If Abdul Rajoub ever doubts his fate should he be discovered on one of his secret night-time visits to his children, there is the videotape of his brother’s last few hours to remind him.
”They cut off his fingers one by one,” Rajoub said. ”When they were torturing him he never admitted to being a collaborator. We were working for the Israelis and everyone in our village knew it. But he never admitted it to them.”
Mousa Rajoub was tortured, shot and strung up from an electricity pylon in the centre of Hebron in 2002 with two other Palestinians who collaborated with Israeli intelligence. Abdul Rajoub now lives in hiding in the Israeli city of Ashqelon with a new wife and family, but he makes fleeting visits back to his village, Dura, to see the eight sons and daughters he left behind.
The 46-year-old Palestinian has worked for Israeli intelligence for two decades. He is not ashamed to call himself a collaborator even though informers are vilified as the worst kind of traitor in Palestinian society.
”I was one of the people who vigorously resisted Israeli occupation and I was a member of Fatah,” he said. ”In 1986, I was arrested by the Israeli security services. This was the ideological turning point. I was looking at at least 20 years in jail and I found I did not believe in the ultimate victory of the Palestinians.
”I was not ready to pay an ultimate price for something I did not believe in. So I declared that I joined the Israeli security apparatus and I was working in broad daylight.”
The Rajoub family is renowned through the Palestinian territories and beyond. Abdul’s cousin is Jibril Rajoub, national security chief to Yasser Arafat. A brother, Yunis, is head of Arafat’s office in Jordan.
But for many years, the real power in the village was Abdul and Mousa.
Protected by Israeli patronage, they did not hide the fact that they worked with the occupiers. Both men openly carried weapons at a time when most Palestinians were not permitted guns.
Abdul Rajoub says he recruited others to work with the Israelis without too many problems, including members of his own family, after the first intifada erupted in the late 1980s.
”Each collaborator has his own motive. The intifada was a cruel phenomenon, hard, and there were a lot of people [who] wanted to become collaborators. Many have hatred against Fatah, and now the Palestinian Authority,” he said.
Israel began recruiting collaborators from the first days of its 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, using an array of pressures. Some, such as Abdul Rajoub, were drawn in as an alternative to years in jail or strong-armed while in prison. Others were subjected to blackmail over their sex lives or petty crimes.
But tens of thousands of Palestinians have been coerced into low-level collaboration — giving information on who lives where, or the movements and allegiances of their neighbours — just to be able to get on with daily life. Many of those who need an Israeli permit to travel, work or study say they are pressured to cooperate or be denied. It is a dangerous business. About 90 alleged collaborators have been killed by fellow Palestinians during this intifada, 21 of them while in the custody of the Palestinian security forces.
Two were killed while lying in hospital beds this week. Last month Muhammad Rafiq Daraghmeh (45) was shot in front of a baying crowd in the public square of Qabatiya.
More than 1 000 alleged informers were murdered during the first uprising. Palestinian human rights groups say many of the dead were not collaborators but falsely accused victims of score settling or family rivalries.
The latest outbreak of panic about informers followed the Israeli assassination of the Hamas leader, Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi, in May. Many Palestinians believe that the Israelis would not be able to pick off so many militants without the help of collaborators.
Abdul Rajoub declines to discuss the detail of his collaboration but insists he has never tortured or killed anyone. He says he has stopped at least two suicide bombings, one by a member of his extended family whom he caught at a checkpoint carrying an explosives belt.
In the 1980s, when Israel still had full control over the occupied territories and Arafat remained in exile, Rajoub lived openly in Dura as a collaborator. That did not stop Palestinian activists from trying to kill him. ”Fatah tried to assassinate me three times. I still have a bullet in my head from one attack,” he said.
After the 1993 Oslo Accords handed control of many areas of the occupied territories to the Palestinian Authority under Arafat, Rajoub decided it was no longer safe to remain in Dura. The Israeli intelligence services moved him to Ashqelon but Mousa Rajoub refused to leave Dura and paid with his life.
Weeks after the latest intifada erupted nearly four years ago, Mousa Rajoub was arrested by the Palestinian Authority, accused of collaboration and locked up in a Hebron jail. Eighteen months later members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, seeking revenge after an Israeli rocket attack killed their leader in Hebron, dragged him from prison with two other collaborators.
”They sent me a videotape. It shows his interrogation,” said Abdul Rajoub. ”They were asking him about being a collaborator and his connection with intelligence. He was denying it. They cut off four fingers, five minutes apart, on one hand. Then they cut off the other four.
”Then one of the guys doing the interrogation appears before the camera reading a piece of paper. It said: ‘I am Mousa Rajoub. I am a collaborator. I participated in several operations to kill Palestinians and I committed a crime against the Palestinian people. I ask for swift punishment.’
”They didn’t cut off Mousa’s thumbs, so he could stamp the paper.”
Punishment was not swift. He was beaten some more and, bleeding badly, shot several hours later. His body was hanged by one leg from a pole alongside the two other collaborators.
”There were 17 people involved in those killings. Some of them we identified from the videotape, some from information. We captured 12 of them and killed five.”
Rajoub makes fleeting visits to Dura every few weeks, usually in the middle of the night and for no more than a couple of hours. ”You won’t find a Palestinian family without collaborators so we are just like everybody else,” said his brother, Suliman, who always welcomes him. ”I don’t want my brother to go this way but these things do not reach a blood feud, to kill each other over it.”
The taint of collaboration has not stopped the extended Rajoub family from turning to Abdul for assistance when they need something from the Israelis.
”If there is a possibility for him to help us, he will help,” said Suliman Rajoub. ”If we need the Israelis to issue permits, he will help. If one of the family is arrested, is in jail, he is capable of finding out about him.”
Rajoub says he does not regret becoming a collaborator but he would like to go home. ”I’m living here among the religious Jews and the radicals who do not like Arabs,” he said. ”The government says we can become Israeli citizens, but I don’t want to. I know I can never go home, but I think about it. I know I have sentenced myself to become an Israeli. I will for ever be judged as a collaborator.” — Â