Fatah Being Betrayed by Arabs Enabling Israel to Nab Terrorists

By ROBERT GAMZEY (The writer is a special correspondent for The Courant in Israel).

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Transcribed from the clipping

LYDDA, ISRAEL — Abu Harb, 19-year-old East Jerusalem self-proclaimed "freedom fighter" for the Palestine Liberation Front, stood in an Israeli military court here and casually admitted "I placed time bombs in Jerusalem near Bickur Holim Hospital Aug. 18 and Sept. 4 in the Tel Aviv bus station and it was my duty to do so. I have proof that I had the right to place the bombs.

I am innocent and shall prove it." Abu Harb was one of four East Jerusalem Arab youths, aged 18 to 20, who faced trial for planting explosives in public places. In the same court, 19-year-old Ahmed Mohammed Muheimar turned on another suspect, Latif Kamel, 18, and accused Kamel of betraying him to the Hebrew police.

Kamel took the stand to tell how he joined the Fatah terrorist organization on a visit to Amman last June when he was paid 30 Jordanian dinars to organize a sabotage group in Jerusalem.

Out of such testimony freely given by 1,300 Arab terrorists held in Israeli prisons can be gleaned the reasons for the failure of Fatah and other Palestine "freedom fighters" whose exaggerated exploits were advertised in a Time magazine cover story. Kamel's betrayal of Muheimar was typical of the Arab penchant for informing on each other.

This streak of ingroup disunity aids the police in breaking ring after ring of saboteurs.

How this transcription was made

Date confirmed on the page (masthead). Legibility fair; any passage that could not be read is omitted rather than reconstructed.

Context added by this archive

THE SHARPEST LANGUAGE IN THE BATCH SITS HERE, and it is in a staff correspondent's news story, not an op-ed. Two sentences, in The Hartford Courant's own voice, unattributed: 'Kamel's betrayal of Muheimar was typical of the Arab penchant for informing on each other.

This streak of ingroup disunity aids the police in breaking ring after ring of saboteurs.' That is a racial generalisation about a people, stated as a fact that explains a police result, under a staff byline, on page 5 of a major American daily. It is not a quotation from an Israeli official. It is the newspaper talking.

The headline does the same work in shorter form: 'Fatah Being Betrayed by Arabs Enabling Israel to Nab Terrorists.' Note the vocabulary across one page: 'terrorists' five times in the paper's voice, 'Arab terrorists' as a category of prisoner, 'saboteurs', 'the Fatah terrorist organization', and 'freedom fighter' / 'freedom fighters' always inside scare quotes and always prefixed 'self-proclaimed' or 'other Palestine'.

The paper never uses the word without distancing it. And yet this is also the one clipping in the batch where a Palestinian speaks at length. Abu Harb gets 48 consecutive words.

The reporter frames them with 'casually admitted' and the page is built so that his statement is evidence against him, but the words are there, printed, and they include 'it was my duty to do so' and 'I am innocent and shall prove it.' For an archive of what American papers printed about Palestinians, that is a find: the longest Palestinian quotation in seventeen slides is a teenager defending himself in a military court.

The photograph at the top of the page shows Israeli children running to a shelter. There is no photograph of the four defendants.

Cite this clipping

"Fatah Being Betrayed by Arabs Enabling Israel to Nab Terrorists," Hartford Courant, 20 December 1968, p. 5. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1968-022. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1968-022