With the revival of Middle East peace talks following the Annapolis meeting, agreement over security issues between Israelis and Palestinians will be crucial to building a negotiating momentum. In particular, the development and expansion of Palestinian government security forces is a vital national interest for Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans alike.
Palestinians face a double threat when it comes to their own security. First, they face the security threats inherent in an occupation by a foreign army, the abuses and confrontations that result in deaths of both combatants and civilians. Second, Palestinian society lacks a well organized and disciplined security service-its towns are plagued with political militias and criminal gangs, as well as ad hoc violence. The problem of militias was most clearly seen in June, when Hamas-controlled gunmen seized Gaza and expelled the Palestinian Authority and Fatah from the strip.
Palestinians cannot afford to have private armies that parties use to consolidate their power outside constitutional structures and to conduct their own independent foreign policies. In the name of resistance against occupation, these militias launch attacks, including rockets aimed at Israeli towns, intentionally designed to undermine Palestinian diplomatic progress, even though negotiations are the only realistic prospect for securing an end to the occupation and creating a Palestinian state.
Therefore, these two security problems – occupation by the Israeli military on the one hand, and militia violence that undermines diplomatic efforts on the other – require the same solution: creating an independent state, and solidifying the Palestinian government s security forces as the exclusive military force in Palestine.
Security forces associated with the Palestinian Authority were continuously targeted by Israel during the second Palestinian uprising that began in September 2000. At the time, Israel may have seen those forces as a threat or sought to promote rivalries among Palestinian parties in a divide-and-conquer strategy. However, today, in Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, Israel is dealing with a leadership committed to peace, committed to doing whatever it can to prevent violence. Their ability to act on this commitment must be strengthened to the point that extremist militias will no longer be able to sabotage Palestinian diplomatic strategy.
A major threshold has recently been crossed in Nablus, previously the most chaotic city in the West Bank. Israel agreed to allow Abbas and Fayyad to send 300 Palestinian police officers into the town to impose order. However, Israel s continued incursions into Nablus after the police deployment seriously undermined attempts by the Palestinian Authority to establish legitimacy in its efforts to police the city.
For now, this problem appears to be better. The Nablus effort seems to be producing the desired effects, with ordinary Palestinians reaping the most direct benefits of no longer being at the mercy of armed thugs. As the American consul-general in Jerusalem, Jake Walles, noted in mid-November: The recent actions by the Palestinian Authority have resulted in significant improvements on the streets of Nablus.
Some argue that this was a case of the Palestinian Authority policing the occupation on behalf of Israel. But this ignores the need that Palestinians have for both freedom from occupation and freedom from crime and mayhem. Most Palestinians fully understand that their society cannot flourish in a condition of lawlessness and anarchy.
Israel must recognize that it, too, needs a robust Palestinian security force to prevent political violence aimed at derailing peace, and that security can only be ensured by a monitored agreement with an empowered and functional Palestinian government. Strengthening a disciplined Palestinian security force is therefore a win-win proposition.
The successful experiment in Nablus should be consolidated and expanded to other towns and villages throughout the West Bank and, ultimately, to Gaza as well. A good starting point in Gaza would be to transition control of key crossing points, now in the hands of Hamas, to the Palestinian Authority s security services. This would reduce the opportunities for smuggling, both for criminal and political extremist purposes. It would also be the first step to break the impasse created by the split between Gaza and the West Bank.
The United States has a crucial role to play in this process. Major General Keith Dayton, appointed to help develop disciplined Palestinian security forces, should be provided all the resources this mission requires. General Jim Jones, named by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as the new special envoy for Middle East security, is in charge of Palestinian and Israeli compliance with all their obligations under the road map. This is a major concrete step that came out of Annapolis.
Law and order, enforced by a single, disciplined and well-trained police force, are vital to building a Palestinian state, ending the occupation, and providing Palestinians with the security of independence. Security deliverables on the ground in accord with the road map also depend on this. So does the well-being of ordinary Palestinians and the reconstruction of their society ravaged by occupation and violence.
However, improvement in security for Palestinians and Israelis cannot be divorced from two other components of progress. First, it must be clear that the diplomatic process is leading inexorably to the establishment of a fully sovereign and viable Palestinian state. Second, security progress must be accompanied by improvements in the daily living conditions for Palestinians, especially economic progress and opportunities, and the easing of restrictions on the movements of goods and people.
As talks between Palestinians and Israelis face the usual recriminations and disturbing moves on the ground, Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert must find ways to rebuild sustainable Palestinian security and economic institutions. Strategic threats to the survival of their people in their independent states are real and cannot be made to go away by merely talking about painful concessions. They must make them.
Ziad Asali is president of the American Task Force on Palestine and co-chairman of the US Palestinian Public-Private Partnership. This article is distributed by the Common Ground News Service, and can be accessed at www.commongroundnews.org.
