Israel's Dark Arts Of Ensnaring Collaborators
By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
16 September,
2008
Countercurrents.org
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”.
“I assume that it is the standard interrogation that thousands
of other Palestinians undergo,” he noted after his release.
“They did not hit me, but I was placed in restraints and forced
to sit on a chair”, he said referring to the infamous “shabah”
stress position that becomes unbearably painful after a short period.
Keshta also had medication withheld.
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.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash
of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East”
(Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments
in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.
This article originally appeared in The National (www.thenational.ae),
published in Abu Dhabi.