‘We arrested countless Palestinians for no reason,’ says ex-top Shin Bet officer

Haim Rubovitch

Amos Harel interviews Haim Rubovitch in Haaretz on 17 February 2022:

“A line was crossed,” says Haim Rubovitch, referring to the government’s decision to allow the Shin Bet security service to use digital contact tracing to locate persons who came into contact with victims of COVID-19. “At first there was hysteria over the coronavirus – no one knew what to make of that monster. But, the use of those tools moved along the thin line between constitutional and unconstitutional.”

Rubovitch knows whereof he speaks. He served for 25 years in the Shin Bet, in posts ranging from case officer to head of a directorate, the No. 3 job at the agency. “You have to understand that in the struggle waged by the security branches and the police against terror and crime organizations, there’s no way the state’s technological supremacy won’t be guaranteed – in the same way, for example, that the United States is committed to supply Israel with better weapons than the neighboring countries have,” he says.

“That competition goes on all the time,” he adds. “If your intelligence target has an iPhone 13, you need to be in possession of technology that will allow you to bypass the encryption methods it’s using. Every law-abiding citizen should want the Shin Bet and the Mossad to have those capabilities – and also for them to be under judicial and governmental oversight. The problem is that an entity external [to the organization] has a very limited ability to supervise intelligence and technological activity.

“Until the Landau Commission, which investigated the use of torture in Shin Bet interrogations and published its report in 1987, the courts relied on Shin Bet statements in court claiming that there was no torture in interrogations like that was the gospel truth. There might be similarities between that affair and the present [NSO surveillance-software] affair, but I’m far from knowing all the details.”

When Rubovitch was in the Shin Bet, intelligence work consisted mainly of a combined use of human intelligence (HUMINT) and wiretapping (SIGINT, signals intelligence). Over the years, a third element rose to the fore: intelligence acquired by means of cyber technology. The public has recently become more aware of the Shin Bet’s abilities against the background of the NSO affair and the Israel Police’s use of that company’s Pegasus spyware, which is comparable to the capabilities of the intelligence agencies.

The person singled out as being responsible for introducing advanced technologies into the police force is Roni Alsheich, a former deputy director of the Shin Bet who served as police commissioner from 2015 to 2018.

“Bibi [former PM Benjamin Netanyahu] made a serious mistake [by appointing] him – Roni is a brilliant guy,” says Rubovitch, who knows Alsheich well from their years of joint service. Rubovitch is cautious when addressing the recent revelations in the financial newspaper Calcalist, according to which the police made wholesale use of Pegasus against various targets, some in inappropriate ways. “That’s a worrisome story. I hope we will find that it is less serious and widespread than it looks now. Not because of Roni, but because of all of us.”

Rubovitch left the Shin Bet in 2005, at what was the relatively young age of 49, considering the senior posts he held, but felt he had played out the security-related part of his life and had reached his peak in the agency’s hierarchy. Unlike many high-ranking figures in the defense establishment who retire, Rubovitch knew exactly what he wanted to do afterward: to engage in educational activity that would help illuminate some of the dark and discriminated-against corners of Israeli society.

That is what he did for the past 15 years, until last fall, when he was compelled to retire following a decline in his health: He was diagnosed with ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). Now he is willing to talk for the first time about his service in the Shin Bet and his insights about Israeli society and its relations with the Palestinians. During a series of conversations with Haaretz, Rubovitch spoke candidly about a range of topics.

‘Fighting family’

Haim Rubovitch, 64, was born and raised in Jerusalem, part of his family’s sixth generation in the city. Udi Rubovitch, the Betar Jerusalem soccer team’s greatest player during the 1960s, is his father’s cousin. He himself is named for his father’s older brother, who was killed in the Har-Tuv Convoy battle in the War of Independence. “We were part of the ‘Fighting Family,’” he relates, referring to the members of the pre-state Irgun and Lehi underground organizations. “The transmitter from which Geula Cohen broadcast by means of an underground radio [belonging to the Lehi militia] was hidden in the family’s house, with British security forces all around. I had relatives who were involved in the assassination of [the United Nations mediator] Count Folke Bernadotte. Of the whole extended family, only my father was a member of the Haganah [Labor-affiliated pre-independence army]; the others in the family were in the Irgun and Lehi.”

