‘How to to defeat terror: share your humane values’
Friendly Fire
By Ami Ayalon with Anthony David Scribe, £16.99
Ami Ayalon is a wellknown figure in Israel. He is the former commander of the Israeli navy, director of Israel’s internal security service, Shin Bet (Shabak), Cabinet Minister, Knesset Member, and recipient of the Medal of Valour, Israel’s highest military decoration. Therefore, what Ayalon says in the fascinating and wellwritten Friendly Fire (sub-titled: How Israel became its own worst enemy — a memoir) matters, based as it is upon years of military and political experience in the service of the state of Israel.
It was mainly his time as Shin Bet’s director, from 1996 to 2000 — a period of bloodshed in which Palestinian terrorists blew themselves up in Israeli towns and cities, in restaurants and on buses — that transformed Ayalon. Having to deal with Palestinian terrorism, he forced himself to try to understand the Palestinian state of mind, its motivations and aspirations, as a means of stopping the attacks. And this learning process helped Ayalon to sympathise with the Palestinians, something which, as he puts it, is not an easy matter in Israel where “the slightest empathy for our enemies is like spitting on the country”.
His efforts to try to understand the enemy led Ayalon to conclude that, “if we wanted to end terrorism, we couldn’t continue regarding [the Palestinians] as eternal enemies, and we needed to stop dehumanising them as animals on the prowl…”
His basic argument in this book is that democracies like Israel can win their ongoing struggle against terror only by taking up the humanistic values upon which our democratic societies are based. Crude nationalism — on both sides — and fearmongering will not defeat terror, he writes.
Ayalon is not naïve. He accepts that, “we will still need the IDF, special forces, and the Shabak because, in the Middle East, the threat of terrorism and violence… will continue into the future”.
But he calls for Israeli governments to fully commit to the values of civil rights, minority rights and human rights; pluralism, transparency and “peace with our neighbours”. This, he says, is the one approach that “can send the message to our friends and enemies that ours is a just war, that fanatics will not be allowed to destroy our hard-won democracy.”
And overall, Friendly Fire is an optimistic book, envisaging as it does a state of peace one day flourishing between Israelis and Palestinians. But, at the same time, its author warns that, as long as Israel carries out antiterrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose.