The classic collaborator was a contemptible individual. He would tattleon his friend, who would then be executed by the Mista’aravim(Israeli undercover commandos disguised as Arabs), orcaught and tortured.
Now there is a new breed of collaborator. They are respectable. They areaccorded the world’s appreciation, and granted fat budgets from humanrights organizations. They report on the atrociousconditions in the liberated Palestinian territories. They reportthat human rights are being trampled, that Arafat is an evil despot,that all his men are utterly corrupt, and that his security forcesarrest innocent people and torture them to death.
The Israeli market is hungry for this type of merchandise, particularlywhen it comes by way of Palestinians themselves. Those individuals appearon Israeli TV, get pages of exposure in the Israeli press (which ignoresthe human-rights abuses of the Israeli occupation), and are hailed by theIsraeli government. Israel’s powerful propaganda machine ensures thatthis information makes its way into the international media. Israeliembassies are instructed by the foreign office to see to this.
What is the role of this new collaborator? On May 4, 1999, Arafatintends to declare the establishment of the Palestinian state.Towards this end, he needs the massive support of internationalpublic opinion, as well as that of Israel’s enlightened public. Thepropaganda assault aims at destroying this support base. Why supportthe establishment of yet another despotic and corrupt Arab state? IfArafat is just another Third-World small-time tyrant, a kind ofPalestinian Mobutu — why give him a hand?
True, not all the information is false. The Palestinian state-in-the-making is confronting many serious problems in the arenas of humanrights and corruption. It has been built in haste, out of nothing, onterritories governed for years by a brutal and corrupt militaryoccupation. Like any Arab leader, Arafat was forced totake into consideration the underpinnings of the Arab society, withits reliance on the overwhelming authority of the important families.In order to preserve unity, he was forced to parcel out many of thehigh positions to these families, and, unfortunately, not all of therecipients are always capable or honest. (In Israel, it is commonknowledge that thousands of “fat” administrative state jobs arehanded out to Likud and Shas apparatchiks, lacking the most minimalskills necessary.) Within the untrained Security Forces, there areinstances of individuals drunk with power. There is a conflict ofauthority between the President and the Parliament.
Among the Palestinian public, there are individuals andorganizations who have been diligently and honestly fightingthese problems, and they should be commended. There are also thosewho take advantage of these problems to promote their own politicalopposition agenda. No one accuses Arafat himself of corruption or oftyrannical tendencies. There is an overall sense that things aresteadily improving, albeit at too slow a pace.
Were the Palestinian state already in place, with its future secured, thestruggle against these problems should unquestionably take center stage inthe state’s affairs. This is how it unfolded for Israel with theestablishment of the state and the end of the 1948 war, when myfriends and I began a titanic struggle against corruptionand abuseof authority.
However, the Palestinian circumstances are entirely different.The Palestinian nation is at the height of the struggle forits very survival. The Netanyahu government is waging a relentlesswar against it on a daily basis: Palestinian lands are being pulledout from under them and handed over to settlements; water, crucial totheir physical survival, is stolen from them; houses are demolished;people are jailed en masse; their economy is being strangled;curfews and blockades destroy their livelihoods; Palestinianmerchandise is left to rot in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa; there isno way of exporting or importing merchandise without bribing Israeliagents (“commission”) who enjoy the protection of theoccupation authorities; there is no way to travel between Gaza andthe West Bank; East Jerusalem is entirely isolated from the West Bankand its residents systematically pushed out of the city; everyliberated Palestinian town is encircled on all its sides; newIsraeli bypass roads criss-cross the length and width of theterritories.
Step by step, the infrastructure of the Palestinian people isbeing destroyed. Only a fraction of this process is reflected by theIsraeli press, which, in contrast, gives enthusiastic coverage tocases of abuse and corruption by the Palestinian Authority.
I must note with regret that a few Israeli “leftist” journalists havealso taken up this campaign. They have jumped on the critics’bandwagon. Why? Most of them genuinely feel the Palestinians’ pain,not seeming to grasp that they are being exploited by the Netanyahupropaganda apparatus. For some journalists who are routinely called”PLO stooges”, it is a way to show that they are impartial. For some,this is a convenient excuse to withdraw from the Palestinianstruggle, since there is no good reason to support an evil andcorrupt entity. Some hate Arafat for ideological reasons (after all,he is no leftist).
But all Palestinians, including his most extreme opponents, admit openlythat in the crucial struggle for the survival of the Palestinian nationand the establishment of its state, there is no substitute to Arafat.Without his leadership, the Palestinian nation at this point intime could break up into a thousand splinters. Those who areundermining Arafat’s stature on the international stage are pullingthe ground out from under the Palestinian struggle at the mostcritical moment of its existence, and with it, any chance for peace.