Who will save Imad Sa'ad?
DISSIDENTS everywhere pay a price for their courage. Many have paid the ultimate price. No one can better understand what such courage entails - what it means to resist repression and state terror, notwithstanding the risk of persecution or prison or worse - than a fellow dissident. Which is why Ida Nudel has taken up the cause of Imad Sa'ad.
Nudel, 77, is a famous former refusenik who battled the Soviet Union for 16 years - four of them from exile in Siberia - for the right to immigrate to Israel, which Moscow finally granted in 1987. Sa'ad, 25, is a Palestinian policeman who was sentenced to death by a Palestinian Authority court in Hebron last week. His crime: alerting Israeli authorities to the whereabouts of four Palestinian terrorists, who were subsequently killed by Israeli forces.
In assisting Israeli counterterrorism, Sa'ad may have saved scores of innocent lives. For doing so, he was charged with "collaboration," and will face a firing squad unless international pressure forces Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to commute his sentence. Or unless Israel, as Nudel urges in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "launch[es] a rescue operation to extract the prisoner from his cell."
Hundreds of Palestinian dissidents have been murdered through the years as "collaborators." During the intifadah of the late 1980s, so many Palestinians were butchered by fellow Palestinians that the internecine violence came to be called the "intrafadah." At times, incitement to murder any Arab who opposed the Palestine Liberation Organization's lethal tactics came straight from the top. When Elias Freij, the influential mayor of Bethlehem, proposed a truce to end the rioting on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Yasser Arafat issued a blunt warning: "Whoever thinks of stopping the intifadah before it achieves its goals, I will give him 10 bullets in the chest." Freij withdrew his proposal.
The coming of the Oslo "peace process" and the creation of the Palestinian Authority were supposed to inaugurate civilized Palestinian autonomy and an end to terrorism against Israel. They led to the opposite. Under Arafat, Palestinian life grew increasingly corrupt, brutal, and anarchic. Terror attacks on Israelis soared to unprecedented levels. Few Palestinians defied the terrorists or openly supported peaceful coexistence with Israel; the consequences of doing could be fatal. "Scores of alleged 'collaborators' were unlawfully killed by armed groups or individuals," Amnesty International reported in 2003. "The PA consistently failed to investigate these killings and none of the perpetrators was brought to justice."
But didn't all this mayhem and savagery come to an end with the death of Arafat in 2004? Haven't we been assured of the peaceful aspirations of the Palestinian Authority today, or at least that part of it presided over by Abbas and his Fatah government in the West Bank? President Bush routinely hails Abbas's pacific goals. "The president is a man of peace," Bush said when Abbas was in Washington two weeks ago. "He's a man of vision. He rejects the idea of using violence to achieve objectives."
It is on the strength of this conviction - that Abbas is no Arafat and Fatah no Hamas - that the US, Israel, and the international community have lavished the Palestinian Authority with so much money, weapons, security training, and diplomatic support. But then why is Imad Sa'ad on death row?
Like Arafat before him, Abbas has committed the Palestinian Authority to unequivocally ending violence and terrorism and halting all official incitement against Israel. Yet like Arafat before him, he invariably refuses to do so. In the language of the Road Map, Palestinian officials are required to "disrupt and restrain individuals and groups conducting and planning violent attacks on Israelis anywhere." That is just what Imad Sa'ad did. In a rational and civilized society, he would be commended. In the poisoned world of the Palestinian Authority, far gone in nihilism, death-worship, and Islamist fanaticism, he is to die.
On a similar occasion in 2005, another former Soviet dissident demanded that Israel intervene to prevent the Palestinian Authority from executing "collaborators" who had helped thwart terrorism. "It is impossible," Natan Sharansky warned then, "to build a peace process based on blood." Sharansky and Nudel, survivors of the Soviet gulag, speak with a moral authority that none of us who are free can decently ignore. When Bush returns to the Middle East next week, saving Imad Sa'ad should be his highest priority. The misnamed, misbegotten "peace process" can wait.
Jeff Jacoby can be reached at jacoby@globe.com.
