men and women will blow themselves—and many others—into eternity. Meir Dagan knew that the further Israel was from the last suicide bomber, the nearer it was to the next.
That was the fearful reality of life and death in the Holy Land.
By January 2003, five months after he had walked from the Mossad headquarters canteen to thunderous applause, Meir Dagan had become a hero to his staff and a man feared by Israel’s enemies. Even the most bitter of them acknowledged that Mossad was once more the most effective and ruthless spy service in the Middle East, and beyond. Dagan knew more about the secrets of Arab security services than did the Arab political rulers. Indeed, he had placed new agents in the private offices of senior government officials in Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and the United Arab Emirates. Under his watchful eye, Mossad had infiltrated with new vigor all sectors of Arab political life, its business communities, and other areas of Muslim society.
In the past four months since taking command, he had studied the sins and mistakes that had led to a collapse of morale in Mossad. He had rectified this by ensuring that those who were responsible were culled from the ranks of Mossad. Replacements had been brought in from the army; some were also recruited from Shin Bet and Israel’s other intelligence services. Dagan made it clear that he had chosen them because they would follow his rules—not the rule book. For their part, they had shown they would serve him purely out of the conviction that he was the man they wished to follow.
He worked eighteen-hour days, and longer, at his desk. He sometimes slept on his couch. Life was hard. He came and went like the proverbial thief in the night. He went to Mombasa and places beyond to follow the trail of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. Other intelligence chiefs would not have left their office. But that was not his style. He had always led, from the front.
