Thursday. September 14,1989 — THE BULLETIN — 6
INTERNECINE WAR OFTHE WEST
Sabah Kanaan knew she was going to be murdered. The 32-year-old single mother had been accused of collaborating with Israeli; intelligence and-of proriiiscuity. A Palestinian "shock conimittee-brpkeLinto her home in the West Bank city of Nablus aiid held her pris6her/or three nights while they brutally beat her. Taken to a hospital by neighbors* Kanaan denied all the whispered charges against her and told reporters "they will never jet me live.** Two months-after she was released, her bludgeoned body was fouiid near the Nablus Onion Market, axed and riddled with stab wounds. ^^^^
It was not the first such execution in Nablus. Adli al-Thalji was clad in paja:mas when his corpse was found dangling from a meat hook in the market. In Gaza, Jamil Kiahmud Shehedeh, a resident of the teeming Jabaliya refugee camp, was stabbed to death and his arm liacked off at the shoulder. A message near his body said, "Death sentence carried out against a collaborator.**
In: the 21 months of the intifada ; :. street battles between Pafestinian stone throwers and Israeli soldiers aredeclinihg and increasingly, Arabs are attacking one another. A recientPalesti^ nian underground leaflet warned that the killing of Palestinians by other Palestinians is getting out of hand: At least <S7 have been slain by fellow Arabs since December j987; 40 such killings have taken place in the past three months. Israeli officisils claim 48 percent of 1,403 beatings, stabbings and attacks on property by Arabs during the first half of 1989 were directed against Palestinian, not Israeli, ttargets.
Palestinian leaders in the West Bank and Gaza. . . admit that suspepted coliabpratdrs are being. killed. Liquidation of infpnhers; they claim, is self-defense, communal retribution meted out to traitors who have ignored warnings to change their ways,. . ...
Some of those murdered have been collaborators in the full sense of that ugly word: Palestinians who betrayed other Palestinians in exchange for money or favors from Israeli occupation authorities. U.S; officials say others have been common criminals. Still others haye criticized or opposed the intafada, or simply refused to pay protection money to thugs who terrorize in its name. But Israeli analysts insist that many of the victims of the f/i/i/a</a'5 kangaroo courts have been guilty only of doing routine business with Israelis.
Israeli analyst Israel Stockman charges that the attacks are part of a "systematic campaign to intimidate,^^ B^ jbelieves maii^ of :the sla)^in^ are Lebanfese^s^te use iMe charge of coMbot^ t(A;ov^?b^li§fe vendettas. Israeli military authorities charge that was the case
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"JewB who return to Arab countries would live es free and equal citliens."
FACT The PLO's suggestion that Jews born in Arab states would leave the' democracy of Israel to live under oppressive Arab dictatorship is preposterous.
In 1975, the Iraqi government Issued an invitation for all former Iraqi Jews to return "home." Only one former Iraqi in Israel was known to have accepted the invitation. When Iraqi officials told Western reporters in Baghdad that "a trickle" of Iraqi Jews had returned, newsmen started referring to YusefNavi as "Mr. Trickle.-After a year in Iraq, Navi re-emigrated to Israel.
The exodus of Oriental Jews from Arab countries djd not come as any surprise. For centuries, Jewsof the Arab world lived as second-class citizens, oppressed by discriminatory taxes, restrictions on their freedom, and acts of violence.
On the anniversary of Mohammed's birth in April 1972, Egyptian President Sadat cited Mohammed's treatment of the Jews as justification for his refusal at that time to negotiate with ' Israel:
"The most splendid thing pur prpphet Mohammed did waste evict them from the Arabian peninsula. We know their history with our prophet. They aremean and treacherous people." V ,
^ The remnants of Jewish comrnunlties stilt Arab countries at the time of the Six-Day Vi^ar suffered brutalvengeancejat the hands of the Arabs, and the few thousand who jrernajn today In Syria live In extreme fear. As a result, most of the Arab world is Judenrein. - .
Nearly every Arab government has declared Islam its state religion. Yet the PLC claims that Oriental Jews who return to Arab countries can expect to enjoy "every right.''
Reprinted from iMyfhs and Facts, a publicatibh of Near: East Research, Inc. Complete copies of Myths and Facts are available for U.S. $3.95 from Near East Report, 500 North Capitol street; .N.W.i Wa8hingtbh,v:':^5^^^^^pi D.C. 20001.:-sr.-. : nvi:- .......
with some of the 10 recent stranglings inside the bleak. Ketziot detention camp, where Israel now holds 2jOOO Palestinians. Palestinians allege that those killed were snitches.
But the Israeli government charges that assassination is a tool the Palestine Liberation Organization uses to discoyr^ge West. Bank and Gaza Palestinians from j[>ypassihg Yasir Arafat arid dealing directly with Israel on terniis for an interim settlement
In fact, the rising tide of violence is turning against the PLC, too. Within a day of his press conference (with Prime Minister Shamir), the walls at PLO-backed West Bank lawyer Jamil Tarifi's home were daubed with so many threats to his life, reportedly from more-radical Palestinian groups, that he left town. Gars belonging to PLO leaders in the West Bank city of Ramallah have been mysteriously burned. And just last week, anonymous painphlets accused 12 leading Palestinians, include ing Radwan Abu Ayash, considered a central leader in Arafat's Fatah organization, of embezzling ^millions of dollars allocated for the intifada:' , :
According to Israeli Army intelligence, various Palestinian factions have organized rival hit teams in the occupied territories .'
