Ex-IDF intel chief: Those who burn Palestinian villages destroy Israel’s legitimacy
Amos Yadlin says US recognizes Israel has right to act after Tuesday’s deadly terror shooting, but warns ‘legitimacy is very fluid’ amid settler rioting in West Bank
The former head of IDF military intelligence warned Wednesday that settler rioting in Palestinian towns following a deadly shooting attack the day before were dangerously undercutting international support for Israel to expand counterterror operations in the West Bank.
After four Israelis were shot dead Tuesday at a gas station outside the settlement of Eli, settler vigilantes rampaged in several Palestinian towns. The violence continued Wednesday, as hundreds of Israelis set alight homes, cars and fields in the town of Turmus Ayya, where a local resident was killed in unclear circumstances.
Speaking with Channel 12 news, Amos Yadlin said the US recognizes that Israel has “legitimacy to take action” in the northern West Bank after terror attacks like Tuesday’s. “But legitimacy is very fluid. It can be lost in a second. It can be lost internally when there are, heaven forbid, losses [to Israeli forces]. It can be lost when Palestinian non-combatants are killed.”
And, he stressed, “it disappears when Palestinian villages are burned and non-involved Palestinian residents are hurt. That is simply destroying Israeli legitimacy.”
The rioting by settlers over the past day has been met with numerous international denunciations, with the US State Department on Wednesday condemning the violence and calling for “accountability and justice.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called on Israelis to obey the law and said “we will not accept rioting.”
Yadlin, once a Labor party candidate for minister of defense, said that the government has rightly designated the imperative to stop Iran’s nuclear drive, and the bid for normalization with Saudi Arabia, as being at the top of Israel’s national security agenda.
“If we follow the messianic agenda of the extremists in the government we will hurt ourselves,” he warned. “We want to stop Iran. We want to bring Saudi Arabia [to the peace table]. We need the Americans for that. We don’t want to harm the good relations we have with Egypt and Jordan. We don’t want the UAE to close down its embassy here.”
Therefore, said Yadlin, “there’s a whole national security envelope that requires a very carefully calibrated, very precise operation [in the West Bank], backed by legitimacy [from our allies]. If we embark on an operation against a background of burning Palestinian villages, we will do immense harm to ourselves and will not achieve the necessary operational success — of increasing our security against terrorism.”
He also dismissed calls by some ministers for a major IDF offensive in the West Bank to tackle terrorism akin to 2002’s Operation Defensive Shield, saying “they don’t know what they are talking about.”
That 2002 military operation, focused on destroying the terrorist infrastructure behind the Second Intifada’s onslaught of suicide bombers, saw the IDF re-enter major Palestinian cities where the Palestinian Authority had gained full control under the Oslo Accords.
“Israel had not previously entered Area A” — the major West Bank cities, noted Yadlin. “Nowadays, Israel [routinely] enters Area A, and goes wherever the PA is not functioning, on the basis of specific intelligence information.”
“Nonetheless,” added Yadlin, the former head of the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University, “the enemy is becoming familiar with Israel’s operational methods and is improving. The level of terrorism is rising — because there are weapons everywhere, and there is money everywhere, from Iran and Hamas. So different methods are needed.”
“It may be that the IDF, instead of overnight raids, may have to take control of more territory, for longer, but still in a focused manner — in places such as the Jenin refugee camp and other parts of the northern West Bank where the PA is not in control and from which terrorism is being dispatched.”
Tensions between Israel and the Palestinians have been elevated for the past year, with the military carrying out near-nightly raids in the West Bank, amid a series of deadly Palestinian terror attacks.
Since the beginning of the year, Palestinian attacks in Israel and the West Bank have killed 24 people, including 17-year-old Nachman Mordoff, 17-year-old Elisha Anteman, 21-year-old Harel Masood and 64-year-old Ofer Fayerman, who were killed Tuesday.
According to a tally by The Times of Israel, 129 West Bank Palestinians have been killed during that span, most of them during clashes with security forces or while carrying out attacks, but some were uninvolved civilians and others were killed under unclear circumstances.
