Palestinian security forces are caught between a rock and a hard place.
By James M. Dorsey
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Muhammad Manassara walked in late February into a gas
station near the West Bank settlement of Eli. Armed with an automatic weapon, Mr. Manassara killed
two people before he was shot dead by the owner of a restaurant at the
station, the site of the killing last summer of four Israelis.
The weapon
used by Muhammad Manassara. Credit: YnetNews
Three weeks later, Mujahid Barakat Mansour, a father of two
small children, opened fire near the Israeli West Bank settlement of Dolev. Mr
Mansour killed an Israeli soldier and wounded six others in an hours-long gun
battle before an Israeli military helicopter took him out.
Mujahid
Barakat Mansour and his toddlers
Days afterward, Abu Rida al-Saadi opened fire on two school
busses and a car in the Jordan Valley, wounding three Israelis, including a
13-year-old boy. Mr. Al-Saadi escaped the scene but turned himself in two days
later amid a tightening manhunt.
Israeli
troops secure the scene of a shooting incident, near Jericho in the
Israeli-occupied West Bank, March 28, 2024. (Reuters)
Messrs Manassara, Mansour, and Al-Saadi had more in common
than just having attacked Israelis. The three men were active or former members
of the Palestine Authority’s security forces.
Muhammad Manassara. Credit: YnetNews
The three incidents are among an increasing number of
seemingly lone-wolf attacks on Israelis since the Gaza war erupted in early
October and come amid daily clashes between Israeli forces and Palestinian
militants on the West Bank.
What sets the three incidents apart is that they shine a
spotlight on the 35,000-member Palestinian security forces that the United
States, Gulf countries, and much of the international community want to see in
charge of on-the-ground security in post-war Gaza.
Reporting to Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, the
security forces comprise the police, the National Security Forces, the Presidential
Guard, Preventive Security, and the General Intelligence Services.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has insisted that Israel
will retain security control across Gaza and the West Bank but refuses to take
day-to-day charge of the devastated Strip. Mr. Netanyahu has further rejected
US-backed efforts to pave the way for the return to Gaza of Mr. Abbas’s
Authority.
At the same, Mr.
Netanyahu’s envisioned alternatives – Gazan clans, Arab states, and private
security and military firms – have all refused to help him fill the vacuum,
starting with securing the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza.
Violence perpetrated by Palestine security force associates,
including some like Messrs. Manassara and Mansour, who have served sentences in
Israeli prison, stiffened Mr. Netanyahu’s resolve.
The three incidents serve the prime minister’s insistence on
having compliant Palestinians run Gaza’s day-to-day affairs, including ensuring
law and order, even if Mr. Netanyahu’s rejection of the Authority has as much,
if not more, to do with his refusal to acknowledge Palestinian national rights
than security concerns.
The incidents and Mr. Netanyahu’s refusal lay bare not only
the yawning gap between Israeli and Palestinian perceptions of what Gaza should
look like the day after the guns fall silent but also what the security forces’
role should be.
Israel conceives the forces’ main task as preventing
anti-Israeli violence, whereas Palestinians believe they should be protecting
Palestinians against Israeli military and vigilante settler attacks.
“People come in(to the security forces) with this assumption
that they’re going to be part of the liberation struggle, but then the
liberation struggle is translated to them as this kind of maintaining peace and
order of their own people,” said Fadi Quran, a Palestinian activist and
political analyst.
Jenin’s police commander Brig. Gen. Azzam Jebara, left, decorates Palestinian security officers, who responded to an arson attack by angry protesters on a Palestinian police station in 2023. Credit: Nasser Nasser, Associated Press
This week, issues associated with the Palestinian security
forces took on added significance with US
President Joe Biden pressuring Israel to substantially enhance the flow of
humanitarian aid into Gaza, ensure the protection of innocent civilians, and
agree to an immediate ceasefire.
CIA director
Bill Burns was expected to travel to Cairo this weekend for a meeting with
the Prime Minister of Qatar, the director of Mossad, Israel’s foreign
intelligence service, and the head of Egyptian intelligence, to try and reach a
breakthrough in stalled talks on a ceasefire and Israeli-Hamas prisoner
exchange.
The United States, Qatar, and Egypt see a ceasefire as a
steppingstone for an end to the six-month-old war that would put post-war
governance and security arrangements at the top of the agenda.
