Gideon's Spies полностью

The Mossad analysts shared the view of deputy prime minister Shimon Peres: “Zionism was built on geography but it lives on demography.” They saw the realpolitik motives that had made Sharon order the razing of twenty-one Jewish settlements that lay along a stretch of the Mediterranean. To protect their eight thousand inhabitants from the surrounding 1.3 million Palestinians was a huge drain on Israel’s resources.

To defend the settlements on the West Bank, Sharon had ordered the erection of a towering security barrier of reinforced concrete and razor wire that snaked down the length of the country; it meant Israel’s effective border would be extended.

Like the majority of Israelis, the analysts were preoccupied by how soon Peres’s prescient remark would become a reality. The forward planners on the sixth floor had calculated that by 2010 the number of Arabs living between the river Jordan and the Mediterranean would surpass the projected 5.2 million Jews living in Israel at the end of the decade.

In the months before his death, Arafat had predicted that not only would Gaza be “cleansed” of its Jewish settlers, but that the West Bank would also see the departure of its settlers from the ancient lands of Judea and Samaria.

The analysts had advised Meir Dagan that Arafat had left a legacy fraught with risk. They predicted that while the PLO would use the withdrawal from Gaza as a huge propaganda victory, Palestinian extremists like Hamas would defy calls by the PLO leadership to stop attacks on the settlements. It had turned out to be true.

The evacuation was conducted with overwhelming force by the Israeli army. Afterward synagogues left by the settlers were burned to the ground by Hamas militants. Following a short interval, the suicide bomb attacks on Israel resumed. Hamas justified them by presenting the Gaza withdrawal as no more than a maneuvre by Israel to create more misery and frustration for the Palestinians. “Until the last Jew is removed from our land there can be no peace,” Hamas said.

Throughout Arafat’s life the PLO and Hamas had competed for control of the Intifadas of 1987 and 2000; each had aimed to persuade the shebab, the Arab youth, whose support was crucial in the direction the fight against Israel would take. By the second Intifada, when suicide bombings became the main symbol as Islamists and Fatah activists blew themselves up while killing as many as they could in Israeli pizzerias and restaurants, at bus stations and marketplaces—and Islamic religious leaders called for all-out jihad on the grounds that all Israelis, including women and children, were legitimate targets because Israel was a military society—Arafat was pressured into taking action against the terrorists, not only by Ariel Sharon, but also by moderate elements in the Arab world. Arafat still possessed a political legitimacy among them. But Hamas had the advantage of its Islamic extremism, a powerful drug to the dispossessed youth, epitomised further by the hero worship they bestowed on Osama bin Laden, who had repeatedly proclaimed, “There will be no solution to the Palestinian problem except through jihad.” As the second Intifada continued to explode in a succession of fiery pyres, Arafat had seen his own infrastructure destroyed by Israel’s sophisticated weapons, guided to their targets by the superb intelligence of Mossad and Shin Bet, the country’s internal security service. In what Mossad analysts saw as a last desperate attempt to bolster his ailing leadership, Yasser Arafat had begun to claim that his way of carefully controlled political tension was the only means to pressure Israel into accepting his demand for the creation of a viable Palestinian state. By the time of his death, Arafat had attracted a considerable body of support among influential Palestinians. For Ariel Sharon the risk of Arafat being granted the martyrdom he was rapidly attracting among moderate Palestinians, while at the same time Hamas continued its violence, was totally unacceptable.

The specialists had known from many years of listening to tapes recorded by the yaholomin, Mossad’s communication unit, that Arafat had often spoken of his conviction that he had been chosen to lead the Arab world, a stepping stone to his assuming the mantle of a modern-day caliph; the position of leadership had been handed down from the time of the Prophet Muhammad’s successors in the seventh century.

This fantasy had succoured Arafat during his darkest hours in exile and those turbulent years he had railed that the very existence of Israel was at the root of all problems, not only for the Arab nations but the entire Muslim world. In Washington and elsewhere it was long argued there was no point in listening to the rant of a demagogue whose sole message was one of violence.