Shortly after completing his army service in the Armored Corps, Rubovitch joined the Shin Bet. “At too young an age,” he says now. “Today they look for maturity, for people whose personality is already somewhat developed. They prefer you to begin at age 28 to 30.” To the best of his memory, he was the youngest recruit for the track of case officer and field coordinator in the Palestinian arena. “I saw an ad in the paper that looked interesting. I had no idea what it was for. I didn’t get there because of my military service or through a friend who served there.”

The panel that interviewed him included two division heads, Ehud Yatom and Yossi Ginossar, both of whom would become entangled in the affair involving the No. 300 bus a few years later, when two Palestinian bus hijackers were captured alive by the Shin Bet and later killed. Ginossar put a scenario to the young recruit: “‘Let’s say there’s a bomb in Kol-Bo Shalom [office tower in Tel Aviv]. It’s ticking and you need to interrogate a suspect who knows where it’s hidden, before it goes off.’ And I responded: Hit him until he talks. Ginossar reprimanded me: ‘You’re not allowed to hit him.’ He really started yelling at me. I told him that I didn’t know any other way. Today it’s known that beating people in interrogations is a recipe for failure.”

Rubovitch, perhaps by his nature, leaves it for the listener to discern the irony here: This was more or less the scenario that buried the careers of Ginossar and Yatom – their beating the terrorists from the No. 300 bus to death and the extensive cover-up afterward of that act.

An iconic photos by Alex Levac showing one of two detained hijackers of Bus 300 alive, contrary to Shin Bet claims, in 1984

In retrospect, he says, “I found great intellectual interest in the career in the service. You have to think, analyze and plan all the time. Yossi Ginossar – you enter a meeting in his office and there isn’t a dull moment. Nonstop conceptual challenges. It was the same with Yisrael Hasson and Ami Ayalon [former Shin Bet deputy director and director, respectively].”

But Rubovitch was less thrilled with the assassination operations that tend to generate patriotic drooling among local media outlets: “These operations are the least difficult thing for the Shin Bet. There is no other anti-terror organization on the planet that carries out so many operations at a given time. There is a very high level of skill. Over the years we developed methods to expedite work, to unclog things and execute rapid preventive operations when a warning comes up.”

During the period of the Oslo Accords, and more intensively at the start of the second intifada toward the end of 2000, the Shin Bet developed a modus operandi that enabled it to “intercept” terrorists who are en route to perpetrate an attack, usually in cases where they move from the West Bank across the Green Line into Israel proper. Intelligence warnings are sometimes enhanced by information gleaned about the terrorist’s cellphone, or from that of his accomplice. (This capability was at one time considered a big, sensitive secret, but today is self-evident.) When a phone’s location is pinpointed on the way to an apparent terrorist attack, the circle is closed: In most cases the terrorist is apprehended or killed before reaching their destination.

A warning of such a penetration in the so-called seam area of the Green Line, before the security barrier was built alongside it, was known in the Shin Bet as pigyon (dagger). Rubovitch, who at the time headed the directorate encompassing the northern part of the country and Israel’s Arab community, personally handled dozens of such warnings. “To my regret, I was at the scene of all the terrorist attacks in the north and in the Arab sector in those years. It starts, for example, with information from a listener [SIGINT] about a squad that is setting out from Nablus. By the time you get the information, the time needed to travel across the Green Line has already passed – going from Nablus to Netanya takes no time at all. You need to alert the police, army, Shin Bet. I am responsible for many of the long traffic jams people got caught in during the second intifada. You freeze everything in the hope of nabbing the terrorist in time. We had a number of successes. But the big tests of the heads of the service lie elsewhere.”

