The Collaborator

 By: GERSHOM GORENBERG

Times News

M. lives in a one-bedroom apartment on the main street of an Israeli town. Square, graceless apartment blocks covered in exhaust-stained stucco, their windows shuttered against the Levantine sun, stand above a supermarket, a hamburger joint and a booth selling lottery tickets, all buffeted by the growls of buses. It is a place whose only character is that it is indistinguishable from dozens of other Israeli main streets built in haste. As a setting for an espionage story, it belongs not to an airport thriller but to a Graham Greene tale, one in which a decent man makes one apparently sensible choice and finds himself in a grim labyrinth. M. is that man.

M. is Palestinian, but speaks Hebrew with only a hint of his native Arabic. Even when indoors, he wears a pair of wraparound sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, a standard Israeli affectation. He joined Israeli society years ago, without realizing it, when he was recruited by Israel's Shin Bet security service to provide information about other Palestinians. On the surface, he has learned to fit in Israel. But on a deeper level, he is a displaced person, a casualty of a long war, a man whose peculiar wound is the amputation of a place to belong to.

Our meeting was arranged by the Security Administration for Assistance (S.A.A.), a wing of the Shin Bet set up in 1994 after the signing of the first Oslo accord to help Palestinian informers leave the West Bank and rebuild their lives inside Israel. The condition set by his handlers was that M. would be identified by no more than one initial. Palestinian society sees him as a traitor, and his family remains in danger. His wife and children still live in the northern West Bank village where M. grew up and lived until a dozen years ago, when parties unknown discovered that he was collaborating with Israel.

The Shin Bet has been the main agency responsible for gathering intelligence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip since Israel's conquest of those areas in 1967. For security officials, recruiting Palestinian informers is an essential tool. Eighty percent of all attempted terror attacks, according to a spokesman for the Israel Defense Forces, are prevented on the basis of intelligence. Much of it comes from informers.

The S.A.A. refused to let M. answer questions about what information he passed on to Israeli intelligence or how he had gathered it. So before I met with M., I spoke with Roy Politi, who spent several years in the occupied territories as an Israeli Police operative, working closely with Shin Bet. He recently published ''Rabbits on the Roof,'' a novel written in Hebrew about working with collaborators. As Polity explained to me, the first meeting between an operative and a potential informer resembles a chess game in which one side has three queens and the other is playing only with pawns. The operative has been chosen from among the best and the brightest and has been intensively trained. From other sources, he is likely to know a great deal already about the man in the room with him. The target, on the other hand, is very likely to know little about the operative.

While the Shin Bet will say nothing about how it conducts its covert battle against terror groups, published (and censored) testimony by ex-officials, along with Palestinian human rights reports, creates an outline of how the agency has recruited and run collaborators over the years. In the best case, the operative who is meeting a prospective informer can provide something the target wants -- such as money. One ex-informer, recounting to me his decision to work with the Shin Bet at the beginning of the Israeli occupation, stated bluntly that money was his motive: ''I came from hunger. You see bread in front of you. You're not going to take it?'' It's often not much bread. Yaakov Perry, who headed the Shin Bet from 1988 to 1995, notes in his autobiography, ''Strike First,'' that payments to informers are necessarily small, lest ''sudden riches arouse suspicion.''

Another form of payoff has been the Israeli-issued permits needed by residents of the occupied territories -- a permit to work or do business in Israel or a ''family reunification'' permit, allowing a Jordanian-born wife, say, to join her husband in the West Bank. In one case Perry describes, a Palestinian man sought a permit for his wife to receive gynecological treatment at the Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem; Perry, then a young operative, offered to secure the permit if the man would sign up as an informer.

Business contracts have provided another lever, says Bassem Eid, head of the East Jerusalem-based Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group, which condemns Israeli use of informers as a violation of human rights and international law. ''The [Israeli] Civil Administration decides to pave a road,'' Eid says. ''A Palestinian businessman applies to get the contract. It's worth millions of shekels. Some will collaborate to get access.''

An operative can also play on the rivalries that fragment Palestinian society, exploiting the gaps between ''the Dehaishe refugee camp and the people with the big houses next to it,'' Polity says, ''or between Hamas and the secularists.'' The agent will try to convince the potential Palestinian recruit that by collaborating, he will be doing the right thing for his own people. Indeed, another ex-informer said that he agreed to work with the Shin Bet because he witnessed a bloody grenade attack by Palestinians against Israeli civilians. ''If you want to carry out attacks, get soldiers,'' the man said. ''Not the civilians. That's against religion and law.''

