Squeezing
Palestinians Into Impossible Mission
By Nicola Nasser
12 April, 2007
Countercurrents.org
The
Israeli 40-year old military occupation and the more than a year old
economic siege are eroding the national existence of Palestinians and
squeezing the Palestinian leadership into an almost impossible mission
of securing law and order by practically renewing an old plan thwarted
because, in the end, it could not secure individual safety in the absence
of national safeguards.
Controlling the security
chaos is the second most important priority after lifting the economic
siege according to the platform of the new “national unity”
government of the autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), whose cabinet
discussed in a special session in Gaza City on April 8 a 100-day security
plan presented by interior minister, Hani al-Qawasmeh, in a bid to enforce
law and order especially in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip, but, contrary
to expectations, did not decide any action on the plan and instead postponed
discussing how to implant it to another cabinet meeting next week.
Within the context of military
occupation and economic siege, a prevailing “security vacuum”
originally resulted from power struggle among more than 10 security
agencies, which took roots after the Israeli reoccupation of the West
Bank in 2002 and the redeployment of the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF)
to the periphery of the Gaza Strip in 2005, both events that were accompanied
by the Israeli destruction of the Palestinian security infrastructure
that was built with the scarce money of the western and Arab donors.
The emanating “security
chaos” was exacerbated further by the landslide electoral victory
of the Islamic Resistance Movement “Hamas” in the January
2006 legislative election and deteriorated more by the Israeli and US-led
western boycott that followed. The pressures of reoccupation and siege
have weakened the PA to the verge of financial insolvency and non-governance
and expectedly created a security vacuum that was filled by convergence
to clan, tribal and religious search for communal security and personal
safety while economic insecurity created the right environment conducive
to illegal activities.
More than 50 unofficial armed
groups, some mafias and well-armed clans have stepped in and appear
to be consolidating control over key neighbourhoods in Gaza Strip, according
to Professor Iyad Barghuthi, who runs a Palestinian human rights group:
“Each one of the 53 (groups) wants to show that he has the power
and he can do whatever he likes,” he said. (1)
Member of the PLO Executive
Committee and former minister of culture and information, Yasser Abed
Rabbo, confirmed there are indicators of a serious problem in the Gaza
Strip, including “establishing camps and building militias. No
one knows who is the authority. The Gaza Strip is full of thugs and
gangsters who are responsible for the ongoing anarchy. Soon the Gaza
Strip may be declared a dangerous zone, which means that all international
organizations would have to leave.” Chief Palestinian negotiator,
Saeb Erekat, warned that a “dangerous zone” declaration
would increase the suffering of the Gazans. (2) Muhammad Dahlan, who
was recently appointed PA National Security Adviser, said it was time
to admit that a “curse has hit” the Gaza Strip and “the
situation is catastrophic and many young men prefer to work for clans
and not the security forces.”
Palestinian Justice Minister,
Ali Sartawi, an Islamist and Hamas appointment to the position, confirmed
his PLO official colleagues and warned that the family clans and gangs
in Gaza have become so powerful that Palestinian security forces can
no longer control them: “Because of the power of the families,
and because of the power of the Dogmush family and its strength and
huge numbers, to take action against such a family … would put
the Palestinian interior minister in a very difficult position. If the
interior minister takes action alone against this family and all the
suspects, the result will be catastrophic.” (3)
The security chaos was highlighted
by the kidnapping of BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, 44, in Gaza city on
March 12th, in the longest captivity a foreign journalist has endured
in Gaza over the past three years. The Dogmush family, who is thought
to have a militia of about 2,000 men, is suspected of abducting him
and was blamed for the abduction of two Fox TV journalists held for
two weeks last summer; the family denied these accusations. “This
has become a country of mafia,” said Hani Habeeb, a sociologist
with Gaza's al-Azhar University.
100-day Security
Plan
The ambitious 100-day security
plan relies on clan bosses and anti-Israeli faction leaders agreeing
to permit prosecution of members who break the law. Interior minister
al-Qawasmeh held talks with clan chieftains in Gaza who expressed alarm
at the behaviour of their young militias, which justice minister Sartawi
called an “encouraging sign.”
The plan, according to cabinet’s
spokesman, Ghazi Hammad, includes instant procedures to deploy security
forces to contain abductions, thefts, fratricide and clan feuds and
long-term ones, which envisions an amalgamation of faction militias
into one security force, and more financial support and training to
build up pride in the force and mitigate clan loyalties. But attempts
to combine militia forces have been tried before and failed miserably
in as much as did reform plans to unify the twelve security agencies
into three major forces. These long term goals were targeted as early
as 26 June 2002, when the PA published a 100-Day Plan for Reforms; only
the financial reforms had the chance to materialize under the former
minister of finance, Salam Fayyadh, who holds now the same portfolio.
