DISSIDENTS everywhere pay a price for their courage. Many have paid the ultimate price. No one can better understand what such courage entails - what it means to resist repression and state terror, notwithstanding the risk of persecution or prison or worse - than a fellow dissident. Which is why Ida Nudel has taken up the cause of Imad Sa'ad.

Nudel, 77, is a famous former refusenik who battled the Soviet Union for 16 years - four of them from exile in Siberia - for the right to immigrate to Israel, which Moscow finally granted in 1987. Sa'ad, 25, is a Palestinian policeman who was sentenced to death by a Palestinian Authority court in Hebron last week. His crime: alerting Israeli authorities to the whereabouts of four Palestinian terrorists, who were subsequently killed by Israeli forces.

In assisting Israeli counterterrorism, Sa'ad may have saved scores of innocent lives. For doing so, he was charged with "collaboration," and will face a firing squad unless international pressure forces Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, to commute his sentence. Or unless Israel, as Nudel urges in a letter to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, "launch[es] a rescue operation to extract the prisoner from his cell."

Hundreds of Palestinian dissidents have been murdered through the years as "collaborators." During the intifadah of the late 1980s, so many Palestinians were butchered by fellow Palestinians that the internecine violence came to be called the "intrafadah."...