An unofficial public institution functioning alongside the Israeli military government and civil administration, the “wastonaires” are a product of the occupation. In the local slang, wasta means “mediation.” So the wastonaire is an intermediary—or, in other contexts, a pimp. In the special context of the West Bank this is not, however, just the name of a profession.
The wastonaires are usually from the middle or lower classes, some of them former criminals who have come up in the world and won wealth and power by grace of a sharp and no-nonsense instinct for spotting the opportunities presented by the existing complex and murky situation. Most of them began as collaborators with the security forces, and then, when their relations with the military government had become well established, they began to present themselves to the populace as possessing contacts and influence within the administration. There were men of similarly sharp and quick instincts in the military government who immediately understood that it was worthwhile fostering such contacts and helping the collaborators refurbish their image.
So, when a local Arab presents a request to the administration—for a building permit, for example—and his request is rejected, justly or unjustly, he now has the recourse of turning to the man with the connections, the wastonaire, who has the run of the corridors of the military government headquarters. These intermediaries have become the representatives of the populace, which has no choice but to make use of them, galling as it is. The wastonaire approaches “his man” in the military government and presents his clients’ petitions. The military government official, interested in furthering the reputation of the wastonaire in the eyes of the locals, frequently approves the requests. In exchange for this, the wastonaire is expected both to provide the military government with information and gossip and to influence and direct those with whom he comes in contact. It is not hard to imagine how this process is managed, what it has achieved, and what things are understood but never spoken.
Since, for all intents and purposes, every request for a permit by a local resident must be approved by the military—meaning that the military can deny it, even unjustly and with intentional arbitrariness—the locals must frequently apply to the military government through the wastonaires. Villagers from the Hebron area quoted me the following prices:
Arranging a building permit: 250–300 Jordanian dinars ($750–$900)
Arranging a business permit: 500–1,000 Jordanian dinars ($1,500–$3,000)
Arranging family reunification (the most coveted of permits): 3,000 Jordanian dinars ($9,000).
A terrorist cell was uncovered some years ago in a certain village, and a curfew was imposed for an unlimited period of time. For the village farmers, forbidden to go out to their fields, this meant in essence the loss of an entire year’s crops. The villagers were powerless to do anything. The wastonaire in this particular place was the village elder, the mukhtar (a not uncommon combination). He demanded a thousand dinars from each family in order to arrange for the curfew to be lifted. Those with money paid and were allowed to leave the village immediately. Those without money remained restricted to the village for four entire weeks, and their crops withered.
These are extreme examples, but it is the common, everyday cases which are most infuriating. Generally, the unholy alliance between the regime and its agents means that Arabs are forced to pay large sums of money in order to receive what is, though they may not know it, theirs by right and according to law. The attitude of the locals to the wastonaires is mixed: they despise them, but they need them; they curse them, but are afraid to cross them.
I brought the subject up in conversations with officials in the civil adminstration. This was their comment:
“As to the wastonaire phenomenon—there is a lot of exaggeration. There are not many people who take bribes in order to arrange people’s rights for them.” As a matter of fact, one may assume that the wastonaires, gentle souls, will use any means to ensure that they remain a scarce commodity. The same “high-placed official” went on to say: “You have to understand that we are speaking here of a population not yet free of the customs of the Arab world. It is only natural for the civil administration to encourage people who contribute through their activity and influence to the community, in the sense of keeping things calm, which allows the economy to flourish and is therefore for the general good.”
I appreciated his frankness.
Not long after that conversation, I saw an Arab in civilian clothes walking through Nablus with an impressive pistol prominently displayed on his waist. I asked a local who it was, and after some hesitation, he explained to me that this was a wastonaire. I went to the civil administration and asked if it supplies such people with arms. They said: “A permit to carry a weapon is granted only in the case where a person’s life is in danger, and according to certain criteria which cannot be revealed. In any case, only a few dozen people have been given weapons.”
The emergence of the wastonaires is not the only phenomenon to puncture the fabric of traditional local life: the status of the mukhtar has also greatly deteriorated as a result of Israeli rule. The security forces discovered that it is easier and more convenient to approach the local mukhtar with any local problem, and demand information and cooperation from him. The few mukhtars who refused to cooperate were cleverly dealt with by means of anonymous innuendo and humiliation, after which they could no longer function in their traditional role. Today the security forces use the mukhtars to guide them to the houses of terrorist suspects. Anyone who has served in the reserves in the territories knows that when he needs to carry out a midnight search in a given house in a crowded village, or in the heart of a refugee camp, the easiest way to do so is to go to the mukhtar’s house, awaken him, and order him to lead the troops to the suspect’s house. In this way the security forces have turned the mukhtars into collaborators. Anyone who chances into the office of one of the military governors on a day of a meeting with the mukhtars would think that he had barged unsuspecting into a strange meeting of a quaintly dressed board of directors of a large company. The atmosphere is one of calm, coffee, gossip, and flattering laughter. The mukhtars accept with suspect naturalness the fatherlike authority of the military governor. It may be that they believe that in doing so they better serve their interests and those of their villagers, or it may be their instinct for survival. In any case, one thing is clear: the institution of the mukhtar has been taken out of its natural context, and its content has been greatly distorted.