President Mahmoud Abbas appointed
his security adviser Dahlan, now a Fatah legislator, to head up the
National Security Council amid controversial protests by their ruling
coalition partner Hamas, indicating a residual simmering rivalry. However
clashes between the two rival movements that have claimed at least 4000
Palestinian lives were defused as a major source of insecurity thanks
to the mediation of Saudi Arabia whose King Abdullah sponsored the signing
of the Mecca agreement on February 8 on the basis of which the new “national
unity” government was approved by the Palestinian Legislative
Council (PLC) on March 17.
Violence-breeding
Incubator
But there remains the overall
violence-breeding incubator of the prevailing security chaos.
First, the blurred national
role of the PA security apparatus is eroding public confidence in this
role. Externally what is the point in having more than 80,000 of national
security personnel when they could not stand up to the IOF to defend
their people or at least make their daily onslaughts with a price? Internally,
according to Hassan Khraisheh, deputy speaker of the PLC, “What's
the point in having 85,000 security officers if they can't free a foreign
journalist who has been held in the Gaza Strip for three weeks?”
The PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with
an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; compared to 1:400 in the United
States, according to one estimate.
Second, disarming all but
the government is a security prerogative, but it will not certainly
be a very popular move by the PA to disarm people of personal and overwhelmingly
primitive self-defence weapons while they are still under Israeli occupation
and their “national” security forces are practically unable
and politically committed not to defend them against the ongoing military
incursions, extra-judicial assassinations (dubbed by the Israelis “targeted
killings”), house demolitions and mass arrests.
Third, the absence of what
the US Administration and PA officials have been recently fond of describing
as “political horizon,” the deadlocked “vision”
of a two-state solution, Israel’s undermining of the Road Map
and her rejection of the Arab Peace Initiative are all factors contributing
to a destabilizing no-war-no-peace situation that is playing on an already
edgy Palestinian nerves and their collective sense of insecurity.
Fourth, the economic and
financial siege imposed on Palestinians by the Quartet of the UN, US,
EU and Russia is eating at their threatened existential survival. One-third
of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied territories are food insecure,
according to a “Comprehensive Food Security and Vulnerability
Assessment” published in March by the United Nations World Food
Programme (WFP) and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO); most affected
is the Gaza Strip, where 51 percent of the population suffers from food
insecurity. Karen Koning AbuZayd, the commissioner general of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near
East, told an IRIN reporter on March 31 that the humanitarian crisis
in the West Bank and Gaza is “worse than ever.”
Fifth, The World Bank compared
the Palestinian current recession to the Great Depression of 1929. Approximately
10,000 have emigrated from the territories, and approximately 50,000
have applied to do so. Production has been lost due to outright destruction
of physical infrastructure and assets by the IOF and the Quartet boycott.
A joint study by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund
(IMF) late in March said the Israeli military hits on Palestinian infrastructure
brought local production to its knees. Dozens of factories migrated
to Jordan and scores of businessmen moved abroad to doom the private
sector to a situation worse than the public sector. Of course foreign
investment is tantamount to nil. This writer personally knows of PLO
leaders who are harassed by their landlords because they could not pay
their rentals and of PLO ambassadors who have been managing on their
own for months. “Today, almost two-thirds of the Palestinian population
lives in poverty, with per-capita income at 60% of its level in 1999,”
Salam Fayyadh said.
Sixth, the insistence of
the major western “democracies” on ruling out recognition
of the outcome of a democratically-elected Palestinian leadership and
on dealing selectively with the government emanating thereof, is a premeditated
policy to reignite a Palestinian divide that a few months ago threatened
a civil war, thus exacerbating the popular sense of insecurity. It was
noteworthy that the US original pledge of $86 million for PA security
forces loyal to President Abbas was announced on April 10 to be only
$43 million earmarked solely for the Palestinian Presidential Guard
(PPG), which is not the direct instrumental force to enforce law and
order.
Seventh, the economic siege
is also eroding public confidence in the financial accountability of
the PA; the donors’ aid selectively channelled to bypass the PA
Ministry of Finance is nowhere transparent to be accounted for: “The
money coming in can no longer be traced, and we cannot ensure that it
is not being misappropriated,” Fayyadh said. This state of affairs
is fuelling a chronic PA grievance with rumours about corruption, at
a time when older corruption cases are officially still pending judicial
prosecution.
This state of affairs will
inevitably contribute to further insecurity and will more likely squeeze
the Palestinian leadership into an almost impossible mission of securing
law and order; citizen’s security will continue to be wishful
thinking as long as the national security and sovereignty are missing,
in as much as democracy is impossibly unattainable if not practiced
in a free liberated homeland.
Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist in Kuwait,
Jordan, UAE and Palestine. He is based in Birzeit, West Bank of the
Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories.
Notes
(1) National Public Radio
–NPR, April 3, 2007.
(2) Jerusalem Post, Apr.
5, 2007.
(3) Sunday Telegraph, April
7, 2007.
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