Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
A Bipartisan Pipe Dream
On May 23, 2002, Israel narrowly averted what would have been the most devastating terrorist attack in its history.
That morning an Israeli fuel tanker driver named Yitzhak Ginsburg drove to the Pi Gelilot liquefied petroleum gas depot to fill up his tank. The depot was located on the northern outskirts of Tel Aviv, adjacent to Ramat Hasharon, and Herzliya, which put it in the middle of the most densely populated area in the Western world.1
At seven a.m. Ginsburg passed through the security checkpoint, entered the depot, and began fueling. Suddenly the ground began to shake beneath him. “There was a massive boom,” he later told reporters. “Everyone went flying in all directions, and the tanker, which weighs twenty tons, just exploded in the air. Everything was burning and going up in flames. Miraculously nothing happened to me. I thought it was an electrical malfunction. It never occurred to me that it was a terrorist attack.”2
But it was. Palestinian terrorists had placed a bomb in Ginsburg’s fuel tank. A cell member had followed Ginsburg to Pi Gelilot, waited for him to begin fueling, and remotely detonated the bomb.
The only reason Pi Gelilot is not remembered as the most deadly terror attack in history is because Ginsburg’s tanker carried diesel fuel.3 Had it been carrying gasoline, which is much more flammable than diesel, not only would the entire facility have been destroyed, but the fireball created by the explosion would have engulfed neighboring communities. Tel Aviv’s tony Ramat Aviv neighborhood, home to 11,400 people, would likely have been reduced to a smoldering ruin. So would Ramat Hasharon and Herzliya, which have a combined population of 127,600.
And that wouldn’t have been the end of it. Pi Gelilot is also located next to one of Israel’s busiest traffic arteries, as well as the headquarters of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign intelligence service, and of Israeli Military Intelligence. The Israel Security Agency, Israel’s version of the FBI, is located nearby. Had the bomb worked as the Palestinian terrorists planned, the highway would have become a fireball at the height of rush hour, and Israel’s intelligence nerve centers would have been leveled.
The attack at Pi Gelilot took place the morning after a suicide bombing at a pedestrian mall in downtown Rishon Lezion, a bustling coastal city due south of Tel Aviv. In the month that followed the attack, another sixty-five Israelis were murdered, including fifteen children, in Palestinian terrorist attacks of every sort carried out from one end of the country to the other. Adjusting for Israel’s relatively small population, this would have been the equivalent of 2,600 Americans being killed.
More than 90 percent of the attacks that month were directed against civilian targets. Less than 10 percent of the dead and less than 5 percent of the wounded were Israeli military forces engaged in counterterror operations.4 Teenage boys were gunned down at a basketball court. A grandmother and her infant granddaughter were blown up at an ice cream parlor. Another grandmother and her five-year-old granddaughter were blown up, along with five other people, at a bus stop. Two families were massacred in their homes, and a fourteen-year-old girl was murdered at a falafel stand.
The perpetrators of these attacks came from almost every active Palestinian terror group. Most were Fatah terrorists.
Fatah is the largest faction of the PLO. It was founded by Yassir Arafat in 1957 and the leaders of the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority are overwhelmingly members of Fatah. The Fatah terror cells that perpetrated most of the terrorist operations were directed and funded by the Palestinian Authority.
Others attacks were carried out by Hamas and Islamic Jihad cells. Some of the terrorists served more than one master.
In perpetrating these attacks, terror groups openly collaborated with one another. Some of the attacks were carried out jointly by terrorists from different groups. For instance, a terror cell with members from Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine massacred forty-year-old Rachel Shabo and her sons, sixteen-year-old Neria, twelve-year-old Zvika, and five-year-old Avishai in their home.5
This sort of mayhem is what passed for everyday life in Israel on June 24, 2002, when in a much-anticipated speech, President George W. Bush set out his position on the Palestinian conflict with Israel.6
Until that date, Bush had kept his position to himself. Warring factions within his administration competed over which narrative the president would advance. The establishmentarians, led by Secretary of State Colin Powell, wanted the United States to pressure Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians. The renegade hawks in the Defense Department and on Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff wanted the United States to put pressure on the Palestinians and side openly with Israel in its war on the Palestinian terror wave that had engulfed the country. In the days leading up to President Bush’s speech, the international community was abuzz with anticipation that America’s commander in chief was finally ready to choose which side he was on.
To a certain degree, Bush lived up to those expectations. In that speech, he became the first U.S. leader since the onset of the peace process between Israel and the PLO in September 1993 to tell the Palestinians to get their house in order. Other American leaders had called for the Palestinians to fight terrorism, but Bush told them to stop sponsoring it. Moreover, he seemed to express that U.S. support for the Palestinians depended on a change in their behavior. “Today, Palestinian authorities are encouraging, not opposing, terrorism,” he said. “This is unacceptable. And the United States will not support the establishment of a Palestinian state until its leaders engage in a sustained fight against the terrorists and dismantle their infrastructure.”
