Israelis know lull in suicide attacks unlikely to last

By Michael Matza
Knight Ridder Newspapers

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Still, they say, the past six months have been a period of remarkable calm inside the buses, marketplaces and cafes that had been frequent targets.

Since January, there have been three attacks with 20 deaths, and none since March 14, when a double bombing at the busy Mediterranean harbor in Ashdod killed 10 port workers.

In the first half of 2003, there were 10 such attacks, resulting in 71 deaths and scores of injuries, according to statistics released by Israeli officials.

Suicide attacks became the weapon of choice of Palestinian militant groups about half a year into the current 44-month-old conflict over land, and ever since that grim reality took hold, Israeli cities and towns have not had a respite lasting this long.

Over the same six months, 67 fully ready attacks — defined as a bomber and a bomb in motion — have been prevented by Israeli troops.

"We are more effective, more efficient," said a senior army commander, speaking on condition of anonymity. "And I have to be frank: When you are talking about this level of attacks, you have to have some luck."

For Israelis, the lull has brought an easing of the gnawing anxiety that had come to accompany everyday actions, like a trip to the ice-cream parlor or having a cup of coffee with a friend at a sunny sidewalk cafe.

"Before, everyone was as jumpy as a cat, talking about nothing but attacks all day long," Aaron Saadyan, 49, said recently as he got ready to board a bus in Tel Aviv. "Now, everyone's more relaxed, less stressed — these bad thoughts are more in the back of the mind."

Army and intelligence sources attribute the drop in bombings to a number of factors: targeted killings of extremist leaders; the inexperience of the cadres who replaced them; a sharp increase in arrests of Palestinian militants; the effectiveness of the separation barrier between Israel and the northern part of the West Bank; better intelligence; and an improved capacity to deliver the intelligence in "real time" to Israeli forces on the ground so that infiltrators can be intercepted.

"Basically, terrorism is a combination of two factors: motivation and operational capability. Only when a group of people has both will a terrorism campaign happen," said Boaz Ganor, an Israeli counterterrorism expert at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, a college north of Tel Aviv.
 
Israel's killings in March and April of Hamas leaders Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdul-Aziz Rantisi were expected to raise Hamas' motivation for revenge, and up the ante for bloodshed, but that has not happened.

Palestinian Hisham Ahmed, a professor of politics at Birzeit University near Ramallah in the West Bank, sees two factors at play in the recent lull.

"The international uproar against suicide bombings has caused some resistance groups to rethink their work. Palestinian resistance groups are keen not to be viewed as terrorist organizations," Ahmed said.

There also is the possibility, after Israel's targeted killings of the two senior Hamas leaders, that the group is working on tactics of a magnitude that will surpass the suicide bombings, because "there are higher expectations now on resistance groups," Ahmed said.

"After Yassin and Rantisi, you heard people say, 'If Hamas goes for a bus, now that would be a mockery,' " Ahmed said.

For the moment, Hamas and similar organizations, such as Islamic Jihad and Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, seem to lack the capacity to carry out bombings inside Israel. "For the last six months, the limiting factor in their attacks is not their motivation, it's their operational capability," Ganor said.

"The problem is that the influence of lowering the capability is a short-term phenomenon. It could hold for a day, a week, a month or two. If you want to lower operational capability on an ongoing basis, you have to repeat your offensives so that they won't be able to recover," he said.

"And even if you are very successful, it only gives you a window of time to deal with the motivation, because it cannot last," he said. "They will recover. They will find new tactics. You will have to deal with them again."

"Israel has had remarkable success in recent months in lowering the capability of the terrorist organizations. Yet Israel is a great failure in dealing with their motivation ... "

A tense calm may have to suffice, even though no one really believes it will prevail.

"What you hear a lot is that people don't really believe that it is different at this moment. You hear people saying things like, 'This quiet is frightening. ... This waiting for the next attack is very frightening,' " said Danny Brom, a psychologist at the Israel Center for the Treatment of Psychotrauma, a Jerusalem clinic.

"If the situation is really different, it will take time for people to really believe that it is different. A post-traumatic society needs time to come to a certain balance again after so many things have happened. The learning that comes after suicide bombings is very hard to unlearn."

Material from the Los Angeles Times is included in this report.