Aiding Israel Can Prove Deadly : A Life of Betrayal: Danger Stalks Arab Collaborators

“When you stop giving milk, they throw you away,” M. said as he contemplated his plight as a petty informer in danger. “My friends in the security forces haven’t helped me at all. I’m burned.”

M., an Arab from the village of Silwan near Jerusalem, is on the run. Branded as a collaborator, he believes he is being pursued by three Palestinian Muslim extremists who want to kill him. He cannot return to his home, where his family and neighbors condemn him as a traitor.

Without support from the police, he has taken refuge here in Kiryat Arba, the most militant of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank. But he wants to quit his double life and convert to Judaism, become Israeli in body and soul, and change his name and the names of his seven children to Hebrew versions.

“I do not feel Arab anymore,” M. said as he adjusted his kippa , the traditional Jewish skullcap, worn at a tilt on his head.

M.’s story opens a rare window onto the seamy world of collaboration, a subject of deadly significance these days in Israel, where informers in the service of the Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence service, are at the center of military efforts to put down the Arab uprising in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. Palestinians have responded by undertaking a campaign of vengeance against suspected collaborators.

Hardly a day passes without a report of a brutal attack by an Arab on another Arab accused of betraying the Palestinian national cause. Suspected informers have been shot in hospitals, stabbed in the street, beaten by masked gangs, hung from meat hooks, thrown dead onto trash heaps, dismembered and mutilated. They have had their bones broken, their cars set afire, their homes sacked.

Nationalist activists call these assaults “cleaning the Palestinian household.” As Palestinians see it, collaborators have sold out to an alien power. The turncoats inform on neighborhood activities in return for money and privilege--a permit to build a house or acquire land, rights to water, permission to travel. They act as intermediaries between Palestinians and the Israeli government, greasing the bureaucratic machinery.

Vulnerable to Blackmail

Disdainful Palestinians insist that many collaborators have criminal records and are thus vulnerable to Israeli blackmail to keep prostitutes on the streets and hashish on the market. Worst of all, in the eyes of some Palestinians, the collaborators arrange deals that give away villages’ communal land, which is growing scarcer and scarcer.

Israeli officials say these charges amount to slander against “peace-loving Arabs.” The victims, they say, are guilty only of wanting to live in harmony with their Jewish neighbors and of rejecting the uncompromising rhetoric of anti-Israeli die-hards. Left to their own devices, they say, these peace-loving Arabs would gladly accept Israel’s offer of self-rule and get on with their lives.

The use of collaborators has been an open secret since the founding of modern Israel in 1948. Initially, informers were of paramount importance in intelligence work. They let Israel know what was going on across the border in the West Bank, which then belonged to Jordan, and the Gaza Strip, which was under Egyptian control.

Petty Informers

Contacts took place at border points, where information was passed secretly from Arab to Israeli. After the Six-Day War of 1967, in which Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the network expanded to about 1,500 individuals. Petty informers who spied on their neighbors’ political activity and business dealings were derisively called “shtinkers” by the Israelis.

Throughout the years, Israel has needed to keep a closer eye on West Bank political trends. Who sympathized with the Palestine Liberation Organization? With Jordan? With Syria?

Israel also began to buy up land, and there were widespread reports of collaborators making money by signing forged contracts.

When the Arab uprising began in December, 1987, the drawbacks of relying on informers became evident. Israeli officials admit that the popular revolt was unexpected; years of investment in a spy network had proved next to fruitless. At the same time, the need for information from the occupied lands multiplied.

Problems quickly arose. Many of the informers were already well known to their neighbors. They were ostracized, threatened and eventually attacked. Some made dramatic confessions at mosques. Others were driven off. More than 60 have been killed. The well of information was drying up.

Threat of Revenge

Israeli military officials threatened to avenge attacks on informers and began to carry out manhunts of Palestinian activists suspected of leading attacks on collaborators. Some informers fled into Israel for protection, while others took refuge on army bases and in police stations. Still others, like M., were left to fend for themselves because they were not considered important enough to protect.

“Suddenly, everyone pretended not to know me,” M. said, recalling visits to his police contacts for help.