Israel has also used stronger inducements, Eid says, like offering a deal to someone arrested as a drug pusher or as a car thief: ''We'll close the file if you become a collaborator.' Most will accept.'' Palestinians have also charged that Israeli recruiters use sexual blackmail, but confirmation is hard to come by. There is one known case of Shin Bet's using sexual blackmail, but it was against Jewish terrorists. In the early 80's, the agency was hunting Israeli extremists who had set bombs in the cars of two West Bank mayors and the garage of a third. The investigation was going nowhere when Shin Bet investigators discovered that a settler known for extreme views had been having an affair. They arrested him, took him to a Jerusalem hotel room and showed him a video, taken in the same room, of him in the act with his lover. They threatened to show his wife the video unless he told everything he knew about the bombing. (The man refused.) Presumably, the agency has used similar methods on Palestinians.

Once someone has given Israel a bit of information, a canny operative can force him to provide more information by threatening to unmask him as an informer. That is one purpose of paying a source, Perry says. ''The money . . . incriminates him, so that turning back becomes much harder for him, if not impossible.''

Recruiting an activist who is already deep within a hostile Palestinian organization provides his controllers with the quickest payoff. But Perry's account shows that outsiders also have value. An informer meeting his controller -- at a secret spot in the occupied territories or in an apartment the agency has rented inside Israel for the purpose -- can bring tips about what is happening in a village or refugee camp: who, for instance, has taken to meeting whom under the fig tree at the edge of town. If an informer usually travels to work in a neighbor's van, Perry says, his controller may tell him to switch to the bus, so he can ''stop off on the way home at a crowded coffee house and keep an ear out for information that moves around such places.''

M. was an adolescent when Israel conquered the West Bank in 1967. His family, like nearly everyone in his village, fled to the mountains before the Jews arrived. After three weeks of sleeping under trees, they returned to the village. Their neighbors, they saw, had gone home and had not been slaughtered. Every day, one or two army jeeps passed through the village. At first, children ran away; later, they grew used to the patrols, M. remembers. Sometimes soldiers got out and played soccer with them.

At 16, he left school to work for Israeli farmers just across the half-erased border. ''They'd visit me at home on Saturdays,'' he says. ''Everyone had Jews coming. On Saturdays two-thirds of the village was Jews.''

Those were the relatively quiet years of the occupation. Palestinians became Israel's unskilled workers, and a few patrolling soldiers were enough to control the territory. Beneath the surface, P.L.O. factions operated, trying to rip the quiet by attacking Israelis. Once, M. remembers, several Fatah men shot at an Israeli bus that came to town to bring villagers to work in Israel. ''I was always against that stuff,'' M. says. ''They'd try to recruit people. They'd come with a bunch of money to pay for every time you'd attack the Jews.''

No one tried to enlist M. for Fatah. They knew he was a friend of the mukhtar, the man serving as the village's go-between with the Israeli authorities. It was another Palestinian, already working with the Shin Bet, who suggested he become an informer. ''We were against any kind of terror,'' M. explains. ''I came to the conclusion that was the only way for me.'' He says nothing more about how he was recruited, and in fact he may know nothing more. For an ex-collaborator living on the Israeli side, of course, there is a motivation to describe the decision to inform as a matter of principle, not the result of pressure or greed.

When M. was recruited in 1987, the era of low-key occupation was coming to a close. Before the year ended, rebellion swept through the West Bank; frustration and humiliation transmogrified into nationalism. To be known as an informer was now deadly -- and M. became known.

''I've got no idea how they found it out,'' he says. But they did, and fear followed. Twice the house of the mukhtar was torched. Every day, M. says, he heard news of collaborators being hanged in other villages.

One night, a dozen masked men pounded on the door of his parents' house, where he still lived with his wife and four young children. His wife went to the door. The men outside carried axes and knives. She said he wasn't home. They gave her a note: he had 48 hours to leave the village.

A nearby office of the Israeli military government gave him a permit to stay inside Israel around the clock. From then on, he spent his nights wherever he worked. ''If I worked at a farm,'' he says, ''I slept in the tool shed.'' He had agreed to cross the line; now, having lost control of his own life, he found that he had crossed the border permanently.

He slowly lets out smoke from a cigarette as he tells his story in a tone beyond resignation. He saw his family once every week or two, usually at a Jewish settlement, and only for a few minutes. After the Israeli pullout from much of the West Bank in 1995, he decided that even his brief meetings with his family were too risky.

