The classic collaborator was a contemptible individual. He would tattle on his friend, who would then be executed by the Mista'aravim (Israeli undercover commandos disguised as Arabs), or caught and tortured.

Now there is a new breed of collaborator. They are respectable. They are accorded the world's appreciation, and granted fat budgets from human rights organizations. They report on the atrocious conditions in the liberated Palestinian territories. They report that human rights are being trampled, that Arafat is an evil despot, that all his men are utterly corrupt, and that his security forces arrest innocent people and torture them to death.

The Israeli market is hungry for this type of merchandise, particularly when it comes by way of Palestinians themselves. Those individuals appear on Israeli TV, get pages of exposure in the Israeli press (which ignores the human-rights abuses of the Israeli occupation), and are hailed by the Israeli government. Israel's powerful propaganda machine ensures that this information makes its way into the international media. Israeli embassies are instructed by the foreign office to see to this.

What is the role of this new collaborator? On May 4, 1999, Arafat intends to declare the establishment of the Palestinian state. Towards this end, he needs the massive support of international public opinion, as well as that of Israel's enlightened public. The propaganda assault aims at destroying this support base. Why support the establishment of yet another despotic and corrupt Arab state? If Arafat is just another Third-World small-time tyrant, a kind of Palestinian Mobutu -- why give him a hand?

True, not all the information is false. The Palestinian state-in- the-making is confronting many serious problems in the arenas of human rights and corruption. It has been built in haste, out of nothing, on territories governed for years by a brutal and corrupt military occupation. Like any Arab leader, Arafat was forced to take into consideration the underpinnings of the Arab society, with its reliance on the overwhelming authority of the important families. In order to preserve unity, he was forced to parcel out many of the high positions to these families, and, unfortunately, not all of the recipients are always capable or honest. (In Israel, it is common knowledge that thousands of "fat" administrative state jobs are handed out to Likud and Shas apparatchiks, lacking the most minimal skills necessary.) Within the untrained Security Forces, there are instances of individuals drunk with power. There is a conflict of authority between the President and the Parliament.

Among the Palestinian public, there are individuals and organizations who have been diligently and honestly fighting these problems, and they should be commended. There are also those who take advantage of these problems to promote their own political opposition agenda. No one accuses Arafat himself of corruption or of tyrannical tendencies. There is an overall sense that things are steadily improving, albeit at too slow a pace.

Were the Palestinian state already in place, with its future secured, the struggle against these problems should unquestionably take center stage in the state's affairs. This is how it unfolded for Israel with the establishment of the state and the end of the 1948 war, when my friends and I began a titanic struggle against corruptionand abuse of authority.

However, the Palestinian circumstances are entirely different. The Palestinian nation is at the height of the struggle for its very survival. The Netanyahu government is waging a relentless war against it on a daily basis: Palestinian lands are being pulled out from under them and handed over to settlements; water, crucial to their physical survival, is stolen from them; houses are demolished; people are jailed en masse; their economy is being strangled; curfews and blockades destroy their livelihoods; Palestinian merchandise is left to rot in the ports of Ashdod and Haifa; there is no way of exporting or importing merchandise without bribing Israeli agents ("commission") who enjoy the protection of the occupation authorities; there is no way to travel between Gaza and the West Bank; East Jerusalem is entirely isolated from the West Bank and its residents systematically pushed out of the city; every liberated Palestinian town is encircled on all its sides; new Israeli bypass roads criss-cross the length and width of the territories.

Step by step, the infrastructure of the Palestinian people is being destroyed. Only a fraction of this process is reflected by the Israeli press, which, in contrast, gives enthusiastic coverage to cases of abuse and corruption by the Palestinian Authority.

I must note with regret that a few Israeli "leftist" journalists have also taken up this campaign. They have jumped on the critics' bandwagon. Why? Most of them genuinely feel the Palestinians' pain, not seeming to grasp that they are being exploited by the Netanyahu propaganda apparatus. For some journalists who are routinely called "PLO stooges", it is a way to show that they are impartial. For some, this is a convenient excuse to withdraw from the Palestinian struggle, since there is no good reason to support an evil and corrupt entity. Some hate Arafat for ideological reasons (after all, he is no leftist).

But all Palestinians, including his most extreme opponents, admit openly that in the crucial struggle for the survival of the Palestinian nation and the establishment of its state, there is no substitute to Arafat. Without his leadership, the Palestinian nation at this point in time could break up into a thousand splinters. Those who are undermining Arafat's stature on the international stage are pulling the ground out from under the Palestinian struggle at the most critical moment of its existence, and with it, any chance for peace.