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Palestinian women holding pictures
of Palestinians killed during the recent
outbreak of Israeli-Palestinian violence,
march during a llamas protest
in Nablus Jan. 10.

not only people on the left. Center
Party Knesset Member Dan Meridor,
an ex-Likudnik who heads the Defense
and Foreign Affairs Committee, said a
law-abiding society cannot kill people
without trial. Mofaz has said the army
carries out assassinations only if sol-
diers' lives would be endangered by the
attempt to arrest the targets.
Yet there are unquestionably -serious
problems with some of these assassina-
tions. The first, on Nov. 9, was aimed
at a target who might have been legiti-
mate to anyone who legitimizes these
assassinations. Hussein Abayat was
one of the top Fatah gunners who had
turned the Jerusalem suburb of Gilo
into a free-fire zone. However, two
women passersby were also killed when
the Israeli combat helicopter fired a
missile at Abayat's pick-up truck.

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Peace Activist Killed

The thinking was that by targeting
key players in the intifada, Israel
might put a dent in the Palestinian
fighting capability and get some slack
in the public relations arena by killing
adult killers, not child stone-throwers.

Measuring Effects

The success of the assassination policy
is difficult to ascertain. An Arab
observer in the territories says it has
struck fear into many intifada activists.
"A lot of them have gone under-
ground," the observer said, noting that
many of these are small fry whom
Israel doesn't consider worth killing.
"All the Fatah people you talk to say
they're on the list [of assassination tar-
gets]. It's a way of making themselves
seem more important."
But at the same time, says the
observer, the assassinations have not
deterred the Palestinians from going
forward with the intifada. The recent
lull in violence has nothing to do with
the assassinations, he adds, rather with
orders from Arafat to cool it while the
American-led negotiations go forward.
While most of the Israeli public
appears to accept the assassinations as a
fair, even scrupulous, response to
Palestinian killings of Israelis, many
public figures have criticized them, and

The New Year's Eve assassination of
Dr. Thabet Thabet, leader of Fatah in
the Palestinian city of Tulkarm, raised
the sternest objections.
Thabet was a well-known peace
activist; visitors to his home saw pho-
tographs of him with Jimmy Carter
and Shulamit Aloni. Meir Pa'il, a
noted Israeli military historian and
former head of the army's defense doc-
trine team, says there•are doubts
whether Thabet was in fact responsible
for Israeli deaths.
"In a case like that, where it isn't a
clear certainty that the target has
blood on his hands, they shouldn't hit
him," says Pa'il.
New objections have been raised
over the weekend executions. These
were cases where Israeli assassinations
led directly to the deaths of
Palestinians working for Israel. "We
didn't protect the collaborators well
enough, and the collaborators weren't
careful enough to protect themselve s ;"
says Pa'il, calling these two more fail-
ures of Israel's assassination policy.
Yet Haaretz columnist Zvi Barel
probably spoke for most Israelis when
he wrote recently: "Will all the noble
souls get off their high horses, please,
and stop preaching to the Israeli army
about assassinations? ... Do the
Palestinians employ such thinking
when they place bombs on buses or
shoot at civilian cars?" ❑

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