Front Group (Arab-Israeli Wars)

A front group, as a general concept, is an organization set up to and controlled by a previous one that seeks to perform services and functions for that party, often in order to hide the involvement of the party in activities that could be considered damaging to its reputation. Contrastingly, the front group may be formed in order to conduct legitimate activities, often advocacy or financial ones like charity fundraising, but with the actual intention of furthering the goals of the controlling party. In the Arab-Israeli Wars, the phenomenon has seen itself grow to almost ridiculous proportions, as both sides of the rift have used the method to acquire support from civil populations or from foreign governments.

Background

Until 1948, when the UN Partition Plan of November 1947 was to be implemented, the Jews and Arabs of Mandatory Palestine were represented by two bodies, the Jewish Agency led by Chaim Weizmann and David Ben-Gurion and the Arab Higher Committee led by Grand Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husaini and his rival Raghib al-Nashashibi(who by 1946 had left). Yet even in those days both of them were seen as little more than represantatives of the armed groups that backed up both sides, the Jewish Haganah and the various Arab irregular militias, and not the other way around. While Ben-Gurion was faced with serious opponents within the Jewish settlement movement in the form of the liberal Revisionist Party and its military wing the Etzel, Husaini throughout the 1948 was virtually unopposed as head of the AHC, as many of the other Arabs were terrified of him and his nephew Abdel Qader Husseini. By 1946 the AHC was totally dominated by the Hausaini family's Palestine Arab Party, the most hard-line opponents of a compromise with the Jews.

Israeli front groups

Though Israel achieved statehood in 1948, front groups established before independence survived afterward, though some changed form in the course of the state's history. The two main groups, the Workers' Party of the Land of Israel (Mapai) and the Herut Party, successors of the Revisionists each had front groups for youth, workers and women in order to promote themselves in the realm of civil life.

While Mapai dissolved its paramilitary wings Palmach and Haganah at independence into the Israeli Defence Forces, its youth movements Hashomer Hatzair and the smaller Habonim Dror survived, and the party completely dominated the state labour conglomerate the Histadrut, the Jewish National Fund, the Jewish Agency (which though it had been replaced by the State of Israel as the governing body of the Jewish population in the state retained an important role as a civilian representative to Jews abroad), and the World Zionist Organization. Unlike many of the examples brought in this article, however, most of the institutions that were in the 1950s dominated by Mapai have long since shaken off their influence, since Mapai itself has evolved into the much weaker Israel Labour Party. Of those institutions, the last that retains any vestige of influence by the party is the Histadrut. Labour only regained its control over the Histadrut after the body's chairman, and head of the breakaway One Nation party, Amir Peretz, rejoined the party in 2005 in order to contest its leadership. Mapai and its successor groups also dominated for most of their history the United Kibbutz Movement (Takam), and the corrupt management of several Mapai " businessmen" led to a serious financial crisis in the 1980s that led to the bankruptcy of a number of the communities controled by the Takam.

Herut also had dissolved the Etzel in 1948 despite the divisive Altalena disaster, and become to all intents and purposes a legitimate civil organization after conducting terror operations during the Mandate. However, several organizations it had backed in order to provide cover to the Etzel during its 1940s campaigns against British authorities remained. Among those were the Betar Youth Organization. Herut's small size at statehood and its limited funding and influence prevented most of its associated organizations or front groups from growing.

Jewish terror groups throughout statehood have attempted to wrap their activists in the flag of scholarship or activism. Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the ultra-right Kach Party, founded the Yeshiva of the Jewish Idea sometime in the 1980s. Kach, illegal since 1993, has since spawned the Jewish Brigade, not to be confused with the Royal Army units formed during both World Wars to fight Germany. Yet usually these groups are so small in actual membership as to actually make the formation of front groups as unnecessary and burdensome.