In 1982, long before the two intifadas, the Lebanon War broke out. After completing his initial course in the service, Rubovitch was appointed a junior case officer in the northern sector: “Very soon after the war began, Ginossar sent me up to Lebanon. I was in the Tyre District for three months. When the first Tyre disaster occurred, in November 1982 [an explosion that destroyed the Israeli government building in the city], I was in Aley, in the Lebanese Beqaa. Friends of mine were killed, including Zvika Fogel, who was recruited along with me.”

Lebanon at the time “was the wild west,” he recalls. “Total chaos set in. We made arrests in crazy numbers. We filled the Ansar detention camp to capacity. The truth is that the only way to survive in Lebanon in those years was for someone to join an armed militia. The simplest thing for us was to take a Palestinian like that and place him in detention. I was in charge of Rashidiya, the largest [Palestinian] refugee camp in the area, south of Tyre. Throw a stone and you would hit a wanted person. We arrested countless people for no reason.”

Looking back, Rubovitch discerns a mistake that Israel made in its approach to the Lebanese Shi’ites during that period. In his view, an opportunity was missed to forge ties with the less extreme elements in that community, whose leaders were affiliated with Amal – at the time the largest and most prominent Shi’ite militia.

“I observed Israel’s big mistake as the field officer in Tyre,” he says. “In Aley, we were always getting caught in bloody battles between the Christians, our allies, and the Druze. One day I got a call from a Druze collaborator. He introduced me to a Shi’ite from the south who was active in the region. The man sent a message to Israel, a letter that spoke about the need to forge an alliance with Amal in that area. I was only the messenger.” Amal’s proposal did not, however, draw a substantive Israeli response, and the reasons for that have been lost in the fog of the years that have passed in the interim.

Rubovitch, who continued to deal with Lebanon on and off through the 1980s and ‘90s, and was chief of the Shin Bet’s northern directorate on the eve of Israel’s withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, is convinced that Israel made a mistake: “I say this categorically, as someone who participated in many discussions over the years. I know for certain: Israel missed an unequivocal opportunity to establish a type of connection with the Shi’ites. ‘Alliance’ is too big a word, but there was an opportunity there. Effective cooperation could have been created with the Shi’ites in southern Lebanon, as most of them were not yet under the direct influence of Hezbollah and Iran.”

Still, by then, Hezbollah, abetted by Iran, had begun to focus on perpetrating attacks against Israelis. Rubovitch was involved in thwarting one of the first of them, in the Tyre region: “A group of Shi’ite students from the American University in Beirut booby-trapped a wooden crate of citrus fruit. We found the bomb and afterward nabbed the squad relatively quickly. Hezbollah wasn’t yet known by its name then, but hid behind names of front organizations like ‘the Wretched of the Earth.’”

The 1990s, too, he maintains, were rife with Israeli missteps while dealing with Hezbollah. “Israel did not do all it could have done operationally to dislodge Hezbollah’s entrenchment in the gray area north of the [Israeli-controlled] security zone. The work in Lebanon was carried out according to the IDF’s methods. In order to declare a particular area a military target for bombing, a lengthy process was required. For each such area an extensive intelligence-target file was drawn up. Eliminating an active terrorist is a more immediate matter, like we did in the territories. There’s no way you can engage in such a lengthy process.”

That does not mean that careful clarification of all of the details is unimportant, Rubovitch stresses: “Even in a rapid preventive move, you need to decide with very high probability that you have identified the target before taking action. Sometimes you act on the basis of one source, whose reliability is proven and who is trustworthy, and then you add more tools that support the indication. In the 1990s that method did not exist in Lebanon. Military Intelligence operated by the book, drawing up target files, and it all took a lot of time. In that period we could have hit Hezbollah commanders and struck their sites north of the security zone relatively easily. That didn’t happen. Today, on the basis of what happened in the second intifada, we know it works. It’s not nuclear physics. But at that time Lebanon was ‘far from the eye, far from the heart,’ as the song goes.”

