the establishment of a palestinian police force in the west bank and gaza strip

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The establishment of aPalestinian police force inthe West Bank and GazaStripBrynjar Lia aa Researcher‐analyst at the Norwegian DefenceResearch Establishment (FFI) , Kjeller, NorwayPublished online: 08 Nov 2007.

To cite this article: Brynjar Lia (1999) The establishment of a Palestinianpolice force in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, International Peacekeeping, 6:4,157-170, DOI: 10.1080/13533319908413803

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The Establishment of a Palestinian PoliceForce in the West Bank and Gaza Strip

BRYNJAR LIA

One main reason why Israel decided to reach a settlement with thePalestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1992-93 was the belief thatviolence emanating from the Occupied Territories would come to an end ifthe PLO were allowed to assume responsibility for internal security in thePalestinian-populated areas.1 The Israeli government persuaded publicopinion of the wisdom of the Oslo Accords by arguing that these wouldrelieve the Israeli army of 'the burden of occupation'; furthermore, thatPLO leader Arafat 'could combat terrorism more effectively than the IDF(Israeli Defence Forces) because he does not have to worry (as the primeminister does) about the legality of his methods'.2 This in turn meant thatthe PLO would need a strong police force which could command respectand obedience among the Palestinians and be capable of suppressing anyrejectionist groups who might want to continue the struggle against theIsraeli occupation.

This leads us to the rather understudied issue of the establishment of thePalestinian Police Force (PPF) in the West Bank and Gaza. To elucidate thefactors that influenced the process of creating this force, the following studywill deal with three major themes: First, a brief retrospective on the kind ofpolicing which existed in the pre-Oslo Israeli-occupied West Bank and GazaStrip will shed light on the historical background, traditions and legaciesaffecting the newly created police force. Second, we will see how the OsloPeace Accords themselves shaped the PPF and created politicalcircumsstances that influenced the new police and their work. The mainthrust of this study, however, will be on donor efforts in the field of policeaid and police reform, focusing on donor coordination, donor-recipientrelations, and finally how these efforts have influenced and shaped the PPF.

The main argument of this study is that all three factors influenced theformative period of the Palestinian police and its performance. The legaciesof vigilantism and street justice from the pre-Oslo period, as well as variousprovisions of the Oslo Accords that acted to circumscribe efforts to create a

Brynjar Lia is a researcher-analyst at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment (FFI) atKjeller, Norway.

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158 PEACEBUILDING AND POLICE REFORM

credible and professional police force, negatively affected the Palestinianpolice during its formative period. Partly as a result of the peace accords andpolitical circumstances, donor efforts in police assistance and police reformwere limited and fragmented, lacking overall coordination. This in turnhampered efforts at seriously reforming the Palestinian police.

Policing in the West Bank and Gaza Strip Prior to the Oslo Accords

The West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip had beenunder Israeli occupation since the 1967 war. Until 1988 the policing of theOccupied Territories was largely carried out by Palestinian police officersemployed by the Israeli Police Force, while riots and disturbances weredealt with by the Israeli Defence Forces. After the eruption of thePalestinian uprising - the so-called intifada (shaking off) in late 1987 - thePalestinian leadership took steps to 'shake off the Israeli occupation byboycotting all institutions associated with Israel, including the Israeli police.A call was issued for all Palestinian police officers to resign from theirduties, which most of them did: by mid-1988 the Palestinian areas were nolonger policed by Palestinian police officers. Instead, new forms of policingemerged.

The most prominent force to undertake policing duties were the so-called 'striking forces' (quwa daribah) consisting of young and often armedactivists from the various political factions. They punished petty crime,enforced boycotts and strikes, and executed sentences passed either by theirsuperiors in the political factions or by traditional tribal institutions. Thekind of policing and law enforcement undertaken by these striking forcesdefied most modern standards of policing. The same individual could bepolice, prosecutor, judge and executioner; and sentences - usually somekind of corporal punishment such as beating or knee-capping, and in somecases capital punishment - were passed and carried out within minutes. Theomnipresence of the Israeli occupation and the harsh sentences meted out tomembers of the striking forces by Israeli military courts created anenvironment in which only extremely speedy legal processes werepossible.3

