Palestinian Workers Say Israel Wants Them to Spy
February 25, 1998 - 0:0
GAZA - For 13 years Sami toiled on the construction sites of Israel, rising each day before dawn to leave his home in Gaza and returning after dark. Now Sami works when he can, a regular livelihood gone since the abrupt withdrawal of the Israeli identity card he needs to enter Israel from Palestinian-ruled Gaza through an Israeli-built workers' terminal at the Erez crossing point.
He says the Israelis confiscated his card late last year for unspecified security reasons 10 days after an officer of Israel's Shin Bet Intelligence Service took him into a room at Erez and asked him to spy on his neighbors. He refused. Do you know the monument to Yitzhak Rabin? I built it, Sami says with a bitter laugh, referring to the shrine in Tel Aviv to the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995 for making peace with the Palestinians. I told the intelligence officer that and I'm still asking myself why they confiscated my card.
Psychologically I'm suffering but what can I do? asked Sami, a 35-year-old father of five whose income has plunged from a steady 180 shekels ($50) a day to 80 shekels ($22) a day when he is lucky enough to find work in Gaza as a laborer. Do you want me to go back to the Shin Bet officer to say I'll work with him so I can go to Israel? Forget it.
I'm not going to be blackmailed. Blackmail or Lies? Israeli officials deny the Shin Bet, also known as the Shabak, recruits Palestinian workers. They say men like Sami are banned from entering Israel either for security reasons or because they have lost Israeli jobs but that they often cite a Shin Bet approach as a way to save face in their own society.
We have about 80,000 workers and businessmen who come into Israel from Gaza and the West Bank and the number who lose their permits in a year is very, very small, said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli policy chief in the territories. Usually when they have problems it's very nice in their neighborhood to say the Shabak wanted to draft them and they refused.
It makes you a hero, Dror said. But interviews with Palestinian officials, intelligence officers, civil rights activists and trades unionists as well as written statements from Palestinian workers seen by Reuters all suggest Sami is one case among many. According to these accounts, some of the 24,000 or so Gazan workers who enter and leave Israel through Erez each day are singled out at the heavily guarded crossing and ordered into rooms to talk to Shin Bet officers.
When the workers go to Erez they find the same Shabak officer who used to be responsible for their neighborhood during Israeli occupation, said Faek Loulou, a colonel in the Palestinian Security Service. They start by requesting very simple information, then they ask about lack of food supplies in the neighborhood, then later they ask for the things they really want them to do, he said.
Collaborators Risk Death Israel ran an extensive network of informers in Gaza during its 27-year occupation, which ended in much of the territory with the handover to Palestinian self-rule in 1994 under the Oslo Interim Peace Accords. Many collaborators lost their lives during the seven-year Palestinian Intifada (uprising) that preceded self-rule, killed by fellow Palestinians and often dumped in roadside garbage bins to signal contempt.
The advent of the Palestinian Authority further hampered Israel's ability to gather intelligence on its own account. In a revealing aside, Israel's Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Amnon Shahak recently joked to foreign reporters that the media's sources in Palestinian areas were now more extensive than the army's and you pay less for your sources. Mohammad Dahman, head of the Democracy and Workers Rights Center in Gaza, said dozens of workers had turned to his civil rights group for support in the past year after losing the right to work in Israel for refusing to collaborate.
We have 65 affidavits so far from these people. Most workers are convinced we can't help them so they don't even show up here, he said. Without their plastic identity cards bearing a photograph and computerized personal details on a magnetized strip workers cannot get a work permit. Spying to Close a Gap Palestinians say the Shin Bet's recruitment drive has gathered pace since March 1996 following a rash of suicide bombing attacks in Israel by Islamic activists and amid Israeli accusations of inadequate Palestinian security cooperation.
Day by day, we get more and more confirmation that Israel uses workers for security purposes, said Rasem al-Bayari, president of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza. Many workers are being blackmailed, he said. People are getting fed up with it and come and tell us, he said. He said he knew of 2,700 cases of Gazans who had lost the right to work in Israel in 1997 for no apparent reason.
Sami did not recognize the Shin Bet officer who interviewed him but said he seemed to know so much about him that it felt like he was my brother-in-law. Mohammad, a 20-year-old spray painter who had hoped for a job in the Israeli-controlled Erez industrial zone adjacent to the crossing, was also surprised at how much the Shin Bet officer who interviewed him knew about his affairs.
I even know what you eat at your home, Mohammad quoted the officer as boasting during a lengthy grilling at which he said the man pulled wads of shekels from a drawer to try to tempt him to spy on certain named individuals. Then he said, 'Congratulations, why didn't you invite me to your wedding?'...he even told me who I married, Mohammad said.
Tough Limits on Work Access Younger Gazans like Mohammad can apply for jobs in the industrial zone, though Israeli security sets far stricter conditions on access to work in Israel itself. Applicants for such work permits many of whom, according to Palestinian officials, seek jobs through shady Gazan middlemen who charge up to 1,200 shekels ($330) for the service must be at least 25 years old and married.
They, and usually their close relatives as well, must also have a clean security record. Some 80,000 Gazans worked in Israel before self-rule. Their income was the lifeblood of the Gazan economy. Now, as a result of stricter Israeli security conditions and a closure of the Palestinian territories, numbers are down to around 24,000. That and harsh economic conditions in Gaza, where unemployment runs at 32 percent, make the lure of the Shin Bet hard for some workers to resist.
