The Palestinian Authority security services: origins, reality and future

The course of security coordination between the authority and the occupation harmed the youth of the resistance (Midjerney - Al Jazeera)

With the outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Flood Battle, an American vision crystallized calling for handing over the rule of the Gaza Strip to a renewed Palestinian authority, which was discussed by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, and National Security Advisor to US Vice President Philip Gordon, in separate meetings, with President Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas.

At the beginning of this year, former Palestinian Prime Minister Muhammad Shtayyeh announced the launch of a project to restructure the security forces, which number eight agencies, including: National Security, Civil Police, General Intelligence, Preventive Security, Military Intelligence, Presidential Guard, Civil Defense, and Customs Police.

In February 2024, Shtayyeh announced the resignation of his government, and Major General Abdel Qader Al-Taamari was appointed to the position of Director of Preventive Security as part of indicators of the launch of a new phase in the march of the Palestinian Authority security services, whose members currently number approximately 50,000 in the West Bank alone, in addition to 30,000 who receive salaries. Their salaries in Gaza have been without work since Hamas took control of the Strip, which requires reading the history of these agencies since their establishment in 1994, the extent of their ability to guarantee Palestinian security, and the obstacles that stand in their way.

The dilemma of establishment after Oslo

The Palestine Liberation Army was established in 1964 to be a military wing of the PLO, and its cadres were distributed following the events of Black September in Jordan in 1970 and then the exit of Yasser Arafat and his fighters from Lebanon following the 1982 war, between several countries, most notably Jordan, Lebanon, Tunisia, Yemen, Sudan, Algeria, and Iraq.

The “Oslo 1” agreement in 1993 between the PLO and Israel included an agreement to build a Palestinian police force to maintain public order and internal security for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with the Israeli army assuming responsibility for defense against external threats. Then the Cairo Agreement was signed in 1994, and stipulated The occupation’s withdrawal from several areas in the Gaza Strip and from the city of Jericho to begin the first phase of self-rule, and the agreement also specified the size of the Palestinian security forces at nine thousand individuals, including seven thousand individuals allowed to return from abroad with their families. These forces were formed of four branches, including the civil police. Public Security, Intelligence, and Civil Defense. Then the “Oslo II” agreement in 1995 divided the West Bank into three regions:

Area A, in which the Palestinian Authority has administrative and security responsibilities, includes the eight major cities of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip with the exception of Israeli settlements and military sites.

Area B, in which the Palestinian Authority has only administrative responsibilities, includes 450 towns and villages.

Area C, which represents 61 percent of the West Bank, is controlled security-wise and administratively by Israel.

The agreement allowed the formation of the Preventive Security and Presidential Security services, and the number of members of the security forces increased to 30,000, of whom 12,000 were distributed in the West Bank and 18,000 in the Gaza Strip.

These developments placed the cadres of the Fatah movement, which represents the pillar of the PLO, and whose members constitute most of the security services, facing a major identity crisis.

Fatah, which established a revolutionary political and military organization and fought the occupation for three decades, is now required to work under the banner of “renouncing violence and combating terrorism,” and in security coordination with the occupation in confronting Palestinian groups that reject the Oslo Accords, under the pretext of working to build institutions that will pave the way for the establishment of an internationally recognized Palestinian state. .

The dilemma of the inside and outside has also emerged. Thousands of fighters returning from abroad, along with their families, will need salaries, training, and employment within a structure that takes into account the seniority of their participation in the armed struggle, in the face of a new generation of insiders who participated in the first intifada, and who need courses of action that guarantee them stability and career advancement. Within the nascent Palestinian Authority.

With his charismatic personality, Arafat played the role of the link between the cadres of the authority, and he established the security services according to the approach he used in the era of guerrilla action, making their responsibilities interconnected without a clear hierarchical infiltration, so that some of them competed with each other in carrying out the tasks assigned to them, and their leaders were preoccupied with the internal competition.

His assistants returning from abroad assumed command of the civil police, national security forces, presidential security, and military intelligence, while internal cadres were concentrated in the Preventive Security Service, whose branch in Gaza was led by Colonel Muhammad Dahlan, and its branch in the West Bank was led by Colonel Jibril Rajoub.

By late 2000, the number of security services had swelled to 17 different agencies with a total of 50,000 personnel;

Which made the leader of the Islamic Jihad movement, Ramadan Shallah, say, “If you open your window, Preventive Security will look at you; if you open your door, you will find the Presidential Security Service; if you go out into your garden, you will encounter Military Intelligence; if you go out into the street, you will encounter General Intelligence.”

Security coordination and the beginning of the clash with Hamas

Following the Oslo Accords, a joint coordination committee was established consisting of representatives from the relevant security services, led by an Israeli officer with the rank of brigadier general and a Palestinian with the rank of major general. Joint patrols were also organized in areas of contact between the two sides.

This contributed to limiting resistance activities. According to a statement by then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, 1992 witnessed about 2,400 attacks in the West Bank, then the number decreased to 140 attacks in 1999.

