‘Street Justice’ for Suspected Informers

Kheir Fahim Sultan’s past caught up with him just yards from his home here, when a man walked up behind him, shoved aside his 6-year-old son and pumped a bullet into his head. As Sultan crumpled to the ground, the gunman coolly shot him again, then fled.

Sultan was one of nearly a dozen Palestinians suspected of collaborating with Israel who have been killed by other Palestinians since late September, when the current uprising, or intifada, erupted in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The slayings have raised fears among Palestinians that their government is losing control of the street and that the upheaval against Israel may be turning in on itself, just as the first intifada did.

Of the 2,000 Palestinians killed during the 1987-93 intifada, as many as 900 were slain by fellow Palestinians. The killings left scars that have never healed.

Back then, militants said they carried out “street justice” against suspected informers because there was no Palestinian government in place. This time, they say the Palestinian Authority has not moved aggressively enough against collaborators.

In a society that considers itself at war with Israel, no one is more feared or hated than those who turn informer. Western governments and human rights organizations condemned the Palestinian Authority for executing two collaborators by firing squad in January, but most Palestinians applauded. They blame collaborators for helping the Israeli army assassinate militant leaders whom most Palestinians regard as heroes, and for destroying the fabric of society.

The two men put to death, Palestinians point out, were convicted of giving Israel information about family members who were later killed. One of the executed men, Majdi Makawi, was convicted of helping the Israelis kill his nephew, Jamal Abdel Razek, who was slain Nov. 22 in Gaza.

Razek’s mother appealed by letter to Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat to put her brother to death for helping the Israelis kill her son.

But the vigilante slayings worry Palestinians, who remember that the first intifada began with mass demonstrations against the Israeli occupation and deteriorated into internecine bloodletting.

Palestinian Authority officials say they are determined to prevent vigilante killings, but no one has been arrested for carrying one out. Some Palestinians even suspect members of the many security services of being involved in at least some slayings.

Families Left Behind Are Marked by Shame

What is certain is that the killings wreak havoc in a society already traumatized by five months of confrontation with the Israelis. Every suspected collaborator who is slain leaves behind a family forever marked by the shame of his alleged crime, a village where clan is divided against clan, a neighborhood where people fear that anything they say or do that appears suspicious may mark them for death.

“These killings are increasing the internal violence in Palestinian society,” said Bassam Eid, director of the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Arafat’s own Fatah movement and its militia, the Tanzim, “are killing people in revenge for the Israeli assassinations of activists. Fatah and the Tanzim, not the Palestinian Authority, are ruling the territories,” Eid said.

The 33-year-old Sultan left behind seven children ages 2 to 12 and a pregnant wife, who have no means of support. The factory that he built in a shop beneath his home, where five seamstresses sew dust covers for computers and other products, will close soon because no one in the family is capable of running it, said his widow, Firyal.

Villagers stay away from her house, she said, and her children are taunted. She worries that when they grow up, they will find no one to marry because of their father’s disgrace.

Neighborhood children “tell my 4-year-old son that his father was a spy,” she said. “He feels like an outcast. My 12-year-old daughter asks me what she should think about her father. I tell her to walk with her head held high, as her father did. But I think this will affect them for the rest of their lives.”

Crime Is Said to Have Been Being a Policeman

Sultan’s family insists that he did not spy. His crime, they say, seems to have been serving on the Israeli-run police force in the West Bank before the Palestinian Authority was established in 1994, the year after the Oslo peace accords were signed.

During the first intifada, most Palestinians who served on the Israeli police force quit after they were threatened by militants. Some who ignored the warnings were killed, but others were left unharmed. Under the Oslo accords and subsequent agreements, the Palestinian Authority promised not to harm people who “were in contact with the Israeli authorities” before 1993.

Sultan’s brothers have demanded that the Palestinian Authority investigate the slaying and arrest the shooter, who the family suspects was a member of the Palestinian security forces. If the Arafat government does not act, they said, they will track the man down and kill him.

A senior Palestinian intelligence official, who said that for security reasons he could not be quoted by name, insisted that the case is under investigation. He denied that Sultan was killed by anyone working for the security services.

But Sultan, the official said, “was doing some bad things. This guy opened fire on Palestinian demonstrators during the first intifada, when he was a policeman. He had a well-known record of being a collaborator.”

Sultan’s slaying was worrisome, the official said, because “it is our job to make sure that the law is enforced. We don’t support killing in this way. This man should have been arrested and put on trial.”

The recent wave of vigilante killings has so alarmed the Palestinian Authority, the intelligence official said, “that we have mobilized our forces to make sure that this doesn’t continue.”

If Arafat’s administration is unable to stop the killings, said Hussam Khader, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council from the Balata refugee camp near the West Bank city of Nablus, “it will open the gates of hell to a mess in our house.”

In a tribal-based society, he noted, each slaying raises the specter of a blood feud, with families of suspected collaborators seeking to cleanse their honor and exact revenge by killing someone from the family of the attacker.