Arab Front Organizations

Because the Arab states' side of the conflict with Israel has evolved from a united effort in the 1948 and 1967 wars, into a region riven with divisions and complications, it would be impossible to detail the complete list or the variations of the front organizations in one article. It can be said, however, that the application of the definition has involved over the past sixty years, especially among Palestinians, from that of groups like the Arab Higher Committee that were in fact of very little substance, into front groups with a very real infrastructure of workers and even sub-organization. The categories can be divided as followed:

• State Controlled: In beginning of the Arab-Israeli Wars, much of the opposition to the Jewish presence in British Mandate Palestine was in fact promoted by foreign parties, especially the states of Syria and Egypt. Syria's proxy, the irregular militia leader Fawzi al-Kaukji was one of the earliest examples. Part of this was due to the absence of homegrown Palestinian guerrilla leaders since the defeat of the 1936-39 Arab Revolt that left the legendary Izzedine al-Qassam dead and exiled Abdel Qader el-Husseini.Kaukji's force was a very disorganized predecessor to the movements that would come later.

In the 1950s, following their flight to Gaza, many Palestinian refugees were encouraged by Egypt to conduct cross-border raids into Israel, leading to the formation of the fedayoun, a loose term for marauding gangs from the Gaza Strip and to a lesser extent the Jordanian West Bank and Syria and Lebanon. The attacks usually targeted the civil population in Israel, particularly agricultural settlements, and led to numerous reprisals, including the notorious Qibya raid. The fedayoun were almost completely armed by their host states, with the strongest gangs based in Gaza, and were used as proxies by the royal government in Cairo and later by the Nasser regime that deposed it.

In 1964 Nasser went a step further by forming the first political leadership of the Palestinian refugees since the Arab Higher Committee, the Palestine Liberation Organization led by Dr. Ahmed Shukeiri. Dr. Shukeiri's group was intented to be an umbrella group that would unite all Palestinian guerrilla organizations, and in the process ally them to Nasser and his goal of pan-Arabism. The PLO was initially a complete failure. It had a very low military presence relative to the most powerful Palestinian faction, Fatah, which had been formed in 1958 in Kuwait by the exiled refugee and ex-fedayoun Yasser Arafat. Arafat, who quickly established bases of support in refugee camps in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon, refused to bow his head to Nasser, who was the first of many Arab dictators to attempt to assume control over the Palestinian cause.

In June 1967's Six Day War the credibility of Nasser and other Arab leaders like Jordan's King Hussein I was destroyed by the debacle that caused both the West Bank and Gaza to fall under Israeli occupation. That year Shukeiri was ousted and replaced by the equally ineffective Yahya Hammuda, who held the chairman's position until Arafat seized control of the PLO on February 2, 1969 after a power struggle with Nasser's loyalists. With Nasser himself in bad health and depression (he would die the following year of a heart attack, his vision of a pan-Arab state stretching from Morocco to Iraq as far away as ever), the PLO loosed itself from Egyptian domination, having the distinction of being one of the few front groups ever to become independent. In effect, the PLO accomplished its goal of becoming in the 1970s the umbrella group of almost all of the Palestinian guerrilla and terror organizations, though it is well noted that as an organization it was almost completely dominated by the Fatah movement, what would lead to the formation of the Rejection Front. The PLO military wing, the Palestine Liberation Army, never shook off the dominance of its host states Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, of and from 1969 most of the armed actions carried out by the PLO were in fact acts carried out by their member organizations such as Fatah and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

This did not mean, however, that Arab states retired from their efforts to exert influence on the Palestinian liberation movements. In 1966 the Syrian government formed as-Saiqa (the thunderbolt), which was ostensibly the Palestine branch of the Ba'ath movement. Led by the notoriously corrupt Zuheir Mohsen after Hafez al-Assad's 1970 Corrective Revolution, as-Saiqa fits the classic definition of a front group, as most of its actions were made on the premise of aiding the goals of Assad, and far less towards helping the Palestinians as a whole. During the 1975-90 Lebanese Civil War, as-Saiqa troops fought side by side with the Syrian Army against Fatah guerrillas whenever the Assad came to loggerheads with Arafat, which happened often. At the beginning of the war, when almost all of the Palestinian factions were aligned with the opposition to Lebanese President Camille Chamoun, as-Saiqa fought with the Syrians in order to prop up Chamoun's coalition of reactionary Christian militias. The group repeated this in 1985 during the War of the Camps when they fought side by side with Col. Said Muragha's Fatah-Intifada and Ahmad Jibril's PFLP-General Command against Arafat in the Lebanese refugee camps. The War of the Camps destroyed the credibility of as-Saiqa and many other Rejectionist Front groups, as many of them earned the reputation as spineless marionettes of Syria or other Arab states.

Iraq's Ba'ath leader President Saddam Hussein formed his own counterpart to as-Saiqa in 1969, calling it by the vague title Arab Liberation Front. Led initially by a Syrian Shia living in Baghdad, Zeid Heidar, the ALF never reached the size of as-Saiqa. Heidar earned the position mostly due to his excellent relations with Palestinian factions in Beirut. The ALF was mostly formed for internal purposes, namely assuring that the 40 thousand Palestinian refugees and militants in Iraq remained loyal to Saddam, and was never used by Saddam to attempt to seize the PLO out of Arafat's arms, as Assad tried to do using as-Saiqa. To a certain extent the ALF was merely an armed force that Saddam could trust not turn against him in the event of internal turmoil in Iraq. Indeed, the ALF was used by Saddam in his most of his military adventures, though on a small scale, and he never ended up turning them on their fellow Palestinians, as had occurred in Assad's War of the Camps. Other purposes of the group included forming a Palestinian group within the world Ba'ath movement in order to counter the Syrians (both states had rival Ba'ath movements active in Lebanese politics loyal to each one), and as a liaison with the PLO, particularly after the 1991 Persian Gulf War when it became inconvenient for the PLO to openly deal with the Saddam regime. In the 2000s the ALF assumed a new role during the Al-Aqsa Intifada by funneling Saddam's cash rewards to the Palestinian families of suicide bombers. The policy added fuel to the testimony that Saddam supported terrorism prior to the 2003 War in Iraq that toppled Saddam. Since the fall of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq the ALF has virtually vanished as its source of financial support no longer exists and it never had any true support outside of the refugee communities in Iraq.

Since the 1993 Oslo Accords, when the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) was formed in the West Bank and Gaza, Palestinian front organizations supported by Arab states have virtually disappeared, since PNA and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat has been regarded as the sole representative of the Palestinians.

•Terror Sub-Groups

Though almost all PLO and non-PLO groups within the Palestinian liberation movement have engaged in terror or guerrilla attacks, they vary in the extent and willingness by which they target civilians. In the 1960s the largest rift was over whether to limit operations to cross border raids as advocated by Fatah, or to extend the conflict to Europe and the West which was the strategy advocated by George Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Habash argued that a wave of terror attacks in Europe would increase international attention to the conflict, and perhaps lead to international pressure on Israel to recognize the Palestinian right to a state. Though Arafat initially refused to execute attacks in Europe, after the 1970 confrontation with Jordan known as Black September that led 10 thousand Palestinian refugees and militants in Jordan dead, Arafat vowed to repay King Hussein. He therefore ordered the formation of an external operations group called Black September, led by the young Ali Hassan Salameh, and which coordinated many activities with the PFLP. Black September carried out the murder of Jordanian Premier Wasfi al-Tell and the now legendary Munich Olympic Massacre (1972). Arafat therefore was able to accomplish what Habash had proposed, even though Fatah never acknowledged that Black September was in reality simply a sub-group of its own intelligence wing, Jihaz al-Razd. Thirty years later the Munich terror attack may still be the most famous crime in the conflict even though terror attacks committed by the Hamas and Islamic Jihad since the 1990s have since far surpassed it in carnage.

In the course of the First Intifadah, Fatah and other PLO splinter groups established gangs in the West Bank and Gaza in order to direct the struggle against the Military Authority. Among these was the Fatah Hawks. The Hawks were used by Fatah in order to harness the rage of the Arab youth in the West Bank and Gaza and transform it into a representative force of Yasser Arafat there. The strategy worked once again, and it was a major cause of Arafat's success in forcing Israel to the negotiating table at the Oslo Accords. The Hawks also gave the Israelis the impression that the exiled leadership of the PLO in Tunis was inseparable from the local stonethrowers in the Ramallah and Gaza, an impression that was not entirely true, as by then Hamas and the Islamic Jihad had begun to launch their own military mobilizations, and much of the local resistance had nothing to do with Arafat.

