Don’t work in anti-corruption if you can’t answer this question
- Suheir Freitekh
- 3 days ago
- 4 min read
Updated: 2 days ago
By Suheir Freitekh, Peace and Anti-Corruption Researcher, West Bank – Palestine
A short foreword
I reached out to Suheir Freitekh to see if she would mind writing a few words about her experience working with social norms and corruption in the West Bank. I expected a couple of sentences.
Instead, what I received, caught me off guard, in the best way possible.
It is an unvarnished reflection of seeing a familiar truth turned upside down. And then asking a question that hits at the heart of so much of this field.
Suheir joined Besa’s CJL team in 2023 as the resident, study lead on the role of norms and abuse of power in a citizen- facing government institution in the West Bank.
These are her unedited words… marking the first and only post on this blog to be published in its 100% original state.
I hope you take a moment to read them.
-Cheyanne Scharbatke-Church
I want to start by saying I didn't go into this work naive. I'd been reading corruption reports for years, citing them in my own papers, nodding along to the usual language about "weak oversight" and "institutional capacity gaps." I thought I knew the shape of the problem before I ever sat down with anyone.
Then I started doing the interviews.
It was the word Wasta that kept tripping me up. Not because I didn't know it, I grew up hearing it, and honestly, I've used it myself when I needed to. Like everyone here. But there's a difference between knowing a word and watching it run the whole machine.
I remember a young man, maybe twenty-two. He'd been beaten badly during a protest, and the guy who did it got arrested, but then released. He never filed a formal complaint. Didn't even try. He just shrugged when I asked why, like the answer was obvious. Like I was the one missing something.
He said it almost like he was explaining something obvious to me, something I should already understand: what's the point without someone behind you. He wasn't angry when he said it. That's what got me. He wasn't even cynical. He was just describing how things work.
I left that interview and sat in my car for a while before driving home.
I think I'd assumed, going in, that corruption was something happening despite the social fabric, some kind of breakdown or deviation. What I actually found was corruption happening through the social fabric, as an extension of it. Protecting a cousin. Getting a nephew into a position. Looking the other way when a relative needed something. Nobody I spoke to described these things as betrayals of the public trust. If anything, doing the opposite (refusing to help your own family) was the thing that needed explaining, the thing that looked strange.
That's not an easy thing to write down as a researcher, especially as a Palestinian researcher. There's a part of you that wants to protect the picture, to insist the problem is really about Israeli occupation, donor dependency, the absence of a functioning state, all real factors, by the way, all things I still believe matter enormously. But sitting across from people, again and again, the explanations they gave me weren't about occupation. They were about obligation. About family. About clan. About a loyalty that felt older and more binding than anything written in a civil service law.
I kept trying to draw a clean line, here's legitimate networking, here's corrosive favoritism and I couldn't do it. The people I talked to couldn't do it either. Wasta lives exactly in that shape. It's the same impulse that holds a community together when the state can't be relied on, and it's the mechanism by which a cousin gets promoted over someone more qualified. Same root. Different fruit, depending on the situation.
What actually shook me, if I'm honest, wasn't learning that any of this happens. Somewhere I think I always knew. It was realizing how reasonable it all sounded from inside it. Nobody I spoke to thought of themselves as corrupt. They thought of themselves as good sons, good cousins, good members of a Hamula that takes care of its own. In a place where institutions have been inconsistent, underfunded, and politically squeezed for decades, leaning on family isn't some moral failure, it's often just what works. It's survival logic.
That's the part that changed how I think about fixing any of this. You can rewrite every procurement law, double the oversight committees, prosecute every case that comes across a desk and the underlying current will still pull people back toward kin over institution, because that current isn't legal, it's social. It's about what people feel ashamed of and what they feel proud of. Right now, in a lot of contexts I documented, helping family is the thing people are proud of. Following procedure, when it works against your relative, is the thing that can get you quietly shunned.
I don't have a tidy fix for that. I wish I did. What I have is a different question than the one I started with. I stopped asking "why aren't the institutions stronger" and started asking "why would anyone choose the institution over their family, given everything they've lived through." Until we have a real answer to that second question, I don't think the first one gets us very far.
If this perspective resonates, the Social Norms Accelerator was built to apply social norms in practice, not just theory.
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Suheir Freitekh is a peacebuilding researcher and practitioner with extensive experience in conflict analysis, dialogue, corruption, and development. She holds a Master's degree in International Studies from Birzeit University, has pursued advanced studies in Peace and Conflict Management at the University of Haifa, and is currently a PhD candidate at Dublin University. Her academic and professional journey reflects a longstanding commitment to advancing peace in conflict-affected contexts through research and practice. She has contributed as a researcher and consultant with a well-known international think tank and has been actively engaged with civil society organizations, including serving as an Editorial Board Member of the Palestine-Israel Journal (PIJ), while also bringing experience from her previous work within the Palestinian Authority.