In retrospect, too, Rubovitch justifies Israel’s withdrawal from Lebanon, just as he supported the disengagement from the Gaza Strip five years later. Of the prime ministers serving during those operations, he says, “Ehud Barak deserves a lot of credit for the withdrawal, and Ariel Sharon for the disengagement. Looking back, some of our hitches in Lebanon stemmed from neglecting the opportunity for contact with Amal, and from sticking to the cumbersome protocols and methods of Military Intelligence during the fighting with Hezbollah. But I can’t say for certain that if we had behaved differently, it would have changed the general picture.”

Not like a tsunami

Between his stints in Lebanon, Rubovitch rose through the ranks in the Shin Bet, including serving in senior positions in the East Jerusalem and West Bank sectors. In 1987, a few months before the eruption of the first intifada, he was posted as a case officer to the Jenin district. “I remember that we were on patrol in the village of Yamoun and we detained an active member of the Democratic Front [for the Liberation of Palestine] for a talk. He burst out at us: ‘Don’t detain me. Who do you think you are?’ We were stunned. We had never experienced behavior like that. Gradually, the situation on the ground became ever more tense. There were more and more activists who hadn’t experienced the Palestinians’ great defeat in 1967. They were born into this situation, and to our astonishment they refused to accept it.”

The first intifada, he says, did not erupt in the West Bank like a tsunami. “It didn’t happen in one fell swoop – things started to change. You embark on an operation to make arrests in a village near Jenin, and the whole village comes out to confront you. In Yamoun, homes of collaborators were torched. In a famous incident in the town of Qabatiyah, a mob attacked a collaborator and he barricaded himself with a weapon and shot at them. They pulled him out and hanged him from an electricity pole. We were the ones who cut him down. We sent dozens of local residents to prison for life because of that incident.”

Years later, in September 2000, the second intifada broke out in the territories. Like the IDF, the Shin Bet also needed a few months to adust its activity to the new and intense threat it posed. In the initial months, they continued to rely, in vain, on security coordination with the Palestinian Authority, which had been created during the period of the Oslo Accords. When the PA’s units turned out to be problematic partners, the Shin Bet, and afterward the IDF, shifted to a more aggressive posture.

Protesters in the Gaza Strip fleeing Israeli troops during the second intifada

Shin Bet director Avi Dichter (2000-2005) and his successor, Yuval Diskin (2005-2011), initiated continuous operations to eliminate terrorism, which included hundreds of pinpoint assassinations (or “targeted preventions,” in Shin Bet newspeak). Afterward, Dichter described the method of operation as a “lawn mower”: relentless strikes at the infrastructure of Palestinian terrorism by means of arrests followed by interrogations that led to more arrests or assassinations.

Rubovitch: “Dichter and Diskin proved to the IDF and to Military Intelligence that an operational blueprint against a target [i.e., wanted person] could be drawn up according to a very short timetable in order to eliminate it. By now this has been part of the jargon for years. The Shin Bet method is dominant. Military Intelligence has been able to accept and internalize it.”

However, he disputes Dichter’s notion that there is “a bottom to the barrel of wanted individuals” and that a stubborn and persistent effort would reduce the terror threat to a minimum for a lengthy period: “Already after the Lebanon War we saw proof that a theory like [Dichter’s] was untenable. The question is how you define the goal of your activity and what measures contribute to achieving that goal. In the territories there is a large population under our responsibility, which must be allowed to live with dignity, to make a living. In the end, you want something positive to spring up there, for people to be able to live like human beings.

“When a wanted person initiates terrorist attacks, you need to stop him or decapitate him – if there is no other choice,” he continues. “But there is nothing useful in a war against an Islamic organizational infrastructure that assists the needy. Elimination of terrorism has to be selective, to focus on the organizer of the terrorism and the troops he sends into action. Whenever we tried to make mass arrests, in Lebanon or during the intifadas, it didn’t contribute a thing.

