Collaborators slaughtered in besieged West Bank
Independent, 02 April 2002
Collaborators slaughtered in besieged West Bank
By Robert Fisk in Ramallah
02 April 2002
Ariel Sharon's declaration of "war'' yesterday sent the Israeli army
storming into more Palestinian towns and brought execution to eight convicted
Palestinian collaborators, who were coldly taken from their prison in Tulkarm
and gunned down by hooded men only hours before the Israelis arrived.
Then, in mid-evening, a car bomb exploded on the
border between east and west Jerusalem, close to an ultra-orthodox Jewish
area, wounding three people, one of them seriously.
Earlier in the day, Israeli troops entered the Kalkilya
refugee camp and positioned their armour on the hills above Bethlehem.
In Beit Jala, Westerners demonstrating against the Israeli attacks were
wounded by Israeli troops.
The only good news until last night was that – for
the first day in almost a week – not a single Palestinian suicide bomber
appeared to have made it through the lines to murder more Israelis.
Last night's bombing occurred after an Israeli policeman
had stopped a car on the old Green Line dividing Jerusalem. Whether or
not the driver was a would-be suicide bomber, his vehicle exploded and
the badly wounded policeman was dragged away in flames.
Israeli forces fought gun battles with Palestinian
fighters around Ramallah, a city which the Israeli army – contrary to claims
in Jerusalem – clearly does not control.
A visit to Ramallah by The Independent yesterday
provided proof that the conflict near Yasser Arafat's headquarters continues,
with gunfire and rockets directed at Israel's invading armoured units.
On Sunday night, the Israeli army tried to prevent foreign journalists
entering the city by announcing that the terrain was a "Closed Military
Area''. In fact, Ramallah remains legally – if not de facto – part of the
Palestinian Authority's territory, in which the Israeli military restriction
has no legal power.
The bloody scenes in Tulkarm were probably predictable
but no less savage for that. The eight men accused of collaboration by
the Palestinian Authority – Mr Arafat has always been better at rounding
up Israeli agents than Palestinian suicide bombers – were apparently abandoned
by their guards as the Israeli army prepared to enter the city. Presumably
anxious to prevent the eight from starting work once more for their Israeli
masters, the two hooded gunmen who dragged the prisoners from the building
shot them all down together in cold blood.
The executions brought to 11 the number of collaborators
shot dead in under 24 hours.
If all the evidence points to a steady Israeli reoccupation
of the West Bank – and perhaps Gaza as well – Ehud Olmert, the Israeli
major of Jerusalem, insisted yesterday that reoccupation "is not the purpose,
not the aim, not the strategy of the Israeli government''. But what that
strategy was remained unclear to many Israelis.
One Israeli writer, Rogel Alpher in Haaretz, yesterday
scathingly described Mr Sharon's Sunday night address to Israelis as "troubled
and neurotic''. After a series of suicide bombings that claimed dozens
of Israeli lives, Mr Sharon had talked about "terror, terror and more terror".
But Mr Alpher said that the Israeli Prime Minister came across like "a
stuffed bear ... pathetically confused". The hour awaited a speech, Mr
Alpher remarked, but what Israelis got from Mr Sharon was a "telegram from
hell".
Across the Arab world, meanwhile, all the warnings
of America's Arab allies were turning into reality. In Cairo, where President
Hosni Mubarak has frequently expressed his fear of instability and public
anger at Israel's assaults on the West Bank and Gaza, Egyptian police fought
back with tear gas and batons as thousands of demonstrators tried to reach
the Israeli embassy at Gezira island for the fourth day running. At Jordon
University in Amman, crowds confronted security police, burning American
and Israeli flags. There were demonstrations, too, in Syria, Lebanon and
Libya.
Further Israeli attacks are now expected on Jenin
– the city from which so many Palestinian suicide bombers have emerged
– and even on Palestinian areas of Hebron. At least 20,000 Israeli reservists
are now engaged in military operations, many of them inside the West Bank
or Gaza. Even the diplomatic rules – by which US officials were enjoined
to refer to the occupied territories as "disputed'' – now seem certain
to change.
As "independence" is snuffed out in those areas
once given to the Palestinian Authority, to be replaced by the old routine
of fear and Israeli midnight arrests and torture, so Palestinian anger
and frustration continues to build. If Yasser Arafat, who was himself a
dab hand at midnight raids and torture, really could "control and arrest''
the suicide bombers, he now has no ability to follow the instructions of
Israel and the United States. His prisons and intelligence offices have
now largely been destroyed by the Israelis, and his policemen are, in many
cities, on the run. How easy it would be, many Palestinians are now saying,
for Israel to claim that its own army must reimpose "law and order'' by
reoccupying all the Palestinian territory.
© 2002 Independent Digital (UK) Ltd
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