Story of a Palestinian collaborator
Palestine, Culture, 2/21/1998

Nasri is his alias, or nom de guerre. His story tells a lot about how bad it is for Palestinians who become collaborators with the Israeli secret services, Mossad.

The was Nasri started his contacts with the Shin Bet was typical of many other collaborators. An "innocent chat", an offer to help or a request for aid are the most simple means of recruiting collaborators from within the Palestinian community.

During the seven-year Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation, at least 1,200 Palestinians were killed, almost half of them by fellow Palestinians who suspected they were collaborators with the Israeli military government. During those years of the intifada, between 1987 and 1994, many collaborators ran away from their villages and lived inside Israel. Some complained they were treated badly by their recruiters. Others looked for ways to assimilate with Israeli society.

In 1991, the Israeli military government issued orders to demolish a number of houses in Nasri's home village near Jenin. The houses were demolished, yet rebuilt by the owners who said they had no other choice but to build a place for them and for their families to stay. But the military government issued another order to demolish all those houses and Nasri went to seek help from the village Mukhtar (a community leader in Arab villages). The Mukhtar said he couldn't do much and suggested that Nasri go to another Mukhtar in the same village. "I never figured out that my visit to the Mukhtar would be my first step toward becoming a collaborator with the Israeli occupation," he said.

Nasri and the Mukhtar agreed to meet at the military government headquarters in Jenin. Nasri was there on time. The Mukhtar never showed up. Instead, Nasri met a soldier at the building and asked for his help to stop the demolition of his house. The soldier said he could not intervene in civil issues because he was from the Shin Bet (Hebrew acronym for the Israeli General Security Services). It was a bit strange that a man in Israel, any man, would introduce himself as a Shin Bet agent because Shin Bet staff and officers maintain covert life and activities and their identities are not published. The identity of the Shin Bet head was only recently made publishable in Israel. Yet, the short encounter between Nasri and the soldier ended with the former expressing readiness to collaborate with the Shin Bet in return for favors and services he would get back from the organization.

Nasri returned to his village and started to collect intelligence information on a number of people. Political activities, underground anti-Israel groupings of local residents in the village and general information of certain people were all part of the data Nasri was asked to collect and pass on to the Shin Bet through a liaison, the Mukhtar of a neighboring village who later escaped and sought refuge in the Mediterranean coastal city of Acre in Israel.

Nasri asked for the cancellation of the demolition orders but was told by his recruiters in the Shin Bet that all they could do was to freeze the implementation of the orders. He worked with the Shin Bet for some time and was given a special permit to go to Tel Aviv for work. In Tel Aviv, he worked for six months, during which time he met a number of collaborators and was shocked at the kind of life they had. "They had no control whatsoever. They carried out dirty actions both socially and culturally and I decided it was about time for me to return to my own people and stop all links with the Shin Bet," he said.

After the Palestinian National Authority was proclaimed in parts of the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, Nasri gave himself over to the Palestinian Security Services and confessed to his links with the Shin Bet. "I voluntarily told them everything I knew on the Shin Beth and the network of agents it had. They did not beat me and I was not tortured. I was held for two months during which time I disclosed everything I knew about the Shin Beth."

But Nasri's clean return did not last for long. After a quarrel in his village, he was summoned by the Palestinian police. His friends, as he said, advised him to run away for he could be put to death by the Palestinians because of his past. He ran away to Tel Aviv but again was deterred by actions of fellow collaborators and decided to distance himself from them. He went to an Arab city in northern Israel where his sister has been living for years after she got married.

His sister, he found out, was married to another collaborator who personally took part in faking land documents and was responsible for selling vast areas of Arab lands to Jewish settlers. He also found out that his sister had received a sum of US $100,000 in return for her signature on documents relevant to their mother's land. Nasri was furious to find that the property of his mother was illegally sold to Israelis and threatened to go to court, but he did not have enough documents to prove that the deals were fraudulent.

Nasri later obtained documents he needed to prove the land deals were all counterfeit. He returned to his home village, met with Palestinian security officers and explained to them all he had gone through. Now, he said, he is living peacefully in his home village with "a clean conscience" after he had finally distanced himself from the collaborators and returned to his patriotic field.

"I might have been lucky enough to survive all this ordeal and return home safely," said Nasri, "but I think luck is not always waiting at the first corner. We all need to be careful not to fall in traps of collaboration with the enemy because some of those traps are deadly."

Previous Stories:
  Israeli Mossad report on Amman Fiasco: background   (2/16/1998)
  Sheikh Yassin leads Hamas towards moderation   (1/31/1998)
  Battle over lands: blackmail, extortion and murder   (10/14/1997)

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