Unsung Swarthy Heroes

One of the regular commenters here at treppenwitz shared a troubling thought on yesterday's post that I seem to get nearly every time I mention my belief that most Palestinians are regular people who have the same kind of family and financial concerns as we do, and who are not actively working towards, or even actively hoping for, the destruction of Israel. 

He said:

"I have a suggestion for all the wonderful Arabs who want to make nice with Israel from Gaza and the West Bank.  You want hostilities to stop and to have a normal life?  Become spies for Israel within the murderous terror orgs of your brothers."

This commenter is no dummy.  He has been around the Sun a few more times than I have, and has a lot of good solid information at his fingertips with which to support his worldview.  His only problem is that he is human, and has fallen into the very human habit of willfully ignoring inconvenient facts that don't jibe with what he sees and hears.

Spying is a dirty, dangerous business.  When people do it against our national interests (think Mordechai Vannunu, Udi Aviv, Marcus Klingberg), we want to string them up from the nearest lamp post... or at least let them rot in jail forever. 

But when someone, for whatever reason, does it for us (think Eli Cohen, Jonathan Pollard and countless others who's names we will probably never know), they are heroes of the first order!

So with that in mind, let me tell you a story.  Pay close attention to the details.  I can almost guarantee you'll miss the important ones:

Prologue: A Palestinian terrorist gets on a bus or walks into a crowded restaurant and blows him/herself up, snuffing out a few dozen innocent lives and maiming scores more in the process.  The public settles in to follow the familiar acts in this well-worn libretto:

Act One: 'The pas de duex'... This opening dance features terse sound bites exchanged between a suitably somber public official (usually a police or government spokesman) and an inappropriately eager/bright-eyed media talking head.  They have no real information to share at this point so instead they rehash a standard police statement that there had been 150 individual intelligence warnings of an impending attack during the previous two weeks.  This act is mostly filler used to kill time while the camera crews arrive on scene.

Act Two: 'Impressionist Dreamscape'... Through the weird tunnel vision of a zoom lens the first camera crews on the scene show the audience their first glimpse of the carnage... an exhibition of ordinary everyday objects (cafe tables, buses, bus shelters, mall entrances, etc.) bent and mangled into improbable angles and locations that would make Salvador Dali proud.

Act Three: 'Blair Witch Videography'... The press video crews, having become emboldened, leave their distant vantage points behind the police tape and venture on foot towards the epicenter of the carnage.  This transitory act takes it's name from the choppy news footage that is so reminiscent of the shaky hand-held camera work in the low budget 1999 film from which the act takes its name.

Act Four: 'The Voyeur'... Though we want to look away at this point, the Blair Witch camera crews have dashed in past wildly gesturing security personnel and treated us to the grisly images of blood oozing out from under lumpy plastic tarps, and ZAKA crews buzzing around like bearded yellow bumblebees bagging bits of unidentifiable matter that our minds would rather not catalog.

Act Five:  'The justification'... Now that our emotions have been primed to be properly receptive, we are introduced to a Palestinian 'spokes-liar' doing his best 'We condemn this unfortunate act' bit where he says with great resignation that "EEZ-RAH-EYL-EE [they always pronounce it in that 5-syllible cadence that makes it sound like an Arabic curse... which it sort of is if you think about it], atrocities and genocide against the Palestinian people have led to this unfortunate, spontaneous display of Palestinian frustration." 

Act Six: 'The Celebration'... The last image we are usually shown... and therefore the image that stays with us the longest... is the obligatory tight angle shot of celebrating Palestinian crowds dancing in the street and passing out sweets to little children.

[Curtain]

OK, let's look at this tragic opera for a moment through more critical eyes and talk about what we have actually seen... as well as what we probably haven't:

• Yes, there was a terror attack which - Palestinian claims of spontaneity not withstanding - required a fair amount of advanced planning, funding and logistical support to carry out.
• Yes, the suitably unctuous Palestinian spokes-liar might as well send in file footage for all the variation in his usual statement.
• Yes, it is infuriating to see anyone celebrating the murder of our people.

