(New York Times) Gershom Gorenberg - M. is Palestinian, but speaks Hebrew with only a hint of his native Arabic. He joined Israeli society years ago, when he was recruited by Israel's Shin Bet security service to provide information about other Palestinians. On the surface, he has learned to fit in in Israel, but on a deeper level, he is a displaced person, a casualty of a long war. Eighty percent of all attempted terror attacks are prevented on the basis of intelligence, much of it from informers, according to a spokesman for the IDF. During the first Palestinian uprising, between the end of 1987 and the signing of the Oslo accord in 1993, about 1,000 Palestinians suspected of being collaborators were murdered by other Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Bassem Eid, head of the East Jerusalem-based group, estimates that fewer than half of the accused collaborators actually worked with Israel. Between late March and the end of May 2002, at least 26 accused collaborators were murdered.
2002-08-23 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive