Introduction

by Dr. Andrew Rigby

In February 2001 PASSIA convened a one-day conference to explore the phenomenon of collaboration within Palestinian society. The background to the symposium was the concern aroused following the execution of two alleged collaborators a few weeks earlier in Nablus and Gaza, and the sentencing to death of two others following a summary 'trial' by a security court in Bethlehem. In each case the accused were alleged to have assisted the Israelis in the assassination of Palestinian activists. As the Israelis made it clear that they would continue their policy of liquidating key activists in the Al-Aqsa Intifada, there was growing concern in certain quarters that popular anger against those accused of betraying their fellow Palestinians and the national cause would result in an outbreak of vigilante action, fomenting further divisions within Palestinian society and thereby weakening resistance to the occupation. This worry was compounded by concerns that the justice administered by the Palestinian Authority was flawed - with serious questions being raised about the procedures whereby men were being condemned to death without the opportunity to defend themselves and without the right of appeal.

Recent Palestinian history has shown that all too often the national struggle has been undermined by divisions created within society around the issue of collaboration. Thus, the Palestinian Revolt of the late 1930s was weakened by the internecine conflicts between feuding clans and political groupings, with false charges of collaboration being leveled in order to discredit rivals and legitimize their elimination. Again, during the Intifada that commenced in 1987, the number of Palestinians killed for alleged collaboration increased as the mass base of the uprising was eroded. It has been claimed that by the spring of 1990 more Palestinians were being slain by their fellow citizens than by the occupying forces. Over the following three years the average number of Palestinians killed on suspicion of collaboration remained constant at around 150 to 200 a year . These relatively high numbers were the result of a two-fold process: the intensification of the struggle against collaborators by the strike forces and a broadening of the category of people deemed to be collaborators and deserving of execution.

As someone brought up in post-World War II Europe, my childhood reading included stories of heroic resistance against the Nazis in occupied France and elsewhere. I grew up assuming that under occupation there were two types of people: the heroic resisters and the cowardly collaborators. Just how painfully naïve such a view was became apparent to me a decade ago when I was doing research on the Intifada. I began to realize that so many of the people who were being accused of collaborating with the Israeli occupying force were not 'evil people' as such, but people with whom I could identify. They were people who were caught in difficult circumstances and who made their choices as best they could according to their morality, their interests and their courage. I began to wonder what I would have done in their place. What if a member of my family needed medical treatment only available overseas? What if the occupiers agreed to grant the necessary permits, so long as I returned the favor by agreeing to meet with them once a month to discuss various matters? I began to realize that under such circumstances there was no clear line between good and evil, between victim and perpetrator. Especially under conditions of occupation questions of culpability, guilt and innocence become matters of degree - they are rarely black and white. This was something that Ian Buruma came to appreciate as he reflected on the Dutch experience of occupation in World War II:

"Occupation is always a humiliating business - not just because of the loss of sovereignty and political rights but because it dramatically shows up human weakness. Heroes are very few in such times, and only a fool would put himself or herself among the imaginary heroes. It is easier to understand the ugly little compromises people make to save their own skins, the furtive services rendered to the uniformed masters, the looking away when the Gestapo kicks in the neighbor's door."

Points of Discussion

Unfortunately the 'ugly little compromises' without which people cannot survive under conditions of occupation can lead all too easily down a slippery slope to betrayal, a process Dr. Saleh Abdul Jawwad graphically depicts in his paper. Most Palestinians who have been arrested and imprisoned by the Israelis have come under pressure to become an informer. Many possessed the courage and the conviction to resist, but running through Dr. Abdul Jawwad's analysis is a sense of compassion for those who gave way. For, as he writes, 'The minute the potential collaborator agrees to provide even the smallest piece of seemingly insignificant information, he is at the mercy of the system.'

Dr. Abdul Jawwad concludes his paper with a point that is echoed in the contribution of Dr. Said Zeedani. Whatever the crimes committed by the alleged collaborators, due process must be observed in their trial and sentencing. Condemning the 'street justice' that has resulted in the slaying of a number of suspected collaborators, Dr. Zeedani writes, 'The pressure of public opinion should not be the determining factor; public and fair trials by courts and not vigilante groups are what is required and necessary. Mob justice is as objectionable as vigilante activity.'

The summary execution of alleged collaborators is not something confined to the Palestinian case. Throughout occupied Europe during World War II suspected collaborators were assassinated. It has been estimated that in France around 10,000 killings took place. The majority of these occurred during the last few weeks prior to liberation, and a further 4,500 were killed over the following months. Perhaps the majority of these were driven by popular rage fuelled by frustration at the slow pace of official justice, but a significant proportion of the killings were politically motivated or carried out for private gain.

One of the consequences of such acts is a legacy of bitterness, which can lead to violence and division over many years, particularly in cultures that emphasize the significance of collective responsibility amongst members of the same family or clan. In the case of the killing of a villager from Bruqin in the West Bank, reviewed by Dan Williams in his contribution, we witness a tragedy unfolding. Someone is executed one night outside his home. Leaflets appear accusing him of being a collaborator. No one in the village can believe such allegations. They suspect the killing was carried out for personal motives by someone who had an affair with the victim's former wife. But they despair of obtaining justice as the suspected perpetrator works as one of the Palestinian Authority's security officials. As such they fear he can act with impunity, whatever he does he will be protected by his 'clan' - the PA.

Reflecting on the significance of such cases Dr. Zeedani raises the possibility that whilst the prime cause might be the decades of occupation, they also illustrate the flaws that run through the Palestinian polity and society, flaws that have been deepened and exploited by the Israelis. Thus, many collaboration cases have had their origins in some contravention of accepted sexual and moral standards. In a repressive society and culture too many transgressors are rendered vulnerable to blackmail and extortion. Calling for a collective process of self-examination Dr. Zeedani raises the possibility that 'there is something wrong in our value system that this kind of phenomenon feeds on.'

One of the reasons the problem of collaboration has continued to fester has been the fact that the safety of collaborators was guaranteed under the Oslo Accords. Thus, in the Cairo Agreement of 1994 the Palestinian negotiators committed themselves 'to solving the problem of those Palestinians who were in contact with the Israeli authorities. Until an agreed solution is found, the Palestinian side undertakes not to prosecute these Palestinians or to harm them in any way.' (Cairo Agreement, Article XX, para. 4). Likewise, in the Taba Agreement of September 1995 the Palestinians vouchsafed that 'Palestinians who have maintained contact with the Israeli authorities will not be subjected to acts of harassment, violence, retribution or prosecution.' (Article XVI, para. 2)

With its hands tied by its agreements, and unable to exercise any state-like power over considerable areas of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, the Palestinian Authority has been unable to develop a coherent policy for dealing with collaborators. The result has been a chaotic mix of vigilante killings and the violation of human rights in the name of 'justice'. The longer-term consequences of this are a cause of considerable concern. This was articulated most clearly by one of the contributors who voiced the fear shared by many about the future of the Palestinian state: 'Unless we learn to do justice under stress we will never learn; unless we begin to build democracy under stress we will not be able to build it when the Israelis leave.'

Towards a Longer-Term Perspective - Reconciliation

When one thinks about the long-term future for the Palestinians, thoughts must turn not just to the question of an eventual peace settlement with the Israelis but also to the prospects of reconciliation within Palestinian society itself. For reconciliation to be approached in the future, it is necessary that the divisions and hurts of the past are addressed in as constructive a manner as possible. The problem is how to acknowledge the past but not allow its painful legacy to determine the future. This is a crucial issue not just for individual Palestinians, but for the society as a whole as it emerges out of the bloodshed, division and collective nightmare of occupation. There are a number of models that Palestinians can draw for guidance in this process.

Amnesia and amnesty

In 1975, the Spanish dictator Franco died. He came to power through a military rebellion and subsequent civil war, and after his victory in 1939 his regime became infamous for its barbaric treatment of the defeated and the repression practiced throughout the country. Yet after his death and the transition to democratic rule there was no purge, but rather an exercise in collective amnesia. Everything was subordinated to the peaceful transition to democratic rule - and this exercise in letting bygones be bygones would appear to have worked, the roots of democracy in Spain have deepened. But what of justice?

Purges and trials in pursuit of a kind of justice

At the opposite pole from amnesia is the active attempt to police the past and prosecute the guilty. Here the example comes to mind of the prosecution of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators that took place at Nuremberg and elsewhere in Europe after the Second World War. More recently there has been the prosecution of former East German border guards charged with the killing of fellow citizens trying to escape to the West in the years before the European political map was transformed in 1989, and the International Criminal Tribunals for Former Yugoslavia and for Rwanda.

