-Caveat Lector- >From http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,2763,772205,00.html
He pointed the finger and pulled the strings, but the protection ran out Reviled collaborator whose treachery cost him his life Suzanne Goldenburg Saturday August 10, 2002 The Guardian Musa Rajoub died a traitor's death, dragged from a jail cell in the cold hours before dawn, shot, and strung up by his left foot from an electricity pylon in the centre of Hebron without an ounce of pity. He must have known he had it coming to him. In the West Bank and Gaza there is a special hatred reserved for Palestinians believed to have trafficked with Israel's intelligence agencies, and Rajoub had openly boasted for years of his powerful connections. When an Israeli helicopter gunship fired four missiles into the car of Marwan Zaloom, incinerating the local commander of the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades and a fellow passenger, Rajoub's fate was sealed. Under cover of darkness, a mob of masked men descended on the central jail in Hebron and dragged Rajoub and two other prisoners outside. It is unclear where Rajoub's Palestinian Authority jailers were at the time, but there is no sign that they intervened to stop - or even protest at - his punishment. The three men's mouths were sealed with masking tape, their hands and feet bound with wire. All three - Musa Rajoub from Dura, a village not far from Hebron in the south of the West Bank, Mohammed Dababse from Halhoul, which is also near Hebron, and Zuhair Muhtaseib from Beit Safafa near Jerusalem - were married with children. All three were accused of collaborating with Israel. They were beaten for nearly 24 hours and shot on the spot where Zaloom died, around dawn on April 23. The summary execution was claimed almost immediately by the Martyrs' Brigades, a militia linked to Yasser Arafat's Fatah movement. "They opened fire on their bodies. Minimum each one took not less than 20 bullets," a researcher from the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group said. Then the bodies were strung up for the mob - half-naked carcasses by this point for the boys who stoned, spat at and stubbed out cigarettes on cold and greying flesh. According to witnesses interviewed by human rights organisations, no one tried to stop the ghastly spectacle or to persuade the mob that the men deserved to be put on trial. Several hours later the police cut them down and carted the bodies to city hall in a rubbish truck. Rajoub's widow, Sahar, recognised him by his shirt. "It was more than mutilation," she said, sitting in the family home in Dura. "If I show you the clothes he was wearing, you will see. So much blood. The collar of his shirt is encrusted with it." Palestinian informers necessarily operate in secret, for fear of ending up like Rajoub and the 70 other suspected collaborators who have been killed in the West Bank and Gaza in the past two years. But Rajoub never hid his allegiance, neither has his family. "Of course he was a collaborator. He always used to admit it. Everyone in Dura knew it," his widow said. "But that's not the real reason why he was killed." Mrs Rajoub's lack of embarrassment at her husband's profession is extremely rare; the stain of collaborating with Israel is not easily erased. The families of collaborators almost always disclaim any knowledge of their activities, even after they are killed, or jailed by the Palestinian police. That Rajoub's family is even prepared to discuss his death is testimony to the power he exerted over his village, Dura, and his powerful clan connections. The Rajoubs are one of the biggest families in Dura, and well connected: Jibril Rajoub, a distant cousin of Musa, is a former West Bank security chief. Musa behaved as if he was untouchable, drawing on those family contacts, the threat that he could bring down Israel's wrath on those who crossed him, and the protection money he is believed to have paid to the local Palestinian police each month. "He held his M-16 aloft and walked ostentatiously through the streets of Dura. He would bully people in the street. He would humiliate them," Khalid Amayreh, a Palestinian journalist and commentator from Dura, said. "He acted in a gangsterly manner. I dare say many many Palestinians in the town have personal stories about their encounters with him." Others in Dura have more charitable memories. They say Rajoub was forced to sell secrets to support his seven children, and that while he doubtless preyed on his fellow Palestinians in other parts of the West Bank he showed relative leniency to the people of Dura. In a living room plastered with images of Arab militancy - Lebanese and Palestinian fighters, at least four pictures of Saddam Hussein, and one of Osama bin Laden - his neighbour Bassem Zeer describes a man who was ready to use his connections with the Israeli authorities to benefit others - for a fee. Mr Zeer, a dealer in illegal weapons, had frequent needs of his services. He said Rajoub interceded with Israel on at least two occasions to keep him out of jail. "Not just me, he used to help a lot of people. If you needed a building permit, or wanted to get people out of jail, you went to Musa. He used to walk in the streets of Dura, and say: 'If I do anything bad to my own village, then you are welcome to kill me'." That shameful collusion between patriotism and practical need is crucial to the position of collaborators in Palestinian society. Since Israel occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 it has used a variety of methods to build up an extensive