Middle East: In a highly irregular move, and one that reveals increasingly vociferous domestic criticism of the hardline policies of Ariel Sharon's right-wing government, four former heads of Israel's internal security service yesterday issued a doomsday warning to the country's leaders and the public: if Israel does not resume peace talks with the Palestinians and reach an agreement, it faces catastrophe, writes Peter Hirschberg in Jerusalem
"We are headed for the abyss, because all the moves we make are moves that are contrary to the desire for peace," said Mr Avraham Shalom, who headed the Shin Bet security service from 1980-86. Israelis, he added, had to "admit that there is also another side, that it has feelings and is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully".
"One thing is clear, without a political agreement we will be (down) on the canvas," added Mr Carmi Gillon, who resigned his post as head of the Shin Bet after bodyguards from the service failed to thwart the assassination of Prime Minister Rabin in 1995.
The four, whose years at the head of the security service span almost two full decades - from 1980 to 2000 - met to talk and to deliver their Jeremiah-like message to the mass circulation Yediot Ahronoth newspaper.
They questioned the government's method of fighting armed Palestinian groups such as Hamas and Islamic Jihad, in particular the assassination of leading militants with the use of missile-firing helicopters. Mr Ami Ayalon, who headed the Shin Bet from 1996 to 2000, suggested the targeting of militants had been elevated from the operational realm and become "government policy".
Mr Sharon and his ministers did not respond publicly yesterday to the brazen criticism, but one government source dismissed the views of the former security chiefs as naive. "The situation is not as weak as they describe," he said.
But with the intifada into its fourth year, dissident voices, to which the four ex-security chiefs have now added theirs, are multiplying. Two months ago, a group of pilots shocked Israelis when they sent an open letter to the air force chief saying they would not obey orders to carry out assassination bombing missions in Palestinian population centres.
Last month, a group of left-wing Israeli political leaders and prominent Palestinians signed an unofficial peace document. The move encountered ferocious criticism from a government that appeared unnerved by the initiative. Earlier this month, Israel's army chief criticised government policy in the territories, saying roadblocks stoked Palestinian resentment and boosted support for groups such as Hamas.
Mr Shalom agrees. He told Yediot Ahronoth that Israel's crippling restrictions in the territories were "humiliating" to the Palestinians.
Israel's only exit strategy from its current predicament, the four ex-security chiefs agreed, was to withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip - a move, they said, that would require the dismantling of Jewish settlements and evacuation of settlers.
"There will always be some groups ... for whom the Land of Israel nestles in the hills of Nablus and inside Hebron and we will have to clash with them," said Mr Yaakov Peri, who was Shin Bet chief from 1988 to 1995.
Mr Ayalon, who is now promoting an unofficial peace plan he drew up with moderate Palestinian intellectual Dr Sari Nusseibeh, intimated that if Israel did not separate from the territories, it would soon face an untenable demographic scenario in which Jews were a minority in the geographical entity between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and were ruling over an Arab majority. "We are taking sure, steady steps to a place where the state of Israel will no longer be a democracy and a home for the Jewish people," Mr Ayalon said.
In the Gaza Strip, meanwhile, Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin said he was ready to hold talks with Palestinian Prime Minister Ahmed Korei to discuss a new truce. But Sheikh Yassin said that while Hamas was ready to listen to Mr Korei, "under present circumstances, we have no room for a truce".