Security cooperation had a negative impact on the Palestinian Authority’s relationship with the resistance factions, led by the Hamas movement, which culminated in the police opening fire on a demonstration organized by Hamas from a Gaza mosque on November 18, 1994.

Which resulted in the killing of 13 demonstrators. Preventive Security also carried out an arrest campaign of Hamas members in 1996 after the Al-Qassam Brigades launched revenge attacks in response to the assassination of its leader, Yahya Ayyash.

But Arafat avoided the crisis with Hamas reaching the threshold of civil strife, so he combined pressure with turning a blind eye, and allowed Hamas’ political, social, and advocacy institutions to operate during his reign.

For its part, Washington urged the Palestinian Authority to give priority to the issue of combating terrorism, which affected the institutional nature of its work.

Since 1996, the CIA has provided tens of millions of dollars annually directly to the security agencies responsible for confronting the Palestinian resistance, according to a study published by the Congressional Research Center.

Despite security coordination, the relationship of the Palestinian security services with the occupation army was not free of friction due to Israeli transgressions. These frictions reached their peak in 1996 following the opening of a tourist tunnel under Al-Aqsa Mosque, which led to massive protests that included clashes between Palestinian officers and the occupation army that resulted in... Sixty-nine Palestinians and fourteen Israeli officers and soldiers were killed.

The second intifada and the destruction of the Palestinian security services

Following the failure of the Camp David summit with the participation of Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Yasser Arafat to reach a permanent peace agreement, the then Israeli opposition leader, Ariel Sharon, stormed Al-Aqsa Mosque on September 28, 2000, sparking massive protests that developed into a second intifada that lasted about five years.

The day after Sharon's visit, Israeli policeman Youssef Tabaja was killed by a Palestinian policeman during a joint patrol near Qalqilya. Security coordination faltered as many members of the Palestinian security forces engaged in attacks against the occupation. They also contributed to the establishment of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.

On the other hand, Israel demonstrated that the weapons, barracks and equipment it allowed to be provided to the Palestinian security services could be easily destroyed, so it bombed its headquarters with aircraft, and the occupation army penetrated into Area A, destroyed all of its vehicles and equipment, detained thousands of its cadres for interrogation, and besieged Arafat in a small part. From his presidential headquarters in Ramallah.

Arafat was subjected to American and European pressure to delegate part of his powers to his aides. In 2002, he issued a decree attaching the police, preventive security, and civil defense to the Ministry of Interior. He also amended the Basic Law, which serves as a constitution for the Palestinian Authority, in 2003 to create the position of Prime Minister, which was occupied by Mahmoud Abbas, but Arafat continued. In communicating with the leaders of the security services directly without referring to the Minister of Interior or the Prime Minister, he also maintained for himself subordination to General Intelligence, Presidential Security, and many other agencies.

With the death of Arafat in 2004, he was succeeded by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen), who adopted the road map proposed by the International Quartet, calling for restructuring the security services and dismantling the infrastructure of the resistance factions. In 2005, he issued a law regulating the work of General Intelligence, reconstituted the National Security Council, and issued A law regulating the security services to operate within three basic components, including the National Security Forces under the Minister of National Security, the Internal Security Forces under the Minister of Interior, and General Intelligence under the President. The Preventive Security Service was also attached to the Internal Security Forces.

He also referred a large number of leaders of the security services associated with Arafat to retirement, worked to dismantle the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades by appointing its members to the security services, and obtained a pardon for them from Israel in exchange for them handing over their weapons and accepting temporary detention in Palestinian headquarters.

The United States and the European Union supported Mahmoud Abbas, so Washington created the position of “American Security Coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” and appointed Lieutenant General William Ward in March 2005 as coordinator of a group that included 45 officers from nine NATO member states, with the coordinator reporting to the Secretary of State. The American mission, in coordination with the Ministry of Defense, focused on coordinating the imminent Israeli withdrawal from Gaza.

Lieutenant General Keith Dayton assumed the role of coordinator in place of Ward in December 2005, and his mandate was extended after the Israeli withdrawal to work to assist the Palestinian security services by designing and implementing plans that determine their required size, arming, and training in accordance with Israeli security concerns.

Dayton served for five years, receiving an average annual US funding of $100 million.

In 2005, the European Union also sent a permanent police training mission, but with a limited annual budget of between six and ten million euros. It trained six hundred Palestinian policemen annually, and also brought in some trainees to attend courses and workshops in Europe.

Focus on the West Bank after the loss of Gaza

Legislative elections took place in 2006, and Hamas obtained a parliamentary majority that allowed it to form a government, including the Ministry of Interior, which officially supervises most of the security services. International donors suspended their aid to the Palestinian Authority, and the American security coordinator cut off all communications with the government, and limited his dealings with the president’s office, and focused on His activities were to strengthen the Presidential Guard to make it a counterweight to Hamas, while Abbas issued a set of decisions that transferred the security services’ subordination to him. For example, he attached members of the naval force to the ranks of the General Intelligence Service, which was under his direct supervision, and appointed Muhammad Dahlan as National Security Advisor in 2007 to supervise all the security services. To which the government responded by forming the “Executive Force” in Gaza to be a body affiliated with the Minister of the Interior, given the refusal of the security forces to submit their reports to the Minister or abide by his instructions.

