By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
On a Thursday evening in April, the Northwest Chapter of the American Technion Society, together with Temple De Hirsch Sinai in Bellevue, sponsored a presentation by Israeli-born counterterrorism expert Dr. Sabi Shabtai that seemed more like a security briefing than a lecture.
“Israel and the New War on Terrorism” began with Shabtai qualifying his audience by naming three notorious terrorists to see, with a show of hands, who knew their names.
As a harbinger of potential terrorist strikes, Shabtai has operated on five continents to help governments, corporations, the military and public safety agencies strategize and plan counterterrorist operations.
Shabtai is a former member of the Israeli Foreign Service and served in the intelligence branch of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). He is an accomplished screenwriter who has chilled moviegoers with high-level drama in films like “Passenger 57” and “The Assignment,” a movie based on his pursuit of the infamous terrorist Carlos “The Jackal,” and he is the author of the bestseller Five Minutes to Midnight.
But it wasn’t until Sept. 11, 2001, when Israel’s experience with terrorism also became an American experience, that his expertise became critical to the United States. Shabtai is now in greater demand than ever by U.S. intelligence agencies. And for a man who regularly appears as a commentator on television and radio, Shabtai is now under a kind of media muzzle because of security constraints imposed on him due to his current contracts as a consultant to the Pentagon.
The bottom-line warning, says Shabtai, is that what happens in Israel is the indicator of what will be exported to the rest of the world, including the United States.
“Israel is a bellwether…you can see it again and again,” Shabtai said. “What happens in Israel is sometimes 10 to 15 years ahead of what happens in other parts of the world. But there’s no one better on the face of the earth, and the Technion is at the forefront of the research in counterterrorism. We’re tougher and better trained. If we don’t make it, you won’t make it.”
Shabtai traced a timeline of some of the most heinous terrorist events from the last 35 years, stirring up memories of hijackings playing out on airport tarmacs, tourists murdered while relaxing on vacation, and the methodical execution of Olympic athletes.
“Before 1968,” Shabtai began, “these people were not called terrorists — they were not professional. They were recruited on an ad hoc basis. Modern-day, international terrorism started in 1968 with the first hijacking of an El Al airplane for political purposes. It didn’t even hit us at the time what was the significance of that. But that’s how it started. One year after the 1967 war. In those days, Israel was a superpower in the Middle East. We were invincible. So they tried some more. This was the first hijacking [in Israel] and…the last one.
“The next thing they went to were our diplomatic missions,” said Shabtai. “Nobody thought you would attack diplomatic missions. They were successful two or three times, but we learned fast.
“Then they started to attack Israeli tourists,” Shabtai continued. “It culminated in Munich, at the 1972 Olympic Games. There wasn’t one single guard along the fence. That was the one place that no one thought they would attack, and it was violated. And who were the first victims? The state of Israel.”
It is these examples of terrorism against Israel that Shabtai believes should act as an early-warning system for the United States. By establishing the pattern of events that includes both predictability and surprise, he claims that what is happening in Israel today will be happening in America tomorrow.
“Osama bin Laden was not on our list,” Shabtai said. “He had never done anything to us. But he is going after the ‘big devil’ and the economy is definitely the target.”
Shabtai recalled what he deemed to be the “deathblow” to international terrorism dealt by Israel during their 1982 invasion into Lebanon. At the time, Shabtai says, Israeli intelligence knew of 88 different terrorist groups that were operating there. In Afghanistan today, where the United States is waging its own war on terrorism, Shabtai asserted that the number is 10 times greater.
Shabtai went on to report that there were only two terrorist cells in the Middle East in 1992 as compared to the 60 cells that currently operate worldwide.
“When someone says don’t worry, you should worry,” Shabtai warned. “You can’t become complacent because they wait until your guard is down. We are all soldiers and eyes. Terrorism is not just an Israeli problem or a Jewish problem.
“You must protect major targets and venues because if you don’t, you will become a ‘Big Brother’ society,” he added, referring to a potential future of compromised personal freedoms. “If you protect your major targets the future will most likely be a ‘Little Brother’ society.”