Rizik Bani Odeh said it will take years to heal the rift opened within his family by cousin Allan Bani Odeh’s betrayal of another cousin, Ibrahim Bani Odeh, to the Israelis.

Ibrahim Bani Odeh, 31, was a leader of one of the military wings of the militant Hamas Islamic movement in Nablus. Allan was a 24-year-old who liked loud music and fast cars. The ideologically committed Ibrahim had little in common with his playboy cousin. But after the Palestinian Authority arrested Ibrahim on suspicion of carrying out attacks on Israelis, Allan began visiting him in the Palestinian Authority’s Nablus jail.

On Nov. 23, Allan lent his cousin a car to use on furlough from jail. A few minutes after Ibrahim borrowed the Subaru, the driver’s side headrest exploded, killing him instantly. He left behind a wife and five children.

When Allan’s brothers realized that the young playboy had fled to Israel, they began looking for him, determined that he would turn himself in and cleanse the family’s honor, Rizik said. Eventually, Allan’s brothers contacted him on his cell phone and convinced him to return, promising he would receive fair treatment.

He was arrested by the Palestinian Authority, quickly sentenced to death by a security court and publicly executed by firing squad Jan. 13 at police headquarters in Nablus. Rizik was one of several family members who witnessed the execution.

“I could not stand on my legs when I saw him being shot,” he said. “I went home, and I was very sad. I could not eat or sleep. I could not get this image out of my head. But my little daughter said: ‘Daddy, do not feel sad about Allan. Do not forget Ibrahim.’ ”

The Bani Odehs--a tribe of about 7,000--refused to let Allan’s brothers bury him in the tribal village, where Ibrahim was given a hero’s funeral. Allan eventually was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in Nablus.

Now, Rizik said, he is trying to persuade the family not to shun Allan’s wife and two small children. “They are babies, and they do not know what their father did,” he said. “They should not be punished for his crime.”

The fear of collaborators in its midst has twisted Palestinian society, Rizik said. “It forces you always to take care, to not spend time with people outside your immediate family. To always be fearful of others.”

Israel only acknowledged its use of collaborators after Palestinians began killing them during the first intifada. The Israelis insist that those who work for them come forward on their own, offering to trade information for pay.

Gideon Ezra, a member of the Israeli parliament and a former top official of the General Security Service, or the Shin Bet, said his nation must continue to recruit informers because “we can’t rely on the Palestinians to hunt down terrorists; we have to rely on ourselves.” Both Israelis and Palestinians should be grateful to informers, he said, “because some of them have saved Israeli lives and Arab lives too” by foiling terrorist attacks.

Groups Charge Israel Has Used Blackmail

But Palestinians and human rights organizations charge that during Israel’s long occupation of the territories captured during the 1967 Middle East War, it has often resorted to blackmail or other forms of pressure to enlist thousands of Palestinians to spy for it.

When militants began shooting, stabbing, strangling and burning to death suspected collaborators during the first intifada, thousands of informers were offered asylum inside Israel. They and their families today live in Arab towns and villages or in Jewish areas. They are generally treated as pariahs by their neighbors.

There is even a self-appointed Board of Collaborators that lobbies for greater protection, citizenship and better benefits for active and retired collaborators. The board has been agitating recently for Israel to do more to protect its informers from harm in Palestinian-controlled areas. A handful of collaborators even demonstrated recently outside the home of outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

Eid, the Palestinian human rights activist, said it is not surprising that Israel is still able to recruit collaborators seven years after the Palestinian Authority established itself in the West Bank and Gaza. Although Israel’s army no longer occupies most Palestinian towns and villages, the Israelis still control many aspects of the daily lives of the more than 3 million Palestinians in the territories.

“You need a permit to work in Israel,” said Eid, whose organization recently issued a report finding that the Palestinian Authority tortured collaborators it arrested and failed to give them fair trials. “You go to the checkpoint in the morning and a soldier confiscates your permit. You’re taken to the Israeli intelligence office at the checkpoint, and they say, ‘If you give us information, we’ll give you back your work permit.’ You’re living in a refugee camp, you have 10 children to support. How can you survive if you refuse to collaborate?”

Many times, the information provided is inconsequential, Eid said. The recent wave of killings seems to have been triggered, however, by Israel’s assassination of several high-level leaders of the current uprising. The leaders were tracked down by hit squads that Palestinians believe could only have pinpointed their movements through the aid of informers. The deaths alarmed militants and enraged Palestinians.

Now, the Palestinian intelligence officer said, Arafat’s government is determined to root out collaborators.

“We believe there are a limited number of people informing for the Israelis and that this phenomenon is about to be eradicated,” he said. “Some have turned themselves in to us, and they are being rehabilitated. Others are going on trial. We have very strict orders from Yasser Arafat himself that if anyone takes the law into his own hands and kills a collaborator, we must arrest him.”

But he understands the impulse to ignore Arafat’s orders: “If I learned that my brother was a collaborator, I would kill him myself.”