By Geoffrey Aronson, Executive Director of the Washington, D.C.-based Foundation for Middle East Peace
Paul Wolfowitz was one of the first to question Gen. Keith Dayton after a May 7 speech at the influential Washington Institute for Near East Policy. Wolfowitz, a deputy secretary of defence and key Pentagon architect of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, asked Dayton if “your people” -- the Palestinian gendarmerie forces being trained by Dayton in support of the West Bank rump of the Palestinian Authority (PA) lead by Mahmoud Abbas – “are seen as collaborators by Palestinians.”
Wolfowitz’s question was as revealing as Dayton’s answer. The administration of George W. Bush viewed the bottom-up training and equipment programme of the Palestinian Authority’s National Security Forces (NSF) managed by Dayton as a means to increase Palestinian security capabilities within strict operational and territorial limits defined by Israel. The Bush White House supported the training of Palestinian forces that at the very least would not challenge Israel’s broad security and settlement prerogatives in the occupied Palestinian territories and that might even effectively participate in a counter-terror policy against the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). Dayton himself added his voice to this view, noting with satisfaction that the NSF’s successful deployment during Israel’s assault on Gaza and its successful suppression of limited popular unrest in early 2009 freed Israeli forces for action in Gaza that would otherwise have deployed to the West Bank.
Dayton’s comments were meant for American audience of pro-Israel activists whose support of the U.S.-lead effort is based on the value Palestinians can add to Israel’s security agenda. Dayton’s words however, were also read by Palestinians. And it was also for them that he answered Wolfowitz. According to a report in the Nation. “the general acknowledged that Hamas and its sympathizers accuse the Palestinian battalions of being ‘enforcers of the Israeli occupation.’ But he stressed that each one of them believes that he is fighting for an independent Palestine. ‘With big expectations, come big risks,’ said Dayton. ‘There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you're creating a state, when you're not.’" (quoted from Robert Dreyfuss on The Nation’s blog may 12)
Countless discussions with Palestinian members of the various PA security forces operating in the West Bank during the last three years reveal a similar calculation. To a man they are prepared to work to establish law and order by arresting law breakers and taming rogue elements of security forces that broke away during the al Aqsa intifada that erupted in 2000. They are anxious to confront Hamas and the Islamic charitable institutions that perform a critical role in Palestinian civil society even as the need for reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas in the new political environment created by the Obama administration unfolds. As Dayton warned, the programme for internal security aiming to impose law and order and aspiring to defeat domestic opponents cannot be sustained without answers to the Palestinian demand for independence, the evacuation of Israeli settlements, and an end to military occupation by Israel. This long-sought objective is the challenge the Obama administration faces today – to end occupation and establish a Palestinian state by 2011.
Palestinians can be forgiven for being skeptical of Washington’s latest interest in securing a Palestinian state. The Bush administration brought them one policy disaster after another. Diplomatic stalemate, more settlements, and the growing power of Hamas, which won democratic elections in January 2006 and humiliated Abbas’ Fateh Party-lead security forces in Gaza in June 2007, were the dubious achievements of Bush’s diplomacy. The new look in U.S. policy during the last 18 months of Bush’s presidency took the form of a zero-sum challenge to the Palestinian public to reject Hamas and embrace Fateh. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, at the Annapolis conference in November 2007, urged the Palestinian public to "follow us" - Abbas, the West and, by association, Israel - "not them," namely, Hamas, which had defeated the ruling Fateh Party in parliamentary election in January 2006 and ruled uneasily until its militias defeated Fateh forces in Gaza in June 2007, leading to a bitter split between Hamas-ruled Gaza and the Fateh-ruled West Bank. The Bush plan envisaged modest improvements in the Palestinian economy and security forces alongside a broad assault on Hamas’ influence that aimed to restore Fateh’s lost supremacy, reduce Hamas' popularity, and decimate its civic and terror infrastructure. These developments would in turn convince Israel to permit expansion of the power and functionality of the Ramallah-based forces, including in the key security domain, and to agree to tangible diplomatic progress toward ending the occupation. Meanwhile, Gaza would experience the calamitous consequences of the policy of economic deprivation engineered by Israel and the PA, with international support, and furious Gazans would make Hamas pay for its refusal to play according to the Annapolis rules. The consolidation of Hamas’ power in gaza, a heightened level of internecine conflict, continuing settlement expansion, and diplomatic stalemate are the results of this policy.
