"Listen, bro, I went to court and they want a recommendation from you. You know my situation. The collaboration wasn't just between you and me. I was loyal to the state and I remain loyal to the state. There's a difference between us – I was on trial and you weren't. I was sentenced to death and you weren't. I didn't betray my country. But you refusing to give me a recommendation is a betrayal. I burned myself for this country and now my life is in danger. You know that I enlisted because you pressured me, when you caught me working without permits. There was violence, too. I just recently had a daughter. She and her mother live in the village and they are getting death threats because of what happened to me. I had no choice, you have a choice – help me."
This plea for help is a text message sent by Bahaa, a 35-year-old Palestinian man from a village in Samaria, to one of his Israeli handlers in the territories. Bahaa was pressured to help the Israeli intelligence services, exposing him to Palestinian retribution. His text message was never answered.
Bahaa collaborated with Israel for four years. When he was "burned" – exposed as a collaborator – and charged as a "Judas" (traitor), he was put in a Palestinian prison for seven years. There, he was brutally tortured and continuously humiliated and ostracized. Upon his release from prison, he fled to Israel to avoid continued harassment, and worse.
He has been living in Israel for four years now. Every few months he extends his temporary permit to reside in Israel. Under the permit he is not allowed to work, have access to public health care or drive a vehicle, among other restrictions. In the last two years, his wife and two daughters have been living with him, having illegally infiltrated Israel. It was only recently that they finally received their own limited permits.
Throughout this time, Bahaa has been waging a legal battle to be officially recognized by Israel as a "say'an" (assistant), and to be granted a blue identification card that would make him a legal resident. He has now decided to share his story in a documentary series that will air on Israel's Kan 11 TV channel next week.
"At first, I collaborated with the Shin Bet security agency. Then, I was with the police intelligence unit," Bahaa recalls. "It all started in 2004, after I was arrested for entering Israel illegally with someone else's papers. I was caught in Jerusalem. I was beaten pretty badly, and then they offered for me to become a collaborator. I agreed. That was it – once you agree, there's no going back."
Q: What were your duties as a collaborator?
"I helped the Shin Bet all the time. I had a lot of operational successes. I helped them apprehend terrorists and catch criminals. I would hear things, like terrorist cells planning attacks, and report back. Once the terrorist is already at the scene with explosives or a knife, it's already too late. It is generally possible to pre-empt these things and catch the terror cells already in the planning stages."
In 2008, having evaded the Palestinian Authority's suspicion a number of times, Bahaa was arrested by Palestinian security. "During my interrogation, I was subjected to unbearable torture," he recounts. "After that, in prison, the guards would call up their friends and say, 'There's a party tonight,' and then they would blindfold me so I didn't know who was beating me. They shocked me with electricity and sprayed me with water. They pinned me up against the wall, cocked their weapons and told me to make my final request. I felt like someone who had died and come back to life."
"When you're suspected of collaborating with Israel, even the other Palestinian prisoners also hate you. Whenever you talk to someone, they think you are trying to recruit them. You can't have any friends.
"They would snitch on me all the time, say they heard me say a word in Hebrew on the phone. I was punished a lot. Torture, solitary confinement …"
The answer to his plight came for Bahaa, like it did for many other Palestinian collaborators, in the form of attorney Michael Teplow, a 57-year-old religious Jewish man with a pleasant disposition. Teplow lives in the Samaria settlement of Karnei Shomron. He was born in Boston to a Zionist Jewish family, studied economics and law at Columbia University and worked on Wall Street as a tax attorney. He took a gap year between graduating high school and starting university and spent it in Israel, studying Torah at a yeshiva in Jerusalem. It was during that year that he decided he would one day live in Israel.
"We had a tour guide who took us to all the communities in Judea and Samaria," he says. "I felt like that was my opportunity to contribute to the Zionist enterprise."
He moved to Israel in 1990 with his wife and 7-month-old daughter, and they settled in Karnei Shomron.
Q: What is a right-wing attorney doing helping Palestinian collaborators?
