Knesset member warns of Arab Spring in West Bank
In an interview with Al-Monitor, Kadima Knesset member and former Shin Bet official Israel Hasson warns of Israel's humiliating approach to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and predicts that if negotiations blow up: "The Arab Spring will get to the West Bank.''
The reports on Friday morning, April 4, about attempts to resuscitate the negotiations that this week entered an inevitable crash trajectory, took Knesset member Israel Hasson back to the early morning of Nov. 5, 1995, eight hours after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.
Hasson, at the time head of the Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem regions' command of the Shin Bet, convened his staff for an assessment of the situation. Naturally, the atmosphere was influenced by the bruising blow suffered by the organization, which had failed to defend the prime minister, against the backdrop of the political upheaval that had already begun and would bring Benjamin Netanyahu to power within six months.
In an interview with Al-Monitor on April 4, Hasson recalled the political prediction he made that morning, which turned out to be correct in the ensuing years. “I told them that we are now entering a period of 15 to 20 years of leadership turmoil. … It was clear to me that morning that our leadership boat would be tossed on the water, without knowing which shore it would reach, because other than Rabin, there was no leader of that stature to bring about a major change with the Palestinians. And then, in 1996, there were the Likud and [Benjamin] Netanyahu, and then Ehud Barak, and since then the Likud in different variations. Did any of them know where they were going?”
As deputy director of the Shin Bet, Hasson continued to follow the leadership crisis, and when he got out, he turned to politics. At first, he found himself in Yisrael Beitenu, Avigdor Liberman’s party, but after falling out with the foreign minister, he moved to Kadima, where he holds one of the two Knesset seats that the party got in the last elections. Together with party chairman Shaul Mofaz, the former defense minister and army chief of staff, even in Kadima’s shrunken version, it has dozens of years of priceless diplomatic and defense experience, which unfortunately are not being used by the country’s leadership.
