Is a different order of violence descending on the luckless Palestinian people? A key adviser to President Yasser Arafat was gunned down this week in Gaza City. The man who riddled Khalil Al-Zaben, a 59-year-old journalist and longtime Arafat confidante, with bullets has not been found. But it seems very likely that he was an Arab and that the murder was a new step in the deadly feuds that are emerging among the Palestinians.
At a time when unity would be the strongest weapon against Israeli oppression, the people of the West Bank and Gaza are being lured into internecine war. Palestinians know that their daily lives are watched by US spy satellites and that their telephone calls are closely monitored. Yet if this signals intelligence were as powerful a weapon as Washington would like people to believe, Al-Qaeda would have been rolled up long ago. A spy satellite cannot see who is traveling in a car, yet the Israelis always seem to know.
At the heart of Israel’s deadly success in targeting its Palestinian opponents lies some very expert human intelligence. It is not coming from Israelis. It is coming from Palestinians. There are people in the Palestinian community who through sheer greed or because of blackmail or coercion are prepared to provide information to Israel. An Israeli intelligence chief recently admitted the value of these people but also referred to them with contempt because even he saw that they were betraying their own people.
His comments were no doubt also designed to stir up suspicion among Palestinians. Anyone thought to be an informer can expect little in the way of justice. Such is the anger and tension in the community that some have been executed summarily on the vaguest of evidence. But spies there certainly always have been.
Now another suspicion needs to be examined. Is it possible that as factionalism grows within the Palestinian community, rival militants are themselves giving information to the Israelis to enable their opponents to be targeted? If this is true, it presents a deeply disturbing development. In all conscience, how could one Palestinian faction justify facilitating Israeli attacks on its rivals? What sort of a Palestine could be built out of such actions, such short-term opportunism? Would not any Palestinian leader tempted to follow such a course be betraying not just his own cause, but the whole future of a united, viable Palestine?
But worse than the distrust that any such betrayal will sow, is the great victory that it hands to the Zionists. They want a weak and divided Palestine. If they can achieve this thanks to information supplied by Palestinians themselves and thereby have the opportunity to assassinate leading militants, their triumph is doubled. If this is the way that Palestinian rivalries are leading, the country’s faction leaders must come to their senses.
