MID-EAST REALITIES © - www.MiddleEast.Org - Washington - 5/02: Motives are of course a very important aspect of life and politics...as is timing. And when it comes to someone who has been head of the Shin Bet, like Ami Ayalon, and who is saying these things now, at this particular crucial and sensitive time, there are good reasons to have many suspicions, and many questions, and many doubts. Indeed, in the end it is probably most reasonable to conclude that Ayalon's professed "sensitivity" and "understanding" are primarily as a result of wanting to help Israel get "where we want to go" rather than to help the Palestinians whom he has so personally worked so hard to repress, to torture, and to co-opt. Even so...interesting comments that Ami Ayalon has recently made; and along with motives and timing comments worth pondering.

JERUSALEM (Reuters - 1 May 2001) - Ami Ayalon once headed the Israeli security organization the Palestinians despise the most, but now the former chief of the Shin Bet says his country must learn to understand their pain.

Israel's Channel Two broadcast an interview with Ayalon late Monday that revealed a sympathy for the Palestinians' plight and a readiness to blame Israelis rarely seen from a member of the security establishment past or present.

For nearly four years starting in 1996 Ayalon headed the Shin Bet intelligence service, set up with the state's founding in 1948 with the twin purposes of fighting secret hostile activity and protecting Israeli leaders.

In the interview, he acknowledged permitting the Shin Bet to use what he said others would call torture -- he prefers to call it "physical pressure" -- to coerce information from Palestinian prisoners. He said it was justified to save lives.

After leaving the Shin Bet, he acted as go-between for former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak with Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. Now 55, Ayalon is known for his contacts with Palestinian officials.

Normally taciturn, Ayalon said he wanted Israelis to know he rejected the "ethos" of the present right-wing Prime Minister Ariel Sharon which he said dated back to the 1950s when Israel believed it had "no choice" on how to deal with Palestinians.

Ayalon said that since a 1993 breakthrough peace deal with Arafat, Israel had another choice. But he said Palestinians had lost faith in Barak, ousted by Sharon in a February election.

"We never manage to understand their pain just as they to a very great extent don't understand our pain. I believe we don't understand their fears. We speak of our fears, we speak of our fear of being thrown into the sea. We don't understand that all of the Palestinians are afraid of being thrown across the (Jordan) river," Ayalon said.

Chief of Palestinian preventive security in the Gaza Strip, Mohammad Dahlan, told Reuters: "We have differed greatly with Ayalon, and we also agreed with him when he was still in his job, and he dealt with the Palestinians as a people with dignity and he always admits his mistakes.

"Other Israeli leaders are still dealing with the Palestinians from the occupier mentality," Dahlan said.

Ayalon denied having political aspirations of his own.

The interview, with Israeli journalist Ilana Dayan, was a nearly no-holds barred exchange of views in the thick of more than seven months of raging violence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Israel.

Ayalon said Palestinians feared a repeat of what they call the "Nakba" or "Great Catastrophe" of Israel's creation in formerly British-mandated Palestine when many left or were forced to flee their homes never to return.

"Until we understand what a Palestinian child draws when he looks at an Israeli, what is the meaning of an Israeli soldier, what is the meaning of an Israeli checkpoint, what is the meaning of humiliation, we won't truly understand what they are going through or where we want to go," he insisted.

He said the Palestinian Authority had in the past arrested thousands of Islamic Hamas group militants opposed to the Israeli-Palestinian peace deal and had even killed, interrogated and tortured them in order to ensure Israeli security.

He said they did this believing it would help them reach their goal of a Palestinian state next to Israel.

Violence had erupted, he said, because Palestinians lost hope. "What they are saying is that 'we will reach our aim in another way'. They haven't given up on the aim and so naturally we have no choice but to give them a state," he said.

"We are so strong, so strong from a security standpoint -- and I personally want to believe also from a societal standpoint -- that we can live with the reality of there being a Palestinian state beside us."

He likened the Palestinians to Israel's Siamese twin. Separation was a complex surgery which must offer the Palestinians a full life, he said.

"When this twin will feel he has no life whatsoever, he will cause us very deep suffering."

BEHIND THE HEADLINES:

JERUSALEM, May 1 (Jewish Telegraph Agency, JTA) - Israel doesn't understand the Palestinians, lamented a former official who has spent years trying to do so, and this is why Israel doesn't know how to deal with them.

The speaker was Ami Ayalon, until recently the head of the Shin Bet security service, which fights an ongoing war against Palestinian terrorism.

Ayalon, who became a go-between for former Prime Minister Ehud Barak with Palestinian officials after his Shin Bet service, suggested a "simple" solution to the conflict with the Palestinians when he was interviewed this week by Israel's Channel Two Television.

Give the Palestinians an independent state and the seven-month intifada will be over, Ayalon said in the interview broadcast Monday night.

Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat chose the path of violence over diplomatic negotiations because "Barak lost all the confidence the Palestinians had initially given him," Ayalon said.

Israel is "strong enough militarily, and I would like to believe morally, to give the Palestinians their own independent state," he said.

The interview was noteworthy because the comments sympathetic to the Palestinian cause came from a man who once stood at the core of the Israeli security establishment.

It also was noteworthy because of how isolated Ayalon is in his analysis of Palestinian motivations.

Not only hawkish members of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government would disagree with Ayalon; many leftists, disenchanted with Arafat, also consider Ayalon's analysis naive.

Across the political spectrum, Israelis feel they have good reason to suspect the Palestinians. While many Israelis had believed that the violent Palestinian uprising that began in late September would burn itself out, it shows no signs of abating.

Time and again, Arafat pledges to reduce the violence - and Palestinian attacks intensify. Shooting and bombing attacks continue at the rate of dozens a day.

This week, for example, just as Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was announcing that Israel and the Palestinians were nearing agreement on the terms of a cease-fire, Hamas terrorists killed an Israeli in a West Bank ambush. The victim's father had been killed in another West Bank drive-by shooting in January.

Do the Palestinians really want to end the violence?

Some Israelis thought there was light at the end of the tunnel last week, when the two sides discussed reopening the casino in the West Bank city of Jericho.

Immensely profitable for the Palestinian Authority, which is a joint owner, the casino was among the first casualties of the violence that erupted last September. Before that, it provided a living to more than 1,000 Palestinians, drawing thousands of Israelis for whom gambling is illegal within Israel's borders.

If Israel would let Israelis come back to the casino, Palestinian negotiators promised, the Palestinian Authority would bring an end to attacks on the Jordan Valley road, a major traffic artery between Jerusalem and the Galilee.

Israeli drivers have all but stopped using the road for fear of roadside ambushes.

Many Israelis were outraged, saying the Palestinians should not be permitted to keep the peace where it is profitable for them to do so, while attacking Israelis elsewhere. Others noted that the offer seemed to resolve doubts about whether the Palestinian Authority can control the anti-Israel violence if it chooses.

The talks broke down when Sharon said he would not rescind an order preventing Israelis from traveling to the West Bank. Without Israelis, who were the leading patrons of the Jericho casino, there was little point in pursuing the idea of reopening the gambling mecca.

Israelis also were optimistic that the violence might end when Arafat reportedly issued an order last week for an end to Palestinian mortar attacks on Israel.

Within days, however, the attacks resumed - and Palestinian militia members denied ever having received the order from Arafat in the first place.

Even Peres, one of the lone voices in the Sharon government who still believes that Arafat is a partner for peace, said he has no explanation for the Palestinian leader's behavior.

Even if Israel can reach agreement with Arafat on a cease-fire, many wonder whether he would be able to deliver on the deal.

Arafat often tries to shirk responsibility for Palestinian violence, saying it emanates from elements he does not control. Sharon, however, increasingly is holding the Palestinian Authority responsible for all attacks that originate in areas under its control.

Since taking office earlier this year, Sharon said he would target Palestinians responsible for attacks on Israelis, but would seek to avoid collective punishment against the general Palestinian population.

The policy was based on the assumption that the civilian population eventually would force the Palestinian leadership into a cessation of hostilities.

So far, however, the opposite appears true.

Far from seeking peace, the Palestinians have created a new militia that draws its membership from Arafat's own Fatah faction, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

When rumors circulated this week that Arafat wanted to disband the new militia, hundreds of Palestinians took to the streets of the Gaza Strip in protest.

In addition, many Palestinians believe that the success of Hezbollah fighters - whose war of attrition forced Israel to withdraw its troops from southern Lebanon - shows that Israel understands only the language of force.

Public opinion polls have shown overwhelming support among the Palestinian public for continuing the violent uprising - 80 percent of respondents, according to a recent poll by the Palestinian Jerusalem Media and Communications Center - with 75 percent supporting suicide bombings.

A rare dissenting voice is Bassam Abu Sharif, a political adviser to Arafat and one of Arafat's closest associates. Abu Sharif criticizes Palestinian terror attacks directed at Israeli civilians.

"Your attacks should be aimed at the soldiers deployed at the entrances to our cities," Abu Sharif said during a television interview. "Why don't you attack them, and not blow up children on their way to school?''

Abu Sharif charged that attacks on Israeli civilians give Sharon rhetorical ammunition against the Palestinians as he seeks support from the international community.

Abu Sherif's interview did not play well in some Palestinian quarters.

Three days after it aired, Islamic religious leaders in Bethlehem demanded that Abu Sherif be declared a collaborator with Israel.

Little wonder that the Israel Defense Force continually warns that dealings with the Palestinians are likely to get worse before they get better.