M.’s troubles began 10 years ago, when he was working for the Jerusalem police. In broad daylight he nabbed a purse snatcher in the Old City and turned him over to the police. Immediately, M. became the target of threats.

“I was just helping to keep order,” he said. “I don’t feel I was some sort of traitor.”

He said a stipend from the police augmented the small salary he received as a guard at a Jerusalem hospital.

One day, he was lifting weights at an Arab health club, where he was seen by a Muslim cleric. When M. left, the cleric switched a light on and off. It was a signal to assassins, he said.

At least two gunmen followed M. up a street. He noticed them and tried to run away. Someone fired a shot, and M. was hit in the stomach. A resident answered his pleas for help and took him to a hospital. M. survived multiple wounds from a fragmentation bullet. The scars mark his belly in spirals.

He was haunted by the shooting, afraid the assassins would try again. His mind was put to rest when, months later, the police called him and told him the gunmen were in custody. They belonged to a militant vigilante group called Islamic Sword. M. testified against them and they were sentenced to life in prison.

“They begged me for mercy,” he said. “But I couldn’t sleep while they were at large.”

In 1985, Israel released about 1,200 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the return of three Israeli soldiers held in Lebanon. Among them were the gunmen of the Islamic Sword.

M. had gone back to informing, though he had little to offer because everyone knew he worked for the Israelis. One day, while M. was carrying out undercover watch duty near the Old City in Jerusalem, he encountered one of the bearded gunmen. The man publicly swore to Allah that he would kill M.

Meanwhile, reports of collaborator executions began to increase. M. grew fearful and went to the police for help. They told him they could do nothing.

Two months ago, M. was walking past the Damascus Gate, the door of the Old City that leads directly into Arab East Jerusalem. Although he had grown a scruffy beard and wore his kippa , someone recognized him.

“Luckily, there was a police van nearby and I ran to it,” he said. “Otherwise, I could have been attacked.”

The incident frightened him.

M., who is 31, had heard that residents of Kiryat Arba had taken an interest in the fate of collaborators, and he took refuge there. He is studying the Bible and hoping to convert.

“I go to see the rabbis,” he said. “They tell me to study more. They think I am not sincere.”

M. lives with his family in an apartment supplied by a resident of Kiryat Arba. It is bare except for a few inexpensive decorations. One, a heart with outstretched arms, bears the inscription, “I love you this much.”

His oldest son also wears a kippa , speaks Hebrew and plays with Jewish children. The others, and his wife, speak only Arabic.

Kiryat Arba stands on the fringe of Hebron, a Muslim city in the southern part of the West Bank, and has been the scene of numerous clashes with Arabs living in surrounding neighborhoods. The Israelis there consider themselves in the vanguard of Jewish settlement and look on the Arabs as usurpers in a land promised to the Jews by the Bible.

Recently, Kiryat Arba militants have campaigned in favor of protection for collaborators. In Friday’s issue of the newspaper Haaretz, settlement leader Naom Arnon was quoted as saying: “We absorb them because they are in danger. They were in danger because of connections with Israel, and the security organs did not take responsibility for them.”

Gush Emunim, a West Bank settler movement, has formed a group called Hand for a Friend to rescue collaborators. Gush Emunim has taken in three families in Kiryat Arba and several others elsewhere.

One family of refuge seekers from a village near Ramallah arrived a month ago. All 13 members of the family, including five children, are trying to convert to Judaism.

The family was suspicious of a reporter who visited them and said their rabbi had forbidden them to talk. Haaretz said the family had been driven from their village because of accusations that they cooperated with Israeli authorities. One of the young male members of the family confided: “This is a secret matter. I work for the Shin Bet.”

Another told The Times: “Arabs who lived here were nothing when Jordan ruled. We don’t want to be like the rest of the Arab world and live under a dictatorship. God willing, Israel will occupy all the Arab states.”

He said that by converting to Judaism they will gain an added measure of protection.

“Now when I walk into Hebron no one bothers me,” he said. “They know where I live and there would be trouble if they harmed me.”

M. called on the family to share his religious lessons. He has taken on the responsibility of helping them prepare for conversion, and he gave them a gold paperback book of Talmudic studies. Some of the sons could read Hebrew, but the father and children stared at the books blankly.