Israel’s enduring use of Palestinian collaborators to entrench
the occupation and destroy Palestinian resistance was once the great
unmentionable of the Middle East conflict.
When the subject was dealt with by the international and local
media, it was solely in the context of the failings of the Palestinian legal
system, which allowed the summary execution of collaborators by lynch mobs and
kangaroo courts.
That is beginning to change with a trickle of reports indicating
the extent of Israel’s use of collaborators and the unwholesome techniques it
uses to recruit them. “Co-operation”, it has become clearer, is the very
backbone of Israel’s success in maintaining its occupation of the West Bank and
Gaza Strip.
Collaboration comes in various guises, including land dealers,
who buy Palestinian-owned land to sell it to settlers or the Israeli government;
armed agents who assist Israeli soldiers in raids; and infiltrators into the
national organisations and their armed wings who foil resistance operations.
But the foundation of the collaboration system is the low-level
informant, who passes on the titbits of information about neighbours and
community leaders on which Israel’s system of control depends.
Recent reports in the Israeli media, for example, suggest that
the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, far from reducing the opportunities for
collaboration, may actually have increased them. The current siege of the Strip
– in which Israel effectively governs all movement in and out of Gaza – has
provided an ideal point of leverage for encouraging collusion.
Masterminding this strategy is the Israeli secret police, the
Shin Bet, which has recently turned its attention to sick Gazans and their
relatives who need to leave the Strip. With hospitals and medicines in short
supply, some patients have little hope of recovery without treatment abroad or
in Israel.
According to the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights,
the Shin Bet is exploiting the distress of these families to pressure them to
agree to collaborate in return for an exit permit.
Last month, the group released details of 32 cases in which sick
Gazans admitted they were denied permits after refusing to become informants.
One is Shaban Abu Obeid, 38, whose pacemaker was installed at an
Israeli hospital and needs intermittent maintenance by Israeli doctors. Another,
Bassam Waheidi, 28, has gone blind in one eye after he refused to co-operate and
was denied a permit.
But these cases are only the tip of an enormous iceberg. Those
Palestinians who refuse to collaborate have every interest in making their
problems public. By contrast, those who agree to turn informant have no such
interest.
As with other occupation regimes, Israel has long relied on the
most traditional way of recruiting collaborators: torture. While a decision by
the Israeli Supreme Court in 1999 banned torture, the evidence suggests the Shin
Bet simply ignored the ruling.
Two Israeli human rights groups, B’Tselem and Hamoked, found last
year that seven “special” interrogation methods amounting to torture are still
being regularly employed, including beatings, painful binding, back bending,
body stretching and prolonged sleep deprivation.
Detention provides other opportunities for recruitment. In the
past 17 years alone, 150,000 Palestinians have been prosecuted by the military
regime. According to the Israeli group Yesh Din, 95 per cent of these trials end
in plea bargains, offering yet another chance to persuade a detainee to turn
informant in return for a reduced sentence.
Cell-sharing in Israel’s prison system, as Salah Abdel Jawwad, a
Ramallah-based political scientist, has observed, is also the perfect
environment in which the Shin Bet can collect data not only about the detainee
but also about the wider society from which he or she is drawn.
With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians having passed through
its prisons since 1967, Israel has been able “to control the population from an
early stage”, Mr Abdel Jawwad said, “particularly because it is able to identify
those who are the potential future leaders of the society.”
An example of the use of pressure during detention emerged last
week when a gag order was lifted on the case of Hamed Keshta, 33, from Gaza. A
translator for news agencies and the European Union, he was arrested in July
when he tried to use a permit to cross the border into Israel for a meeting with
his EU employers.
Mr Keshta said he was taken into detention and offered the chance
to turn collaborator. When he refused, interrogations by the Shin Bet “began in
earnest”, the Haaretz newspaper reported. He was held for a month, accused of
serious charges including “security violations” and conspiring to commit “a
crime against state security”.
For decades, the occupation has imposed a system of absolute
control on the lives of Palestinians that requires them to apply for permits
either from the military regime ruling over them, known misleadingly as the
Civil Administration, or from the Shin Bet.
Most Palestinians need a permit to carry out such essential daily
tasks as building or altering a home; passing through a checkpoint to visit a
relative or reach a hospital; passing through a gate in Israel’s separation wall
to farm their land; driving a taxi; receiving import or export licences; leaving
the occupied territories, including for business; visiting a relative in prison;
winning residence for a loved one; and so on.
There are few Palestinians who have not needed such a “favour”
from the military authorities at some point, either for themselves or someone
they know. And it is at this point that pressure can be exerted. In her book
Sharon and My Mother-in-Law, Suad Amiry describes this process eloquently. In
return for help or a permit, a small favour is given by the occupation regime.
Once taken, the recipient’s integrity is compromised and slowly greater demands
are made.
It is this gentle ensnaring of large sections of the Palestinian
population – together with open threats of physical violence to smaller sections
of the population – that ensure collaboration with the occupation is endemic.
This, as Israel well understands, creates an environment that frustrates
successful resistance, which requires organisation, co-operation and
intelligence-sharing between armed factions. As soon as the circle widens beyond
a few individuals, one of them is likely to be an informant.
The result can be seen in the dismal failure of most armed acts
of resistance, as well as the ease with which Israel picks off Palestinian
leaders it “targets” for execution.
Mr Abdel Jawwad calls this approach “psychological warfare”
against Palestinians, who are made to believe that their society is “weak,
sickly and composed of untrustworthy characters”.
In short, it encourages social fragmentation in which
Palestinians come to believe that it is better to stab their neighbour in the
back before they get stabbed themselves.