network of spies: sexual blackmail; offers of travel, work and building permits; early release from prison. "Collaborators have been a cancer on the collective conscience of the Palestinian people," Mr Amayreh said. "They are the worst and most diabolical product of the Israeli occupation, and the collective hatred for collaborators cannot be over-estimated." Rajoub began his career as a collaborator after he was arrested by the Israeli army in 1983 for harbouring wanted men in his home. His was a conventional initiation. He started as an asfour - literally a sparrow - the name Palestinians use for the men planted in crowded cells to elicit information from inmates. The asfour also has a more sinister use. Since the Israeli supreme court restricted the use of torture during interrogations two years ago, Palestinians say, collaborators have been used to administer beatings in the cells. But if they are caught they can be beaten to death themselves. By the time of his death, people in Dura say, Rajoub presided over five cells of collaborators who collected snippets of information about militant Palestinian groups in the village and nearby areas of the West Bank. On the side he ran a lucrative contracting business sending Palestinian labourers to jobs on building sites in Israel. He was often away, in other parts of the West Bank, and in Hadera, in northern Israel, where he was able to conduct his business using the Israeli identity papers he was given in 1994. All those activities came crashing to an end on November 15 2000 when he was arrested by the Palestinian police and imprisoned in a Hebron jail on charges of collaborating with Israel. A trial was instigated, Mrs Rajoub retained a lawyer. But the proceedings fizzled out, and she turned her attentions towards ensuring her husband's comfort and safety in prison, and securing his eventual release, through bribery rather than the law. In her version of events, securing Rajoub's safety was simply a business arrangement. Each month she paid a healthy sum to his jailers as an insurance policy, and she began negotiating a price for his eventual release. There was talk of cash payments and vehicles. Mrs Rajoub looked for a buyer for a plot of family land in the village. The months passed. Elsewhere in the West Bank and Gaza, life became increasingly perilous for those accused of collaborating with Israel. Since the uprising against Israel began in September 2000, 71 Palestinians have been killed on suspicion of serving as spies and informers, according to the Palestinian Human Rights Monitoring Group. Two were publicly executed by the Palestinian Authority after rapid proceedings that made little pretence of being a fair trial. The others were victims of vigilante justice exacted by Palestinian armed groups - mainly those linked to Fatah. They were killed by the mob. Most of the bodies were dumped in waste ground or in unmarked graves, denied a proper burial in a Muslim graveyard. Rajoub, however, escaped that final insult. The reason for such hatred is evident. Since the uprising began the Israeli army has used helicopter gunships, tanks, and booby-trapped cars to assassinate 82 Palestinian activists and militants and 31 bystanders. It hunted them down with information provided by the network of collaborators in the West Bank and Gaza. The army has also protected its informants. When it reoccupied the West Bank last month troops headed for the jails to free prisoners held on suspicion of collaborating. The 130 collaborators held in Hebron's two Palestinian prisons disappeared, moved to other villages in the West Bank where their personal histories were unknown, or to Israel proper. But that was too late for Rajoub. On April 20 his wife visited him in jail. He was weak and had developed asthma. But Mrs Rajoub was hopeful. A few weeks earlier Rajoub's superior in the hierarchy of informers, Ismail Abu Hmeid, had secured his own release by paying a bribe of $100,000 (£65,000) to the Palestinian Authority. Ms Rajoub was finalising the arrangement to sell the family plot of land and had settled on the terms for buying her husband his freedom: the equivalent of $15,000 in cash plus his 1997 four-wheel drive vehicle. She told him he would not be in jail much longer. But the cosy business arrangement was coming to a close. Two days after her last visit to the prison Zaloom was assassinated in the streets of Hebron. His followers in the al-Aqsa Martrys' Brigades wanted retribution. Although Rajoub had been in jail for 18 months and was in no position to have given the Israelis any current information on Zaloom's whereabouts, his earlier notoriety made him a prime target for revenge. Months later Mrs Rajoub remains shocked at the collapse of the deal. "My husband was in jail for a year and a half. He had nothing to do with Zaloom's assassination," she said. "We were in the middle of negotiations. My sense of things was that if I paid the money he would be released." Palestinian security officials in Hebron deny that there was such a deal. They also say they were powerless to prevent the men from al-Aqsa Brigades taking Rajoub and the two others from prison. But few people in Dura believe that story. "I was not surprised, but of course always there is an ambivalent feeling because he was also a victim," Mr Amayreh said. "What happened is the epitome of the entire Palestinian tragedy: Palestinians killing Palestinians. Musa Rajoub and the likes of him are not immaculate people. But they themselves are victims of the Israeli occupation." 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