“In the first intifada,” he says, “almost everything happened deep within the territories, in the Palestinian communities. In the end, due to some sort of activity, you yourself thrust additional Palestinians into the cycle of terror and give them motivation to act. There are endless stories like that. You arrest a lot of young people for undramatic reasons, with the whole point being to calm things down in a village that no Israeli ever entered. What do they have to do together in prison? Plan the next action.”

Today, Rubovitch believes, “the process is much more focused. There is a very professional process by which a person is brought into an interrogation. The mass arrests have ended. The Shin Bet learned something with time.”

During the second intifada, Palestinian terrorism faded out gradually by around 2005-2006, thanks largely to the successes of the Israeli defense establishment. However, Rubovitch accepts the hypothesis that the campaign never really had a decisive end, but rather morphed into a different, protracted conflict, in which attacks and other incidents are less prevalent.

“It’s the same gloomy stalemate. The two intifadas were superfluous from our point of view. The battle against them didn’t promote any goal other than self-defense itself. Nothing happened in the intifadas other than the fact that we added a great many rows in the cemeteries, on both sides. We added anger and hatred.”

Rubovitch has no regrets about the actual operations that were undertaken, in many of which he was a participant. “There is no argument about the need to eliminate terrorism. In the Shin Bet, we were full partners to that in the [second] intifada. No one forced the preventive activity on us. When the terror raged, we were under enormous pressure to lower the flames and calm things down.”

The problem, as he sees it, lies mainly with the definition of policy at the [governmental] levels above the security agencies. “In many cases, the State of Israel rolls along. The policy is dictated from below, by the agencies that deal with prevention on the ground. So the concept is created of the ‘lawnmower’ as the be-all and end-all.”

Moshe Ya’alon, who was the IDF chief of staff at the height of the second intifada, spoke of the need to “burn the Palestinians’ consciousness” – to exact a sufficiently high price to make the Palestinians realize that there was no point in continuing to perpetrate acts of terrorism. Rubovitch is not convinced that the goal was achieved. “An intifada is an event in which long years of pressure, frustration and hatred come together. Life is cyclical. That wave could rise again. It’s a consciousness of those who have had all they can take of the existing situation.

“What is the goal of our activity?” he continues. “If the goal is to continue to control their fate, then we had a great success. If we had any aspiration for a permanent solution, though, we didn’t move forward by even a millimeter. I still think that the majority of Israelis don’t want to rule another people. But they are indifferent to this issue. The vast majority of Israelis don’t really experience the control of the Palestinians on an everyday basis. People don’t take the kids on an outing to the Nablus casbah on Shabbat. That’s not what they feel like doing. The situation that has been created [in which Israel controls the fate of the West Bank Palestinians] is not moral, not Jewish, not principled and not anything. Do you think the Palestinians will get used to it? That will never happen.”

Is this what he always thought? “It’s a realization that came to me already in my first years in the service. I was always a sort of Mapainik [referring to the forerunner of Labor]. In my political worldview, I was a socialist. I very much identified with the approach of Meir Dagan, with whom I worked quite a bit when he was in charge of the southern Lebanon region and afterward when he was head of the Mossad. I am in favor of reaching agreements. But if you want to fight with me [i.e., the State of Israel], I am a lot stronger than you. If you want peace, let’s talk. If it’s war, I will use all the means at my disposal against you.