In the years preceding the signing of the Oslo Peace Accords inSeptember 1993, policing within the Occupied Territories had deterioratedand tended towards an ever-larger degree of indiscriminate violence. The'dirty period' had begun: the intifada turned inwards, and the revolutionstarted to 'consume its own children'. There was an explosion in killings ofalleged collaborators, and many Palestinians feared their own strikingforces more than the Israeli army. I would argue that it is impossible tounderstand the style of policing subsequently adopted by the PPF without

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ESTABLISHMENT OF A PALESTINIAN POLICE FORCE 159

putting it into the historical context of the types of alternative policing andrevolutionary justice practised by the striking forces in the OccupiedTerritories.

What emerges from studying the pre-deployment period is that longbefore the official Palestinian police arrived in the Gaza Strip and theJericho Area in May and June 1994, the leading Palestinian faction, theFatah Hawks, had come to an understanding with Israel which allowed themto operate more freely and assert more openly their role as a de facto policeforce. An agreement reached in Rome in January 1994 between Israeliintelligence and Fatah Hawk leaders allowed the Fatah activists to operateas a Palestinian police and secret service throughout most of the OccupiedTerritories. This force was to become the nucleus of the largest Palestinianinternal security agency, the Preventive Security, whose early practices borean unmistakable resemblance to the policing methods of the striking forces.4

The Oslo Peace Accords

The second major element influencing the PPF was the provisions laiddown in the Palestinian-Israeli accords, in particular the Gaza-JerichoAgreement signed 4 May 1994, whereby the two parties reached agreementon the size of the force, equipment, conditions for recruitment, powers andresponsibilities, as well as a few provisions for donor assistance to thepolice.

Closer reading of the peace agreements reveals several factors whichclearly hampered both the donor countries and the Palestinians themselvesin establishing a credible, legitimate and professional police force. Thesefactors demonstrate to what degree the accords themselves may shape thedevelopment of police reform in a war-to-peace transition.

First, the Oslo Accords provided for only a limited transfer of powers tothe Palestinian Self-Rule Authority, such as responsibility for internalsecurity, while external security, borders, etc. remained in Israeli hands.Furthermore, the agreements allowed for the continuation of the Israelioccupation of most of the West Bank and a third of the Gaza Strip, andfailed to put an end to the expansion of Israeli settlements in the OccupiedTerritories. This made it hard for the Palestinian leadership to convinceordinary Palestinians that they had gained much from making 'peace' withIsrael. Consequently, a large majority of the Palestinian population hascontinued to support so-called 'armed operations' against Israeli targets,viewing the Palestinian police and especially its counter-terrorism policiesas the work of a collaborationist militia.

Second, the peace accords contained very few institutional or legalrestraints on the PPF. Only lip service was paid to the need for independent

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courts and human rights standards. Scant attention was given to the need fora firm legal and institutional framework to restrain as large a securityapparatus as that which came into being in the Palestinian areas. The resulthas been a high degree of unaccountability on the part of the Palestinianpolice and security branches. For example, interference by the securityservices in the judicial system has occasionally paralysed the judicialsystem, preventing the judges from 'doing their jobs'.5 A 1997 human rightsreport listed 117 Palestinians held in Palestinian jails for one to three yearswithout charges.6 Moreover, as the courts lack the power to act against thesecurity forces, police officers have acted in their own interests or in thoseof friends or relatives who use their influence with security services insteadof the legal system.7 Torture and human rights abuses have led to onlylimited legal actions, usually as a result of outside diplomatic pressure orlarge-scale riots and disturbances in the Palestinian areas, protesting againstpolice brutality.

Third, the Oslo Accords contained no provisions for a third-partymonitoring role in the demobilization, disarmament and reintegrationprocesses - or for a monitoring mission to follow the activities of the policeon a daily basis. As a result, these important peacebuilding processes werenot addressed, or were expected to be resolved by the PLO leadership at itsown discretion without external interference or support. I would argue thatthis is one reason for the minimal progress on the matter of collection ofsmall arms, as well as for the large-scale recruitment of clearly unfit andundesirable elements into the police forces, motivated by political orpatronage concerns rather than actual qualifications.

