Citizen Soldiers
By Eli Lehrer
As the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over soldier Gilad Shalit continues this week, TAE looks back to a post-9/11 article from December 2001, exploring the terror-fighting strategies of Israel’s citizens.
A cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, Israel Police spokesman Gil Kleiman pulls a secure police pager from his belt and begins reading the day’s news bulletins. It’s October 4, 2001. A little after 9:00 a.m. two men entered a house in an Arab village and killed the owner; the same suspects had murdered the homeowner’s son the evening before in an apparent blood feud. At 10:34, 2,000 people joined a protest on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City: Police arrested 15 Jews and about 30 Arabs. At 12:30, an Arab terrorist dressed as an Israeli soldier opened fire in the central bus station in the city of Afula, killing three and critically wounding a dozen others. The gunman was also killed but, as Kleiman tells a caller, “we don’t count terrorists.” At 2:38, an urgent bulletin indicates that a Russian airliner out of Tel Aviv has crashed over the Black Sea. Officials first suspect a terrorist attack, but it later turns out that an errant Ukrainian missile brought the plane down. “Is this unusual?” we ask Kleiman. “Just another day at our office,” he answers, shaking his head. It is still only 3:00 p.m.
Israel, more than any other democratic society in the world, faces a constant threat of terrorist attack. While only a minority of Palestinians engage in terrorism, many more lend political support to the men conducting the violence. From their sheltered redoubts on the West Bank of the Jordan River and in the Gaza Strip, terrorists have launched a renewed campaign against Israel this year, killing hundreds of Jewish, Arab, and Druze citizens. While Israel’s body count of a few hundred terror victims per year pales in comparison to the more than 5,000 Americans killed on September 11, it’s still a fearsome toll in a country less populated than metropolitan Chicago.
Without Israel’s vigilant security policies, however, things would be much worse. Consider the following: No Israeli aircraft has been hijacked in over 20 years; security forces regularly stop even suicidal terrorists; and, in a society loaded with guns, mass shootings are rare. Indeed, Israel thrives amidst the attacks. The Jewish state has lively electoral politics, a feisty culture, and a bustling high-tech economy. As it reassesses its anti-terrorism policy in the wake of the September 11 attacks, the United States could learn a lot from Israel.
In a week of intensive visits with Israeli government officials, law enforcement officers, private security staff, and ordinary citizens, TAE studied the Jewish state’s counter-terror efforts. Our main findings: First, Israel has an extraordinarily alert population that serves as the nation’s first line of defense. Second, Israel involves its entire society in the fight against terrorism, including corporations, volunteers, law enforcement officers at all levels, and a small corps of highly trained anti-terror professionals. Third, Israelis adamantly refuse to let terror disrupt their normal lives. (The Sbarro pizzeria that was the site of this year’s most notorious bombing carnage, for instance, reopened within days.) Above all, Israel understands that savvy people—more than technology, or physical barriers, or special tactics—are the critical weapon they can wield against terrorists.
Every Israeli prepares for the worst. Each home built since the Gulf War has, by law, a “secure room” that can function as a family shelter against terrorist attack. At a glance, the secure room in Uzi Landau’s modest apartment near Tel Aviv looks like a typical study. A computer whirs quietly in one corner, and software manuals, spiritual texts, and books of political philosophy line the shelves. But a closer look tells a different story. A heavy steel plate is rolled over the window with a few tugs. The windows and steel door have gaskets which seal the room against biological and chemical attack. The walls, floor, and ceiling of the room are made of reinforced concrete. And government-distributed gas masks sit beside a manual for Windows 98. “We make sure that everyone knows what the stakes are,” says Landau, who is not only a homeowning family man but also Israeli’s Minister of Public Security.
At one point or another, nearly every Israeli has taken an active role in the fight against terrorism. Israel mandates three years of military service from every 18-year-old non-Arab citizen. But that is only the beginning of the nation’s mass mobilization against terror. Every neighborhood has pits where citizens can throw suspicious packages that could be bombs. Parents must work a few days a year providing security at their children’s schools. A comprehensive civil defense program gives every citizen information about evacuation routes and shelters. Major hospitals maintain mass outdoor showers to wash off chemical weapon residues. From the early primary grades, school children learn to spot suspicious strangers and situations. High-school students may learn fighting skills even before they enter military service.
Still, Israelis have no illusions that such target-hardening protects them entirely from terrorism. The gas masks, for example, won’t work against all chemical weapons. The secure rooms don’t provide protection against radiation. Many of the most likely contingencies are covered, though, and mass preparations have given nearly every Israeli some personal role in the fight against terror.
