Once upon a time the two most prolific contributors to OpinionJournal’s Best of the Web Today were Barak Moore and Carl Sherer. For a few months now Barak has been blogging at IRIS. Now Carl has started blogging at Israel…

The Israelis cannot easily penetrate this tight, clan-based society with undercover agents. They depend largely on electronic surveilance and informants.

The informant stream largely dried up in the early years of Oslo as Arabs saw the shabby treatment Israel gave to its South Lebanese allies after withdrawing in the north, and how many Pali informers were abandoned in the wake of the peace process.

That collaborating now appeals is testimony to the disgust most Palis have for their leadership, and to their dawning realization that they aren’t going to win this.

Carnival of The Vanities Recommended: Boxi…

Yourish compiles some numbers and concludes that the “truce” is a sham, but the wall and stepped up security measures are working. Numbers here.

I find that unsurprising…

Myth: Criminal justice is the way to solve terrorism.
Fact: If nothing else has been learned in the past five years, this myth has been proved wrong. It was the strategy that Europe took prior to and after Sep. 11. It was the strategy (if you can call it that) that America took prior to Sep. 11. Europe has had enormous failures on this front (release of the Hamburg co-conspirator, release of numerous Spanish suspects). America has had some pretty spectacular failures in its military confrontation with Al Qaeda too, but can point to some successes too. In the case of Israel, criminal convictions of terrorists are relatively easy to get and are commonly pursued. But it is by no means a detractor to Palestinian’s willingness to participate in the activity. That’s because most Palestinians in the territories are already living in prison-like conditions, so a stint at Megiddo (Israel’s primary security prison)isn’t such a bad thing. More importantly, any Palestinian who serves time in an Israeli prison for security charges is automatically given a lifetime pension which is enough to support a family’s basic needs. Thus being convicted of terrorism by Israeli courts is an economically attractive exercise.

Myth: The security fence being built around the West Bank will stop terrorism in Israel.

Fact: It will dramatically slow it (it already has), but it won’t stop it. One of the most fascinating untold stories of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the last two years was the tunnel war in Gaza. Palestinians were furiously digging tunnels, under borders and under Israeli troop fortifications. The Israelis were furiously trying to detect them and destroy them. But it was the Palestinians who won that battle–they built more tunnels than Israel could find. It was a classic case of high tech vs. low tech (the Pentagon calls it asymetric warfare), and the low-tech won. More than anything else, it was the unwinability of that battle that finally changed the IDF’s mind about the propriety of continuing the Gaza occupation. Now, though, the tunnels are continuing–from Gaza and eventually from the West Bank too. The wall will never be impregnable by a single suicide bomber small enough to squirm through a rathole.

Does that mean that the wall is a mistake? Absolutely not–as I said, it impedes terror. But to assume that it will end it is a mistake.

Myth: Making a suicide bomb is such a simple technology that eliminating bombmakers does nothing to stem the supply of future bombmakers.

Fact: This myth, propounded by every ‘counter-terror expert’ in the world, was exploded by Operation Defensive Shield. Suicide bombs are not on the level of fabbing a semiconductor chip, but they are about as complex as garage engineering gets. They also tend to fail frequently and they tend to explode prematurely too. A good suicide belt is the work of a masterful mechanic with excellent metalworking, chemistry and electrical skills. A pipe bomb it isn’t. The U.S. military’s single greatest failure in Iraq is that it hasn’t eliminated enough bombmakers. If it can fix that flaw, Iraq’s politics will change overnight.

(a version of this posting is up on samjaffe.com)