In the Second Intifada, better-known as the Al-Aqsa Intifada, almost every Palestinian political faction has its own military wing that takes the credit for its armed actions. They go as follows:

Fatah: the Tanzim militia, formed in 1994 and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, formed 2001, both by Marwan Barghouti. Al-Aqsa has been known to carry out suicide bombings on civilian targets throughout Israel. The Tanzim is known as a breeding ground for AAMB recruits, though its members have also carried out terror attacks. The AAMB is itself factionalized, and includes several sub-groups like the Abu Reish Brigade. There is also the special operations unit Force 17, formed in the 1970s as Arafat's bodyguard unit that has mostly become an instrument of protecting Fatah's statesmen from the very real risk of assassination, though its members have occasionally taken part in terror attacks. The Fatah Hawks still exist, though only in Gaza, and are considered a hard-line faction of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades.

Hamas: the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades named after the pre-state guerrilla leader, and formed in 1992 by Salah Shahade, Yahya Ayyash, Muhammad Deif, and other members of the Islamic Resistance Movement, Hamas. It has taken the initiative in conducting terror bombings against Israel since then. Since the kidnapping of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, it has been speculated that Hamas's exiled leader Khaled Meshal controls the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and the political leadership in Gaza led by Palestinian National Authority Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has no influence over Deif, or over the man who appears to be the real leader of the Brigades, Ahmad Jaberi.

Islamic Jihad: Al-Quds Brigades formed at an unknown juncture during the 1990s, this group is little more than the branch of the Islamic Jihad world organization that operates within the West Bank and Gaza. It can be said that Al-Quds is not really a front group, as Islamic Jihad has declared a war of no restraint against Israel, and unlike Hamas has no political wing, only a terror infrastructure. There are members of the Islamic Jihad who are not Al-Quds fighters, for example the man accused of being the leader of the group Dr. Sami al-Arian, who actually lives and worked in Florida as a professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa, and most of the group's personnel outside of the West Bank and Gaza. Since the group doesn't recognize the Palestinian National Authority or any of its institutions as a governing body, it has no political wing in Gaza, and therefore the Al-Quds Brigades is the only representative of it, and perhaps may be the largest wing of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad.

PFLP: On August 27, 2001 the movement's Secretary-General Abu Ali Mustapha was assassinated by the Israeli Air Force in a helicopter assault, and its military movement was renamed after him. The Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades have been responsible for a number of terror attacks, including the assassination of Israeli Minister of Tourism Rehavam Ze'evi, and the abortive attempt to associate ex-Chief Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The PFLP also named its political wing Martyr Abu Ali Mustapha in his honour in order to run in the 2006 Palestine Legislative Council elections, where it won 3 seats. Whereas the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades are considered indifferent to the orders of their political wing at times, the Abu Ali Mustapha Brigades usually maintain organizational discipline, as the PFLP is already a small group in relation to its rivals. Even though the PFLP's new secretary-general Ahmad Sa'adat is currently in prison, the various branches of the movement remain loyal to him, allowing him to surpass George Habash (who retired in 1999) as the only leader who has maintained unity in the PFLP.

•Crypto-terror groups and Civic Projects

Whereas all of the above examples have been in the category of armed or political groups, the vast majority of the front organizations formed by the Palestinian terror organizations never had any military function, and were instead used to funnel support from Palestinian civilians and other sympathizers through a sort of "middle man". Almost every PLO group and later Hamas and the Islamic Jihad formed groups such as these, mostly taking the form of educational and charity organizations, though also including commercial ventures and businesses. Examples of this are the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions, started in 1965 among exiles in Kuwait, that in fact was a front group for Fatah and still is dominated by Fatah in the West Bank, and the General Union of Palestine Students an organization of Palestinian students, many from refugee families studying abroad, which at one time was dominated by Fatah but today can be considered independent of any of the PLO factions, though many of its members support armed groups in the Palestinian Authority. Other front organizations include women's rights organizations, hospitals, and news outlets. Almost every Palestinian faction has a newspaper, although those of Fatah and Hamas are the most extensive.