Alarmed by the situation^ m/i^^a leadership recently issued two directives calliiig for killing "only in extreme cases of collaboration, and after full, thorough and irrefutable evidence is available and after gaining approval from the highest levels of Palestinian leadership.**
The danger is that the m/i/a^a already has spawned a self-defeating wave of violence ho one can control. By Richard Z. Chesnoff U.S. NEWS & WORLD REPORT with DaoudKuttab and Aug.2i,i989 David Makqvlisy in Jerusalem
the;- .. . . . . ■
economist
WHOSO SHEDDETH BLOOD
The American marine who went to Lebanon as a peacekeeper, wearing the blue beret of the United Nations; ended up being hanged by bigots in some Lebanese basement. L.-Col. William Higgins may not really have been killed (this week), as his assassins claim, in response to IsraeFs moonlight kidnapping a few days earlier of ^heikh Abdei Karim Obeid. But even if he was killei^ nionths ago his murder cries out for an appropriate reply from President Bush .. ..
Those who criticise Israel's action on high moral grounds ("an aboininable crime," the Right Rev Robert Tuncie, the Archbishop of Canterbury, called Sh^^^
ing sanctimonious npnsense. There is no jnoral equiyaience between the criminal who preys on innocents and the stat^ stops the criminal and — when it can — brings him to justice. Hezbollah, the Iranian-inspired "Party of G-d" to which the sheikh belongs, has declared itself the enemy of the West. It has backed up this declaration with kidnapping, extortion, air piracy and mass murder.
"Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed." The hard doctrine of Genesis describes justice-in-anarchy. It also describes self-defence. The first duty of a state under attack is to defend itself and protect its citizens. AVhen the attackers are criminals like the Hezbollah gangs, the ideal defence is to haul them before courts and have justice rendered under the rule of the law. When that is impossible — and the rule of law has long since collapsed in Lebanon — other methods are justified. This is why it was right for America to bomb Tripoli in 1986 to punish Libya for past terrorist acts and deter it from future ones; right for FBI agents to abduct a Lebanese hijacker from a yacht off Lebanon's coast in 1987; and right for American fighters to force down a jet carrying away the man responsible for seajacking the/Ic/i/Z/ie Lawro in 1985.
Morally, the kidnapping of Sheikh Obeid falls into this category .. .. . •
Whatiever errors Israel may have made in the kidnap, it is the-world that \yill be making a mistake if it talks itself into belie ving that Israel's behaviour is the main cause of terrorism, The politician's instinct of Mr. Bush, who watched the Carter presidency break apart andtheReagah presidency buckle under the weight of the recurring hostage nightmare, \yas to distance himself from what Israel had done. But to respond as a statesman he must go beyond the plea he made for both sides to free their respective prisoners and thus "break the cycle of violence." That sort of curse-both-their-houses even-handedness is based on wishful thinking.
The'wishful thought is this: if the world stopped provoking Hezbollah and its kind, terrorism would fadeaway. It wouldn't, even if -Israel bowed to American pressure to svirrender up Sheikh Obeid for nothing in return. Hezbollah does not act as it does because of some "cycle of violence," but because it chooses to find a lot of unexceptional things sorely provoking. It is provoked by Israel's existence, notjust its actions. It is provoked by British authors who write novels it dislikes. Despite the , advent of the putatiyely moderate President Rafsanjani in Iran, the declared policy of both Hezbollah and its Iranian paymasters is; still to extinguish the Jewish state and murder Salman Rushdie. Against unreason like this it is no policy for free men to mutter, with the Roberts, (Senator) Dole and Runcie, "Don't provoke them."
The answer to terrorism is to wage constant, active, resourceful war against it. Left, undisturbed, the madness that breeds in Lebanon does not stay meeklyat home. It reaches out, todestroy American jumbo jets over Lockerbie or to blow away lives an limbs in the boulevards of Paris ...
The two beit weapons against terrorism have so far been least used. One is to deprive the terrorist organizations of oxygen by applying relentless pressure against
• ; ; Photos this.page:
Israel Sun
MASSIVE CAdHE Of amis apprehended in Gaza Strip camps: used by Palestinian Arabs to Intimidate and murder their brethren.
IDF troops interrogate a Palestinian Arab during a search and arrest operation in Kalkilya.
IDF checkpoint at Erez, where magnetic ID cards are now being used to admit Gazans to work in Israel. Those using the cards have been beaten, harassed and murdered by PLO supporters in the Gaza Strip.
HI
YOUTH In Tuikarem (only kiiometres from Kfar Saba) are deligh-t@d to display for cameramen some of the weapons thsyuse to attack Israeli soldiers. i
three governments which openly shelter them. The other is to hunt down individual terrorists, both to bring those who are caught to justice and to scare the others. Israel was on shaky ground if it snatched Sheikh Obeid to bargain for the release of its own prisoners. Too many'governments have rewarded kidnappers by buying back their victims with cash and favors; But it had the right idea in making a pin-point attack on one of the people waging terrorist war.
These weapons may not save the lives of the handful of hostages now facing their worst-ever week in Lebanon. Thiey may even endanger them. Bui they offer the best hope for,ending the wretched commerce in hostages once and for all. Aug. 5,1989 THE ECONOMIST
London, England