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Osama's shadow over
Israel
By B Raman
JERUSALEM -
Three terrorist incidents directed against Israeli
nationals and interests since November last year do not
fall into the pattern of the normal terrorist strikes of
which Israel and its nationals have been victims.
The first of these incidents took place in
Mombasa in November last year, details of which are well
known and need no repetition. I had commented on this
incident as follows (See Israelis targeted in ominous new terror
trend, Nov 29, 2002): "When bin Laden
announced the formation of the IIF [International
Islamic Front] in the beginning of 1998 and issued its
first fatwa, it designated the United States and Israel
(the crusaders and the Jewish people, as he put it) as
the principal enemies of Islam, and called for attacks
on them. In many of his subsequent statements, this
characterization of the US and Israel as the principal
enemies of Islam has been a recurring theme.
"However, despite this, al-Qaeda and the other
components of the IIF had confined their attacks mainly
to US and other Western targets and avoided attacks on
Israeli nationals and interests, though some Jewish
persons were reported to have been killed in the
terrorist strike by al-Qaeda in Tunisia earlier this
year.
"This was due to the anxiety of the
Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and other
organizations allied to it not wanting to be perceived
by the US as having links with al-Qaeda or the IIF. The
PLO used to be of the view that Palestinians would never
be able to achieve their political objective without the
support of the US and, therefore, wanted the Palestinian
organizations to keep away from bin Laden. While some
Palestinians do serve in al-Qaeda, no Palestinian
organization is a member of the IIF.
"Bin Laden,
too, respected the concerns of the Palestinian
organizations and avoided any terrorist strike against
Israeli targets lest there be any difficulties for the
Palestinian organizations in their attempt to get the
political support of the West against Israel.
"If indeed the strikes in Mombasa are
established to be the work of al-Qaeda or the IIF, this
would show that this consideration no longer acts as a
restraining factor. Either al-Qaeda and the IIF have
decided to strike at Israeli targets without worrying
about the concerns of the Palestinian organizations, or
they undertook the Mombasa operations with the approval
or at the instance of the Palestinian organizations,
which have been disillusioned with the failure of the US
to restrain Israel and, therefore, no longer see any
need to keep away from bin Laden. If this is the case,
more attacks on Israeli lives and interests are likely.
"
The second terrorist strike, which did not fit
into the normal pattern, took place at Haifa in Israel
on October 4, 2003, when 19 civilians, including
reportedly some children, were killed by a woman suicide
bomber believed to be from the Islamic Jihad, in a
restaurant called Maxim. Aljazeera and other Arabic TV
channels had claimed that the restaurant was part-owned
by an Arab and that some of those killed were Arabs.
While large sections of the international media
focused on the family background of the suicide bomber
and the alleged death of one of her brothers at the
hands of the Israelis in an unfortunate attempt to
rationalize her killing of innocent men, women and
children, they did not highlight another ominous aspect
of the bombing.
The owner of the restaurant and
the non-Jewish victims were not Arab Muslims as
initially reported, but Maronite Christian migrants from
Lebanon. In an article in the Jerusalem Post October 10,
Walid Phares, a US-based professor of Middle East
Studies and a terrorism expert, has drawn attention to
this and raised the following questions:
"Non-Shabbat-observing Haifa Jews eat at various local
restaurants. Why would Islamist suicide bombers
knowingly target a Lebanese Christian restaurant in
Israel, when they could have attacked any culinary
establishment? Why did bomber Hanadi Jaradat select this
particular eatery?"
The writer says: "Indicating
the real ethnic and religious identities of the owners
and the workers would open a new chapter in the
jihadists' war, both in Israel and the Middle East."
What is this new chapter about? The professor
does not explain, but anyone who has been studying
carefully the pre-and post-September 11 terrorist
strikes of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani and Southeast
Asian components of the IIF would have been struck by
the ominous similarity to the targeted killing of
Christians and Christian establishments by the jihadi
elements in Indonesia and similar targeted killings of
Christians in Pakistan last year.
