The American Spectator

Special Report

The Middle East War Nobody Knows

By Lawrence Henry on 7.16.02 @ 12:02AM

There is a great unreported story in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, what amounts to an unreported war: the war of the Palestinian resistance. And no, the Palestinian Authority and its terrorist accomplices -- Hamas, Hezbollah, the Al Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, and the rest -- are not a "resistance" movement. They are, rather, the dictatorship against which the resistance struggles. The real resistance, anonymous, not even properly described, is the fight against terror within the West Bank and Gaza by a fifth column of Israel sympathizers.

This resistance gets reported only under one rubric -- "suspected collaborators" -- and only under one circumstance -- the execution of those "suspected collaborators." Sometimes these executions take place under a thin cloak of criminal procedure, as sentences carried out by the Palestinian Authority after trial. More often lately, they are simply slaughters in the street, often accompanied by mobs baying for blood and mutilation -- and getting it.

The collaborators are not Jewish spies, though certainly the Mossad must provide them some support, and must debrief them when it can. When they are identified at all, it is evident they are Arabic and Muslim.

What they do is not pretty. They identify leaders and technical experts among the terrorist groups, guide the Israeli Defense Force to those terrorists, and help in getting them arrested or killed. People naively and wonderingly look back at the Nazi scourge in World War II and wonder why no "good Germans" arose to bump off Nazi party leaders and SS generals.

This is why:

"GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) January 13, 2001 -- Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority put two men before firing squads Saturday for collaborating with Israel in killings of Palestinian militiamen, executing them before weeping family members and crowds of hundreds amid cries of 'God is Great!'

"Palestinian courts in Gaza City and the West Bank town of Nablus on Friday convicted Majdi Makawi, 28, and Alam Bani Odeh, 25, of involvement in separate attacks that killed Jamal Abdel Razek, a leader of Arafat's Fatah movement, and Palestinian bomb-maker Ibrahim Bani Odeh. Arafat upheld the courts' execution orders.

"In Nablus, the 3-year-old daughter of Bani Odeh clung to his hand as he waited for execution, his mother and wife crying beside him."

So is this:

"The Independent, By Robert Fisk in Ramallah, August 9, 2001 -- Preferring to avoid the controversial trials that have condemned nine alleged collaborators to death, Yasser Arafat's intelligence operatives are now murdering Palestinians suspected of spying for Israel, killing at least 20 men in the past nine months, at least six of whom were more than 50 years old.

"Palestinian police no longer investigate the 'mysterious' killings of men believed to have worked for Israel's Shin Bet intelligence service, who in some cases helped the Israelis to murder Palestinian militants; many of the Palestinian killers have been masked, at least one victim has been gunned down by men wearing Palestinian police uniforms while another was killed by fellow prisoners in a Majido prison in Nablus -- under the full control of Arafat's Palestinian Authority."

And this:

"The Telegraph (U.K.) | Alan Philps April 24, 2002 -- Gunmen pumped dozens of bullets into three suspected Palestinian informers and strung one up yesterday in a gruesome ceremony at the site of a burnt-out vehicle where the Israeli air force had killed two leading militants."

And most recently, these paragraphs, buried at the bottom of a July 14 story by AP's Ibrahim Barzak:

"More than a dozen Palestinians are now on death row after being convicted of collaborating with Israel in the targeted killings of militants.

Letter to the Editor

topics:
Law, Israel