Orchestrated terrorism has reared its head in an attempt to take over the media agenda. Senior defense officials, the police, and the Shin Bet said following the Beersheba and Hadera attacks that there was no intelligence indicating imminent attacks and that you cannot station police officers or soldiers on every street corner. While they were largely right, their logic also sports one critical flaw, as all they should have done was glance at the calendar or the nearest social media platform.
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There are those who try to link the murderous attacks in Beersheba and Hadera to the Muslim month of Ramadan, but the reason for the attacks is one: the unfortunately successful attempt by terrorist organizations to dominate the public agenda and the news cycle in the face of historical events taking place, namely Sunday's Negev Summit, with the full participation of the foreign ministers of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Morocco, and Egypt; and last week's tripartite meeting between Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, UAE Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan.
These official, public meetings, as well as meetings between Israeli officials and their Arab counterparts from near and far in the region as a result of the Abraham Accords, are a bright red flag for terrorist organizations and an inconceivable indication for them that the doctrine of terrorism, which aspires to breed prolonged chaos as means of undercutting peace efforts, simply does not work.
This is what drives global terrorist organizations, directly or via their local proxies, to produce a murderous spin: the need to divert the attention of terrorist sympathizers from realizing that what they perceive as unthinkable could actually be taking place – that the doctrine of terrorism has failed.
As the new strategy of terrorist organizations is to urgently change the media and public agenda, it is time to abandon the outdated premise that we are dealing with "lone-wolf terrorism" and recognize that this is organized, coordinated terrorism. The time has come to abandon the assumption by which a person suddenly wakes up in the morning and decides to become a terrorist, and accept a new premise by which terrorist groups groom potential attackers to act at a specific date and time in order to produce the required media and public spin.
Meanwhile, until this realization dawns on the defense establishment, civilians, soldiers, and police officers will continue to become casualties. Admittedly, terrorists cannot be allowed to dictate the public agenda or bring everyday life to a halt, but on the other hand – one also cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that these are planned incidents.
Such a level of coordination does not manifest from thin air at a moment's notice. The terrorists from Umm al-Fahm and Hura did not sit by the radio all day to learn what time the summits were taking place. Information today is readily available, visible, and accessible on social media and the internet – it is a terror smorgasbord. The only piece of information that remains unknown is who will be the next terrorist called to arms.
Security forces are duty-bound to thwart these coordinated attacks before they take place – not try to excuse their failure to do so after the fact, which is why former Shin Bet officials who said the Hadera attack was an intelligence failure were right. It should be immediately said that the defense establishment has had much success in foiling terrorist attacks, but unfortunately, the public and the media remember only its failures.
This is why the only way to fight orchestrated terrorism is to create a counter-spin against terrorist groups ahead of time; to locate terrorist cells and "ticking time bombs" ahead of time rather than fearing that raids and arrests would spark an escalation and give terrorist groups a pretext for carrying out future attacks.
If the assumption is that a terrorist-in-waiting can be deployed at any given moment, targeting his handlers can foil the next attempt to launch a murderous agenda spin.
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