Fourth, the accords prohibited the prosecution of former Palestiniancollaborators.8 This provision has served to exacerbate lawlessness inPalestinian-ruled areas. It has prevented open and transparent prosecution ofquislings from the intifada period, rendering impossible the establishmentof Truth Commissions which have been so fundamental to nationalreconciliation in other post-conflict transitions. In the absence of legalchannels for dealing with these painful remnants of the Israeli occupation,dozens of Palestinians have been illegally detained, tortured, lynched, orextra-judicially executed by elements in the Palestinian security apparatus,on suspicion of collaboration with Israel.9

Finally, the security tasks to be fulfilled by the PPF, as set out in the OsloPeace Accords, were both vague and comprehensive — such as to 'take allmeasures necessary in order to prevent acts of terrorism, crime andhostilities directed against each other, against individuals falling under theother's authority and against their property'.10 In practice, such passageshave been interpreted to include the responsibility for preventing violentacts and suicide attacks by Palestinians, even if these occurred inside Israel

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proper and even if the attacks were directed from Palestinian rejectionistgroups operating outside Palestinian-controlled areas. This has forced thePalestinian police and security forces to resort to a wide range ofunsophisticated counter-terrorism measures, such as long-term, illegaldetention of suspects, the establishment of the notorious State Securitycourts, and torture to extract confessions.

Police Assistance and the Donor Community

The role of the donor community in establishing the Palestinian PoliceForce has been an important one, yet donors' influence on the subsequentdevelopment of the Palestinian police appears rather limited. This was notonly due to such deficiencies of the Oslo Accords as the failure to establisha police monitoring body, through for example UN CIVPOL. As we will seein the following, an examination of the mechanisms created to ensure morecoordinated police assistance efforts shows that the coordinating bodieswere fragmented and lacked continuity. In addition to the weakness of inter-donor coordination, police donors and police advisors working with the PPFfaced another set of challenges due to the lack of coordination within thePPF itself, caused by severe rivalries between different police branches, aswell as disagreements on policing concepts and the role of police in society.

Coordination of Police Assistance

The issue of assistance to support the establishment of the PPF was largelyavoided at the large donor conference convened in Washington in October1993 to support peace in the Middle East - a conference at which some US$2.4 billion was pledged to support Palestinian Self Rule. None of thecoordinating mechanisms established in the wake of the Washington donorconference dealt with assistance to the establishment of a PPF. A majorreason was that the World Bank, which occupied a dominant position in thecoordinating bodies, was reluctant to take on the task. The United Nations,with its CIVPOL and peacekeeping departments, had been sidelined at theinsistence of the USA and Israel; and the World Bank, which had noexperience in assistance to police reform, argued that such an issue felloutside its domain.

In light of this development a special police donor conference wasconvened in Oslo in December 1993, to discuss ways of channelling aid tothe Palestinian police. At this meeting and a subsequent meeting held inCairo in March 1994, a number of donor countries made pledges to supportthe PPF with training, equipment and limited financial aid. The Cairoconference also resulted in the establishment of the first coordinatingmechanism, the Coordinating Committee for International Aid to the PPF,

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aptly acronymed COPP. This committee was chaired by Norway andconsisted of representatives from the main donor countries. During most of1994, including the critical months prior to and after deployment ofPalestinian police in Gaza and Jericho, the COPP served as the main bodyfor information exchange on donor efforts in support of the police. TheCOPP maintained and updated matrices over requirements andcontributions to the Palestinian police, and worked primarily to ensure thatthe most basic requirements of the nascent police force were met." It alsosupported the planning of the deployment of the PPF in Gaza and the WestBank town of Jericho in May and June 1994.