Perhaps some of them agree because they don't have a job here and a loaf of bread is very, very expensive for them, said Modallal, the director general of employment at the Palestinian Labor Ministry. It is not good for our nation and it is not good for our workers. ($ = 3.600 Israeli shekels) (Reuter)
He says the Israelis confiscated his card late last year for unspecified security reasons 10 days after an officer of Israel's Shin Bet Intelligence Service took him into a room at Erez and asked him to spy on his neighbors. He refused. Do you know the monument to Yitzhak Rabin? I built it, Sami says with a bitter laugh, referring to the shrine in Tel Aviv to the Israeli prime minister slain in 1995 for making peace with the Palestinians. I told the intelligence officer that and I'm still asking myself why they confiscated my card.
Psychologically I'm suffering but what can I do? asked Sami, a 35-year-old father of five whose income has plunged from a steady 180 shekels ($50) a day to 80 shekels ($22) a day when he is lucky enough to find work in Gaza as a laborer. Do you want me to go back to the Shin Bet officer to say I'll work with him so I can go to Israel? Forget it.
I'm not going to be blackmailed. Blackmail or Lies? Israeli officials deny the Shin Bet, also known as the Shabak, recruits Palestinian workers. They say men like Sami are banned from entering Israel either for security reasons or because they have lost Israeli jobs but that they often cite a Shin Bet approach as a way to save face in their own society.
We have about 80,000 workers and businessmen who come into Israel from Gaza and the West Bank and the number who lose their permits in a year is very, very small, said Shlomo Dror, spokesman for the Israeli policy chief in the territories. Usually when they have problems it's very nice in their neighborhood to say the Shabak wanted to draft them and they refused.
It makes you a hero, Dror said. But interviews with Palestinian officials, intelligence officers, civil rights activists and trades unionists as well as written statements from Palestinian workers seen by Reuters all suggest Sami is one case among many. According to these accounts, some of the 24,000 or so Gazan workers who enter and leave Israel through Erez each day are singled out at the heavily guarded crossing and ordered into rooms to talk to Shin Bet officers.
When the workers go to Erez they find the same Shabak officer who used to be responsible for their neighborhood during Israeli occupation, said Faek Loulou, a colonel in the Palestinian Security Service. They start by requesting very simple information, then they ask about lack of food supplies in the neighborhood, then later they ask for the things they really want them to do, he said.
Collaborators Risk Death Israel ran an extensive network of informers in Gaza during its 27-year occupation, which ended in much of the territory with the handover to Palestinian self-rule in 1994 under the Oslo Interim Peace Accords. Many collaborators lost their lives during the seven-year Palestinian Intifada (uprising) that preceded self-rule, killed by fellow Palestinians and often dumped in roadside garbage bins to signal contempt.
The advent of the Palestinian Authority further hampered Israel's ability to gather intelligence on its own account. In a revealing aside, Israel's Chief of Staff Lieutenant General Amnon Shahak recently joked to foreign reporters that the media's sources in Palestinian areas were now more extensive than the army's and you pay less for your sources. Mohammad Dahman, head of the Democracy and Workers Rights Center in Gaza, said dozens of workers had turned to his civil rights group for support in the past year after losing the right to work in Israel for refusing to collaborate.
We have 65 affidavits so far from these people. Most workers are convinced we can't help them so they don't even show up here, he said. Without their plastic identity cards bearing a photograph and computerized personal details on a magnetized strip workers cannot get a work permit. Spying to Close a Gap Palestinians say the Shin Bet's recruitment drive has gathered pace since March 1996 following a rash of suicide bombing attacks in Israel by Islamic activists and amid Israeli accusations of inadequate Palestinian security cooperation.
Day by day, we get more and more confirmation that Israel uses workers for security purposes, said Rasem al-Bayari, president of the Palestine General Federation of Trade Unions in Gaza. Many workers are being blackmailed, he said. People are getting fed up with it and come and tell us, he said. He said he knew of 2,700 cases of Gazans who had lost the right to work in Israel in 1997 for no apparent reason.
Sami did not recognize the Shin Bet officer who interviewed him but said he seemed to know so much about him that it felt like he was my brother-in-law. Mohammad, a 20-year-old spray painter who had hoped for a job in the Israeli-controlled Erez industrial zone adjacent to the crossing, was also surprised at how much the Shin Bet officer who interviewed him knew about his affairs.
I even know what you eat at your home, Mohammad quoted the officer as boasting during a lengthy grilling at which he said the man pulled wads of shekels from a drawer to try to tempt him to spy on certain named individuals. Then he said, 'Congratulations, why didn't you invite me to your wedding?'...he even told me who I married, Mohammad said.
Tough Limits on Work Access Younger Gazans like Mohammad can apply for jobs in the industrial zone, though Israeli security sets far stricter conditions on access to work in Israel itself. Applicants for such work permits many of whom, according to Palestinian officials, seek jobs through shady Gazan middlemen who charge up to 1,200 shekels ($330) for the service must be at least 25 years old and married.
They, and usually their close relatives as well, must also have a clean security record. Some 80,000 Gazans worked in Israel before self-rule. Their income was the lifeblood of the Gazan economy. Now, as a result of stricter Israeli security conditions and a closure of the Palestinian territories, numbers are down to around 24,000. That and harsh economic conditions in Gaza, where unemployment runs at 32 percent, make the lure of the Shin Bet hard for some workers to resist.
Perhaps some of them agree because they don't have a job here and a loaf of bread is very, very expensive for them, said Modallal, the director general of employment at the Palestinian Labor Ministry. It is not good for our nation and it is not good for our workers. ($ = 3.600 Israeli shekels) (Reuter)