It was late 1978, on the eve of Khomeini’s revolution in Iran. Crowds marched down Pahlavi Boulevard in the heart of Tehran and beat themselves to the point of bleeding in an Ashura procession. They stormed El Al’s office in the Iranian capital while shouting threats, prompting Israelis there to flee for their lives.
“We saw death before our eyes when the traditional Ashura procession turned into a demonstration of rage against the Shah’s regime,” recalls Carmi Gillon, 73. He was later the eighth head of the Shin Bet during the Rabin assassination, but then, in 1978, he was the young security officer at the Israeli delegation in Tehran.
“When they broke the reinforced glass of the office, it looked like a herd of maddened elephants charging at us. We, the security guards at the site, were terrified and realized that there was no point in protecting the property there . and it was better to get on the roof and run away.”
At the Kinneret Zamora publishing house of his fifth book, Double Loyalty, which he wrote with thriller writer Yosef Shavit, Gillon looked back 45 years.
“Since the biblical story of the 12 spies, who were sent to explore the earth, there have been spies in the world. The question is what ‘goods’ they bring,” says Gillon, as our conversation unfolds against the backdrop of the end sounds of Operation Shield and Arrow.
Former Shabak head Carmi Gillon from the protest tent against Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in front of the president’s residence in Jerusalem on August 20, 2020. (Credit: OLIVIER FITOUSSI/FLASH90)
What should we learn from Shield and Arrow?
“This Hamas won. We hit Islamic Jihad hard, but without taking anything away from the targeted killings during the operation, this is still an enemy that can be eliminated in an instant. That is not true for Hamas, which we allow the latest operation to take place while promising not to take part in it. Israel has now basically accepted, not for the first time, that Hamas is de facto sovereign in the Gaza Strip, which of course comes at the expense of the Palestinian Authority.
“Israel can say it doesn’t negotiate with Hamas all day, but the fact is that by signing a ceasefire with Islamic Jihad, we opened the crossings as Hamas demanded and allowed goods to enter the Strip and the departure of workers from Gaza to Israel”.
In an abrupt transition, should demonstrations against judicial reform continue in the current situation?
“Of course they should, and I’m active on the fringes of the protest movement. I made it a point to go to places where there’s political disagreement and try to convince them, even if they boo me.”
Looks like you all fell in love with the demos.
“We didn’t. There is a concrete threat against Israel’s liberal democracy. Without the protest movement, the high-tech people, the pilots, the doctors, the financial people and everything else would not have risen up against this threat.”
In your opinion, is the right-wing government a catastrophe for Israel?
“Absolutely, yes. In the current government, two messianic parties are dominant, and they want to create a halachic state together with the Haredi parties. This government behaves with a kind of ‘me and nothing else’ tyranny, creating a rebellion that has never been seen before, this causes a terrible break in the people, which was not like this at the beginning of the state when they sought to unify, not divide.
“Netanyahu’s political dependence on them is absolute, without them, he has no government. And not only them. He brought into the Likud Knesset faction people who would not have set foot under Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, who was a rightist ideological and renounced a right-wing government and preferred unity to not put [Meir] Kahana in government.
“In contrast to Shamir, Bibi [Netanyahu] he established a fascist-messianic-racist government and through it crushes Israeli society, out of concern for his personal affairs. Bibi only sees Bibi, as a person who says she deserves everything. “I volunteered to be prime minister, now do what I want and appreciate it.”
In your book Cruel Messiah, you and Yosef Shavit discussed the rise of Ben-Gvir.
“Ben-Gvir and Smotrich. We had no idea how captive he was [Netanyahu] it would be in his hands. In the follow-up book, Cruel Secret, in the opening, we describe the State of Israel as a state of Halacha, which according to what is happening now is a scenario that is slowly being realized before our eyes . Both of them, and other ultra-orthodox and orthodox politicians, are Jewish Jihad.”
You said Ben-Gvir was an arsonist.
“Of course! Ben-Gvir is a distinct product of the Kach movement, which did not shrink from any means to achieve its goals, including the expulsion of all Arabs from the State of Israel. Ben-Gvir is a bigoted racist and homophobe who has no respect for others in any way.
When he returned from a security mission in Paris in 1982, Gillon was put in charge of a small unit that dealt with attacks on West Bank mayors and formed the basis of the Shin Bet’s Jewish department.
“The peak was in February ’83, with the capture of Yona Avroshemi, who killed Emil Greenzweig with a grenade thrown at him at a Peace Now protest,” Gillon pointed out. “For me, it was a decisive moment. The prime minister, Menachem Begin, demanded the capture of the murderer at any cost. “This incident could lead to the destruction of Israel,” Begin warned, and I shuddered at the his words.”
Is such an underground possible even now?
“Now, there is no need for such an underground, because they came to power. After all, Ben-Gvir and Smotrich are sons, or grandsons, of members of the Jewish underground. In my opinion, this underground won, moreover moreover. , established facts on the ground through the settlements.”
Could another political assassination occur?
“Sure! It will happen. When, where and who will carry it out, it is impossible to know. But in a society as divided as ours and when there is politicization in every issue and topic, it can happen again.”
Are you afraid a civil war will break out here?
“I don’t know. It’s true that this possibility exists unless the politicians come to their senses when they realize that what is happening now may make our lives unbearable.”
Are you worried about the future of the country?
“Definitely yes, unless there is a leadership that understands that we are on the edge of the abyss. I am less concerned about the external threat, which at the end of the day is handled by professionals, and more about the internal threat” . when the political fracture becomes a social fracture”.
