Following the Abbas-Hamas Accord: The Dangers of U.S. Aid to Palestinian Security Forces

By Arlene Kushner, David Bedein
Israel Resource Review
Center for Near East Policy Research
05 May '11


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY


USSC PROGRAM ESTABLISHMENT

In early 2005, the United States established the Office of the U.S. Security Coordina­tor. Lt. General Keith Dayton served for years as Coordinator and primary force in the development of its program. He has now been succeeded by Lt. General Michael Moeller.

The Hamas coup in Gaza, June 2007, convinced the White House and Congress to become serious about a PA force that could keep Hamas out of the West Bank. Some $370 million has been allocated to train and equip the National Security Forces and the Presidential Guard, primarily in Amman, Jordan.

The goal of this program, stated quite explicitly, was the formation of a Palestinian state. In 2009, General Dayton put a time frame of two years on the establishment of that state.

CRITIQUE

Multiple questions about the viability and advisability of the program must be raised, however, for there are conceptual flaws inherent in its planning. Americans, eager to see a moderate PA state that can defend itself against terrorism, may have been unrealistic.

A key issue is one of intent of PA troops. Numerous experts attest to the fact that there is no way for a training program to install loyalty to a state. Palestinian society is at core a traditional Arab society, with first loyalty to the clan (some of whose members might belong to Hamas).


The Fatah (PA) connection to Hamas over time was not attended to with sufficient seriousness. Separation between Fatah and Hamas was never as complete as commonly thought. Throughout the course of USSC training, the potential for the PA to join a unity coalition with Hamas existed. This raises the question of why the U.S. has been funding forces to combat Hamas when those very forces had the potential be controlled by Hamas.


Similarly, there have been misunderstandings about the PA position on anti-terrorism. General Ya’akov Amidroriii , who now serves at the National Security Adviser to Prime Minister Netanyahu rexplained in 2009:


There is a huge difference in the Palestinian view between law enforcement, which is seen as legitimate, and anti-terrorism, which is NOT seen as legitimate. The U.S. confuses the two.


The PA has no laws against money laundering for terror groups; PA statutes do not define any group as a terrorist organization; The PA maintains no agreement to hand over those who have murdered Israelis to the Israeli government.


There has been no action against Hamas undertaken by PA security forces out of anti-terrorist ideological conviction or solely to protect Israel. PA actions have been pragmatic, and thus subject to reversal.


There is a history of PA forces having been trained by the U.S. turning their expertise and weapons against Israelis. Now there is concern that this may happen again - particularly if there is frustration if the state Dayton spoke about does not come to fruition. In recent days there have been incidents - including one death - that are of serious concern.


The human rights record of the PA security forces is horrendous, and there is serious question as to propriety of U.S. support, in light of the evidence.

With all of the above, the bottom line is that the PA has just signed a unity agreement with a terrorist faction overtly sworn to Israel’s destruction. American law may well prohibit further support for the PA in light of this situation.

 Read the full report of the Center for Near East Policy Research by clicking here.


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U.S.-Trained Palestinians in Shooting Spree

P. David Hornik
pajamasmedia.com
25 April '11

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/palestinians-in-shooting-spree-u-s-trained/?singlepage=true

In the aftermath of yesterday's attack at Joseph's Tomb, Israeli MK Danny Danon calls on the U.S. to stop funding and training the PA security forces.

Since 2007 the U.S. has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in training and equipment for Palestinian Authority security forces. Reports of rampant torture in the prisons run by these forces, and warnings by Israeli military and other figures of the danger posed to Israel, have gone unheeded.

Early Sunday morning the danger grimly materialized. At least one PA policeman opened fire on a group of Israeli worshipers in Nablus in the West Bank, killing one and wounding four, including one seriously.

It appears to have been little short of an ambush. The worshipers, who were from the Breslav Hasidic sect, were driving back in a three-car convoy from Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus — a site where, according to Jewish tradition, the biblical Joseph is buried.

According to one report, the convoy:

… encountered a surprise checkpoint and [was] met with a hail of gunfire from a Palestinian jeep. The fire continued even after the vehicles turned back in an attempt to escape. Two of the three vehicles were hit.

