Ex-Shin Bet head says Israel should negotiate with jailed intifada leader
Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, Ami Ayalon says in Guardian interview
A former leader of the Shin Bet domestic security force has said Israel will not have security until Palestinians have their own state, and Israeli authorities should release Marwan Barghouti, jailed leader of the second intifada, to direct negotiations to create one.
Ami Ayalon, a retired admiral who also commanded Israel’s navy and was wounded in battle and decorated for his service, also said destroying Hamas was not a realistic military goal, and the current operation in Gaza risked entrenching support for the group.
“We Israelis will have security only when they, Palestinians, will have hope. This is the equation,” he said in an interview at his home. “To say the same in military language: you cannot deter anyone, a person or a group, if he believes he has nothing to lose.”
He said Israel’s war in Gaza was a just one, after the horrors of the 7 October attack, in which Hamas slaughtered at least 1,200 people and took more than 240 others hostage. But too many Israelis could not accept that Hamas did not represent all Palestinians, or that they had a legitimate claim to their own state, he said.
Ayalon said most Israelis believed that “all Palestinians are Hamas or supporters of Hamas”, and they did not accept the concept of a Palestinian identity. “We see them as people, not ‘a people’, a nation,” he said. “We cannot accept [the idea of a Palestinian people] because if we do, it creates a huge obstacle in the concept of the state of Israel.”
He believes releasing Barghouti, a Palestinian who has been jailed since 2002, serving a life sentence for murder after leading the second intifada, would be a vital step towards meaningful negotiations. According to recent polls he would beat senior Hamas figure Ismail Haniyeh in open elections.
“Look into the Palestinian polls. He is the only leader who can lead Palestinians to a state alongside Israel. First of all because he believes in the concept of two states, and secondly because he won his legitimacy by sitting in our jails.”
He admitted that Israel’s current political climate, where his views are extremely unpopular and the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has promised to “destroy Hamas”, meant there was little prospect of his advice being followed immediately. “Every time when I say hatred is not a plan, it is not a policy, people are very upset,” he said.
Support for Barghouti reflects the fact that current Palestinian backing for Hamas is rooted not in enthusiasm for the group’s ideology, but the sense they are the only faction fighting effectively for a Palestinian state, Ayalon said.
The non-violence embraced in recent years by the rival Fatah faction has been discredited by repeated failures of diplomatic efforts to achieve a Palestinian state, which is dangerous to both Israelis and Palestinians.
He came relatively late to his current views, after leaving the military where the enemy is just a target to be killed, he said. His position at Shin Bet required him to regularly meet Palestinians, including visiting PLO leader Yasser Arafat.
He made Palestinian friends, among them PA security chief Jibril Rajoub and Sari Nusseibeh, a philosophy professor from Jerusalem who can trace his family’s presence there back to the 7th century. “So can I tell him, OK, this land is mine and you are a visitor here? It is nonsense.”
Ayalon said attempts to normalise a Middle East in which the Palestinians did not have a state or much hope of one, was one of the factors in Hamas launching the attacks on 7 October.
He said: “In a way what [senior Hamas figure Yahya Sinwar] wanted to do, was to tell everyone in the Arab world, the Muslim world and the international community, America, Europe: you will not achieve anything in the Middle East, unless you put the Palestinian issue on the table.
“The tragedy is, that he did it. Today you just have to listen to [Joe] Biden. No one believes we can achieve a better reality here unless we accept the reality of two states.”
He said the one thing almost everyone in the international community agreed upon – both Israel’s enemies and its allies, from China to the US, Russia to regional powers – was the need for a two-state solution.
“The other option is to go on fighting, when we know that the wars are becoming more and more violent, and we know today that the enemy is becoming more and more radical.”
The nature of Hamas meant that its destruction was an impossible goal for a military, Ayalon said, although he declined to comment on Israel’s current leadership.
Hamas is not just a militia, but “an ideology with an organisation, and the organisation has a military wing”, he said. “You cannot destroy ideology by the use of military power. Sometimes it will be rooted deeper if you try.
“This is exactly what we see today. Today, 75% of Palestinians support Hamas. Before the war, it was less than 50%.
“For Israel to achieve security, the country needs to set a realistic military goal, such as the destruction of Hamas military capabilities and death or exile of its leaders,” he said. They also needed to discuss what would happen in Gaza after the fighting ended, or risked the war extending indefinitely, he said.
“I’m so upset that we are not willing to discuss the day after. Because I know what happens to wars without a political goal. The war becomes a goal in itself, instead of being a means to achieve a political goal,” he said. “We are experts: this is exactly what happened to us in Lebanon, this is exactly what happened to us in the West Bank. And I am afraid that this is what will happen if we go on fighting without defining a clear essence of victory. What is a victory?”
But he says change only comes under pressure, and he believes 7 October could prove a tragic turning point. He recalls as a young soldier hearing Moshe Dayan say he would rather have no peace deal with Egypt and keep the Sinai, than make peace and give up the Sinai. Two years later came a lasting peace deal with Cairo.
“This is exactly what we say today when it comes to the West Bank. We believe that security will be achieved if we conquer, if we occupy, only by military power. And what [the] Yom Kippur [war] proved to us, is we shall suffer violence because of the occupation. Occupation will not bring us security, it brought us violence and death.”
He points to the very existence of Israel as proof that a minority view can become reality. “The Zionist movement is the result of a dream,” he said. “The majority of Jewish people stayed in Europe and were assassinated there. A minority of Jews created a dream, and it took them about 50 years to achieve it. We should not underestimate the power of hope and the power of a dream.”