There are a lot of exceptional things about Bnei Brak. It is the largest Charedi city in the world. It is the most crowded local authority in Israel. And until Tuesday this week, it was one of the very few towns in Israel that had never known a deadly terror attack. You could see some of this in the way Bnei Brak residents treated the crime scene. Less than 24 hours after a Palestinian gunman had opened fire on a street corner, killing four passers-by, all the red police tapes had been torn away. On the pavement, rows of Neshama candles had been lit around a traditional bereavement notice with the names of the two neighbours who were killed, Rabbi Avishai Yehezkel and Yaakov Shalom. Friends of the two Ukrainians, Viktor Sorkfot and Dmitry Mitrik, who were killed when the gunman fired into the grocery where they worked, had put photographs of them up on the wall, but their names were absent. And there was no mention of the fifth victim, Sergeant Amir Khouri, one of the police team who had chased down the terrorist and shot him dead in a fierce firefight that left him mortally wounded.
“No-one here knows how to commemorate terror victims,” said one local resident. “This is not something anyone here expected.” Bnei Brakis believe that the power of the Torah, studied in a thousand yeshivas, seminaries, schools and cheders in their town, has protected them from harm over all these years. Even during the Gulf War in 1991, when Iraqi missiles rained down on the surrounding towns, Bnei Brak remained unscathed. Some said the attack could only have taken place after the death of Rabbi Chaim Kanyevsky, 11 days earlier: “His righteousness is no longer here to protect us.” But this was an unexpected terror attack in other ways as well.
Eye off the ball?
In early 2016, when the Islamic State was at its peak, the then-incoming head of Shin Bet, Israel’s internal security agency, Nadav Argaman, made the observation that “there are more Swedes in ISIS than Israelis.” At the time, it was seen as an intriguing insight. Of a million-and-a-half Muslim citizens in Israel, only a few dozen had been tempted to travel to Turkey and try to cross the border to join the Islamic State fighters in Syria.
“It sounded clever at the time,” said an Israeli intelligence veteran this week. “In retrospect, it was a mistake. We shouldn’t have just been counting the number of Israeli Daeshists, but also trying to measure the damage they could potentially cause in the future.”
Of the three terror attacks over the past week-and-a-half which took the lives of 11 people, two at least were carried out by Israeli citizens who had tried, unsuccessfully, to join Daesh in Syria, and served time for it in Israeli prisons. The third attack in Bnei Brak was carried out by a Palestinian from the West Bank whose organizational affiliation, if he had one, is still unclear.
Did the Israeli intelligence community take its eye off the ball and fail to keep tabs on the wannabe Daeshists?
It’s impossible to give a full answer to that question right now, especially as the recent attacks could either become the harbingers of a longer wave of terror or remain isolated incidents. Only time will tell. As intelligence analysts always like to say, “it’s not an exact science.”
There are good reasons why the Islamic State has not been a main target for Israeli surveillance in recent years. For a start, it has been in remission for years now, denied of physical space and operational capabilities. Even when it controlled large parts of Syria and Iraq, it had only limited contact with Israeli targets on the Golan border and the couple of attacks it launched there were swiftly repulsed. Daesh was not part of the wide coalition of Islamist terror organisations dominated by Iran, and therefore not considered a direct threat to Israel.
That doesn’t mean that Israel didn’t invest resources in tracking Daesh cells back then. It did, and many European citizens are alive today thanks to intelligence Israel passed on to its allies which helped them intercept those cells before they had a chance to launch attacks. But the threat assessments have changed since then and the handful of Israelis who had tried to join were not seen as serious enough to warrant major resources.
This week, those questions which should have been asked when those failed Daeshists completed their sentences and were released back into the community are finally being raised. For the security services, it’s a major headache as they were preparing for a very different kind of violent escalation during the upcoming month of Ramadan. A more “traditional” type of violence arising from tensions in Jerusalem around Temple Mount, egged on by the usual suspects in Fatah and Hamas.
“The Palestinian terror market was never short on options,” says one Israeli analyst. “Which is why we thought at the time that Daesh simply weren’t that attractive.” At the time, it seemed that Palestinian citizens of Israel had too much to lose by joining a death cult and the Palestinians in the West Bank had enough on their plates. In Gaza, it was more of a matter of competition between the local Isalmists of Hamas and Islamic Jihad which didn’t leave much room for Daesh, though a number of Gazans were attracted to join and crossed the border to Sinai to join its branch there. One of them, a nephew of Hamas leader Yihya Sinwar, was reportedly killed in Sinai a couple of weeks ago, in a clash with the Egyptian army.
These connections between Hamas, which congratulated the “martyrs” who carried out the recent attacks, and Daesh, are now under scrutiny once again. Hamas cooperated with Daesh’s Sinai branch for a while, mainly in arms smuggling, but then there was a major falling-out. Hamas’ Islamic Brotherhood ideology is different to the more Salafist leanings of the Caliphate. But collaboration in the past has existed and may be happening again. Another headache for Israel’s security chiefs as the long, tense month of Ramadan, and within it Pesach and Israel’s Independence Day, beckon.
A summit overshadowed
The terror attacks overshadowed what should have been a perfect week for Israel’s leadership duo, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid, who each, in the space of seven days, took part in a high-level summit that would have been unthinkable not long ago.
Last week, Mr Bennett was invited by Egyptian President and the Emirati leader, Crown Prince Mohamed bin Zaid, to join them in Sharm el-Sheikh for a three-way meeting. The three leaders have a number of concerns in common, all connected to their disappointment in the Biden administration. They are unhappy with the fact that as part of the US’ looming return to the nuclear agreement with Iran, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, which is behind a lot of the mischief in the region, will be removed from the American list of proscribed terror organisations. They are unwilling to make any major changes to their relationships with Russia, despite western sanctions in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine. The oil-producing countries are also reluctant to increase their output to allow European countries to stop buying oil from Russia, and are concerned about the anticipated wheat shortages as most of them buy their grain from Russia and Ukraine.
These grumblings of America’s allies in the region led to the idea of holding another summit, a few days later, when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit Israel. This time, the foreign ministers of Egypt, UAE, Morocco and Bahrain would be hosted by Mr Lapid and tell Secretary Blinken of their concerns together. Every detail, from the invitations to the foreign ministers, to the venue at Kedma hotel next to Kibbutz Sde Boker in the Negev, were planned and put together in a breathtaking four days.
The cliché of an event’s importance being in the fact that it was held could have rarely been truer. The Americans and their Middle Eastern partners did not reach many agreements on Iran or Russia at the “Negev Summit”. That Israel is now, in an unprecedented fashion, not only a partner to Arab summits, but also capable of convening these summits at such short notice, is a sign of much deeper changes in the region, both in the way the Arab regimes regard Israel and their concern over the future of American involvement in the Middle East. In that sense at least, the summit was a success. It got America’s top diplomat to come and listen to the joint concerns of Arabs and Israelis. Whether there will be any results of those conversations remains to be seen. As one diplomat who took part in the summit said afterwards: “The last time the Americans thought they could pivot away from the Middle East, they got Daesh.”