Payment of Police Salaries

Yet another multilateral mechanism was created to deal with funding andthe payment of salaries to the Palestinian Police Force. The World Bank wasopposed to becoming a 'paymaster' for the Palestinian police; to make thisexplicit, a strict separation was enforced between the PalestinianAuthority's general budget, which received funds from the World Bank, andthe budget of the Palestinian police until the spring of 1995. Throughout1994 and 1995 there were increasing concerns about the implications of ahungry and underpaid police force. The newly established Palestinian Self-Rule Authority had not yet developed any efficient taxation system, andlacked funds to pay its own police force. Within the donor community, therewas a search for a way to encourage donors to release funds which could beused to pay police salaries. Considerable anxiety was also felt in donorcapitals about channelling funds to what a diplomat termed 'something asamorphous as the Palestinian police'.12 Already in summer and early fall of1994 there were reports of deaths in Palestinian prisons as a result of torture,and of 'illegal' Palestinian police and security forces being formed outsidethe framework of the Oslo Accords. To allay donor concerns and provide adonor recipient mechanism which would share responsibility and reduce thepolitical risks of such a venture, a multilateral payment mechanism forpolice salaries was established in September 1994, through UNRWA, theUN Refugee and Works Agency (for Palestinian Refugees). This agencywas by far the largest UN organization in the Occupied Territories, and hada sufficiently robust infrastructure on the ground to check thousands ofnames and hand-deliver salaries to some 9,000 police officers each month.During most of the critical months of late 1994 and early 1995, most of thePA's police officers were being paid out of donor funds through theUNRWA. This UN police salaries mechanism was considered a success; itencouraged far more donors to donate funds for this purpose at a time whena weak and underpaid police seemed to threaten the peace process.

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Coordination of Police Training

While the COPP focused primarily on equipment and the UNRWA dealtwith police salaries, yet another mechanism became the main instrument forcoordinating police training. After the establishment of Palestinian SelfRule in the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area, Israel dropped its veto againstUN involvement in the donor efforts. The PLO had tried to bring the UNinto the picture already in late 1993 when the PLO leader Arafat officiallyinvited the UN to coordinate the training of the PPF. In the summer of 1994a UN Special Coordinator to the Occupied Territories was appointed by theSecretary-General. The UN Special Coordination's Office (UNSCO)became an important focal point for local aid coordination efforts, includingthe coordination of police training. During the latter part of 1994 a UNPolice Advisor was appointed; he became one of the few channels availableto the international community for advising and coordinating donor effortsin the police sector. The UN Police Advisor identified needs, advised donorson aid programmes and served as an interlocutor between donors and thePPF.

The UN Police Advisor was seconded from one of the donor countriesactive in the police sector. To date, all UN Police Advisors have come fromthe Nordic countries (one from Norway, one from Sweden and two fromDenmark). His authority derived from the UN and the UN SpecialCoordinator's Office in Gaza, in addition to Arafat's request in 1993 for theUnited Nations to assist in police training. Donor assistance to the PPF waschannelled primarily on a bilateral basis; in practice, donor countries andthe recipient police branches were free to choose whether they wanted tofollow the recommendations of the UN Police Advisor or not. There hasbeen a tendency for the services of the UN Police Advisor to be used mostextensively by the Nordic countries, as well as by a few North Europeancountries. Despite the solid reputation of Nordic states in humanitarian andpeacekeeping missions, their small size and distant location have meant thatthe Nordic UN Police advisors have in fact had a small say when crucialissues and interests were on the table.

The UN Police Advisor's position was also affected by the fragmentedand discontinuous nature of the overall police coordination. The COPPceased to work towards the end of 1994; in early 1995 a Sector WorkingGroup for Police Assistance was established, as a part of a newlyestablished local coordinating structure set up at the end of 1994. TheUNSCO served as a secretariat for the SWG/Police; it was co-chaired byNorway (as one of the lead donors) and the Palestinian Ministry forPlanning and International Cooperation (MOPIC). Even if it assumedresponsibility for donor coordination of both equipment and training, the

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SWG/Police soon confined itself to coordinating training programmes withan explicit focus on 'rule of law' and human rights awareness.

