Avi Dichter knows a lot about hostage situations and Hamas.
The Agriculture and Food Security Minister served in the elite General Staff Reconnaissance Unit, whose expertise, among others, is hostage release operations. He then joined the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and made his way up the ranks until becoming head of the agency, which he oversaw during the Second Intifada. In the early 1990s, he served as head of the Shin Bet’s southern region, which included the Gaza Strip.
Dichter is a member of the National Security Cabinet and was present at the cabinet’s dramatic meeting last Friday and at the following government meeting to approve the hostage deal that ran deep into Friday night. He did not elaborate on the meetings themselves but explained his “yes” vote on the deal.
Israel has a long history of hostage release agreements, Dichter began. The first was in 1968 when an El Al flight was hijacked to Algeria. A significant turning point came in 1985 with the Jibril Agreement, which was the first time terrorists were released to the West Bank and not exiled. Dichter saw the implications on the ground as a young Shin Bet operator.
If Israel had been willing to pay such a heavy price for three soldiers, it would need to pay a heavy price now, stated Dichter, with an unprecedented number of hostages, most of them civilians, and many of them women, children, and the elderly.
“At the moment of truth, whoever did not vote in favor does not understand the situation we are in,” Dichter said. “You cannot say you are yearning for the return of the hostages, and then oppose the deal.”
There was no other way to bring them home, and refusing a deal was “betting on their lives.”
However, Dichter was adamant that alongside the hostage deal, “Gaza will never be a military threat to the State of Israel.”
This was the long-term strategic goal, he stressed. Gaza must be completely cut off from Israel, since the war could very well have led to even more radicalization among the Gazan population, despite Israeli efforts to avoid civilian casualties.
Every family in Gaza had at least one casualty or prisoner held in Israel. The war will lead to Palestinian vendetta attempts for two generations down the road, he said. They must not be able to enter Israel, travel via Israel, or maintain any other ties with Israel.
Dichter said that he did not see how this could be achieved without using military force. Yet, “if we look forward correctly,” Israel could complete the second phase of the deal and bring back the remainder of the hostages. This would entail tactical moves such as redeployment of IDF soldiers but still enable Israel, in the long term, to act in order to ensure that Gaza will cease to be a military threat.
Judea and Samaria
In exchange for his agreement not to quit the government over the hostage deal, Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich demanded and received a National Security Cabinet decision regarding security in the West Bank. It added to the list of war goals: “Significant harm to the terror organizations in Judea and Samaria, and strengthening defense and security in Judea and Samaria, with an emphasis on maintaining the safety of movement and of the towns.”
The text of the decision was revealed by KAN News’s Michael Shemesh, who also reported that ministers were furious that a war goal had been added with such haste. One of these ministers, according to Shemesh, was Dichter.
As a former Shin Bet head, including during Operation Defensive Shield in 2002, Dichter is intimately familiar with the Palestinian arena in the West Bank. How would this new decision influence Israeli operations?
Dichter said that even without the cabinet decision, Israel would have needed to step up operations in the West Bank to thwart Iranian attempts to ignite the area. The Iranian axis was intent on increasing violence in the West Bank as a result of its setbacks in Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and in Iran itself, and Israel would have to act to prevent this.
He did not make much of the cabinet decision itself. Regarding Smotrich, he said that if “someone” felt that the decision would help, and it did not disturb anyone else, then “everyone is satisfied.” Dichter went on to quote a Talmudic passage that translates as “one side benefits, and the other is not lacking.”
But Iran is not the only actor attempting to ignite the West Bank. Extremist settlers attacked several Palestinian villages in the nights following the deal, including ones that were expected to receive some of the Palestinian prisoners who were being released in exchange for the Israeli hostages.
These settlers were “terrorists” for all intents and purposes, Dichter said, but they were “fringe” elements. What did Dichter think about the recent decision by Defense Minister Israel Katz to release extremist Israeli settlers from administrative detention back into the West Bank? Would that not contribute to an increase in violence?
Dichter dismissed the issue, saying that Katz had “his own considerations.” However, the IDF and Shin Bet were on the ground in the West Bank and had tools to maintain security. Administrative detention was an important tool to distance dangerous actors from the area. Dichter said that he “hoped” Katz would still use the tool if necessary to prevent violent acts.
A national epidemic
Dichter entered politics in late 2005, opting to join the Kadima party. He served in the Internal Security Ministry between 2006-2009 under then-prime minister Ehud Olmert. In 2012, he left Kadima and joined Likud for a brief stint as Home Front security minister. Between 2016 and 2019, he served as head of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense committee.
Following the most recent election, in late December 2022, Dichter was appointed head of the Agriculture and Rural Development Ministry, whose name he later changed to Agriculture and Food Security Ministry.