"Part of my work was to 'liberate' land, to purchase land from Arabs in order to build Jewish communities on it. For Palestinians, anyone who sells land to a Jew is considered a traitor and can be sentenced to death under Palestinian Authority law. My first Palestinian client came to me in 1999, when the Oslo Accords were implemented. He was a real estate broker. He simply knocked on my window and said, 'What? You're leaving us?' I told him we wouldn't abandon him and that I would help him. He was murdered in the Palestinian Authority several years later."
Teplow's reputation quickly spread as the only person who can help "burned" Palestinian collaborators in fear for their lives. "Collaborators started coming out of the woodwork," he says. "Over the years, I've handled hundreds of such cases, all kinds: security collaborators who help the Shin Bet, collaborators who help the police apprehend car thieves, collaborators with the Agriculture Ministry to prevent smuggling to and from the Palestinian Authority, and more. I have become acquainted with the enormous collaboration mechanism that Israel operates in Judea and Samaria."
Whether they enter Israel legally or not, the Palestinian collaborators face an uphill battle after they are exposed. Those recognized by Israel as "say'an" are eligible for certain rehabilitation benefits, including housing and some employment assistance. Those who aren't recognized, like Bahaa, can file a request with the "threatened individuals" committee to review their residency status. The committee, established in 1999 and made up of representatives from the Shin Bet, the Israel Police, the State Attorney's Office and the Civil Service, can grant permits for individuals under threat to remain in Israel for six months to a year. When the permit expires, the committee reviews the case again.
"A threatened individual is someone whose life is in danger in the Palestinian territories for assisting the State of Israel," attorney Haran Reichman explains in the Kan 11 documentary. Reichman represents the State Attorney's office on the committee.
"The problem is that for the police, the Interior Ministry, the Shin Bet and in general, the rule of thumb is to let as few Palestinians into Israel as possible. Palestinians are seen as a demographic and security threat," he says. "The number of individuals who collaborated to some degree is so large, and the state has failed to accept that there's a price to pay for using Palestinian collaborators. You turn people into refugees. You make them homeless and miserable. You're taking advantage of their weakness. These are people who sacrificed everything they have ever held dear – they gave up their homes and their families – to help Israel control the territories."
On the opposing side of the argument, Prof. Menachem Hofnung, who researches the topic of Palestinian collaborators and their integration into Israel, says in the series that "more than 100,000 Palestinians have entered Israel through the collaboration mechanism. That's immigration."
"According to my calculations, there are between 4,000 and 6,000 individuals that the State of Israel has recognized as 'say'anim.' Each 'say'an' brings [to Israel] another 25 or 30 more people, and, in some cases, even 100. One veteran 'say'an' came here with several wives, 45 children and 10 grandchildren. So that's the calculation. Today, some of those who aren't officially recognized as 'say'anim' have learned that as long as they have a piece of paper in their hand that says that the legal proceedings are ongoing, it buys them time. They aren't deported."
It is safe to assume that there are Palestinians who take advantage of the threatened individuals committee to extend their stay in Israel despite having entered illegally. But to illustrate the threat that they face, former B'Tselem Executive Director Yizhar Be'er explains that "there are economic, municipal and commercial collaborators. These are criminals, drug dealers and pimps, for example. What makes them collaborators? They weaken Palestinian society and are considered potential targets for recruitment by Israel. Whenever national resistance flares up, like an intifada, they clean house. Collaborators, even those who are suspected of collaborating, are murdered. They've killed thousands. They've tortured more than thousands."
Be'er is the only human rights activist to compile a report solely on the collaborators. After him, international human rights groups stopped monitoring the situation concerning the Palestinian collaborators. According to Be'er, "like in every population, there are disagreements. The easiest way to settle the score with someone is to raise the issue to a national level. To claim treason. This makes all sorts of punishments acceptable. When you publicly put a collaborator to death, be it a true collaborator or just a suspect, and drag their body in a van along the streets for everyone to see and hear the sounds, it has a profound effect on would-be collaborators. It sends a message that anyone who collaborates should be very afraid."
