COLUMN ONE : Informers Want Israel to Pay Up : As peace talks continue, Palestinian collaborators demand rewards and relocation. But efforts to give them new lives are clouded by hostility from both Arabs and Jews.

The way Afif Khalil sees it, Israel owes him a lot for his contributions to state security. Starting in 1974, Khalil, a burly Palestinian who has worked as a building contractor and a taxi driver, began informing on his neighbors in Kfar Shufa, a northern West Bank village.

“I never killed anyone,” he says emphatically. “I was responsible for 10 or 20 arrests, but I never got anyone killed.”

His work for the Shin Bet--the Israeli secret police--earned him enough to build a large house, drive a nice car and live well. Authorities gave him a gun and the village’s only telephone line.

Khalil says his neighbors tolerated his ostensibly secret work--until the intifada , the Palestinian uprising, erupted in the territories in December, 1987.

Then, as nationalist fervor spread, life turned sour for Khalil and thousands of other collaborators, who helped Israel maintain its grip on the West Bank and Gaza Strip with relatively few troops by keeping security services informed of the actions and planned actions of would-be Palestinian guerrillas and other opponents of the occupation.

A total of 942 Palestinians were killed by other Palestinians in the territories between the start of the intifada and November, 1993, according to the Israeli army. The army estimates that as many as 40% of those casualties were collaborators, although their efforts were supposedly secret.

But now, as Israel speeds up negotiations with the Palestine Liberation Organization over redeploying Israeli troops in the West Bank and ceding much authority there to Palestinians, the question of what to do about Khalil and other collaborators has pushed its way onto the national agenda.

With increasing boldness, collaborators are raising what once was a taboo subject, publicly demanding resettlement inside Israel or abroad, pensions and compensation for lost property.

Several hundred families of collaborators have already been resettled across Israel, usually in towns with mixed Arab-Jewish populations. Until now, their predicaments were handled on a case-by-case basis by whichever branch of the Israeli bureaucracy originally hired them.

But both the government and the collaborators now feel that approach is no longer good enough.

Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin has established an interagency task force to devise a policy on how Israel should compensate and protect collaborators. He has said they deserve Israel’s gratitude.

But collaborators who already have resettled inside Israel’s pre-1967 borders have often met with protests and hostility. Both Jews and Arabs don’t appreciate those who, under Israeli protection, had so often so conspicuously bullied their neighbors, flouted local laws, lived beyond their means and divulged others’ secrets.

And now, Arabs and Jews who fear that collaborators may be moved into their communities are raising noisy objections to government relocation plans.

“These are the most difficult families, from the standpoint of socioeconomic issues,” said Sami Albo, head of the Lev Yafo neighborhood committee, which represents the largely Jewish part of Jaffa.

Jaffa, an ancient port city, was incorporated into Tel Aviv in the 1950s and has a mixed Jewish-Arab population that lives in uneasy coexistence.

Albo, who has lived in Jaffa since childhood, says the collaborators threaten to disrupt the delicate balance between Arabs and Jews: Arabs hate collaborators because they betrayed their people, and Jews fear them because they often have criminal records and remain armed even after relocation.

“They didn’t collaborate because of ideology,” Albo said. “They collaborated to solve their problems or for their own economic interests. When they come here, they continue to do all the negative things they did under the protection of the Establishment in the territories.

“They use and sell drugs, they engage in prostitution, they commit crimes,” he asserted.

Such sentiments have sparked public protests in Jaffa and made the collaborators’ fate a bitter point of dispute between Israel and the PLO.

Rabin has linked the release of the remaining 4,000 Palestinians in Israeli jails to the Palestinian Authority’s issuing a blanket pardon for all collaborators. The authority has rejected any such linkage.

Palestinian officials acknowledge that they have yet to decide what their policy should be--whether collaborators should be rehabilitated or punished for past offenses. “This issue is still very much under discussion within the government,” said Intisar Wazir, social affairs minister for the Palestinian Authority.

Khalil, who now lives with his wife and eight children in a three-bedroom apartment on a decrepit commercial street of Jaffa, accuses the Israeli government of acting in bad faith toward the collaborators. He acknowledges that the Shin Bet gave him the apartment rent-free but contends it was so dilapidated that he had to spend thousands of dollars to refurbish it. The agency also helped him find a job as a bus driver, but Khalil complains that the pay is too low to support his family.

“My children don’t have shoes for the winter, they don’t have books for school,” Khalil complained. He said he earns about one-quarter of the pay he earned in the West Bank.

On Sept. 10, he protested in front of the prime minister’s residence in Jerusalem, demanding more money for himself and a clear policy toward compensating all collaborators.

