- JERUSALEM (Reuters) - 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.
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- 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.
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- Says Israel Has A Choice
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- 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.
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- ``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.
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- Israelis Must Understand
-
- ``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.''
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- 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.''
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