This fear is evident in one of the most powerful scenes in the series, in which Bahaa and his friend Mohammed, who served four years in a Palestinian prison for collaborating with Israel, encounter a poster distributed by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade, the Palestinian Authority's military wing. The poster reads: "To those whose base urges tempted them to collaborate with the Zionist occupation, we send a message that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade has permitted their murder." In the scene, Bahaa reads off his own name among a list of other suspects included in the poster.
When a collaborator is "burned" or feels exposed, he usually makes a panicked call to his handler, minutes or hours before he is arrested. Sometimes the Israeli handler scrambles entire battalions to extract the collaborators, as one of them recounts in the series.
"I scrambled the entire Egoz unit to extract this guy, who, as part of his work, handed us suicide bombers and saved the lives of dozens of Jews. For me, he was like an Israeli soldier who was captured," the handler says.
But that's not how it always works. "There are handlers who don't answer the phone, or suddenly pretend they don't know the collaborator," Teplow says. "These abandoned collaborators turn to me for help. Over the years, I probably filed more than 130 petitions to the Supreme Court on their behalf."
Bahaa also filed a Supreme Court petition with Teplow. The court ruled that his life was not in danger and that he must return to his village within six months. During the hearing, it emerged that Bahaa had secretly returned to his village to see his wife and his infant daughter shortly after she was born. That secret visit likely cost Bahaa his case. The court ruled that the evidence presented by the state during the trial – Bahaa and Teplow believe it was the one secret visit – demonstrated that it was safe for him to return home.
Teplow filed an additional petition, this time to the district court, and Bahaa is currently awaiting a decision.
Bahaa feels deeply betrayed by Israel and by his Israeli handler. "At first they said, 'We'll protect you. We'll support you.' But after I fell, no one even looked in my direction. My handlers screened my calls. Suddenly everyone was in a meeting," he says dejectedly. "Now there is nothing I can do in the Palestinian Authority. My life is in danger there and my family is subjected to so many bad experiences because of me. It's deathly frightening. Even if they don't murder me, I can't work and no one will have anything to do with me. I'm burned."
"Last week, my mother was sick. She went to a hospital in the Palestinian Authority and I was so stressed. If anything were to happen to her, I wouldn't be able to come. And if I tried to sneak into the village and something happened to me, my wife and daughters would be left here alone. It's a difficult situation and I'm stuck in the middle. What have I ever asked for? I just want to live peacefully. I don't care about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I just want to be like everyone else – buy a car, build a home for my family, even pay taxes. Someone from Sudan would be allowed to do that, but not me, even after I risked my life for the State of Israel."
Teplow nods in agreement. "I know a senior collaborator – he's an old man now – who, when he was a young man of 18 in 1967, saw Israeli soldiers enter his home town and give milk to a little girl on the street," Teplow says. "That collaborator said to himself, 'Maybe what they say about the Israelis and the Jewish people isn't true.' He realized that it would be best for his own people to help the Israelis."
"Obviously some collaborators do it for money, and some are pressured to do it because they committed some crime, but ultimately there are those who change their attitude and begin to respect life and the pursuit of life."
Q: There are people who say we should stop working with them.
"I think that we need collaborators to ensure the security of the state. They have saved thousands of Jews. Unfortunately, their handlers, and the entire Israeli system, sometimes need to be re-educated and shown that the sanctity of life goes both ways. Collaborators are not just pawns that can be used and sacrificed."
"I said this to the Shin Bet in the 1990s, and in the Supreme Court, and I continue to say it today – we have to take care of the collaborators and the threatened individuals in a moral, fair and decent manner. Otherwise, it is exactly like abandoning soldiers in the battlefield. The sovereign in Judea and Samaria, since 1967 to this day, is the State of Israel. The responsibility is ours. We can't allow the Palestinian Authority to commit these atrocities, particularly against those who are helping us. I am proud of my country, but this pains me. I say, for heaven's sake! Take some responsibility!"