“The Shin Bet is not keeping its promises, and that’s not good,” said Khalil, who wants to contact other collaborators and form an organization that can “put strong pressure on the Shin Bet.”

The Israeli government has seemed surprised that the relocation is causing such problems. Authorities, reluctant to discuss collaborators publicly, decline to say exactly how many have been relocated but insist that most have quietly settled into their new homes.

There have been dramatic exceptions: In one of the more gruesome attacks, a well-known collaborator in Kabatiya, in the West Bank, was killed after hundreds of villagers laid siege to his house for several hours, finally breaking in to stab him to death. The man had used his telephone to frantically call the Israeli army for help, but no one arrived until after his killing. Soldiers found his body hanging from a lamppost.

Hundreds of other collaborator families have resettled in Israeli towns since the start of the intifada.

The Shin Bet hoped that relocated families would blend in with their new urban neighbors. Jaffa was a favored spot because it is divided into two neighborhoods, one mostly Jewish, the other mostly Arab. Collaborators were moved into the relative safety of the mostly Jewish neighborhood but had easy access to the mosques and schools in the mostly Arab neighborhood.

But as the number in Jaffa rose to an estimated 80 families in the past year, the security services discovered that they had badly miscalculated the collaborators’ ability to adapt to their new surroundings. Most were uneducated people from West Bank villages. They have little in common with the urban Palestinians of Jaffa and soon found themselves treated as social and political pariahs.

“It is very easy to know them, because here in Jaffa, the Palestinians are like a big family,” said Kosai Kabaha, headmaster of Achava Elementary School.

Achava, one of two Jaffa elementary schools for Palestinians, has 29 children of collaborators attending classes, Kabaha said.

“The majority of those families are not intellectuals,” Kabaha said. “They were on the margins of society. They have hard psychological and social problems. They do not speak Hebrew.” (Hebrew is a required language in all Israeli schools, whether Jewish or Arab, but in the West Bank, it was never taught as part of the regular curriculum.)

In August, outrage inspired Jaffa’s first joint Jewish-Arab rally--demanding that no more collaborators be resettled in the city.

“Sending the collaborators here is solving one problem by creating another,” said Mikhail Roe’e, a Tel Aviv city councilman who lives in Jaffa and holds the cultural and economic portfolio for the community on the council.

Roe’e says that Jaffa, long a neglected enclave, is poised to take off economically and socially. Both Jews and Arabs see collaborators as threatening the neighborhood’s chance to better itself.

“The Shin Bet is building a time bomb inside Jaffa. If they move hundreds more collaborators here, there will be riots in the streets,” Roe’e predicted.

But the trickle of collaborators into pre-1967 Israel threatens to grow to a flood once the PLO extends its authority throughout the West Bank, at least one Israeli human rights group warns.

B’tzelem, which monitors the territories, estimates that “the number of collaborators and their families in the territories totals between 30,000 and 50,000 people,” according to a report on collaborators it issued in January. Security sources say the figure is much lower--possibly several thousand.

Whatever the number, the Shin Bet is under pressure from Israeli communities to come up with a solution other than resettlement in Israeli towns.

“Why does the Shin Bet insist on moving these people to disadvantaged neighborhoods?” asked Avi Steinmetz, deputy director general of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality. “Why aren’t collaborators taken to Ramat Aviv, or the kibbutzim ?” Steinmetz asked, referring to a wealthy community in the coastal plain and the nation’s collective farming system.

Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ronni Milo appointed Steinmetz to negotiate with the Shin Bet about collaborators after one relocated man killed a Jewish resident of Shapira, a poor neighborhood of south Tel Aviv. The collaborator told authorities he killed his neighbor in the hopes the act would rehabilitate him in the eyes of fellow villagers.

Steinmetz and other municipal officials are urging the Shin Bet to stop sending collaborators to their communities and to build them a village of their own, inside the pre-1967 borders. “That would give them opportunities and structures to support them,” Steinmetz argued. “These people helped the state of Israel. They deserve something.”

“That idea is being studied,” said Oded Ben-Ami, Rabin’s spokesman on security issues. “But the Shin Bet does not want to stigmatize these people by putting them all in one village that everyone would know as the collaborator village. The hope is that, eventually, the children of these people will be rehabilitated and lead normal lives.”

That goal seems remote now as Israel struggles to clean up some of the human mess its 27-year occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip left behind.

The government continues to hope that the Palestinian Authority will ease its dilemma by granting a general pardon.

“The government sees it as a litmus test of sorts,” one senior security source said. “If the Palestinian Authority really can pardon these people, it means that we’ve put the past behind us and are ready to look to the future. If they insist on hounding people for what they did 20 years ago or 10 years ago, it means that they have not made the switch from a mood of fighting Israel to a mood of making real peace.”