Lynching Signals Harsher Measures : Palestinians Cracking Down on Collaborators

When Mohammed al Ayed’s neighbors in Qabatiya lynched him this week and draped his body with a Palestinian flag, they sent a shudder through thousands of West Bank and Gaza Strip Arabs who cooperate with the Israeli authorities.

Ayed was killed after he opened fire with an Uzi submachine gun at hundreds of neighbors who had attacked his home, according to Palestinian and Israeli accounts. He killed a 4-year-old boy and wounded at least 13 other people before running out of ammunition.

Sources in Qabatiya, a West Bank farming town of about 10,000 people, said that Ayed, 41, was attacked because he was part of a vast network of Palestinian informers working for Shin Bet, the Israeli secret police, in the occupied territories. This assessment appears to have been confirmed by Ayed’s use of an Uzi.

“Those who carry any army-issue weapons are transferred from being considered not so good to being very bad,” Daoud Kuttab, a Palestinian journalist, said.

Shifting Stand

Informers are deemed to have crossed the line between acceptable cooperation with the Israelis and treasonous collaboration, but the boundary is fuzzier for other Palestinians. Also, the definition of what is politically acceptable in the Palestinian community and what is not is shifting as the unrest in the occupied territories enters its 12th week.

Attacks on Palestinians considered to be too close to the Israeli authorities are not new here, but they have tended to be sporadic, the work of a few enforcers working on behalf of a particular political group.

But since the present round of unrest began, in early December, they have become more of a community punishment, meted out by local activists to those who are seen as disloyal to what is, by all indications, a popular anti-Israeli uprising.

Security forces arrested more than 100 residents of Qabatiya on Thursday in connection with Ayed’s lynching. The homes of two people accused of taking part in his killing were destroyed as the army sealed off the village.

On days like Wednesday and Thursday this week, which were designated by the uprising’s underground leadership as general strike days to mark the arrival of Secretary of State George P. Shultz, only pharmacies and newspaper stands were expected to remain open. Any other merchant defying the ban risked retaliation.

More than 100,000 West Bank and Gaza Strip Palestinians work in Israel proper, and they too are expected to stay home on strike days. There have been numerous incidents in the last several weeks of commuter buses and taxis being set afire for operating in defiance of a general strike.

No Call to Refuse Work

So far, there has been no call for workers to refuse to work at all in Israel. That would have disastrous economic consequences. But underground leaflets circulated recently have urged Palestinians working in West Bank Jewish settlements to quit their jobs.

Palestinian nationalists have urged members of Israeli-appointed city and village councils to resign, and about a dozen in municipalities around Jerusalem have done so.

In addition, about 19,000 Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip work for the military government, the largest employer in the occupied areas. Nearly 11,000 of them work in the educational system as teachers, clerks and administrators. Israeli officers act as department heads in what the authorities prefer to call the “civil administration” of the territories; Palestinians fill the myriad other jobs required to provide services to the territories’ 1.4 million residents.

In the underdeveloped West Bank and Gaza economies, jobs in the military government are much coveted by Palestinians, and even the most anti-Israel of them have few complaints about it.

“The dividing line is that those who work in the civil administration are basically working for their own people,” the journalist Kuttab said. “They have the interests of their own population in mind.”

But there are definite limits to what is considered acceptable behavior, he said, and added, “A teacher is supposed to teach, not call the Israelis to say there is a demonstration under way, or to inform on who is demonstrating.”

A more problematic group is the 800 Palestinian policemen who patrol the West Bank and Gaza Strip along with Israeli security forces. The Palestinian policemen generally stay out of any clashes between Palestinian demonstrators and the army. Thirty-five of them in the Bethlehem area submitted their resignations a few years ago rather than obey orders to put down a protest.

Yet Arab policemen figured prominently on a list of about 100 names of alleged collaborators that was broadcast recently by Radio Jerusalem in Damascus.

Village Leagues Formed

In the early 1980s, the military authorities organized what were known as Village Leagues, made up of Palestinians considered friendly to Israel. The military gave the leagues protection and widespread power over the lives of ordinary villagers in the hope of establishing a cooperative local leadership in the West Bank.

The leagues are still recalled as the most public example of collaboration in the 20 years of Israeli rule in the territories. Israel Radio once reported that 200 members of the leagues were being given weapons training by the army.

Probably no one knows how many Palestinians have been bribed or coerced into informing on their friends and neighbors. An Israeli source with extensive security contacts said they number “in the thousands” and operate in virtually every school, neighborhood, village and refugee camp in the territories.

Israeli authorities say these informants have long been crucial to their effort, which has had considerable success, to break up Palestinian terrorist cells, often even before they can act. The fact that the unrest that began last December came as such a surprise to the government is considered evidence that it was indigenous and spontaneous, though some people have criticized what they say was an intelligence failure by the Shin Bet.

At Moments of Weakness

Informers are recruited mostly at moments of weakness, the Israeli source said, adding that “they need a favor from the authorities, or they were caught in a criminal act.” That makes them prime candidates for coercion.

A Bethlehem student said an attempt was made to recruit him when he applied for a visa to study abroad.

“This is a general policy,” the student said. “They ask everyone. Say they call in 2,000 people and only 1% agree. That’s still 20 collaborators.”

A restaurant worker from Hebron said the Shin Bet asked him to report on conversations he overheard among fellow employees and promised to release a relative of his who had recently been arrested if he cooperated. He refused, he said, and it led to more than two years of trouble for him. Among other things, he said, he was prevented from taking a driver’s license test, and his bride was refused a West Bank residence permit.

Sweetness and Threats

As described by a Jerusalem teacher, a routine Shin Bet interrogation is a curious mixture of sweetness and subtle threats. He said his interrogator quoted from the Koran and from Arabic proverbs, and he cited as an example: “Give us your eyes, and we will give you our hands.”

He said that at one point his interrogator feigned embarrassment as he listed some of the more famous accomplishments of Israeli intelligence in an effort to get him to join the team. And at the end of the interview, he said, the Shin Bet agent stood over him and tapped him lightly on the top of the head with his pen as he warned of the consequences if he should get involved in illegal political activity.

The teacher said that he rejected the approach and that several years later he was refused permission, normally routine, to cross the Allenby Bridge from the West Bank into Jordan.

It is a rule of thumb here that more than half of all Palestinian youths have spent some time in jail by the time they are 20, usually for throwing stones or for taking part in an illegal political demonstration. Many of them reportedly give information under psychological and physical pressure applied by their interrogators.

“Under torture, many people spill the beans on anyone they know,” a Palestinian source said. “But usually it’s a one-time thing rather than a commitment. The real problem is the people who get a salary as regular informers.”

Palestinians say the identities of some of these people are well known. One is said to run a rental agency in East Jerusalem. Certain villages and refugee camps are known as hotbeds of collaborators.

Increasingly, these people are shunned by their neighbors. There is a sort of scale of measures that communities take against collaborators, according to Palestinian sources. First they are warned, then they receive threatening notes. Next their car or some other personal property is vandalized, or they are cornered and beaten by masked youths.

Executions are rare. This is still very much a clan-oriented society, one Palestinian said, and to kill a collaborator would risk incurring the wrath of his relatives, possibly triggering a communal war.

Still, there are “extreme cases” like that of Mohammed al Ayed, the Palestinian said, and some people fear that his killing may lead to others, giving a new dimension to the unrest.

“This is the end for all people dealing with Israeli security,” a Qabatiya villager told journalists. “The people gave (Ayed) many chances to change, but he didn’t.”