Bush also spelled out what he meant by Palestinian political reform. In his words, “Reform must be more than cosmetic change, or a veiled attempt to preserve the status quo. True reform will require entirely new political and economic institutions, based on democracy, market economics, and action against terrorism.”
Bush’s words were like an adrenaline shot for the beleaguered Israeli citizenry. Not only had the president of the United States recognized that they were the victims of unrelenting terrorist assaults; he recognized that Israel’s very right to exist was under attack. From the Arab world to Europe to U.S. university campuses, Israel was under the gun of hateful propaganda. Its army was being falsely and maliciously accused of committing the same very crimes that the Palestinians were carrying out against Israelis. Its leaders and generals were being targeted by scurrilous war-crimes allegations in European courts. And now here was Bush, the leader of the free world, pledging to put an end to this nonsense.
Unfortunately, a closer--and less emotional--reading of Bush’s speech shows that there was less to the speech than met the eye. While the tone was indeed pro-Israel, Bush later acknowledged in his memoir that it was actually the most pro-Palestinian speech that any U.S. president had ever given.7 It was the first time an American president openly embraced the cause of Palestinian statehood. Moreover, while Bush did call the Palestinians to account for their involvement in terrorism against Israel, he didn’t give them an ultimatum. He didn’t say, Clean up your act or sacrifice U.S. support. He said, Clean up your act and get even more support.
And he also blamed Israel for Palestinian misery. Indeed, every time Bush spoke of Israeli suffering, he matched that statement with one about Palestinian suffering. This pattern began at the outset of the address as he said, “It is untenable for Israeli citizens to live in terror. It is untenable for Palestinians to live in squalor and occupation.”
Three months before Bush’s speech, in April 2002, nearly a year and a half into the Palestinians’ terror war, Israel’s government had finally ordered the IDF to destroy the Palestinian terrorist infrastructure in Judea and Samaria. This involved reasserting Israeli security control of the Palestinian towns and villages that Israel, in the framework of the peace process, had ceded to the Palestinian Authority in 1994 and 1996.8 Israel called its campaign Operation Defensive Shield. It came after a month in which the Palestinians carried out suicide bombings against Israeli civilians nearly every day. One hundred thirty people--nearly all civilians--were murdered. More than a thousand people were wounded, in a country of only 8 million people. In terms relative to Israel’s overall population, the death toll in Israel was nearly as large as two September 11 terror attacks in the United States, but attacks in which the number of dead would be supplemented by more than 40,000 wounded.
Israel needed to reassert its security control of the Palestinian population centers because the Palestinian Authority had used its control of these areas to build not the institutions of a functional state but rather the most widespread and sophisticated terrorist infrastructure in the world.9 After Israeli forces retook control, it required months for them to dismantle this architecture of terror.
From documents found in Yassir Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah, Israel discovered that Arafat had personally overseen the development of this terror machine. He had paid for attacks, and his lieutenants had played central roles in organizing and carrying them out.10
And yet despite everything that Israel--and the United States--had learned about the central role the Palestinian Authority played in Palestinian terrorism, Bush insisted in his June 24 speech that “as we make progress towards security, Israeli forces need to withdraw fully to the positions they held prior to September 28, 2000.” In other words, he called for Israel to return control of these territories to the very PLO regime that had used its control of them to organize, plan, train, and finance the largest terror campaign against Israel that the Jewish state had ever experienced.
And that wasn’t all. Bush also sided completely with the Palestinian narrative against Israel. That narrative claims that Israel has no rights to Judea and Samaria and that those areas belong to the Palestinians alone. Bush said, “Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop.” That is, the U.S. president said that the property rights of Israeli citizens should not be respected in Judea and Samaria.
Less than a year later, on April 30, 2003, the Bush administration joined forces with the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations (a grouping that came to be known as the Middle East Quartet) and published a new “peace plan.” The plan, officially called “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” effectively nullified Bush’s call for Palestinian reform as a precursor to and condition for U.S. support for Palestinian statehood. The roadmap identified the principal goal of the U.S. government as the swift establishment of a Palestinian state, rather than the purging of terrorist elements from Palestinian society and governing structures. It reduced the requirement for Palestinian reform to mere declaratory phrases.
On the other hand, the roadmap required Israel to immediately renounce its rights to Judea and Samaria and take concrete measures to empower the same Palestinian Authority that was actively sponsoring the murder of Israel’s citizens. The only aspects of Bush’s June 24 speech that found their way into the roadmap were those involving Israeli concessions to the Palestinians.11
The inherent anti-Israel bias of the roadmap is nowhere more obvious than in its section on Palestinian incitement.
