NEWS & VIEWS

News Update

15 January 2021

 

Israel’s Illegal Recruitment of Collaborators in the Occupied Palestinian Territories

 

Today, 15 January 2021, Executive Director Marwan Dalal sent a letter to Israeli Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit requesting him to immediately advise the Israeli security forces operating in the 1967 Occupied Palestinian Territories to refrain from their longstanding and widespread policy of recruiting Palestinian civilians as collaborators. 

 

The Israeli authorities, primarily the Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet), the military, and police have been recruiting Palestinian collaborators in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and Gaza since their occupation by Israel in 1967. They did not cease after signing of the 1993 Declaration of Principles with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and subsequent agreements. The practice continues unabated to this day. The policy is a phenomenon given its widespread application and duration. The Israeli security forces acknowledge this practice in their internal procedures but do not address its legality.

 

The recruitment is carried out by using physical violence or psychological and economic threats exploiting basic human vulnerabilities among the targets of enlistment, including their desire to obtain a working permit in Israel.[1] It has been documented by the Israeli press, human rights organizations, and academic research.

 

More often than not information provided by recruited individuals had been used in legal proceedings that do not meet the basic requirements of due process and fair trial such as administrative detentions and trials before the Israeli military courts in the occupied territories. Such information is shielded by Israeli law from adversarial legal scrutiny. No legal challenge has been mounted against the policy of recruiting collaborators despite its clear lawlessness and infringement upon basic rights of Palestinian civilians and society under Israeli occupation.

 

Article 51 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949) explicitly prohibits the practice of recruiting collaborators in an Occupied Territory:

The Occupying Power may not compel protected persons to serve in its armed or auxiliary forces. No pressure or propaganda which aims at securing voluntary enlistment is permitted.[2]

 

ICRC’s authoritative commentary on this prohibitive provision underscored its absolute nature and inclusion as part of the grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949) amounting to a war crime:

The prohibition is absolute and no derogation from it is permitted. Its object is to protect the inhabitants of the occupied territory from actions offensive to their patriotic feelings or from attempts to undermine their allegiance to their own country.

…

It should finally be noted that the Conference included the act of "compelling a protected person to serve in the forces of a hostile Power" among the grave breaches listed in Article 147, thus showing the importance it attached to this indispensable prohibition.[3]

 

The letter to the Israeli Attorney General underscored this policy’s extreme consequences on the recruited individual, his family, community, and the Palestinian society in general:

The constant, widespread, and illegal phenomenon of recruiting Palestinian collaborators has had severe ethical, economic, social, and psychological ramifications on the potential recruited individual, his family, community, and the entire Palestinian society. The individual is practically torn from his community by the security forces’ exploitation of his vulnerability and subsequent to their threat or minimal financial lure. Given that this policy has been practiced for many years it is not difficult to presume its devastating consequences to the recruited individuals, their families, and the Palestinian society.     

 

Given the clarity of the applicable law and the nature of the Israeli security forces’ persistent subversion of the rule of law, declaring the recruitment of collaborators as illegal and ending it immediately are imperative. In the letter Executive Director Dalal referred the Israeli Attorney General to a 2013 report prepared by the former legal adviser to the Israel Security Agency (2006 – 2011) who spent 25 years in the legal advisory section of this organization. He described a persistent disregard for basic legal norms and sough the intervention of the highest levels of the Israeli Attorney General Office. The letter noted the alarming nature of this report and the required urgency to act by abolishing the practice of recruiting collaborators from the civilian population in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.  

 

 

[1] The average salary in Israel is about 11,000 NIS while in the West Bank it is about 3,500 NIS and in Gaza it is approximately 1,500 NIS.

[2] This Convention remains binding upon the Israeli authorities as an occupying power also after the signing of agreements with the Palestinian Authority and transferring certain administrative powers in parts of this area. These agreements have not altered Israel’s status as an occupying power given its effective control of the entire Palestinian territories occupied in 1967. See Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Advisory Opinion, I.C.J. Reports 2004, p.136, paras.78, 86-101. See also article 27 of the Fourth Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949) which secures basic rights of civilians under occupation.

[3] Jean S. Pictet, Commentary: IV Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (ICRC, 1958), pp.292-293.