“Part of the declared policy of Benjamin Netanyahu during 12 years [in power] was a constant approach of threat, intimidation, inflation of the danger that looms from our enemies: Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas. [But] you have to remember that we are the strongest kid in the neighborhood, by far. If we want to make progress with the Palestinians, we will need self-confidence and courage. Until my last day in the field, in 2005, I knew and believed that Israel’s governments in some way wanted to move forward and solve this. I thought that way about Yitzhak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Ehud Olmert, and even Ariel Sharon – say what you will, the ‘disengagement’ from Gaza was the big bang. Menachem Begin, too, withdrew from Sinai. I believed in the sincerity of the intentions of Rabin and Barak. Barak lost office because of that [after the failed peace talks and subsequent outbreak of the intifada, in 2000]. Olmert certainly wanted it; he was brave and smart. That’s precisely why I’m angry with him, because of the way he ended up. He is the prime minister who most disappointed me. He had potential. If he had restrained his behavior a little, [he could have exploited] an opportunity to make progress that presented itself after Yasser Arafat’s death and the disengagement. In recent years, under Netanyahu, I stopped believing that Israel wants to make progress.”

Over the years, the Shin Bet pushed for the assassination of senior Palestinian figures, particularly from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, both of which operated on the border between religious leadership, political activity and active involvement in terrorism. That tendency reached its peak with the assassination of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin in Gaza, in 2004. But the assassinations continued well after the end of the second intifada. One notable case was Israel’s killing of Ahmed Jabari, Hamas’ chief of staff (who was simultaneously involved in the organization’s political decision-making), at the start of Operation Pillar of Defense in the Gaza Strip, in November 2012.

As Rubovitch sees it, “Yassin was not operational level, but he was Hamas’ moral and ideological backbone. He was part of the Palestinian steadfastness. His killing unsettled them, but everything in this story is temporary.” The assassinations in other sectors are measured, in his perception, solely by the degree of effectiveness they had in thwarting the adversary’s moves. Israel’s assassination of Hezbollah secretary general Abbas Musawi, in 1992, “was not especially smart. Sometimes it’s better to stick with the evil you’re already familiar with.” His successor, Hassan Nasrallah, turned out to be a tougher foe.

In contrast, the assassination by the United States of the commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Gen. Qassem Soleimani, in Iraq in 2020, “was a significant blow. He was a person of rare abilities. There is no way that anyone will really step into his shoes. That will take many years. But still, we need to remember: It is impossible to snuff out a religious movement. That has to be axiomatic. It is impossible to eradicate the faith of a people that is fighting against you.”

Clashing narratives

As with his attitude toward the Palestinians in the territories, Rubovitch is far from holding a limited and narrow-minded, security-centric approach toward the Arabs in Israel, a population he was in charge of, from the security point of view, as chief of the Shin Bet’s northern division. In that capacity he was summoned to testify before the Orr Commission of Inquiry, which investigated the death of 12 Israeli Arabs and one Palestinian from Gaza, at the hands of the police, in riots that broke out in October 2000, immediately after the start of the second intifada.

The situation that has been created [in which Israel controls the fate of Palestinians] is not moral, not Jewish, not principled and not anything. Do you think the Palestinians will get used to it? That will never happen.“Everything I tell you now I declared under oath, in detail and at length, to the Orr Commission. The Shin Bet came out of the commission unscathed. I had pushed for things to change before October 2000. I didn’t have to sweat to prove that to the commission. We said from the outset that serious problems exist among Israel’s Arabs and we demanded discussions with the government about that, because the pressures on the ground were mounting. The Shin Bet [overall] sees it correctly. There is a whole division [in the agency] whose business that is.

“In the service we analyzed the events of October in retrospect. Only a few thousand of the [more than one million] Arabs in Israel took part in violent incidents. Many Jews have a childish conception that the Arabs will hum ‘Hatikva’ [the national anthem] before going to bed and will dream about Israeli flags. That is a completely untenable line of thought, which is based on a basic misunderstanding of the clashing narratives.

“There was a war in 1948. We won, we expelled some of the Arabs who lived here, others fled. It’s not actually important at this moment who was responsible for this. War has consequences. We included a Palestinian population within the state’s territory, and they gradually became Israeli citizens. Along the way we made every possible mistake, such as imposing a military regime [on the Arab population, between the years 1948 and 1966]. You have to understand that you are the strong side, to display the generosity of victors even after more than 70 years. These are long-term processes across decades. To see to it that these people will view themselves as citizens of the State of Israel and will want to live here.”

