MIDEAST: Palestinians Who Help the Israelis Kill

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Walid Batrawi

GAZA, May 10 2004 (IPS) - Israel’s assassination of top Palestinian military and political leaders could have been more difficult without the help of Palestinian informers. The issue of collaborators is becoming a daily debate within Palestinian society.

Israel’s assassination of top Palestinian military and political leaders could have been more difficult without the help of Palestinian informers. The issue of collaborators is becoming a daily debate within Palestinian society.

Hamas, which has been badly hit by these assassinations, blames the Palestinian Authority for not doing enough to "uproot collaborators from the Palestinian society." It said its military wing would "prosecute all those who collaborate with the Zionist entity."

Hamas said in a statement it considers collaborators an "essential factor behind the assassinations of the movement’s leaders, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi."

The Palestinian Authority (PA) called on Hamas not to act unilaterally against Palestinians collaborating with Israel. "No Palestinian faction has the right to claim that it would work on prosecuting collaborators alone," Colonel Rashid Abu-Shbak, head of the PA’s preventive security services told reporters.

"As long as there is a Palestinian Authority that is responsible for internal security, this authority should assume its responsibilities and arrest those collaborators and put them to justice," Abu-Shbak said.

Palestinian intelligence is dealing with these cases according to the law, he said in a statement. "We do not arrest any suspect without a legal warrant, and therefore no faction or party should take any steps in this regard, because the punishment should be fair and according to the law."

Israel seems to find it easy to recruit collaborators, but the PA finds it hard to locate them.

Among the cases on Abu Hasanen’s files is that of a 22-year old university student who says in his confession that "they (the Israeli intelligence) gave me 320 dollars a month and brought me two women to have sex with. They later presented me a with a video tape and threatened to show it to my family and friends if I didn’t give them information."

Pressured by this threat, the young man located Salah Shehadeh, one of Hamas’s top leaders and informed his contact person in the Israeli intelligence. "A short time afterwards I heard that Shehadeh was killed by an F-16 air strike," according to the recorded confession.

In another case, a father and his son confessed that they were involved in the first attempt to assassinate Rantisi on June 10 last year by informing the Israeli intelligence of his whereabouts minutes before Apache helicopters fired missiles at his car. Rantisi was injured. He was assassinated in another Israeli strike April 17 this year.

In Gaza, military wings from different factions have formed a "special squad for resisting collaborators" that has asked informers to repent "before the punishment begins."

A leader in the squad says that "the issue of collaborators is now open for all resistance movements to deal with; it is our duty to clean our society of those people who are committing crimes against their own people; they should be dealt with as traitors."

Many Palestinians in Gaza demand severe punishment for collaborators. "They should be arrested and deported to Israel," says a taxi driver. "Those collaborators are sick people," says a woman on a Gaza street. "They can’t be cured, and should be killed with no forgiveness."

Sociologist Magdi Malki says that taking extreme positions "is not the right way to deal with collaborators. This phenomenon is a social one that is negatively affecting the whole society. Collaborators are recruited due to social, economic and political problems and therefore rational solutions should be well studied and discussed before any actions are taken."

There are three different kinds of collaborators, Malki says.

"The first is the younger generation that is recruited easily and quickly as a result of random arrest campaigns conducted by the Israeli army, or by different kinds of sexual and financial blackmail," he told IPS.

The second category "is more dangerous because it involves some previous members of political factions who are in conflict with their parties and therefore they volunteer to cooperate with Israel."

But there is hidden danger from "those collaborators who do not take part in locating targets or informing about them, but are a damaging force that is rarely talked about because it does not involve collaborating for Israel only but other countries."

A way forward would be to "deal with each individual case without making a general prejudice," Malki says. "No collaborator is born to be so; therefore the Palestinian Authority and all factions should take into consideration the circumstances under which those people became collaborators." But he adds that "justice and the rule of law should be implemented."

Seeking justice and a fair trial for collaborators may not be easy because many never make it to court.

Mahmoud Al-Athem, 29, from Beit Reema village north-west of Ramallah was killed by his brother two weeks ago after he confessed in the village mosque that he had served as an informer since 1997. The military wing of the Fateh organisation, the Al-Aksa Martyrs Brigades, praised the brother and thanked the family.