But let's think for a moment about how many Palestinians we have actually seen in action here: 

• There's the bomber and his support/logistics crew... which might be as many as 30 or 40 people. 
• There's the spokes-liar and the government he represents... that's another 150 or so.
• And of course there are the celebrants we saw dancing in the street... another 75 to 100 people (remember that tight camera angle?  That was so the film crew could get the bunch of day laborers and coffee drinkers who were sitting quietly in the cafe two minutes earlier to look like an enormous crowd). 

So in fairness, what we have seen here is no more than 300 Palestinians.  What we usually do with this information is extrapolate the words and deeds of those people onto the millions of Palestinians we don't see in order to formulate our worldview.

Don't feel bad... you're in good company here.  The typical Palestinian (heck, most of the world!) uses this same kind of flawed statistical sampling to form their opinion about Israelis/Jews as well.  The only difference is that we cry foul... and they mostly don't. 

But there is one small piece of information we are given during nearly every performance of this tragic opera that almost all of us dismiss without a second thought.  Didn't catch it?  Think back to Act One. 

While the talking heads were killing time waiting for the camera crews to arrive on the scene, they rehashed some seemingly inconsequential information that every Israeli news outlet receives on a daily basis; the number of terror warnings that were received.  This is a stupid factoid that only becomes relevant when a terror attack takes place... or when one is averted. 

However, few of us actually stop to think about the ramifications of this information's existence. 

Even when we read in the paper about the execution of a Palestinian 'collaborator', it still never dawns on us to put that event together with the innocuous statements about terror warnings.

Much as we would all like to believe that there is a Mossad agent hiding under every rock in Ramallah, the truth is that almost all of Israel's hard intelligence on the various Palestinian terror networks comes from Palestinians.  All the satellite imagery and electronic eavesdropping in the world can't hold a candle to 'HUMINT' (human intelligence) provided by a well placed spy deep inside the enemy camp.  These men and women risk their lives... and the lives of their families... for reasons that still elude me. 

A friend once told me how, during a stint of reserve duty, he was horrified to see an IDF officer walk over to one of a large group of Palestinian prisoners who had been rounded up in the previous night's sweep and begin slapping him viciously in the face.  Within minutes the man was dragged away from his fellow prisoners and led bleeding and groaning from the room.  One-by-one the others got the same treatment.

It was only the next day that this officer confided in him that one of the prisoners was a regular informant who had urgent information about an impending suicide attack (it was averted, thank G-d).  He had signaled his handlers that he didn't trust his regular channels of communications and needed to be debriefed in person.  The only way to do this without raising the suspicions of the villagers was for the IDF to round up a random bunch of men from his area and then, during a bit of staged (but very real) brutality, drag him off to a suitably private debriefing room.

As I said, I'm not really sure what motivates these informants.  It probably isn't overt patriotism since they can't really expect to ever have a real stake in the Zionist enterprise... at least not the way we imagine our stake.  And it probably isn't financial motivation since whatever the IDF and Shin Bet are spreading around among the literally thousands of Palestinian informants, it can't possibly be worth risking a bullet in the back of the head. 

So who knows... maybe these brave men and women just hate to see innocent people killed.  You and I are capable of this noble sentiment, so it really just might be as simple as that.

Whatever the reason, even though I still firmly believe that we are at war with the Palestinians, and that the entire Palestinian people are my enemy (at least until such until such time as peace breaks out), I know with perfect certainty that each time I hear about IDF troops catching a bomber on the way to to carry out an attack (which happens several times a month), or when a bunch of wanted terrorists are rounded up without incident in the middle of the night by a team of IDF commandos... that one of these unlikely spies has stepped up and risked his life in order to save a bunch of people he will almost certainly never meet.

So please remember these unsung swarthy heroes the next time you read the news about a successful IDF operation... and before leaving thoughtless comments on anyone's blog.