Why did police assistance coordination come to focus on thecoordination of training programmes for the Palestinian police, whereas theCOPP had mainly been preoccupied with coordinating in-kind donationsand technical equipment? This was due to several factors. First of all, as thePPF gradually acquired the most basic police equipment, the donorcountries began to view training as an increasingly more immediateconcern. The need for more and better training of the Palestinian police hadbeen strongly underlined by the November 1994 clashes, where a dozenPalestinians had been shot by Palestinian security forces, as well asnumerous incidents involving undisciplined police and human rights abusesby police officers in the latter half of 1994. Donors reacted differently to thereports of human rights abuses; several donors decided to withdraw theirinvolvement in police assistance, or put their aid programmes on hold.Others restricted their assistance to the Civil Defence or the Civil Policebranches, which were less controversial than the Palestinian securityforces.13 Yet other donors put more emphasis on areas such as human rightstraining, democratic policing and 'rule-of-law' programmes on the groundsthat the disturbing news of police brutality and deaths of detainees in policecustody should instead urge an increase in training courses for the PPF, inan effort to counteract these abuses. There was a strong belief that abuseswere a result of an untrained police force without sufficient capacity to dealwith such mounting challenges as soaring crime rates, small-armsproliferation, smuggling and heavy Israeli pressure to curb anti-Israeliviolence at any price. However, it was also recognized that there werestructural problems which could not be addressed merely through trainingand technical equipment. As one police advisor noted, 'what kind of policeone should have is not a technical issue, it is very much a politicalquestion'.'4 Leading police donors acted through diplomatic channels to putpolitical pressure on the Palestinian leadership to take legal action to curbhuman rights abuses in the Palestinian Police, but with only limited success.

Another reason for the SWG/Police to focus primarily on training wasthe fact that, during 1995-96 it became increasingly difficult for theUNSCO as the secretariat in SWG/Police to gather information from donorson their in-kind contributions to the PPF, so it was decided to limit theupdating of matrices to training courses only. It appears that several donorshad established direct contacts with the intelligence and security services ofthe PPF, and had no wish to go public about their donations. By early 1997one of the police donors noted that much of the bilateral assistance to thePalestinian security forces 'was of such character that one probably does notwish to deliberate upon it in the working group (i.e. the SWG/Police)'.15

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Assistance to the Palestinian police beyond human rights training hadbecome a politically sensitive issue; probably for that reason, many donorcountries preferred to keep their assistance programmes on a strictlybilateral basis.

Although in-kind assistance and donations continued to be discussed inthe SWG/Police, the working group did not function according to theprovisions of the SWG's mandate, namely to 'develop an overall view ofdonor-financed activities in the sector', as a basis for the development of 'anannual integrated programme for donor activities with a view to thePalestinian Authority's priorities'.16 Neither the SWG/Police, the old COPP,or the SWGs for other aid sectors had any formal authority to set priorities.With the donors unwilling to coordinate anything more than some parts oftheir police aid programmes, the SWG became more of an informationexchange forum rather than a strategic planning committee aiming at 'anintegrated response from the whole system of actors'." This evolution of theSWG/PPF was not accidental: it followed the pattern of other SWGs inwhich priority was given to certain project areas, while the aim ofmaintaining a general overview of all donor activity was often abandoned.

As the Palestinian Police Force became more self-sufficient, thecoordinating mechanisms for police assistance became less relevant, in theeyes of the donors. The remaining coordinating mechanism for policeassistance, the SWG/PPF, lost much of its original function as an overallcoordinating mechanism. It coordinated various training programmes withan explicit emphasis on human rights and the rule of law, whichincreasingly had become a major concern for most of the donor community.Otherwise it was allowed to relapse into what one donor representativecalled 'a half-sleeping life'.18 When 'counter-terrorism' emerged as numberone priority after the spate of suicide attacks in February-March 1996, theSWG/Police found itself playing second fiddle to the far more importantCIA role in the Palestinian-Israeli security cooperation mechanism, as wellas the CIA and EU-sponsored counter-terrorism training programmes forthe Palestinian security forces.