Dichter has been mentioned as a leading candidate to take over as the new national security minister (responsible for internal security) after former minister Itamar Ben-Gvir resigned in opposition to the hostage deal. Our interview was an opportunity to gauge his views regarding Ben-Gvir’s performance and the state of internal security.
Asked about the sharp increase of crime in the Arab sector under Ben-Gvir, Dichter said that crime was a “national epidemic” and needed to be treated as such. Phenomena such as “protection” payments to gangs targeted all business owners, not just Arab ones, Dichter said.
If not contained, organized crime would not remain just within the Arab sector and would spread to all sectors. It needs to be countered at every level of law enforcement, he said, including the Israel Police, Israel Prison Service, State Attorney’s Office, the court system, the Shin Bet, and more.
A system was only as strong as its weakest link, he said, and in this case it was enough for one of these agencies not to act forcefully enough for crime to continue to fester. For example, Dichter said, if all of the agencies acted competently except for the prison service, criminals could continue running operations while incarcerated, thus undermining the entire effort to counter crime.
Although he refrained from directly criticizing Ben-Gvir, Dichter was clear that far too little was being done on all fronts. Fighting organized crime required special technologies and procedures, since the police could not operate like the army in its work against terror. In the Arab sector it was especially difficult, he said, since Arab civilians were much less willing to divulge information to police than Jewish civilians were.
Dichter noted that when he first entered the position in 2006, he was surprised at the police’s lack of sufficient technology and methods to combat organized crime. He changed that by bringing in advanced signal intelligence (SIGINT) and other methods, but he said that criminal gangs are quick to adapt. Treatment of crime needed to be aggressive, persistent, and innovative, and this was far from the reality, Dichter said.
Haredi IDF service
Dichter said that he was “optimistic” on the issue of haredi IDF service.
The haredi street had changed after Oct. 7, he maintained, and is moving in the direction of increased service and integration. The problem is the ultra-Orthodox rabbinic leadership, who have been unwilling to recognize the change. These rabbis would eventually have to give a green light or at least “not a red light” because “there is no other option.”
As an example, he described his visit at the shiva of a soldier from the haredi city of Beitar Illit. The soldier’s parents told him that the first few days after the funeral, people were hesitant to pay their respects because they did not support IDF service. However, the floodgates eventually opened, and thousands of haredim came to console them. This was an example of a shift toward army service that the haredi community is experiencing, Dichter said.
Still, the increase in haredi draftees needs to be “evolutionary and not revolutionary,” Dichter cautioned. The army needs to build appropriate frameworks in all of its branches, and this will take time.
Dichter then criticized opposition party leaders MK Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) and Avigdor Liberman (Yisrael Beytenu) for what he said were their demands that all haredim join the army immediately. A law was necessary to regulate the gradual increase of haredim in the IDF, and leaving the matter as is, with a general law that requires the draft of every 18-year-old Israeli, was insufficient.
Dichter admitted, however, that haredim who have joined the army were risking potential social ostracization. For this reason, a “bottom-up” approach was insufficient. There needed to be a change top-down, including at the level of haredi rabbinical leadership. However, he did not say how this change could come about.
State commission of inquiry
Over 15 months have passed since the Hamas massacre, and the government has yet to form a state commission of inquiry.
An increasing number of government ministers have said they do not intend to form such a commission, arguing that its results would “not be accepted by all parts of Israeli society” due to alleged distrust of the High Court, as the chief justice is responsible for appointing the committee members.
Some coalition MKs reportedly have attempted to propose other forms of an investigative committee that would be appointed by members of the coalition and opposition. The opposition, along with over a thousand families of Oct. 7 victims, categorically dismiss anything other than a state commission of inquiry.
Asked about this, Dichter defended the fact that a commission had yet to be appointed. He argued that as long as the IDF was at war, it could not afford to redirect resources and attention to the committee. Regarding proposals for a new makeup of a commission of inquiry, Dichter argued that if one is proposed that would gain more trust than a state commission of inquiry, he would support it.
He hinted, however, that such proposals did not exist, and said that the bottom line was that he supported a state commission.
Furthermore, Dichter said that he was “not worried” about a state commission, since he believed that the failure of Oct. 7 was mostly an “intelligence and operational failure.”
He did not address the claim that social unrest over the government’s judicial reforms in the months preceding the attack and repeated warnings by the IDF and Shin Bet that the unrest was eroding Israeli deterrence was a factor in Hamas’s decision to launch the attack.
As a member of the National Security Cabinet, Dichter will take part in voting on fateful decisions, such as whether or not Israel will resume its war against Hamas, or agree to end the war in exchange for the remainder of Israeli hostages.
Dichter’s thesis, that all the hostages can be brought home without Gaza being a long-term military threat, will soon be put to the test – a test that could determine the fate of the remaining 94 hostages.