The occupied territories are formally
governed by the Israeli army acting through the military governors of
the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Those governors direct a complex
bureaucracy, comprising the military and civil administrations and the
coordinator of activities, who usually is a general. This ponderous
apparatus keeps itself busy granting or denying permits needed for every
conceivable purpose, from obtaining a birth certificate or a driving
license to a permit to export agricultural produce or to study abroad.
The authority of these administrations is
limited to Palestinian inhabitants of the territories: the Jewish
settlers are not subject to it. But, as every Palestinian knows from
daily experience, all this is no more than a facade. In reality, all
decisions to grant or deny such permits are made by the Israeli secret
police, the so-called Shabak.
In performing those government functions,
Shabak's power is absolute. Not only can it order the officials of the
twin administrations to grant or deny any permit, but it also can
arbitrarily annul the permits already granted. To harass the individuals
concerned, and thus increase the pressures on them, such annulments
frequently are preferred to an initial denial.
A case in point—one among thousands
occurring daily—is described by Tom Segev in the daily Ha'aretz
of Sept. 4, 1992. Haytham Amru, a young Palestinian from the
vicinity of Hebron, had been granted a permit for a bridge-crossing into
Jordan. On reaching the bridge, however, he was told that the permit
already had expired. He applied for the second time, to undergo the same
ordeal again.
Then, however, he was told to apply in
person to "Captain Claude," the local commander of Shabak.
"Captain Claude" told him bluntly that he had no chance to
obtain the requested permit unless he consented to become a
collaborator. "There is no power in the world," Segev
comments, "that could force 'Captain Claude' to issue a permit he
refuses to issue."
Under such conditions, Lord Acton's iron
rule "Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely"
applies. As corruption increases to the point of becoming absolute,
however, efficiency decreases. In this respect, Shabak is the perfect
example. Shabak officers, to put it bluntly, have become stupider as the
years pass. This has been noticed by the nominal ruler of the
territories, the Israeli army, which even has communicated this
discovery to the Hebrew press.
Some examples of Shabak's inefficiency in
the territories were leaked to Aharon Klein, whose article "The
Army Against Shabak" was printed in the Hadashot supplement
of Sept. 25, 1992. American readers, routinely assured by the U.S. media
that all branches of Israeli intelligence are superbly efficient, may be
surprised to learn that the Israeli army, and a growing segment of the
Israeli media, have a very different opinion.
"Army sources" told Klein that
"Shabak has failed in its primary task in the territories,"
namely in "preventing hostile activities," or in capturing the
culprits with all due speed. Moreover, that failure occurred despite the
fact that since the beginning of the intifada, "Shabak has
increased its personnel in the territories by several hundred
percent," Klein wrote.
"Apparently, this massive
recruitment lowered the quality of Shabak's performance, at least in the
initial stages [of the intifada]. " Klein reported, "The army
officers opine that Shabak's capabilities haven't improved since
then."
However, "higher ranking army
officers," while agreeing with this assessment, told Klein that
"poor performance of Shabak is attributable to factors existing
long before the intifada, whose outbreak Shabak failed to foresee, with
the effect that it found itself completely unprepared for the
contingency. 'The intifada caught the Shabak with its pants down, and
Shabak hasn't been able to button them up since,' say these senior army
officers."
Another "senior army officer"
told Klein that Shabak also failed to predict or even to recognize the
rise of Palestinian guerrillas. "It took them a long time to
understand the mood of the militants, and how it changed about two years
ago. They are incapable of noticing changes. The effect is that it is up
to us [the army] to do their job."
The army apparently has decided that the
failure of Shabak to supply accurate information about the Palestinian
guerrillas has reached the point at which it can no longer be tolerated.
A "senior army officer serving in the territories" told Klein
that "I myself wouldn't trust anything Shabak tells me." He
told Klein that during a large scale army operation "which took
place at the beginning of this year in the northern part of the West
Bank, all information we received in advance from Shabak turned out to
be unreliable." He claims that the operation succeeded only because
the army had its own techniques of collecting information.