Non-Public Assistance

The weakness of the coordinating structure can be partly explained by theincreasing weight of 'non-public' police assistance, mainly counter-terrorism assistance programmes for the Palestinian police. While thebuilding and development of a strategic crime investigation and policeintelligence organization may often fall outside the realm of police reformin an immediate post-conflict situation, the matter is nevertheless relevanthere because the question of preventing violence, or 'fighting terrorism', inthe Oslo peace process was deemed fundamental to the success of the entire

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peace project by two of the most central actors, Israel and the USA. Makingthe Palestinian Authority capable of preventing further political violence byrejectionist groups became a top priority item.

However, it is very difficult to study this aspect of police reform efforts.Naturally, many of the counter-terrorism assistance programmes have beenkept secret, and the extent and character of 'non-public' assistance to thePPF are by their very nature impossible to determine from open sources.Such assistance appears to have expanded after Hamas suicide attacksthreatened to derail the entire peace process in late 1994 and early 1995; andeven more so after the spate of suicide attacks in early 1996. It seems clearthat the CIA had been training Palestinian security services in counter-terrorism for years; and various European police and intelligence serviceshave subsequently become involved in counter-terrorism assistance to thePalestinians. It can be assumed that Russia also cooperates with thePalestinians in this sector.19

The coordination of this kind of assistance is by its very nature non-transparent, but it seems clear that the European programmes have partlybeen coordinated through the EU Special Advisor to the PA, with activitiesreportedly ranging from advice on structuring an intelligence organization,covert operations, surveillance and eavesdropping techniques to non-violentinterrogation techniques and human rights awareness. There is said to havebeen meetings and some informal coordination between the CIAprogramme and the EU Special Advisor, as well as between the UN's PoliceAdvisor and the EU Special Advisor.20 The non-transparency and secrecysurrounding these programmes constitute yet another impediment tostrategic and overall planning for the police sector. More than any othersector perhaps, the police sector can never be completely transparent, due tothe sensitive nature of various forms of police assistance.

Lack of Coordination in the Palestinian Police Force

Competition and rivalries between various semi-independent policebranches and security services have also been a major obstacle to thecoordination of police aid. Rivalries between the Palestinian ministries werea problem recognized by the donor community, but they were even moreprevalent within the PPF. Foreign police advisors had worked hard atpersuading the PPF leadership to agree on a workable and coordinatedcommand structure for the police, but this was blocked by competinginterests of the various police and security branches. The commandstructure was very much dictated by the patrimonial politics of PLO leaderYasser Arafat, who desired to keep potential and real rivals in an eternalstruggle for his favour - a well-known feature of Arafat's politicalleadership for most of the pre-Oslo era. To the extent that the police donors

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attempted to exert pressure to get Arafat to abide by the police structure setout in the Oslo Accords, they were unsuccessful. This meant that in realitythe PPF had no head, since all police and security service commanders wereresponsible to Arafat only. In the absence of clear lines of command,coordination on the recipient side inevitably became a problem. Not until1996 did the PPF agree to a 'Police Assistance Coordination Committee'(PACC); however, various branches of the police continued to deal directlywith donors, competing for the same donor resources. An evaluation reportby European police advisors written in late 1996 revealed frustration at thelack of strategic leadership and initiative in the rivalry-ridden police forces:'We have not found any plans of strategy for the PPF in the future. It seemsto be very much an ad hoc driven organization. Nobody dares, openly, tohave any ideas about the future'.21