In Rubovitch’s view, the very existence of the present government carries tremendous value. “Naftali Bennett is not exactly my cup of tea,” he says in reference to the prime minister. “But the photograph of the coalition leaders smiling on the day of the government’s formation, including Mansour Abbas from Ra’am [United Arab List] – that is an excellent picture in my eyes. There are good dynamics between them. It’s the realization of the Declaration of Independence. Abbas is a political genius. The man is a phenomenon. We need to go back to the basic question: Ra’am represents a large part of the Arab public. What do you want to do? Connect with them or quarrel with them? Remove them to beyond the pale? There’s no need to examine their declarations with a fine-tooth comb every day.”

Abbas’ entry into the government coalition coincided with an unprecedented rise in crime in the Arab locales. Arab MKs pointed an accusing finger at the Shin Bet, which during several periods flooded their communities with Palestinian collaborators from the West Bank, including their families, and apparently also refugees of the Israeli-allied, now-defunct South Lebanon Army, following 2000.

“The allegation that the collaborators are responsible for the crime in the villages is nonsense,” Rubovitch says. “You can check it by name. The SLA refugees have no hold at all there. The crime families in the Arab cities and other communities are large, well-established hamulot [clans]. It’s not that someone suddenly comes from afar and takes control of the communities. The cessation of policing in the Arab communities dates back to before the events of October 2000.

“One of the dangerous phenomena that we didn’t deal with then was criminality against the state and the disobedience of the law,” he notes. “In those years it was perceived [by the Arabs themselves] as a legitimate part of the national struggle. If you committed a crime against the state – you built without a permit, you damaged a police station – you would get support even from a law-abiding family, and that included obfuscation of evidence. That has nothing to do with crime organizations. A stronger community policing system is needed, which will protect the population.

“The police are capable of dealing with the Arab crime families if they are allocated more police officers and resources. The Shin Bet can be a partner to investigative teams that will collect intelligence. But it can’t be tasked with the mission of doing battle against Arab crime. That would be a dreadful mistake. Use of Shin Bet methods in investigations of that sort would not be approved by the High Court of Justice. There is no chance that they would be approved against Israeli citizens if there is no suspicion of a terror offense.”

Inspiring story

Rubovitch left the Shin Bet at the end of 2005, at which point “I cut myself off abruptly from security matters. I knew I wanted to become involved in education. I looked for a tool for bringing about a significant change in society. I wasn’t drawn to political or business life. I had neither the desire nor the requisite killer instinct.”

Around this time, the Shin Bet’s rehabilitation unit asked Rubovitch to draw up a strategic plan for the education of the children of the Palestinian collaborators and SLA refugees who were living in Israel. “For them, too, it was necessary to create the feeling that they are part of Israeli society. People don’t understand the situation. Imagine the wife of a collaborator who wakes up one day to discover that her husband has betrayed her, the religion, the hamulas, their country. Suddenly, in one minute, you have to escape with all the children, cut yourself off and move in with the people who until a moment ago were considered the Great Satan.”

In the course of working on the plan, Rubovitch met Dr. Chaim Peri, a veteran educator who was the director of the Yemin Orde Youth Village, on Mount Carmel, where at-risk youth, many from Israel’s Ethiopian community, resided in a boarding school framework. “We visited the village,” Rubovitch recalls. “Peri was already in the final stages of his directorship. He had forged a comprehensive educational worldview, which he wanted to expand to additional youth villages. You see at once how true and deep the educational way there is; that it’s a holistic concept of life with a beginning, middle and end; that it can be replicated in a broader model. Peri is religiously observant, and the village is religious in nature, but I grasped that he is an open, liberal humanist. At his request, I drew up a strategic document about a transition to additional youth villages. He created an American support organization called Impact Israel and established a nonprofit organization, ‘Derekh Kfar.’”