Meanwhile, friends who were ex-collaborators told him about the S.A.A. and explained that he could apply to it for help. His application was accepted, and he was given an apartment in a Jewish town and later an Israeli ID card. His wife and children turned down the S.A.A.'s offer to move them to Israel. ''The kids are big already, and my wife wouldn't be able to handle it,'' M. says. ''Life is completely different here.'' M. could not ask his family to cross into a world they didn't know. He was alone.

In more ways than one, collaborators are a Palestinian nightmare. During the first Palestinian uprising, between the end of 1987 and the signing of the Oslo accord in 1993, about 1,000 Palestinians suspected of being collaborators were murdered by other Palestinians, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. That is nearly as many as the 1,000-plus Palestinians killed by Israeli forces in the same period.

Bassem Eid estimates that fewer than half of the accused collaborators actually worked with Israel in any way. Even rumors could be fatal. Under the cover of charges of collaboration, clan vendettas and old accounts between criminal gangs were settled. Killings were sometimes preceded by torture -- ''nails in the knees, molten plastic in the ears,'' says Roy Politi, the former intelligence operative -- and followed by mutilation.

Under the 1994 Cairo agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and the following year's Oslo II agreement, the Palestinian Authority promised to protect the safety of Palestinians who had worked with Israel in the past. But when the Palestinian leadership arrived from Tunis in 1994, says Gideon Ezra, the former deputy director of Shin Bet and now a Likud politician and the deputy minister of internal security, ''the only thing that interested them was who had worked for Israel.'' So Israel set up the S.A.A., and hundreds of ex-intelligence sources and their families were moved to Israel and given help learning Hebrew, getting jobs and finding new homes. The relocated informers were relieved to be out of danger but were not necessarily happy. ''Were you to ask them if they had the chance to do it over, would they collaborate, some of them wouldn't,'' Ezra reflects. ''If they'd known Israel was going to pull out, some of them wouldn't have joined up.''

Many more informers, it seems certain, were never exposed and remained in the occupied territories. ''The hidden ones stayed to keep on working,'' Ezra says. Bassem Eid estimates that ''tens of thousands'' of collaborators were recruited in the years before the Oslo accord. Israeli intelligence veterans suggest that Palestinians exaggerate the numbers but say that the pervasive fear they create makes it harder for terrorists to operate.

With the beginning of the new uprising in September 2000, the Palestinians' hunt for collaborators accelerated. One reason, Eid argues, was Israel's assassination policy. In an effort to end Palestinian violence, Israel has killed key Palestinian activists, often in pinpoint strikes: a helicopter gunship hurling a missile at a wanted man's car, a pay telephone exploding as an Islamic Jihad leader talks on it. Many Palestinians assume the information needed for hits comes from turncoats.

In January 2001, following brief trials, two alleged collaborators were executed by firing squads in Gaza and Nablus. An international outcry led Yasir Arafat to withhold his approval for further executions. Instead, convicted collaborators were jailed, as were many others who were arrested but never tried. When Israel began its massive incursion into West Bank cities this spring, Palestinian vigilantes removed many of the suspected collaborators from prisons to prevent Israel from rescuing them. Between late March and the end of May, at least 26 accused collaborators were murdered.

Despite the witch hunt, most Israelis and Palestinians presume that Israel is still gathering information and even recruiting new informers. Against the fear that could dissuade collaborators, there are new pressures to compel Palestinians to work with Israel: deeper poverty and the increased difficulty of moving even from one town to another on roads shut by Israeli checkpoints. Moreover, ''People on the Palestinian street have doubts about Arafat,'' Politi says, and as he sees it, a clever operative should be able to exploit those doubts.

IN MARCH 2001, M.'s sister phoned to tell him their elderly mother was in bad health and wanted to see him. He decided to chance it: he would drive across to the West Bank and into the village during Friday prayers, when everyone would be in the mosque. ''My luck,'' he says, exhaling smoke, ''didn't pan out.''

As he pulled into his family's yard, a van drove up behind him. Eight Palestinian men with drawn pistols got out. ''They said: 'We're from the security service. You'll come with us for a half-hour.'

''They took me outside the village, tied me up, covered my eyes and threw me on the floor of the car,'' M. recounts. ''I thought I'd get a bullet in my head any moment.'' Instead, they drove him to Nablus, to Jneid Prison. Later he was held at the Nablus Central Prison, a Turkish-era building that served Israel before it served the Palestinian Authority.

M.'s interrogation lasted 46 days. ''They tie you to a chair with your hands behind you for four, five, six hours,'' he says, using the second person for distance.