Even though the central government runs the police and nearly all other safety functions, Israeli communities also guard themselves. Within the Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria on the West Bank, residents have set up their own emergency response centers. “Bulletproof vehicles aren’t enough here. You need people to respond,” says Yiftich Sapir, a supervisor at one response center created by the settlers’ elected council. Located in the basement of a community center, the command room is staffed by citizen volunteers and army conscripts. Radios and ubiquitous cell phone links, as well as homing beacons and microphones built into settlers’ cars, allow travellers to be closely tracked, and let authorities know right away when trouble is developing. Police, fire, and ambulance services can be dispatched from here, but in a dire emergency, armed settlers will pile into their own cars to help. Although they comprise less than 5 percent of the Israeli population, settlers living amongst Arab neighbors have recently accounted for about half of Israel’s terrorist casualties—roughly the same death rate American troops faced in Vietnam.
Despite that grim reality, settlers lead active lives. In Ofra, a village of about 2,500 which lies 30 miles from Jerusalem, a visitor could easily believe he was in southern California. From green lawns to new playground equipment, Ofra has an air of suburban tranquility. But residents prepare themselves for terror. Nearly all households contain firearms, and residents patrol the streets on a volunteer basis. Razor wire rings the community. Cars have plastic rock-proof windows and some settlers invest in steel-plated bullet-proof vehicles. In the relatively placid years of the early 1980s, civic leaders looking to build the local economy discouraged Jewish residents from traveling to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv for shopping or entertainment. As the roads have become perilous, however, leaders have begun to see such trips as a civic imperative. “If you stop your relationships with the outside, you’ve surrendered,” explains Pinchas Vallerstein, chairman of the settlers’ YESHA council. “When there’s a bad terrorist attack, we might bring in a big-name singer to show that life goes on and there’s still time to have fun.”
Sometimes, the imperative to resist terror goes to extremes. With the light of more than 100 candles illuminating the shepherd’s cave where he serves visitors plates of hummus and grilled turkey, West Bank settler Dov Wienstok describes how he deals with trouble from Arab neighbors: “When an Arab steals something, I break his bones. Force is the only language they understand.” Wienstok, who spends much of his time leading school-age children of Israeli settlers on politically provocative “nature walks” through areas under Palestinian Authority control, professes a lack of faith in the police and army. He accuses the government of selling out the settlers for the vain hope of peace with the Palestinians, nearly all of whom, he says, support the terrorists. Wienstok says, quite plausibly, that Israel's General Security Service monitors him, but he has so far not gotten in serious trouble for occasionally taking the law into his own hands.
Despite the horrific pressure on the population, vigilante behaviors are comparatively rare in Israel, partly because a massive corps of police volunteers allows responsible citizens to play an active role in official state security. Volunteer police officers are given uniforms, training, and rifles. They ride with professional cops (most patrol cars in the country contain one pro and one citizen volunteer), and while on patrol the volunteers have full police powers (the authority lapses as soon as they go off duty). While many American police departments also use volunteers, they mostly limit their roles to crowd control and directing traffic. In Israel, however, the volunteer corps actually dwarfs the professional force. Metropolitan Tel Aviv, for example, has a little over 3,000 full-time police and more than 8,000 uniformed volunteers. Since Israel has so many volunteers, and such well-prepared ones, they are often first on the scene to deal with calamities. In the deadly Afula attack mentioned earlier, for instance, it was a volunteer policeman who killed the terrorist.
While volunteer manpower plays a major role in keeping Israeli society safe, the nation also maintains a stable of full-time police about 35 percent larger than the United States’ on a policeman-per-citizen basis. Israel’s unified national police force has two major subdivisions: the “blue,” or civil, police and the “green” police known as Border Guards. Blue police units consist of law enforcement professionals with training and equipment very similar to American police departments. They write traffic tickets, collar bank robbers, and investigate drug rings, as well as doing security duty. Green police, on the other hand, are paramilitaries who receive infantry training before learning about police work, with many arriving through conscription. Both forces, however, respond to the same upper-level commanders and carry the same police ID cards.
The Yassam, or Special Patrol units, are a small corps of highly trained anti-terror professionals within the blue police. Most join the police after careers as squad leaders in the army special forces. Like nearly all other police, the Yassam spend some time on prosaic patrol duties. “Day to day, we don't have any particular task a lot of the time. Sometimes, we’ll go to work an area where they’ve had a lot of car thefts,” explains squad leader Mayor Nabir. “Our work is security, we are Israel’s elite security force. We look for suspicious things.” Coming to a scene, Yassam forces might seal off a perimeter and perform searches of suspect individuals. While the details of most Yassam operations are secret, it is well known that their units were involved in catching a cab driver who helped with the recent Tel Aviv disco bombing, and that they have captured accomplices to many other recent suicide bombings.
