Collaborating with Israeli occupation should be a serious crime...for everyone

Recently, while looking for a film to keep myself entertained, I came across quite an extraordinary piece of modern cinema entitled Iron Sky. It’s broadly about the Nazis… in space.

Yes – according to this epic piece of 2012 Hollywood trash, space Nazis have fled to the moon following their 1945 defeat, built a big Nazi paradise on the dark side of the moon and are now returning to Earth in a 90 minute adventure that ends with… well I wouldn’t want to ruin it for you. How might the space Nazis have pulled off this trick? The film doesn’t do much to explain this.

It would have been interesting to see, for example, who was cleaning up the launch pad after them. The evidence of a lunar evacuation would have to have been hidden fairly completely in order to confound the G.I.’s, Tommies and Commies as they stormed Berlin.

Perhaps those tidying away the swastika flags, the iron gantries and the cigarette butts would have been French.

Earlier in the war, French officials aided in delivering vast cohorts of victims to Hitler’s Holocaust. In fact, one of the last remaining SS units to defend Berlin was entirely composed of Frenchmen.

France has gone to great lengths to cover up the scale of collaboration. When the four and a half hour documentary The Sorrow and the Pity was commissioned in 1971 by a government-run TV station, the station subsequently refused to screen it. It depicted the true and harrowing nature of wide scale French collusion with Nazi forces. One critic claimed the film undermined France’s bid “to regain her rank” and that “any wallowing in shame, any prolonged and extensive purges aimed at weeding out all those who in any way had done wrong, would only have served the designs of those among France’s allies who wanted to relegate her to a minor role in the post war era.”

The TV station chief reported to the government that The Sorrow and the Pity would “destroy myths that the people of France still need.” TIME magazine gave the film a positive review, staying that director Marcel Ophuls “tries to puncture the bourgeois myth – or protectively skewed memory – that allows France generally to act as if hardly any Frenchmen collaborated with the Germans.”

That’s not to say there weren’t other nations whose citizens willingly collaborated with the Nazis – Belgium, Greece, Estonia or Denmark are replete with examples. Almost incredibly, collaboration with Nazi Germany was not a crime in most of occupied Europe.

In fact, the Polish were the only nation to make economic or political collusion with the Nazis, no matter how slight, an official crime. Thousands were given death sentences, and though many never took place – the societal shame of even talking with Nazis was so commonplace that the eventual number of collaborators was low. Conversely, Poland had the largest resistance movement in Europe.

Poland’s experience of occupation has some useful similarities to modern Palestine’s. Poles were (and still are) deeply religious, and relied on their faith for succour. The country also had aggressive neighbours who cared little for her national borders (the country had not formally existed on any map from 1795–1918).

Poland also enjoyed little support from the outside world. The country was effectively sold to the advancing Soviets in an effort to keep the Russians in the war, and arms drops to the resistance movement were frequently cancelled. At the end of the war – the Poles were not even invited to the Victory Europe marches in London.

Last week Hamas convicted 30 collaborators, giving them death sentences. There are serious misgivings with how these cases have been investigated – often using the denouncement of a single neighbour, possession of an Orange SIM card, or shekels, as evidence. The trials were short and the penalties prescribed barbaric.

Yet the principal is as clear as Poland’s was – no surrender, and no collaboration. Sadly, such a robust approach to tackling collaboration in Palestine has unforgivable limits.

An academic study in 2011 showed investment from over 16,000 Palestinian businessmen had boosted Israel and West Bank settlements with a whopping $4 billion in capital. Palestinian investors had funded entire companies, and established factories on settler-seized land.

Together, these collaborators generate hundreds of millions in revenue for the Israeli government – much of which is used to fund military oppression which just cost 2,000 Palestinians their lives. Had the money been invested in Palestine, economists say it could have created over 200,000 jobs.

While these elite entrepreneurs go unpunished, Hamas is exacting town square justice on lower level collaboration. The approach is inconsistent.

Some would argue that the investment from Palestine into Israel encourages peace, that economic collaboration is a part of the two countries learning to live alongside each other. Those would be the same people who backed British investment into German companies during the Second World War – outnumbered and immoral. Gaza and the West Bank are under constant economic attack and sporadic military attack. This is a long war with peaks and troughs – but it is a war. And in a war, collaborating with the enemy is wrong.

The rising potential of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions Movement makes this situation all the more urgent.

Some, including politician and economist Dr Mohammad Shtayyeh, have noted the contradiction already: “It is not possible for us to call for the world to boycott Israel, while our annual imports from there are worth $5 billion,” he said in March.

The same logic can apply to capital outflows – it is not possible for Palestine to call on the world to divest, while $4 billion per year is being invested by Palestinians into Israel.

Hamas should be investigating suspected collaborators, such as those sentenced to death last week, in a fair and comprehensive manner: proper investigations and proper trials. They should also replace barbaric death sentences with long custodial sentences.

But the Palestinian Authority should also address the huge problem of economic collaboration, particularly amongst Palestine’s business elite. Those who are willing to make a buck while Gazans die, should be in jail.

Alastair Sloan writes about human rights issues for Middle East Monitor, al Jazeera and The Guardian. He blogs at www.unequalmeasures.com and you can follow him on Twitter @alastairsloan

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.