Since the inception of the Palestinian Authority in 1994, the PA-controlled media organs, school system, mosques, and governing ministries have carried out a massive, systematic campaign of incitement against Israelis. These institutions do not call for Israel’s return to the 1949 armistice lines: they call for Israel’s complete destruction. And they do not portray Israelis merely as citizens of an enemy state: they portray Israelis and Jews as satanic monsters, subhuman enemies of Allah. This campaign of incitement--which continues to this day--has encouraged Palestinians to make the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people their highest goals in life.12
By the last year of Bush’s second term in office, even his most enthusiastic Israeli supporters were unable to believe he was serious about his demand that the Palestinians reform their society and system of government or about making U.S. support for Palestinian statehood conditional on the implementation of such reform.
In 2005 Bush publicly credited Natan Sharansky--the former Soviet dissident, human rights activist, and political prisoner, turned Israeli politician, turned political theorist--with inspiring him to view the democratization of Palestinian and pan-Arab governance as the foundation for lasting peace and security in the Middle East.13 For his part, Sharansky was one of Bush’s most enthusiastic supporters and defenders in Israel and the United States.
But in early 2008 Sharansky broke publicly with Bush, accusing him of abandoning the freedom agenda. In an op-ed (coauthored with Palestinian human rights activist Bassam Eid) titled “Bush’s Mideast U‑Turn,” he wrote:
The real breakthrough of Mr. Bush’s vision five-and-a-half years ago was not his call for a two-state solution or even the call for Palestinians to “choose leaders not compromised by terror.” Rather, the breakthrough was in making peace conditional on a fundamental transformation of Palestinian society. . . .
But the past few years have shown that when it comes to dealing with Israelis and Palestinians, the vital link between freedom and peace is almost entirely ignored. . . .
1. Israel is the most densely populated country in the Western world, with 860 people per square kilometer. Pi Gelilot is located in one of the most densely populated areas in the country, with 7,000 people per square kilometer. See Evgenia Bystrov and Arnon Soffer, “Israel: Demography 2012–2030: On the Way to a Religious State,” University of Haifa, May 2012, http://bit.ly/11vpnIT; and Israel Central Bureau of Statistics, “Localities, Population and Density Per Sq. Km. by Metropolitan Area and Selected Localities,” 2009, http://bit.ly/16S79rS.
2. Atilla Somfavli, “Thousands of People Saved from Death at Pi Gelilot” (Hebrew), Ynet, May 24, 2002, http://bit.ly/16AL9yW.
3. John Kifner, “Bomb Explodes at Israeli Fuel Depot, But Disaster Is Averted,” New York Times, May 24, 2002.
4. “Victims of Palestinian Terrorism Since September 2000,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, undated, http://bit.ly/13u79a8.
5. Ibid.
6. “President Bush Calls for New Palestinian Leadership,” White House, June 24, 2002, http://1.usa.gov/jKNkZ8.
7. George W. Bush, Decision Points (New York: Crown, 2010), p. 404.
8. Gabi Siboni, “Defeating Suicide Terrorism in Judea and Samaria, 2002–2005,” Military and Strategic Affairs 2, no. 2 (October 2010), pp. 113–24, http://bit.ly/16OsRdF.
9. “Suicide Bombing Terrorism During the Current Israeli-Palestinian Confrontation (September 2000–December 2005),” Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies, January 1, 2006, http://bit.ly/17NTxtW; and “The Nature and Extent of Palestinian Terrorism, 2006,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, http://bit.ly/19vNyiU.
10. “The Involvement of Arafat, PA Senior Officials and Apparatuses in Terrorism Against Israel: Corruption and Crime,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, May 6, 2002, http://bit.ly/11NMQ6s; and “Yasser Arafat’s Mukata Compound in Ramallah--A Center for Controlling and Supporting Terrorism,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, April 2, 2002, http://bit.ly/17sosMe.
11. “A Performance-Based Roadmap to a Permanent Two-State Solution to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” April 30, 2003, press statement, http://bit.ly/1dxfQZG.
12. “Recent Examples of Palestinian Authority Incitement,” Israel Ministry of Foreign Affairs, March 13, 2011, http://bit.ly/14NOkGn; “Glorifying Terrorists and Terror,” at Palestinian Media Watch, http://bit.ly/ePPp4a; and Justus Weiner, “The Recruitment of Children in the Current Palestinian Strategy,” Jerusalem Issue Brief (Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs) 2, no. 8 (October 1, 2002), http://bit.ly/150GxhH.
13. Yoav Stern, “Want to Know What Bush Thinks? Read Sharansky,” Haaretz, February 22, 2005.