The nonprofit takes that name – Village Way Educational Initiatives – from an African proverb, which is familiar from Hillary Clinton’s book “It Takes a Village,” meaning that a whole village is needed in order to raise one child. “The approach is that family, community and a safe environment are needed. The story of Ethiopian Jewry is barely known to the majority of the Israeli public. It’s a magnificent, inspiring story. And somehow, the state managed to wreck that, too. The goal of the concept was for the graduates of the youth village to become functioning heads of families, part of the community. People possessing life skills, with a concept of capability that looks forward and can dream. For at-risk youth, this is far from trivial. At-risk individuals are occupied only with the next day, with the immediate range: Where will I get food tomorrow? When children create a picture of a future for themselves – wanting, knowing, capable – it’s very dramatic.”

The nonprofit was established in 2006, with Rubovitch as its founder and first CEO; his partners were Peri and Dotan Levi, who heads the organization’s Educational Institute. The Village Way employs a professional staff of 50, “all of them experts.” They began by working with five youth villages. Today, Village Way works with 3,000 staff members in 66 educational communities across the country in which about 30,000 young people receive schooling. The educational community encompasses Jews, Arabs, Druze, Bedouin, secular, Orthodox and Haredi youth from the Galilee to the Negev. The association also provides courses for officers in the IDF, the Israel Police and the Prison Service. Its staff are helping to draw up long-term educational plans for three cities – Harish, Tamra and Betar Ilit – and its educational concept is being taught in four academic institutions.

“There is a tremendous demand to work with us,” Rubovitch says. “I think the reason is that we bring added moral and professional value, along with solutions that didn’t exist previously. There are wonderful educators in these institutions. The problem lies in the educational establishment. The Education Ministry is a complicated affair, and I’m using mild language. All professionals want to improve themselves and to have recourse to better methods. The people who teach at-risk youth are the ‘special forces’ of the educational system. It’s an insane challenge. If you’re not there mentally and if you’re not genuinely connected to these young people and want to benefit them – you won’t survive for more than a year. You need total immersion.”

Rubovitch’s eyes seem to glitter a bit as he talks about the organization he is leaving behind. “The quality of our staff is extraordinary; I never dreamed we would achieve this,” he says. Surprisingly, he attributes part of the success to his period in the Shin Bet. “From there we took working methods of strategic thinking and planning, examining, evaluating and debriefing. The Shin Bet is an extraordinary organization in terms of its management, and you can learn from it.”

The news that Rubovitch was diagnosed with ALS, an incurable disease, came as a complete surprise to his many friends and acquaintances. The diagnosis was made last June, in the wake of medical problems he had been suffering from. He resigned from Village Way in October, after reaching the conclusion that his health problems were preventing him from doing his job properly. He remains a member of the executive committee and is assisting his successor, Tomer Samarkandi. The disease is still in its incipient stages and is causing him mainly fatigue and locomotor disabilities. Recently he started using a wheelchair to get around. His cognitive abilities remain as sharp as ever: My series of meetings with him were a riveting experience.

True to character, Rubovitch refrains from any form of pathos or sentimentality and displays not an iota of self-pity. He intends to make good use of the time available to him, he emphasizes. Recently he inaugurated an exhibition of photographs he took, some of them during trips to Africa. This week, together with his wife and friends, he traveled to Uganda, on a trip that was originally scheduled for last November but was postponed at the last minute because of the eruption of the omicron variant of COVID there. In Israel he continues to hike with friends on the Israel Trail, in the sections that are accessible to wheelchairs.

One of his dreams is to make a first visit to Anfield, the stadium of his favorite soccer team, Liverpool. Three months ago, when I sent him photographs from a game there, he told me he was “sweating with envy” and that he plans to visit the city soon. Astute and clear-minded, he sounds determined to go on enjoying life for as long as that remains possible.

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