Israel could be threatened by a new generation of bombers

This is the moment Israel’s security establishment has been fearing for months, if not years. There hasn’t been a bomb attack on public transport in Jerusalem for 11 years and to find this level of organisation and planning you have to go back two decades to the dark days of the Second Intifada.

As explosive devices go, this type of mobile phone-activated bomb isn’t exactly at the high end of the terrorist sophistication scale, but it does need a level of knowhow which has largely been absent from the scene for years.

There is a dissonance between the military technology Hamas and Islamic Jihad have in Gaza, with stockpiles of rockets and drones, and what they can use in the West Bank, where their terror cells have been hunted down and pushed underground by both Israel and the PA’s security apparatus.

The West Bank is awash with weapons but these are mainly assault rifles of the kind used in the recent wave of shooting attacks.

Bomb making is another matter. Following Wednesday ’s attacks, the biggest headache is which network has succeeded in obtaining the type of explosive device not seen in Jerusalem or the West Bank for many years.

Then there is the key question of whether they were smuggled from outside. If they were, have similar bombs made their way in? Or is there an active mohandes (engineer) working close by?

Such a bomb maker could be someone who gained experience all those years ago and managed to remain hidden since, until being “reactivated” now, probably for a lot of money.

Or it could be a much younger mohandes who received training abroad or even online.

The answer to these questions will determine whether this was the first in a wave of bombings or a one-off attack.

Split screen

Another aspect that Israelis haven’t seen in a while is the television channels having to split their broadcasting between live coverage of events in Jerusalem and major sporting events.

As the news was arriving and the kick-off hour for Morocco-Croatia in the World Cup drew near, the public broadcasting corporation informed viewers they might need to switch channel to watch the game.

When the time came after nearly five hours of coverage, the decision was made that there were no new details of the bombings, and the match was shown on the main channel, with a news update at half-time.

That, however, is not even close to being the most surreal aspect of the coverage of this most surreal of World Cups.

The Qatari organisers backtracked on many of their commitments to Fifa — but one they’ve stuck to is allowing Israelis to arrive, with Israeli passports on direct flights from Tel Aviv to watch the games.

For Israeli fans it’s been a rare opportunity to share a love for the sport with fans from Muslim countries who don’t have diplomatic relations with Israel. In many cases the interactions were joyous and natural.

There were less pleasant episodes as well in which verbal abuse was hurled at the Israelis. But most Israelis in Qatar reported that, on the whole, they were having a great time and didn’t feel any need to hide their identities. Israel was even allowed to open, for the duration of the tournament, a temporary consular office in Doha to serve its citizens there.

For a brief illusory moment, it looked as if the corrupt and craven Fifa could actually bring peace.

At least one Israeli intelligence official was unimpressed. “Everyone is talking about how the Qatari regime treats LGBT people and foreign workers,” he said. “But Qatar is one of the financial sponsors of Hamas terrorism against Israel and finances Hamas’s main cheerleader in the Arab world, Al Jazeera. The World Cup shouldn’t make anyone, certainly not Israelis, forget that.”

Soft diplomacy

Until the bombings, the outgoing government was on holiday. On Sunday morning Prime Minister Yair Lapid chaired a final weekly cabinet meeting.

That doesn’t mean that next Sunday a new cabinet will be in place. Judging from the desultory pace of the coalition negotiations, it looks as if he may have a few more Sundays in office before the new Netanyahu government is inaugurated.

But the outgoing cabinet doesn’t seem to be interested in hanging around and not all ministers even turned up for their last meeting, which was largely dedicated to summing up what the government of Messrs Lapid and Bennett (also absent) achieved.

The cabinet did, however, authorise one policy item in its last meeting — an agreement with Germany to launch an international effort to collect testimony from Holocaust survivors still alive.

This is the only kind of policy that a government which is about to be replaced and has no mandate can pass. Commemoration of the Holocaust is supposed to be above politics — though that often isn’t the case.

One thing that Danny Dayan discovered on being appointed chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust remembrance centre, was that it was, in effect, one of Israel’s senior diplomatic positions.

He hosts every world leader arriving in Jerusalem, as they all come to Yad Vashem. And when he travels to other countries, meetings with the local leadership are also de rigeur. Often he has to turn down requests for Yad Vashem to take a stand on current affairs.

“I’ve had foreign leaders asking me to support an international tribunal on Russian war crimes in Ukraine,” he told me this week.

“I of course have to respectfully tell them that Yad Vashem cannot be involved in anything like that. We have to preserve the principle that the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust [is our] mandate.”

Back in March, when Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky addressed the Knesset, Yad Vashem rejected the proposal by the Ukrainians that his speech also be screened there.

Yad Vashem did issue a rare condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nine months ago but that, according to Mr Dayan, was a unique case “because [Russia] was calling the invasion ‘denazification’ and the war was taking place in the same places where the extermination of Jews did, but we haven’t said anything since. It isn’t our role.”

Steering Yad Vashem out of political minefields isn’t just a challenge on the international stage; it happens inside Israel as well.

“Yad Vashem is of course a Zionist organisation and I always say to every leader who visits that my two lessons from the Holocaust are that the Jews have to have a sovereign state and that even the smallest manifestation of antisemitism needs to be dealt with decisively,” says Mr Dayan.

“But at the same time, Yad Vashem shouldn’t be doing hasbara. As an institution, it’s not our job to tell people what to think about the Holocaust, just to collect all the information available about it and make that information accessible to the widest possible public. Also, non-Zionist visitors should be able to come here and not feel lectured to.”

This is particularly important, he says, as he sees one of the main challenges facing Yad Vashem in opening up to two Israeli communities who are less frequent visitors: strictly Orthodox Jews and Arab-Israelis.

“I don’t want a Charedi visiting here to feel we’re forcing him to deal with the question of where God was in Auschwitz, and I don’t think this is the place to start a discussion with an Arab-Israeli on the Nakba, though I have my own views.”

There are rumours swirling in the far reaches of Israeli politics that Mr Dayan, one of the first appointments of the outgoing government, is on an unofficial “hit list” of the incoming one.

Seven years ago he was appointed by Benjamin Netanyahu as Israel’s ambassador to Brazil, but the Brazilians refused to accept the former chairman of the settlers’ Yesha Council. Mr Netanyahu instead appointed him to the plum position of Israel’s Consul-General in New York.

On his return to Israel Mr Dayan joined the New Hope party of former Likudniks opposed to Mr Netanyahu. Now there are supporters of the returning PM calling for his abrupt removal from Yad Vashem. Mr Dayan won’t comment on yet another political storm that may be facing the institution.