Scene of bulldozer attack in Jerusalem
Photo: Dudi Vaaknin
What does he have to lose?
Terrorists must know that their families will pay heavy price for attacks
No alerts, no deterrence, and worst of all – the security establishment has no solutions either.
And if this isn’t enough, the Israeli legal system places obstacles in the face of any notion that may create some kind of deterrence, and therefore we shall continue to count, almost daily, more attempts and more attacks of the type that is characterized as a “spontaneous terror attack” – a sole attacker, who doesn’t belong to any organization, wakes up in the morning and decides to settle the score with the Jews on his own; and in order to do that, he is willing to die.
What does he have to lose? He can die in peace. He knows that nobody aside from him will pay any price. His family will enjoy prestige and proper compensation. In some cases, it will even receive an allowance from Israel’s National Insurance Institute. Nobody will touch his home; nothing will be destroyed.
So what if the defense minister decided, in the wake of the Jerusalem yeshiva massacre and previous bulldozer attacks, to raze the murderers’ homes? Legal officials presented legal obstacles, and the idea faded away. They counted on the public’s short memory. We had a short period of quiet in Jerusalem and went back to routine without actual solutions.
Now try to explain to the mother of the Golani soldier at the roadblock, who was blinded after a crazy woman hurled acid at him, that there is nothing that can be done; that this is a sole attacker, not one supported by an organization, who did not receive her orders from Beirut or Nablus. We don’t know anything about her and we cannot apprehend her in advance.
How about trying to explain to relatives of Monday’s attack victims that it was impossible to predict the Palestinian attacker’s behavior, and that in such cases there is indeed nothing that can be done; that we do not have enough police officers and soldiers and Shin Bet agents to monitor every Palestinian who enters Jerusalem.
We need to create deterrence
Indeed, officials promised us to introduce tighter monitoring of Palestinian laborers who work in western Jerusalem and check the permits and background of all Palestinians who operate heavy machinery. So what? It didn’t stop and certainly didn’t deter anyone. Stabbing attacks and attempted stabbing attacks have become an almost daily occurrence that at times goes unreported by the media.
Everyone agrees that there are no advance warnings when it comes to the type of attack we saw in Jerusalem Monday night – yet this does not justify the fact that we gave up, in advance, on the struggle to create deterrence. If we fail to create a new level of deterrence and if it won’t become clear that a heavy price will be exacted immediately, in respect to the terrorist’s family and property – in the form of razed homes and expelled families – we shall continue to live with threat.
A successful attack will be followed by yet another one, and another one, until the sequence will become an existential threat. People will be scared to walk the streets, just like it used to be, when they were scared to board buses. So we shall remain right and humane– but also stupid, helpless, and miserable. This is suicide.
Razing the terrorist homes and punishing their families is a cruel, inhumane matter. Yet does anyone have a better solution for stopping this wave? Perhaps we shall just wait for peace to prevail?