This atmosphere led to the escalation of tension between Hamas and Fatah, and the intensification of the rivalry between the security services, which turned into competing fiefdoms, which led to the scene of the Hamas military victory in Gaza on June 10, 2007, which primarily targeted the Preventive Security and General Intelligence services, which were affiliated with Muhammad. Dahlan;

Which prompted the rest of the leaders of the security services to avoid participating in the fighting.

Subsequently, Abu Mazen announced the formation of a new government led by Salam Fayyad, and authorized him to rebuild the security forces and impose law and order in the West Bank. Fayyad raised the slogan “One gun, one law, one authority,” and in 2008 he launched an incentive program for early retirement from the security services to encourage Undesirable elements on retirement, and in fact 6,000 police officers retired in the same year;

This allowed the recruitment of new individuals who did not have a political or militant past.

Dayton Rise

Dayton's mission changed again in 2007, following Hamas' control of Gaza, to focus on transforming the National Security Forces into a gendarmerie force specialized in riot control, while the Preventive Security Service and the General Intelligence Service remained outside the scope of its powers because they were directly connected to the CIA. Between 2007 and 2010, Washington allocated an amount 392 million dollars to finance the security assistance program for the Palestinian security forces. There was a perception that the survival of the Palestinian Authority required the elimination of Hamas in the West Bank, so the security services arrested hundreds of Hamas cadres and closed or took control of all institutions and associations affiliated with it.

Dayton prepared a plan extending from 2008 to 2012 to train nine battalions of the Palestinian National Security Forces in Jordan under the supervision of contractors from the American company DynCorp, and his successors continued to implement it, in order to deploy a battalion in every governorate of the West Bank except Jerusalem, and to qualify a battalion of the Presidential Guard to operate. As a backup in case of emergency.

The result was the training of 19,000 police officers over ten years, in addition to the training of 10,000 others by the European Union Coordination Office to Support the Palestinian Police in a training center in Jericho whose construction was funded by the United Nations, before the inauguration of Al-Istiqlal University in 2013 to graduate police officers.

These trainings, as Dayton put it in a 2009 speech at AIPAC’s Washington Institute, produced “forces that learn to maintain law and order, not fight Israel, and prepare a new youth between the ages of twenty and twenty-two years old to replace the old generation of militants who founded the security services.”

These new forces proved their effectiveness from the American perspective beginning with the 2009 war against Gaza, where they succeeded in controlling the demonstrations in the West Bank.

This allowed the Israeli army to transfer battalions of its forces deployed in the West Bank to the Gaza Strip after its fears of the outbreak of a third intifada were removed, and the situation continued in this manner in subsequent rounds of the conflict.

During the 2015-2017 knife uprising, security services sent their officers to schools to search for knives in students’ backpacks, and asked teachers to send alerts about absent students.

Obstacles and future prospects

Abu Mazen remained the center of gravity of the Palestinian Authority while remaining in his position for two decades despite the end of his term in 2009. He monopolized the issuance of decisions regulating the work of the security services in light of the absence of the Legislative Council since 2007. However, the cessation of peace negotiations since 2014 and the rejection of the principle of successive occupation governments contributed to The two-state solution, and its insistence on Israeli security control over the entire west of the Jordan River, led to the disappearance of the hopes that accompanied the establishment of the Palestinian Authority’s security services as a step on the path to building an independent state. Then came the Trump administration’s measures of recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, stopping funding for UNRWA, and closing the office. The PLO in Washington represents a new blow to the ambitions of the Palestinian Authority.

The occupation views the relationship with the Palestinian security services from the perspective of its security only.

Therefore, it is not allowed to arm it with advanced equipment, and it insults its members at its checkpoints and during incursions into cities and camps in the West Bank. It deals with it within security coordination, which practically occurs unilaterally, and is linked to exchanging information about resistance activities and protests, and avoiding clashes during the occupation army’s incursions into Area A. ;

And returning Israelis who mistakenly enter Palestinian Authority areas, which creates a scene that undermines the legitimacy of the Palestinian security services in the eyes of citizens.

Local incidents of repression, such as the arrest and beating death of activist Nizar Banat at the hands of security personnel in 2021, the dispersal of repeated teacher sit-ins, and the assault on university students during the student union elections, also contribute to increasing the volume of popular anger towards the security services.

This coincides with the authority’s inability to protect citizens from the occupation’s attacks throughout the West Bank, from the demolition of homes, the confiscation of lands, and the expansion of settlements.

These conditions have recently prompted some members of the security services to carry out attacks against the occupation army, as in the attack of a Palestinian police officer on February 29, 2024, on a gas station in the Eli settlement, south of Nablus.

Resulting in the killing of two Israeli soldiers.

The previous data puts the future of the Palestinian Authority and its security services at stake, especially in light of the ambiguity of the post-Abi Mazen era, the potential conflict over his succession between the leaders of the Fatah movement, the decline in the popularity of the Palestinian Authority, and Israeli intransigence in dealing with it.

Source: Al Jazeera