Even if one
accepts that the Haifa suicide bomber had cause for
personal anger against the Israelis, that does not
explain who selected this particular restaurant owned by
a Christian and hence frequented by Christians. The
Islamic Jihad exploited her personal tragedy and anger
to direct her to the restaurant in order to achieve
targeted killings of Christians as part of the jihad of
the IIF against the Christians and the Jewish people.
During discussions at a conference in Jerusalem
on October 12, I drew attention to the Haifa incident
and said that this incident needed to be investigated
carefully since one could smell the hand and inspiration
of bin Laden's IIF in it. Subsequently, while discussing
my assessment with some of the participants on the
margins of the conference, I stated that if my
assessment proved to be correct, one could expect
targeted attacks on American and other Western tourists
in Israel - a Bali-type incident.
On October 15,
2003, three American officials were killed and one other
was injured when the convoy of vehicles in which they
were traveling in northern Gaza was attacked by
unidentified elements. Is there a link between the Haifa
attack on a Christian-owned establishment and the Gaza
attack on the Americans? Most probably.
These
incidents show that the jihadi terrorist elements
subscribing to the anti-US and anti-Israeli ideology of
al-Qaeda and the IIF are probably assuming ascendancy in
the proxy war being waged against Israel by Syria and
other adversaries through their surrogates such as the
PLO, the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, the al-Aqsa Martyrs
Brigade, etc.
There is as yet no evidence to
show the infiltration of non-Palestinian elements into
the areas controlled by the Palestine Authority (PA) for
organizing terrorist strikes not only against Israeli
(Jewish) civilians as they have hitherto been doing, but
also against the Christian residents of the area and US
nationals and interests. The penetration, the beginnings
of which one is seeing, is not of the cadres of al Qaeda
and the IIF, but of their influence on the terrorist
operations in the area.
To what extent are the
PLO and other organizations allied to it privy to this
penetration? Are they covertly encouraging this, while
overtly continuing to maintain a distance from it?
Yasser Arafat and other PLO leaders have strongly
condemned the attack on the Americans, the first of its
kind during the last three years, but to what extent is
their condemnation genuine and to what extent is it
eye-wash?
In a commentary on the PLO's
condemnation of the Gaza ambush of the Americans, Itamar
Marcus of Palestine Media Watch (PMW) draws attention to
what he vividly describes as the duplicity of the PLO
vis-a-vis the Americans for many years. He says: "In its
English statements, the PA presents itself as an
American ally, while its Arabic messages incite its
people to hate and kill Americans. Never has this
hypocrisy been more striking than today, after the
Palestinian ambush that targeted and killed three
American diplomats in the Gaza Strip. The official PA
rushed to condemn the attack - even as the PA-controlled
media continues its relentless campaign of anti-American
indoctrination. During the war in Iraq, the PA actively
endorsed the killing of Americans, and even produced a
music video celebrating the deaths of US soldiers that
was broadcast repeatedly on official PA TV. In the
months before the Iraq War, the official PA daily
published calls to Saddam Hussein to turn Iraq into a
graveyard for American soldiers. At a pro-Iraq rally
they “praised the role of Iraq and the Commander Saddam
Hussein, and stressed that Iraq’s land will be a
graveyard for the American soldiers ... ” (al-Hayat
al-Jadida, Dec 19, 2002). Since the war, hatred of the
US has continued unabated in the official and
tightly-controlled PA media. Friday morning’s political
cartoon in the official daily, al-Hayat al-Jadida,
attacks the US for trying to “paint” the entire world
American.
Even though the PLO, Hamas, Islamic
Jihad, al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, etc, continue to
overtly maintain a distance from al-Qaeda and the IIF,
it is becoming disturbingly clear that covertly they are
increasingly following the anti-American and
anti-Israeli agenda of the IIF. Its impact on the jihadi
terrorist situation has to be carefully monitored not
only by Israel, but also by India and other victims of
jihadi terrorism.
B Raman is
Additional Secretary (ret), Cabinet Secretariat,
Government of India, and presently director, Institute
For Topical Studies, Chennai; former member of the
National Security Advisory Board of the Government of
India. E-Mail: corde@vsnl.com. He was also head of the
counter-terrorism division of the Research &
Analysis Wing, India's external intelligence agency,
from 1988 to August, 1994.
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