The Concept of Policing

Let us return to the concept of policing - a recurrent theme in donor-recipientrelations. As many Palestinian officers in the internal security services wereformer intifada militants, their policing experience was limited to the kind ofvigilantism practised by the 'striking forces' during the intifada. Most of thehigher-echelon officers in all other police branches, however, were recruitedfrom the Palestinian Liberation Army, i.e. Palestinian military units attachedto Arab armies. A few of them had received limited police training in Egyptand Jordan before deployment. The policing model adopted by the PalestinianPolice Force was clearly built on their experience from their Arab hostcountries, with the overall structure of the PPF patterned on the Jordanian andEgyptian model.22 The police-society relations prevalent in these countries -characterized by a strong emphasis on obedience, respect and deference forthe police as the representative of the state - had an important impact on manyleading Palestinian police officers. On the whole, the overwhelminglymilitary background of higher echelon officers meant that most Palestinianpolice branches saw themselves as military units preparing to defend nationalsovereignty and security, rather than as a service-oriented civilian police.Hence, the army officers in the Palestinian police branches had concepts ofpolicing vastly different from those of the police advisors from the variousdonor countries. The PPF as a whole was a largely militarized force wheremilitary drills and combat training were emphasized. Several PPF units calledthemselves 'army', 'soldiers', 'military officers'. Many branches wore greencamouflage uniforms, and their monthly journals often focused on purelymilitary topics. Fighting capabilities were deemed important in order to deteran Israeli reoccupation of the Self Ruled Areas - which, with the crisis in thepeace process in 1997 and 1998, no longer appeared to be an unlikely option.Needless to say, in such a context the PPF was not very likely to develop into

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a Western-style civilian police force. The inherently military culture of thePalestinian police officers frustrated foreign police advisors who had comethere to train and advise Palestinian officers in policing. A Europeanevaluation report on the PPF can provides illustrations of this minor 'clash ofcivilizations':

The meaning of policing is more Arabic than Western Europeoriented. When asked, officers in Preventive Security described theirresponsibility as 'to keep an eye on the opposition'... [Our impressionis that] the whole (PPF) organisation more committed to be 'freedomfighters' than 'crime fighters... As an illustration of this there is awidespread habit among the senior officers to talk about the membersof PPF as soldiers and not as policemen... Due to the lack of policingknowledge and the very rooted military culture, much of the work inthe different branches tends to be related to military operations, tacticsand thinking.. .and not related to the way a police organisation shouldhave solved the task.23

In sum, police assistance coordination was affected by a great manyfactors which diminished the impact of the assistance on the performanceand development of the Palestinian police. In the absence of an overallpolice coordination structure that could encompass all police assistanceprogrammes with an explicit mandate to monitor, advise and set priorities,a host of coordination bodies dealt with various aspects of police reformissues and became increasingly bypassed by other donor interests related tocounter-terrorism. Finally, donor efforts in the police sector were hamperedby rivalries within the PPF itself, as well as by the conflicting perceptionsof policing styles and more generally what kind of force the PalestinianPolice should be.

Concluding Remarks

The legacies of vigilantism and alternative policing by the 'striking forces'during the pre-Oslo period have had a tangible impact on the policing stylesadopted by the Palestinian Police Force. All the more so, since manyofficers of the Palestinian internal security apparatus are former members ofthe striking forces. Another, and perhaps more pervasive, impact on thePalestinian Police in its formative period was the Oslo Peace Accords,which, with all their shortcomings, provided the political context withinwhich the police operated. In particular the obligation laid down in theaccords to continue to fight terrorism in all forms has contributed toundermine the fragile legitimacy of the police force, and to politicize itswork and actions.

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Donor efforts to support the establishment of a credible and professionalpolice force have been heavily influenced by the political setting. Of themany types of post-conflict assistance in the Oslo peace process, policeassistance assumed particular salience, due to the importance attributed tothe counter-terrorism capabilities of the PPF by Israel and the USA. Policeaid needed to be delivered quickly and in a coordinated manner, given thecritical role of the police force in making the peace process succeed. Thishas proved difficult, however, as some of the donor countries have legal orpolitical restrictions prohibiting the use of development funds for policepurposes. Moreover, frequent human rights abuses by Palestinian policeelements have made donors reluctant to deal with the police sector.Coordination mechanisms or 'donor recipient mechanisms' which shareresponsibility and enhance accountability have helped to achieve increasedfunding for the PPF, as could be seen when the UN police salary mechanismwas established in late 1994. The coordination mechanisms for police aidhave been largely unsuccessful, however, in setting priorities and promotingagendas for the donors with a view to reducing human rights violations bymembers of the Palestinian security forces. One reason for this is that thecoordination mechanisms for assistance to the PPF have been fragmented,lacking continuity. With no explicit mandate for human rights monitoring,they have been able to exercise scant leverage on the PPF, partly becausepolice assistance, especially to counter-terrorism programmes, hasincreasingly been channelled via non-public channels, outside thecoordination structures. This, together with the fact that 'war on terrorism'has become the number one priority for Israel and several major policedonor countries, has weakened the leverage of the coordination mechanismsfor police assistance.