The same dedicated spirit of terror-fighting exists in Israel’s several-hundred-member national bomb squad. “Our entire organization is built to support the sappers” who defuse bombs, explains Shaike Horowitz, the bomb unit’s commander. The department relies on robots and other high-tech equipment, but human skill is the most important ingredient. Every Israeli sapper gets eight solid months of explosives-related training before hitting the streets. In the U.S., by comparison, most bomb technicians learn the ropes in a five-week FBI/Department of Defense course. In Israel, however, the stakes are much higher: 17 sappers have died in explosions over the last two decades.
Much of Israel’s anti-terror work relies on simple observation. “Fighting terror is something that we try to get everyone involved in at least a little,” says Yosef Sedbon, police chief for metropolitan Tel Aviv. “We need professionals but we also need help from everyone in the organization.”
“Many of the things we do are based on our own common sense," explains Wajdey, a border guard commander working in East Jerusalem. As the threat of terrorist attacks has increased, green-uniformed teenage men and women toting automatic weapons have become ubiquitous in public markets and entertainment districts. “We get to know where we work and who the people are,” says Wajdey. Border guards work at two or three posts and, after a few months on the job, they recognize regulars by sight. While they have almost unlimited powers to stop and search cars and pedestrians on suspicion, the green police don’t have the manpower to pull over more than a selected few. Knowledge of the people they deal with provides the key to effective security.
Israel’s internal intelligence agency—the General Security Service or Shin Bet, which is a kind of hybrid of our FBI and Secret Service—also relies heavily on familiarity with human habits to keep the peace. “We could keep a lid on the Palestinian population because we knew it,” says former Shin Bet agent Reuven Paz. “We would go into their houses, often making it clear who we were. We could see how they lived and how they treated their children. We tracked everything. Not just the terrorists or problem people. The whole issue of public morale in the territories was vitally important.” The Israelis continue to do an excellent job of collecting and then dispersing human intelligence to street-level officers.
The Israeli police also rely on massive applications of street-level manpower. To monitor a 150,000-person parade that TAE observed in Tel Aviv, the police mobilized over 1,000 officers. They had so many bodies on the sidewalks one could hardly wander half a block without encountering a fresh knot of patrolmen. Along the main route stood hundreds of green police, automatic weapons in hand. Special motorcycle police (two men per cycle, with the back officer holding a small automatic weapon at ready), threaded constantly through the crowd. Regular blue police and undercover officers were also present in force. And here, as at all times in Israeli cities, special units ranging from bomb technicians to anti-terror task forces cruised the streets in vans.
In heavily Arab areas, Israeli-Palestinian tensions have created an atmosphere for the police worse than anything American cops witness in their shadiest neighborhoods. On an Arab-dominated shopping strip just a few blocks from the American consulate in East Jerusalem, a blue-uniformed police officer walking down the street is accompanied by three border policemen who follow him with black-matte-finished automatic weapons in hands. Were it not for these paramilitary bodyguards, the simple act of handing out parking tickets could result in injury or death for police officers.
Many elements of Israel’s vaunted airline security would be tricky-to-impossible to transfer to the U.S. Tsahi Stromza, who heads security for Israel’s famously safe state-run airline El Al, observes that his airline’s procedures probably aren’t for everyone. El Al flies one or more sky marshals on every plane, employs gun-toting ground marshals as well, uses special compression chambers to check baggage for air pressure bombs, CAT-scans nearly all luggage, tightly secures cockpit doors to prevent hijacking, and questions every boarding passenger for between one and 17 minutes in a quest for suspicious parties.
“We hear all the time now that other airlines should emulate us. But it’s just too complicated in a lot of cases,” Stromza admits. “You could have 100 percent security but no passengers.”
Israel has about the same land area as New Jersey, so Israeli professionals need to fly only if they conduct business out of the country. As a result, El Al launches only 10,720 flights per year—versus more than 35,000 flights per day in the U.S. Many of the small carrier’s procedures would need extensive modification to be useful in America.
Israel understands that security needs must be balanced against other needs—economic, political, psychological. In numerous places the country has gone to almost heroic lengths to balance humanitarian concerns with its hardnosed anti-terrorist attitude. At Karni, for instance, a border terminal linking southern Israel with the Palestinian-packed Gaza Strip, Israel runs a facility earnestly devoted to supplying its mortal enemy with all the commercial goods it needs to sustain its population. A high concrete security wall runs through the entire terminal, perforated by a dozen steel doors through which pallets of goods can be passed after inspectors have combed them for contraband. In a two-ended shed with Israeli officials on one side and Palestinians on the other, goods ranging from oranges to compact disc players to sheep are passed between Israel proper and the Palestinian Authority’s domain. Hundreds of trucks carrying millions of dollars worth of goods pass through the terminal each week, but nobody collects duties. The Israeli authorities simply check for dangerous items by unloading each truck and running the cargo through X-ray machines.