There is something appealing about the prosecution of those guilty of crimes against their fellow citizens. It satisfies our sense that there should be some degree of retribution, people should be made to pay for their sins. Moreover, if the punishments are administered through due legal process they help to establish the rule of law within society and remove any justification for extra-judicial acts of vengeance by misguided vigilantes.

Trials and the pursuit of retributive justice exercise a strong appeal for those who are convinced that there is a clear division between guilty and innocent, perpetrators and victims. But this Manichean paradigm does not reflect the complexity and the 'messiness' of life under occupation. It was for this reason that President Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic was initially reluctant to endorse any kind of purge following the Velvet Revolution of 1989. He was too aware of the manner in which the machinery of the old regime could colonize people, turning them into unwitting accomplices of the repressive apparatuses of the state. As he wrote in his essay 'The Power of the Powerless', it was not necessary for people to believe in the system in order to become one of its pillars, what was important was that people behaved as if they believed in the system, that they acquiesced in 'living within a lie' and thereby reinforced it.

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers, reflecting on the holocaust, distinguished between four types of guilt: the criminal guilt of those who actually committed the crimes; the political guilt of those who helped such people get to power; the moral guilt of those who stood by doing nothing as the crimes were being committed; and finally the metaphysical guilt of those who survived whilst others were killed, thereby failing in their responsibility to do all that they might have done to preserve the standards of civilized humanity.

Purges and trials might be valid processes for determining criminal guilt, but they are not best suited to coping with all the different forms, shades and degrees of culpability. Moreover trials have their limitations when it comes to unveiling the truth about the past. They are combative encounters where defendant and prosecutor compete in what we might term the manipulation of history, insofar as they each have an interest in concealing some aspects of the past and highlighting others. As part of this process trials can serve as morality plays, where good triumphs over evil and the guilty are made to pay the price for their misdeeds, but they are not the best means for dealing with all the subtleties of the past. For that another approach seems best suited - that of the truth commission.

Truth Commissions: whose truth and what about justice?

Whereas trials and purges are aimed at punishing the perpetrators of crimes against their fellow citizens, the prime concern of the truth commission approach to addressing the pains of the past is with the victims. The aim is to identify them, to acknowledge the wrongs done to them, and to arrive at appropriate compensation. The intention is that through such a process they might be helped to come to terms with their anger and bitterness. The pattern was set by the 'National Commission on the Disappeared' established in Argentina in 1983. In its report the Commission tried to unveil the secrecy surrounding the torture, killing and disappearance of the thousands of victims of the military regime. Chile followed its neighbor's example in 1991 when the report of the 'Chilean National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation' was published.

Critics of the Argentinean and Chilean Commissions claim that by revealing only a partial truth they served to conceal other aspects of the past. Thus, in both cases the Commissions were prevented by their remits from naming the individuals responsible for abuses. At the heart of such criticisms is the claim that justice is forfeited in the proclaimed quest for truth and the alleged reconciliation is false. The criminals provide a version of the truth in return for amnesty, and the victims are then left to do the reconciling.

It was because of such criticisms that the South Africans introduced the element of conditional amnesty into their model. Any perpetrator of human rights abuses who sought an amnesty did not have to express regret or remorse, but to be free from the fear of prosecution they were required to confess their crimes and convince an amnesty committee that these had been 'political' in nature and were not committed out of personal malice or for private gain.

For many South Africans there was something abhorrent in these amnesty provisions, which allowed the perpetrators to walk free. What had happened to justice? In response Archbishop Desmond Tutu articulated an alternative conception of justice, the principles of restorative justice embodied in the concept of 'ubuntu'. At the heart of this was the basic insight, which is shared by so many spiritual traditions, concerning the thread of interdependence that links us all one to another. Hence, to the extent that we treat others as if they were less than fully human, so we dehumanize and impoverish ourselves. From this perspective, then, it is in all our interests to try and restore social harmony once it has been fractured. Therefore, to forgive others and welcome them back into our common human household is not altruistic, it is the highest form of enlightened self-interest, insofar as it affirms the humanity of the other, and hence of ourselves, and thereby helps restore community.
Conclusion

The phenomenon of collaboration amongst Palestinians highlights some of the fractures within Palestinian society and its polity. At the core of 'reconciliation' as a concept and a process is the notion of restoring harmony and wholeness, transcending the divisions of the past. The major challenge that faces Palestinians at the moment is the pursuit of reconciliation, not so much with the Israelis, but within their own society. In approaching this challenge Palestinians must seek their own balance between those values that are constitutive of reconciliation but which remain in constant tension - justice, truth, and compassion.