Informers ‘Just Waiting Here to Die’ : Revolt: Palestinian collaborators are caught in the middle of the Mideast maelstrom. Talks hold little hope for them.

Occupied West Bank--”Peace talks?” the armed Palestinian informer in an Israeli army T-shirt repeated dismissively. “We are just waiting here to die.”

A dozen gaunt, embittered men seated around the edge of a small living room nodded in assent. For them, the peace talks convening in Madrid this week mean little.

These men are collaborators, Palestinians who have spied on their own people for Israel. Their dilemma and the problems they help create in the West Bank and Gaza Strip appear beyond the reach of diplomatic exchanges in a distant European capital.

“A Palestinian government or Israeli government, it will be all the same to us. We are of no use to either. So, they will get rid of us,” concluded the man in the T-shirt.

Palestinian nationalists are busily hunting down Palestinians they consider to be lackeys of Israel. The war on collaborators, which has also taken a toll on other victims as well, has become a main feature of the intifada , or Arab uprising against Israel rule.

The weekly death toll of Palestinians at the hands of Palestinians often exceeds the sum of Palestinian victims of Israeli suppression. Overall, in nearly four years of turmoil, Palestinians have killed about 400 of their own people; Israeli troops have slain about 800 Palestinians.

For now, the Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic secret police, and the army are systematically trying to protect their informants by pursuing Palestinians who harass or attack them. Yet, the collaborators take little satisfaction in the protection.

Last Friday, soldiers mistakenly shot two armed collaborators they thought were Palestinian rebels. One was killed, the other seriously wounded. No news of the incident appeared in the censored Israeli newspapers or broadcast media.

But the men of Fahma knew about it and were angry. The victims were two of their own, in the employ of the mukhabarat , Arabic for secret police. “We are waiting for a report from the Shin Bet on just what happened,” said an agitated collaborator named Adnan. “If the Israelis are also shooting us, then what do we do? We are lost?”

The collaborator war is part of a grim backdrop to the Madrid conference: harsh Israeli repression, factional battles among Palestinians, economic hardship and political confusion in the West Bank and Gaza.

Recently, an Israeli army officer was “removed from his post” for fatally shooting a 10-year-old boy. A Palestinian woman jailed for a minor stone-throwing incident was strangled by a fellow inmate who suspected her of being the lover of a collaborator. Activists from the Palestine Liberation Organization and Muslim nationalists engaged in pitched street battles in Nablus last week and tossed a homemade grenade at the nearby Israeli military compound.

In Jerusalem, Israeli settlers invade houses in Arab neighborhoods on the grounds that the places, in fact, belong to the government and have been handed over to them. No matter if there is a family sleeping inside--politicians from the prime minister’s ruling majority accompany the Israelis, and Israel’s Supreme Court has forbid the police to evict them.

Among Palestinians, there is hardly a more divisive issue than the festering question of collaborators. They are feared for their power to finger activists, making them targets either for arrest or for man hunts that often end in death. Yet attacks on collaborators have yet to free the Palestinians from prying eyes, while, at the same time, the violence has enlarged the cycle of vengeance within the Palestinian community.

In the early months of the intifada , when youthful stone-throwing rebels and demonstrators broke the Israeli monopoly on power in the occupied lands, many collaborators were simply driven from their towns and villages by threats. Former Palestinian prisoners, many of whom knew collaborators in jail, a main Shin Bet recruitment ground, led the drive to finger the informers.

The informer network was once said to number 1,500. Since 1988, about 300 have been given refuge within Israel itself.

One resident of Fahma, who called himself Hamed, remembers how in early 1988, nationalist youths in Nablus set his house afire. He has never returned. “They say you could repent in the mosque. This is a lie. If I had gone to the mosque, I would have had to leave my weapon outside. They would have killed me!” he said.

A key moment in the campaign against collaborators took place in February, 1988, when residents of Kabatiya, in the West Bank, lynched a notorious gunman who had opened fire on a crowd and killed a child. Since then, the attacks have snowballed and have included “executions” for such crimes as drugs and prostitution on the grounds that the Israelis can use blackmail of criminals to glean information.

Other offenses include selling land to the Israelis and taking bribes to grease the Israeli bureaucratic machinery.

Collaborators occasionally strike back. One group of armed men once imposed its own private curfew on Yabad. Others circulated on patrols with Shin Bet agents, who executed their enemies on the spot. Israeli officials downplayed such reports, claiming that it was all Palestinian propaganda and arguing that Palestinian-on-Palestinian killings reflect what they regard as the unbridled barbarity of the Arab enemy.

But on at least one occasion, the dirt has spilled into Israel. Two years ago, the biggest mass murder in Israel’s history cast the spotlight on Israel’s spy network.

An informer from the Gaza Strip named Mahmoud Khalibi, whose criminal record included robbery, drug dealing and pimping, fatally shot and strangled seven other petty criminals in Tel Aviv.

Haim Bar-Lev, then the police minister, acknowledged matter-of-factly that Khalibi was given permission to spend nights in Israel. Usually, Palestinians must return to the West Bank or Gaza by sunset. The permission was granted because Khalibi “helped the Shin Bet,” Bar-Lev said.

Khalibi’s neighbors in the Jabaliya refugee said he was recruited while serving time in jail. Once, while fleeing enraged Gaza residents, he fired a gun at them and fled to an Israeli army compound.

Fahma is an old military post built by Jordan, which ruled the West Bank from 1948 to 1967. The low, concrete bunkers and buildings now shelter scores of collaborators and their families, all of whom have been driven here by the violence of the intifada , with its proclaimed goal of “cleaning the Palestinian house” of traitors.

The camp is guarded by a small contingent of Israeli army troops. Residents still carry pistols and Uzi submachine guns supplied by their employer, but the atmosphere is one of fright.

“For sure, I spy for Israel,” said Adnan. “But what does that have to do with my wife? She cannot go shopping without being beaten.”

Some are quite open about their willingness to betray and especially to battle the PLO. Others claim to be reluctant victims of circumstance.

“I was in jail, and when I got out, I went to the PLO for money,” said a collaborator. “They wouldn’t give me any. So, I went to the Israelis. They did.”

Everyone laughed. He said he informed on PLO members in Janin the West Bank until driven away nearly four years ago.

“I was trained by the PLO in Kuwait for military operations,” chimed in another, who looked to be no older than 20 and claimed to have returned to the West Bank just last year. “The PLO ordered me to kill a man they said was a collaborator. But he wasn’t one, so I refused. Then, everyone said I was a collaborator!”

The possibility that the Madrid peace conference might produce results is looked at with ambivalence among the collaborators.

“I can never go back to my village,” said an elderly man from Yabad. “The intifada weakened the Israelis, and look what happened to us. If they leave, we will be finished.”

None thought that Israel would permit them to settle within its final borders.