At a glance, the Karni terminal looks like a model for a new Middle East based on Muslim-Jewish coexistence. The terminal has fewer security guards than many public streets in Israel, and during our tour of the facility Israeli terminal manager Jonathan Dotan greets his Palestinian counterpart with a handshake when they happen to meet in a waiting room. But appearances deceive. Shortly before TAE visited, a Palestinian leapt through one of the steel cargo doors as it opened and shot up an Israeli receiving bay and its occupants with an automatic rifle.
Dotan reports that the Palestinians regularly test his system: his X-ray machines find scissors, axes, and other tools buried deep within crates of produce and bundles of clothing. Major weapons would surely follow if an opening was discovered. The strain is constant; when TAE asks Dotan to smile for a photo, he can barely curl his lips. Just the same, he believes his unpleasant work has meaning. There would be an international outcry against Israel, accompanied by pictures of starving Palestinians, if trade with Gaza was cut off. “I’m here to protect our society,” he says. “I’m here to make sure that commerce continues and that things are as normal as they can be.”
Threats that endanger Israel’s very existence have led the nation to many measures that Americans wouldn’t and shouldn’t accept. Literally none of the major elements of Israel’s main anti-terror law would pass U.S. Constitutional muster. In addition, military courts can detain civilians without trial for long periods of time. This isn’t actually part of the law itself. The Israeli Supreme Court has ruled that Shin Bet can use physical pressure—torture—when it has a strong reason to believe that doing so will save lives. Every adult Israeli must carry a national identity card to show any police officer on demand. Many Israelis TAE spoke with expressed dismay at America’s unwillingness to silence professors and clerics who publish militant statements in our press.
Most Americans would oppose importing these elements of Israel’s anti-terror effort on principle. Certain other Israeli strategies are ill-suited to America simply on practical grounds. X-raying every parcel crossing our Canadian and Mexican borders would be impossible, and is thankfully not necessary anyway. Just the same, large mobile X-ray machines capable of scanning an entire truckload in a few minutes—which the Israelis are eyeing hungrily but for the $6-million price tag—could help our border guards screen a greater percentage of suspicious trucks and parcels.
And there are some Israeli-tested practices that would be easy for the U.S. to emulate. We should, for example, dust off some of our Cold War bomb shelters, and rejuvenate the system of civil defense block wardens we maintained in the 1940s, 1950s and ’60s. In major cities particularly, where terrorism is now a clear and present danger, it would be a practical and worthy goal to adapt Israeli methods of preparing for disasters and evacuations. More extreme measures like distributing gas masks and vaccinating against possible bioweapons also deserve consideration, but only if careful study presents a convincing case in their favor.
American police departments would do well to increase their volunteer manpower, as the Israelis have done so effectively. The relative lack of military experience among our populace means, however, that training volunteers would be harder than in Israel (where most citizens have three years’ experience in the army). American police departments and intelligence agencies have better technology than their Israeli counterparts, yet so far we have failed to use this to our advantage. U.S. law enforcement agencies should share information more fully. If immigration status, traffic violations, and FBI intelligence had been cross-referenced, for example, several of the September 11 attackers would have been picked up by U.S. authorities before they acted. We need vastly improved national databases that can be used to run quick checks on suspicious individuals at border crossings, in immigration offices, and at job, university, and training sites (like flight schools), as well as in routine daily police work.
Training a corps of anti-terror professionals along the lines of Israel’s Yassam makes sense in the United States. But a nationwide bomb squad would prove cumbersome and unworkable in our vast country. Large city police departments in America, though, should upgrade their bomb squad training, as well as giving extra anti-terror training to existing elite units. Small and mid-sized police agencies, which already rely on state police or regional teams to intervene when bombs or other dangers are suspected, might investigate the possibility of creating regional anti-terror units. The United States should, in short, look to Israel for principles more than daily tactics.
Above all, Israel’s ability to balance effective terror fighting with the freedoms of liberal society relies on an alert and engaged citizenry. The Israeli strengths—a collective will to fight terror, strong volunteerism, taking responsibility for the safety of one’s own community, and a willingness to carry on as normal amidst constant threats of attack—are also natural instincts among everyday Americans, and we will need to draw on them repeatedly in the years ahead.
Even when it comes to the dirty and troublesome work of dealing with bombs and battling terrorists as they attack, Israel has learned that no amount of technology can substitute for the disciplined valor of individuals devoted to their society and willing to act in a crisis. Men and women inclined to defend themselves will thwart more terrorist dangers than hired professionals. As America brings its mighty armed forces to bear against terrorists who despise freedom, we should remember the key lesson of Israel’s fight against terror: Active private citizens are the best defense.
Eli Lehrer is a former TAE senior editor.
Click here to purchase this issue.