As one of the Hasidim put it:

The police shot at the vehicles, they were screaming “Allahu Akbar.” It was crazy, they were shooting to kill. I screamed at the driver to drive out of there quickly.

The Hasid who was fatally hit was Ben Yosef Livnat, 25, married with four children, and nephew of Israeli Minister of Culture Limor Livnat. Eulogizing him at his funeral the same day, she said:

My brother’s son was murdered by a terrorist masked as a Palestinian police officer.

Shortly after the attack a crowd of Palestinian youths set fire to Joseph’s Tomb (report and video here). It was hardly the first time, the tomb having been burned to the ground by a Palestinian mob in a famous incident in 2000, early in the Second Intifada, and desecrated many times since then including with graffiti drawings of swastikas.

Among the reactions by Israeli politicians, Defense Minister Ehud Barak said the fact that the worshipers did not coordinate the visit with the Israeli army could hardly justify the attack, and demanded that the PA swiftly investigate it and punish the perpetrator(s). Based on the PA’s record going back to the days of its former Chairman Yasser Arafat, it’s impossible to be optimistic.

Member of Knesset Danny Danon:

… called on the U.S. to reconsider its funding of the Palestinian security forces, as well as the training exercises that it does with them. He passed this request on to Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Chairman of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee.

This incident comes at a time of mounting terror and brutality both in Israel and the region as a whole. Since last month Israel has witnessed the Itamar massacre of five members of a family, a bombing of a Jerusalem bus stop that killed a tourist and wounded about 50 other people, and numerous projectile attacks from Gaza including the firing of an antitank rocket at a school bus that killed a 16-year-old Israeli boy.

In the region, severe violence particularly in Syria and Libya has been grabbing headlines. Although many Westerners react by supporting “rebels,” reports of repression and strengthened extremism in Egypt suggest that merely replacing one Middle Eastern regime with another hardly guarantees the flowering of democracy.

The Middle East indeed poses difficult dilemmas for the West, but the chances of avoiding mistaken policies are higher if it is understood that violence and repression are endemic to the region for deep-seated cultural reasons. In that light, for instance, the U.S. and its European allies might have thought twice before jumping in to support Libyan “rebels” who are no less barbaric than the regime they hate.

But whereas Western forces eventually leave hotspots like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, Israel is in the Middle East to stay, and has to live for a long time with its own and others’ blunders. To Israelis who are more attuned to the region and less to Western hopes and visions, it has seemed all along that building a Palestinian military force is one such blunder — especially when such a force is eventually supposed to assume security responsibility in a sovereign state squeezing Israel into indefensible borders.

While it would be nice to see Sunday’s murderous incident as a fluke, again, an awareness of the Palestinian culture of extreme anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic incitement suggests the opposite. In fact, in another incident last year an Israeli soldier was stabbed to death by a PA police officer, and the Second Intifada began when a Palestinian officer shot his Israeli counterpart dead on a joint patrol — amid other such cases.

It’s to be hoped that MK Danon’s initiative to get Congress aware of the problem will bear fruit.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva. He blogs at http://pdavidhornik.typepad.com/


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Only Palestinians Are Not Held to a Standard

Shoshana Bryen
Senior Director for Security Policy
JINSA Report #: 1,072
March 17, 2011

http://www.jinsa.org/node/2250

It appears that members of the American-trained Palestinian Security Force on the West Bank abetted the Itamar terrorists, prompting outrage over the fact that American military personnel are training Palestinian Security Forces in the first place. The outrage looks through the back end of the microscope - minimizing and magnifying the wrong things. The problem is not the training; it is the political decision-making in Washington that deliberately disconnects the Palestinian military from its political leadership.*

Regular readers know that we have long protested the training of Palestinian "police" (read "national-army-in-training") not because we are worried that individual soldiers will become individual terrorists, but because we are unsure of the nature of the government to which the security force will ultimately be loyal. Current trends are bad.

There is no "Palestine," no constitution (there remains a PLO Charter which contains the objective of removing the "Zionist entity" by force of arms); no parliament (it hasn't met since Hamas won the plurality of seats in the last legislative election and started the civil war that ejected Fatah from Gaza); and there are two entirely different and mutually murderous governing bodies controlling territory, and one of them uses American-trained "police" to ensure compliance of recalcitrant civilians.

