Former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter speaks to 'The Jerusalem Post' about recent wave of terror attacks, hunger strikers and Jewish extremists.
By GIDEON GORENLone wolf attacks or a new intifada?
Likud MK Avi Dichter, the former chief of Israel's General Security Service, suggested Sunday in an interview with The Jerusalem Post that the recent tensions in the West Bank and uptick in Palestinian violence is “due to a totally frustrated Palestinian Authority.”Following the Arab Spring, Dichter explained, the Palestinian issue is no longer a priority for Arab countries, who are dealing with their own individual crises. In light of this reorientation and their sudden solitude, the PA has failed to project control on an increasingly uncontrollable anarchic populace.The result is something between spontaneous riots and an organized wave of violence, he said.In light of two consecutive stabbing attacks on IDF personnel in the West Bank on Saturday, numerous gasoline bombs hurled, and vehicular attacks against Israeli targets in recent weeks, the attacks seem connected to each other but lack the implicit ‘green-light’ from some kind of leadership, according to Dichter.“I wouldn’t call it an intifada or terror attacks by the traditional Palestinian terror organizations,” Dichter said, while not absolving Palestinian Authority President Muhammad Abbas and his cabinet, who he says are still to blame since the terrorists are “not blocked by them either, and that is no less important.”Dichter dismissed a term popular in recent years among those seeking to categorize seemingly spontaneous acts of violence committed in the West Bank, downgrading the concept of “lone wolves” to “barely lone dogs.”“Over the last forty-years that I have been in this business, there has not been a terrorist that attacked an Israeli target without leaving behind anyone who knows about it.” The ex-spymaster went on, giving some insight into the terrorist psyche and explaining that he or she “wants to get credit, either before or after he does it, whether [he or she] gets killed, injured or escapes the attack.” Dichter, who also served as Minister of Internal Security and Minister of Home Front Defense, also shed light on the phenomenon of Jewish extremism, lamenting that “unfortunately we have to face the truth that we have among us some Jewish terrorists.”“I remember this phenomenon at the end of the 70’s,” Dichter recalled, referring to the dangers posed to both Jews and Palestinians by the Gush Emunim Underground, a radical offshoot of the Gush Emumin movement which targeted the Arab mayors of West Bank cities and infamously planned to destroy the Muslim holy places atop the Temple Mount with explosives.“[Since the state was established] There is almost forty years of Jewish terrorism.”A supporter of the recent law allowing Israel’s prison authorities to force-feed hunger-striking inmates, MK Dichter ridiculed anybody who would oppose such a measure.“Whenever any person, let alone a member of Knesset, is supporting a detainee that decided to stop eating,” that is supporting “a means of war,” he said in reference to some Arab MKs who have backed Muhammad Allan, the Palestinian prisoner who is in danger of dying amid a 63-day hunger strike.Dichter took it a step further, equating Palestinian hunger-strikers, such as Allan, to suicide bombers since both use self-destruction as a tool.“It is exactly like a suicide bomber,” Dichter declares, “once [the terrorist] is in jail he cannot leave, so [hunger] is his tool, and we have to build our tools to prevent it.”