The Palestinian security forces’ inability to protect their
own and their frequent crackdown on Mr. Abbas’s critics is a primary reason why
the Authority has lost credibility, and Palestinians see the forces as doing
Israel and the president’s bidding.
"The
problem is with the politicization of the security forces' leadership. Seeing
how bad the PA's (Palestine Authority’s) standing is right now, it's very hard
to see how they can perform security work,” said Middle East analyst and former
adviser to the Palestinian peace negotiating team Ghaith al-Omari.
Middle East scholar Alaa Tartir said Palestinian security
sector reform was designed “to deliver stability, security coordination, and
Israeli security first.”
This week, Mr. Abbas’s Al Fatah movement accused Iran, which backs Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, of trying to sow chaos amid a surge in intra-Palestinian violence in the West Bank.
Iranian arms cache. Source: Shin Bet
The Al Fatah warning followed clashes in the last week
between Palestinian security forces and armed Islamic Jihad militants in the
West Bank city of Tulkarm and a similar incident in Jenin, frequent targets of
Israeli raids.
Palestinian security forces have sought to prevent pro-Hamas
demonstrations in West Bank cities and restricted the display of Hamas flags.
"This isn’t in support of Israeli policy. It’s driven
by concern about Hamas’ rising popularity," a Palestinian security source
said.
Israel’s Shin Bet domestic security agency said last month it
had foiled
attempts by Iran to smuggle large amounts of advanced weapons into the West
Bank.
Shin Bet said the smuggling was organized by Unit 4000, the
intelligence unit of the Special Operations Division of the Islamic
Revolutionary Guards Corps, and the Special Operations Unit 18840 of the
Guards’ Quds Force in Syria.
The agency said a senior Lebanon-based Al Fatah official, Munir
Makdah, was involved in the foiled smuggle.
It said the weapons cachet included fragmentation bombs,
anti-tank landmines with fuses, grenade launchers, shoulder-launched anti-tank
missiles, RPG launchers and rockets, and C4 and Semtex explosives.
Al Fatah issued its statement as Israel braced for possible Iranian retaliation for an
Israeli bombing of Iran’s embassy compound in Damascus that killed two senior
Revolutionary Guards commanders and five others.
Regavim
report. Credit: Regavim
Regavim, a pro-Israeli settler NGO that seeks to paint the
Palestine Authority as a terrorist threat, asserted in a 68-page report
issued in February that 80 associates of its security forces were arrested or
killed while attacking Israeli nationals and soldiers in the past three years.
If anything, the involvement of Palestinian security forces
in anti-Israeli violence shines a spotlight on the fallout of Israel’s
systematic undermining of the Authority and its security forces, and an
occupation policy that generates resistance, even if nothing justifies violence
against innocent civilians.
As part of its rejection of any expression of Palestinian
national aspirations, Israel projects the forces as dedicated to killing
Israelis and threatening security instead of as a force that despite its
nationalist sentiment has worked closely with its Israeli counterparts.
To be sure, security personnel chant nationalist songs and
slogans during training and practice. Their facilities feature portraits of Mr.
Abbas and Yasser Arafat, the late Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO)
leader, and pay tribute to West Bank militants.
Even so, Israel, rather than working with the security
forces, has reinforced nationalist and militant sentiment with the carnage of
the Gaza war and the killing
of more than 400 Palestinians in six months of multiple daily raids on West
Bank towns, villages, and refugee camps.
Israel’s military increasingly limits areas in which the
security forces can operate and subjects them to the same often crippling
restrictions ordinary Palestinians are subjected to.
Making things worse, Israel’s
refusal to fully transfer tax revenues it collects on behalf of the
Palestine Authority means that security force personnel have only received half
their salaries since the Gaza war erupted.
Speaking to The Washington Post last month, the forces’
director of training, who was identified only as a colonel, said Israel
has refused for a year the import of live ammunition for training purposes.
To circumvent the Israeli restriction, the forces send personnel to Jordan for
live ammunition training.
“Israel asserts that we are incapable of maintaining law and
order to justify their daily raids and killings. The result is the growth of
militancy in the absence of a security force that protects rather than
threatens Palestinians,” said a senior security force official.
Dr.
James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological
University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of
the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.
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