They beat him, he says. They hung him for hours by his hands from the sprinkler pipes on the ceiling, took him down to give him 10 minutes to eat and hung him up again. Though his career as an informer had ended long before the Oslo accord, they insisted he was still working for the Shin Bet and had converted to Judaism. At midnight one night, the commander came to him with a piece of paper. ''He said, 'What's written here, you have to confess to.''' M. has no idea what the paper said, but he signed.

He spent a year in the prison, in the wing that held suspected collaborators, in a room with 33 other men. Early this past spring, two prisoners were taken out of the cell and shot. M. assumed the same could happen to him at any time.

In April, the prisoners in the Nablus prison heard the news that Israeli tanks were positioned on four sides of the city. Across the West Bank, Israeli forces were rolling into Palestinian cities in response to the Passover suicide bombing in a Netanya hotel. In M.'s cell, the news ignited desperate hope.

The escape began when they heard tanks outside. Between the top of the cell door and the ceiling was a few feet of wall. ''We broke apart two beds and took the angle irons,'' M. says. His words are suddenly flowing, vibrant; telling about this moment, he has become the hero in his own life, the subject rather than the object. ''We lifted two guys up, and they dug and pulled out the first stone.'' Removing another stone, they had an opening to the corridor, which led to the exercise yard, where they climbed the wall.

Outside, they saw two Israeli tanks down the street. ''I stripped to my underwear, so they wouldn't think I was a suicide bomber, and ran to the tanks and shouted, 'Save me!''' M. says. ''The hatch opened, and a young guy got out and said, 'Where are you from?''' M. yelled the name of the Israeli town where he had been living.

M. and the other prisoners were taken to the nearby office of the Nablus governor, now in Israeli hands. M.'s luck had changed: the tanks had arrived before the vigilantes.

Several days later he was back in Israel. The S.A.A. gave him a hotel room, and he began putting his life back together. He took out a loan to buy a car, replacing the one he had lost driving to his mother's house 14 months earlier. He hasn't seen a doctor since his release. ''If I get a checkup, I'll end up sitting in a hospital, and who will provide for my children?'' he says. Before he was imprisoned, he made $1,100 a month as a gardener and sent two-thirds to his family on the West Bank; while he was in prison, his family's main source of income evaporated.

He is back to sending them money, but M.'s family recently asked him ''not to call three times a week,'' he says. ''Once a week is enough.'' They are afraid. Nor can they visit him in Israel: today, in the midst of the uprising, few Palestinians are allowed to cross the line, and M.'s family can't get permits. Once, access to official permits was an advantage of being an informer. No longer, it seems, at least not for an ex-informer. Though M.'s wife and children are but a few miles away, they might as well be on the other side of the globe.

Through an agency, he found an apartment. But he misjudged the neighborhood. On his second night in the flat, at 3 in the morning, he says, hundreds of his new neighbors gathered around the building, tossing stones through his windows and pounding on his door. ''They shouted, 'Death to Arabs!''' he says in a quiet voice. ''I never thought Jews would do that to me.'' On the street, they smashed the windows of his car and broke off the mirrors.

Finally, M. says, two jeeps of paramilitary border police, used for riot control, came to evacuate him. The commander, he says, ''told me: 'You're going out. If they curse you, don't answer.''' He takes a drag from his cigarette and slowly exhales the smoke. ''It hurt.''

Three days before our meeting, he moved into his current apartment. ''The neighbors here are really nice,'' he says. He holds up one hand and adds, ''The fingers aren't the same length,'' an Arabic proverb meaning that ''people aren't all the same.'' But the proverb hasn't stopped his bad dreams or cured his fear of a knock on the door. And it can't change the fact that a man tortured as a ''Jew'' in Nablus was persecuted as an Arab in Israel. He lives, he admits, in no-man's land; he belongs nowhere.

On the far side of the line, his family is caught in the web of Israeli military checkpoints, meant to keep terrorists from moving; on the side where he lives, every day brings new alerts of possible bombings, information presumably gleaned in part from Palestinian informers.

What, I ask M., does he hope for? The very question surprises him. What he could hardly hope for in prison he has already received: freedom and the chance to support his family again.

''That there will be peace,'' M. answers without emotion. Perhaps he is just reciting accepted words. Perhaps, for the ex-collaborator from whom the conflict has drawn a price he never imagined, hope seems too dangerous. I leave him in the small apartment. I, at least, am able to go home.

Gershom Gorenberg is the author of ''The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount'' and is the associate editor of The Jerusalem Report, a newsmagazine.