JINSA protests training people to do what we want them to do for reasons at odds with why they want to do it. We want the Palestinian "police" to learn discipline, counter-terrorism tactics, use of sniper rifles and scopes and intelligence collection techniques so they can stop "terrorism." They want to learn it so they can take out their enemies - Hamas or Jews. We want them to build an army/security force to protect the people of a new Palestinian State. They want to build an army/security force to kill their enemies. We want to give them defense, they want to acquire offense.

And since there is a disconnect between we and they, why are Americans training them at all?

Americans train with NATO armies and with Israel because we benefit while they benefit; the ethic is not in question. Americans train the armies of countries allied with us in a variety of ways because they benefit both from the tactics of our forces and the democratic politics we bring with us - as happened with the German Bundeswher and Japanese Self Defense Forces following WWII. Sometimes it takes time - as it did in Central and South America, and as it is currently taking time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sometimes despite our best efforts, we don't get where we, and they, want to go, as happened in South Vietnam.

The United States doesn't train the Syrian army because of the nature of the Syrian government. We don't train the Libyan, Venezuelan or Zimbabwean armies for the same reason. We don't expect the soldiers of the Democratic Republic of Congo to have the same military ethic as our military and we don't plan to work with them. Ditto China, Belarus and Iran.

Only in the case of the nascent Palestinian state, currently governed by the Palestinian Authority, has the Government of the United States suspended disbelief about the possible nasty nature of a future Palestinian regime and the objectively nasty nature of the current one. Only Palestinians are held to no standard whatsoever by our government.

That is a political problem, not a military problem. But that is the problem.

* The same is true in Lebanon, where the United States arms and trains the Lebanese Army without regard for the nature of the current Lebanese government.


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CENTCOM Plans for Dayton's Army?

JINSA Report
#: 1,009
23 July '10

JINSA has long expressed concern about military skills being transmitted by the U.S. to a Palestinian Authority military force while the Palestinian government remains openly hostile to Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East. The Israelis tell us, "The more they do against Hamas, the less we have to do." The Americans tell us, "Everything we do is coordinated with our friends in Israel."

We believe them both, while remaining enormously skeptical about the ultimate wisdom of the plan and right now have a queasy feeling about the future of what has been called "Dayton's Army."

LTG Keith Dayton, USA, who for the past five years was the U.S. Security Coordinator for the Palestinians, is being replaced by MG Michael Moeller, USAF (who will receive his third star along with the assignment). Interestingly, while LTG Dayton's career in the Army centered on EUCOM, the European Command of which Israel is a member, MG Moeller comes to the job from CENTCOM, which specifically does not involve itself in matters involving Israel or the Palestinians.

Until now?

MG Moeller, currently director of strategy, plans and policy at CENTCOM, is said to have had no contact with the Palestinians to date, but is it possible that the U.S. is thinking that Americans working with a Palestinian army should be integrating their thinking with CENTCOM - an operationally largely Arab command - while the Americans working with the IDF continue to be EUCOM? Is someone thinking that a Palestinian army should not be partnered with the IDF, but with Arab armies?

Yes, we are channeling a report from January that said overtures had been made to move the PA to CENTCOM - to which Gen. Petraeus said such overtures had not been made, and we believed him. Yes, we are also channeling a report that said CENTCOM was "red teaming" the idea that the U.S. should engage Hamas (and Hezbollah). The reports were by the same person, and refuted by people we trust, but still, it is hard not to think that somewhere in the U.S., military people are taking the approach that Hamas (and Hezbollah) is not an enemy of the U.S., but only of Israel. From there, they can "solve" the "Palestinian problem" with the "two-state solution" and declare victory.

In fact, Hamas is an avowed enemy not only of Israel, but of Fatah, Israel and America's current Palestinian partner and the object of Dayton's army's training.[1] It is impossible to consider American engagement of Hamas while training the army that wants to destroy it- unless you are training a PA army for national purposes regardless of what the future Palestinian government decides to do with it, for example, use it against Israel, not Hamas.

(Read full report)

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