Israeli officials remain profoundly skeptical about empowering PA security forces by significantly reducing the IDF's freedom of action throughout the West Bank, no matter how well the Palestinian security elements supported by Washington perform. Israel’s views on this subject were defined by the pessimistic assessments driving Defensive Shield – the paradigm-shifting Israeli decision in April 2002 to abandon its failed partnership with the Palestinian security services.
Washington’s support for what it terms “security reform” in the West Bank has been guided by the key assumption that Palestinians will be rewarded by Israel in both the security (more territory and autonomy) and political (independence) spheres by good security performance, measured not primarily in the restoration of law and order but in the repression of the Islamist opposition and its social infrastructure. For the Israeli security and political system, however, effective Palestinian security performance is, at best, of merely tactical significance. Despite suggestions of an Israeli interest in “doing less as Palestinian security forces do more,” the security policy inherited by President Obama will not produce a political “payoff” (end of occupation) as a reward for Palestinian advances against Hamas. At best and after much importuning by U.S. officials, Israel is prepared to only tinker with the security system imposed after Defensive Shield.
The Palestinian security services under Mahmoud Abbas’ command are simultaneously dependent upon yet exasperated by and frequently contemptuous of the pervasive presence of U.S. and others in their affairs. They are profoundly skeptical of Israel while certain of their inability to confront it without international support – hence the silent bargain – Palestinians will work to perform according to a security agenda defined by Israel and adopted by Washington, not so much to restore Israeli confidence in their abilities but rather to convince Washington to press Israel to make the security and political concessions necessary in order to end occupation, remove settlements, and create a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.
The deep problems with this equation – problems of a conceptual as well as operational nature – confront the Obama administration as it mobilizes for an outcome different from the failed legacy of its predecessor. The Bush administration erred in mistaking the necessary for the essential. The new team, lead by George Mitchell, inherited a security mission lead by Dayton that had assumed not merely the burden of improving law and order and repressing Hamas but a broader and unsustainable profile as the key element of U.S. policy. Mitchell has kept Dayton on as one of his four principal advisors. But the team recognizes the limitations of the security effort he commands. However successful, the training of Palestinian security forces and the strategy of confronting Hamas cannot be the main engine for ending occupation and providing security in the wake of peace. Indeed, a successful diplomatic effort lead by the Obama administration will not only return security reform to its proper and diminished place in the policy mosaic, it will also require a conceptual re-think of its very purpose.
The Dayton mission inherited by Obama has two security objectives – an improvement in law and order -- supported wholeheartedly by all elements of civil society, and the more controversial commitment to regime protection. Concerning the former, there is no complaint, not even by Hamas supporters. The reigning in of renegade militias, populated by disaffected Fateh gunmen who long ago had turned their guns and predilection for mayhem at their own people rather than Israel, is the most noteworthy security advance of the last two years. Together with the U.S. mission to support the manning and training of new battalions of the National Security Forces, European training and material assistance to the Palestinian Police, provided through the mission of EUPOLCOPPS, has focused on this effort.
Regime protection, the incarceration of Hamas supporters – militants, elected officials, and activists alike – has failed to restore Fateh’s lost luster, blunt Hamas’ popularity or challenge its continued commanding presence in Gaza, or compel Israel to lessen its grip on the grip on the West Bank. Indeed the pursuit of Hamas militants as part of a broader rejection of armed resistance against Israel, and more importantly, the associated attack on the Hamas’ popular community network of support and education – the Dawa – has gravely compromised the image of Abbas’ forces as collaborating in Israel’s rule.
Reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas and a unity, however uneasy, of ranks is slowly emerging as a key political requirement for Palestinians as they prepare for a diplomatic initiative from Washington that promises to succeed where all others have failed. The polarization of Palestinian society at the core of the U.S. security mission contradicts this imperative. “Follow Us Not Them” is clearly unsuited to today’s requirements, and a security mission inspired by this command must be revised if political reconciliation and compromise among Palestinians is to succeed.
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