To this day Hamas's non-military infrastructure is the largest of any of the terror groups in the Palestinian Authority. Hamas, unlike Fatah, started as a social welfare group within the parameters of the old Muslim Brotherhood and only later evolved into the terror group that it has become under the guidance of the late Sheikh Ahmad Yassin. Yassin helped find employment, healthcare, education, and community expression for Gaza's Palestinians during the 1980s, and was at the time encouraged by the Israelis as an alternative to the PLO. It was only later that they discovered he had been stockpiling arms. Until the formation of the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades most of the Hamas terror attacks were of unsophisticated, and were often limited to stabbing or simple shooting attacks. In this way, Hamas is far more similar to the Lebanese Islamist organization Hezbollah than it is to any of the other Palestinian factions. The civil organizations that supported Palestinians from the cradle to the grave also helped brainwash a generation of Palestinian children into willing martyrs. Under Yassin's guisdance, Hamas's civil wing subverted the Israeli civil administration and later Arafat's own Palestinian Authority institutions in Gaza and the West Bank. By having whole communities use their facilities instead of the PNA's, Hamas became the de facto government of many Palestinian citizens, and the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades their police instead of the Palestine Police. It was a situation that greatly aided Hamas in defeating Fatah in the 2005 Municipal Elections and 2006 Palestine Legislative Council Elections.

The fundraising angle of the civil organizations has been used for decades by the armed groups to recruit cash from individuals who did not want to be publicly associated with the PLO or Islamic terrorism. One of the masters of this was Dr. Sami al-Arian. Al-Arian, while working as a professor at the University of South Florida for decades formed numerous Muslim community organizations including the Arab Muslim Youth League, Tampa's Islamic Community Center, the [[Florida Islamic Academy]and other civic organizations in Florida. In reality, much of this was really a mondey-laundering network for the Palestinian section of the Islamic Jihad. Up until his conviction and sentencing to 19 months in prison on May 1, 2006, al-Arian had functioned as perhaps the most senior Islamic Jihad operative outside of the organization's base in Syria. His activities worry law enforcement authorities in the West because the Islamic Jihad has extremely close ties to Iran, and also because its father movement, which operates in Egypt, merged with Al-Qaeda in the 1990s, thereby posing the question of wheter the Palestinian Islamic Jihad is a proxy of Osama bin Laden.

Methodology

If observers are to study the affect of the front organizations on the Arab-Israeli Conflict, they will discover that these organizations always became, with or without the intentions of their masters, the foundation of the civil society that each one intended to form with the final victory over the Israelis. If that was the case with the civil organizations, the military fronts were formed for the opposite reason: open involvement in terror would damage the reputation of the parent group in the eyes of the international community. A front group could take credit for terrorist action, while the real leaders could plead uninvolvement. This can be seen in many of the terror organizations, often showing stark contradictions between armed groups and their civil leaders. The best example is Fatah, where Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades militants daily attempt to attack civilian targets in direct contradiction to Fatah and PNA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's rejection of such attacks. Some would argue that the actual control that Abbas has over Al-Aqsa is debatable, yet the plea of ignorance and non-involvement in terror has already proved ineffective when it comes to the Israeli side. When Marwan Barghouti, Al-Aqsa's leader, tried to hide behind his immunity as a member of the Palestine Legislative Council during his 2003-04 trial the tactic failed, and it was proven he was accomplice to five murders. In the al-Arian case it also was ineffective, as the professor was found guilty of complicity with the Islamic Jihad's terror bombings.

The other factor that has made front groups ineffective as shields for terror operatives has been Israel's targeting killings policy. Since the 1970s Israel has assassinated PLO, Hamas, and Jihad leaders it has considered too difficult to apprehend judicially. Ali Hassan Salameh, the ex-leader of Black September, was considered by many to be too high-ranking in the PLO to be assassinated, yet was killed by Israel in a 1979 car bombing in Beirut. In 2002's Operation Defensive Shield Israel even besieged PNA Chairman Yasser Arafat in his Ramallah compound, proving they were not afraid of his title. Therefore, the existence of front groups today has become little more than a Palestinian-employed legal obstacle that doesn't work in times of true confrontation with Israel. For example, the Israeli behaviour towards the Hamas political wing was far less aggressive during the January legislative elections than it became after Hamas took office in March 2006 and tensions rapidly escalated between the two governments.