A final observation from this study is that the belief that there wasbasically a technical solution (more training and better equipment) to theproblem of human rights abuses and the absence of rule of law, has provedto be mistaken. As long as there is insufficient political will on the part ofthe political leadership in both Israel and the Palestinian Authority to dealdecisively with these problems, there can be no solution to this highlyunfortunate situation.

NOTES

This paper rests mainly on my previous work: Brynjar Lia, Implementing The Oslo PeaceAccords: A Case Study of the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process and International Assistancefor the Enhancement of Security, FFI-Report -98/01711, Kjeller, 1998. For other sources ofreference on the Palestinian Police Forces, see Graham Usher, 'The Politics of InternalSecurity: The PA's New Intelligence Services', Journal of Palestine Studies 25 (2), Winter1996, pp.21-34; Graham Usher, 'The Politics of Internal Security: The Palestinian

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Authority's New Security Services', in George Giacaman and Dag Jørund Lønning, eds.,After Oslo: New Realities, Old Problems, London and Chicago: Pluto Press, 1998,pp.146-61.

2. David Makovsky, Making Peace with the PLO: The Rabin Government's Road to the OsloAccord, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996, p.149

3. Interviews with former Gazan Fatah, PFLP and DFLP activists in Gaza, September 1998.4. See for example Bassam Eid and Eitan Felner, Neither Law Nor Justice: Extrajudicial

Punishment, Abduction, Unlawful Arrest, and Torture of Palestinian Residents of the WestBank by the Palestinian Preventive Security, Jerusalem: B'tselem, August 1995.

5. This practice is fully acknowledged by the security forces themselves. In an interview inJanuary 1998, Head of the Palestinian General Intelligence Service Amin al-Hindi stated, 'Itis true that the New Attorney General ordered the release of some prisoners, but he changedhis mind when we made him appreciate the kind of danger they pose to society. The sameapplies to courts.' See 'Guidelines to Security', Biladi, The Jerusalem Times, 23 January1998, p.6.

6. 'Security Services Crippling Justice System', Palestine Report 3(12), 29 August 1997.7. See for example the monthly magazine of the Palestine Society for the Protection of Human

Rights and the Environment, People's Rights / al-Raqib.8. According to the accords, former Palestinian collaborators shall 'not be subjected to acts of

harassment, violence, retribution or prosecution'. Article XVI, Israeli-Palestinian InterimAgreement on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

9. No exact figures are available.10. Agreement on the Gaza Strip and Jericho, Article XVIII.11. Interview with former COPP police advisor in Hebron, West Bank, November 1996.12. Interviews in Gaza and Tel Aviv, December 1996.13. See for example Overseas Development Council, 'Britain Announces More Aid for the

Palestinians' at http:// www.oneworld.org/oda/press/mar13html dated 13 March 1996,specifying among other things that 'Assistance from the Aid Programme to the police isfocussed on training the Civil Police Branch. It does not include counter-terrorism.'

14. Interview in Hebron, West Bank, October 1996.15. Interview in Gaza City, May 1998.16. United Nations—World Bank, Partners in Peace: The Local Aid Coordination Committee

(LACC) for Development Assistance in the West Bank and Gaza Strip (Gaza, July 1996).17. Brynjar Lia (n.1 above), p.107.18. Interviews with SWG/Police representatives in Gaza City and Tel Aviv, May 1998.19. Russian assistance to the PA has been restricted almost completely to the police sector. In

1995 Russian donated to the PPF a large number of armed personnel carriers.20. Interviews in the West Bank, April 1998.21. Evaluation Report (draft), dated December 1996.22. Interview with Major-General Nasser Youssef, Head of the PPF, in Gaza, May 1998.23. PPF Evaluation Report, Gaza, December 1996.

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the establishment of a palestinian police force in the west bank and gaza strip

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