What can Israeli security teach us?

Martin Fletcher Correspondent • Profile

ASHKELON, Israel — Avi Dichter, the head of Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic spy and security service, speaks to NBC News Martin Fletcher about Israel’s domestic security services in the light of the global war on terror and ahead of the disengagement of Israel’s 21 settlements in Gaza and four settlements in the West Bank begins next week.

NBC News’ Martin Fletcher: When you see London under attack in the last couple of weeks — in the last month, two times —  do you professionally look at that and say, “Well these guys how can they defend London it's too big to be protected?”  Or New York?  Because when I travel to these places,  it seems that compared to Israel, they're wide open for terrorists. How do you see that?

Avi Dichter:  I think that their problem is a little bit lighter then the Israeli problems. We have the terrorist centers right next to the window. You can see them throughout the window, whether it's Nablus or Tulkarem or Hebron or Gaza and until Aug. 2003 we didn’t even have the fence to block them. Believe me, to cross from New Jersey to New York,  it was much more complicated than to cross from Nablus right into Tel Aviv.

And that's the reason why we suffered so many casualties during the first years of the intifada [Palestinian uprising].  Gaza Strip by the way till today — five years of  intifada — not even one suicide bomber succeeded in crossing the fence and carry out a terror attack inside Israel, during five years. The two events were through the crossing points that we failed to detect.

So, I think that England as an island or the United States as an island, it's not more complicated than Israel to protect.

Fletcher: Except that they have many home grown — what they call the "home grown terrorists. From here, people come from the outside, but there 1.5 million Muslims in Britain, seven-eight million in America.

Dichter: I beg to differ. We have in Israeli 20 percent of our population are Arabs, pure Arabs, closer to the Palestinians than to the Jewish people in Israel. And  crossing every day in tens of thousands of Arabs from the West Bank legally an illegally. I'm not sure that it's less complicated than the problem you have in the states or in England.

Fletcher:  So how do you do it — how do you stop terrorism here?  

Dichter: As a matter of fact we haven't done the right steps right at the beginning of this session of violence. We have a long history with them including Shin Bet — we are fighting with them since 1967, but what happened at the 29 of September 2000  — it was a starting of a completely new system of violence.

First of all, the increase numbers of suicide bombers. Suicide bombers are the horrible terror attacks that you can ever imagine, we speak about 60 percent of our casualties are due to suicide bombers. Sixty percent!

While suicide bombers are less than 0.5 percent of the entire pie of terror attacks against Israel, which means once you identify the problem which is suicide bombers than you have to decide what kind of steps has to be taken in order to block them. So penetrating the centers of the terrorism in Nablus, Tulkarem, Hebron, Afghanistan, or any other country.

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