Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement [Hardcover]

Brynjar Lia (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0863723055 | ISBN-13: 978-0863723056 | Publication Date: September 2006

This book examines the role of international donors in creating and reforming the Palestinian police and security forces, beginning in the early aftermath of the Oslo Accords to the outbreak of the second Intifada, which brought most police reform efforts to a standstill. The author explores the challenges and dilemmas facing the donor countries when they strived to assist in building a police that was being without the framework of an independent state. Apart from providing unique insight into the problems of providing aid to police forces created by a national liberation organization in a war torn society, this books also offers a far more detailed and accurate account of a much neglected research topic, namely police reform efforts in the Middle East peace process. The book demonstrates how the donor officials struggled to overcome ingrained unwillingness at home against the use of aid funds for police reform purposes, while at the same time maneuvering uneasily between Israeli obstructionism and security concerns, rivalries between Palestinian police generals, as well as a lack of Palestinian preparedness for the technical and practical aspects of police reform. Based on a host of new unpublished sources, spanning from Palestinian Authority documents, internal Palestinian Police publications, a unique access to the archives of the Norwegian Foreign Ministry (which chaired the most important police coordination committees), the present study gives a unique insight into a hitherto uncharted territory in contemporary Palestinian and Middle Eastern history. This book will be of invaluable interest to students, researchers and practitioners in the field of security sector reform and international police assistance.

Editorial Reviews

Review

'This work is, and is likely to remain, the definitive account of its topic' Rex Brynen, McGill University 'The strength [of the book] lies in the detailed and careful examination of both the social order and policing problems as they have arisen in Palestine and in the problems and processes of donor assistance. Nothing like this ... exists right now on any other police reform and assistance project.' Otwin Marenin, Washington State University

About the Author

Dr Brynjar Lia is a Research Professor at the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment in Kjeller, Norway. He was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University in 2001-2. Lia is the author of A Police Force Without a State: A History of the Palestinian Security Forces in the West Bank and Gaza (Ithaca Press, 2005), and The Society of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt: The Rise of an Islamic Mass Movement 1928-42 (Ithaca, 1998).

Product Details

• Hardcover: 362 pages
• Publisher: Ithaca (September 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0863723055
• ISBN-13: 978-0863723056
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,113,892 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Impressively Researched But Ideologically Marred, July 29, 2008

By 

Jazz It Up Baby - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement (Hardcover)

Recent years have been unkind to the Fatah party as David Schenker expressed in the Middle East Quarterly. Its leader, Yasser Arafat, died in 2004; the organization was roundly defeated by Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, and in 2007, it was violently expelled from Gaza. Despite wide foreign support, Fatah largely finds itself on the defensive today against its Islamist rival.

Fatah's decline was in many ways inevitable given the party's sordid history of misrule, a large part of which involved the Palestinian security services, and particularly the police--which are the topic of two impressively researched new books by Lia, a research professor at the Norwegian Defense Research Establishment, the other being A Police Force without a State: A History of the Palestinian Security Forces in the West Bank and Gaza.

Building Arafat's Police, is another detail-packed study, this one describing the contributions of the donor community in getting the Palestinian Authority (PA) police up and running and some of the hesitations that the community had in contributing to what the PLO initially envisioned as a paramilitary force.

Lia's study provides a wealth of information on the nuts and bolts of fundraising, as well as some gems about the snags in securing donations, such as the humorous revelation that 9,000 new police uniforms provided by Japan were so tiny that they ended up being "handed out to children in Gaza." More problematic, however, were the donations of vehicles to the police force. Despite technical problems--Palestinians could not maintain the vehicles, many of which were cannibalized for parts--few of the automobiles were equipped with appropriate radios for patrolling. Palestinian financial accounting, not surprisingly, also proved less than satisfactory.

Help from Arab quarters was either insignificant or counterproductive. Arab funding for the PA was notoriously low, accounting for less than 9 percent of total donor spending between 1994 and 1998, and such aid was complicated by a lack of Arab enthusiasm for Oslo and by the routine channeling of funds by states such as Saudi Arabia through the PLO and other opaque organizations.

Building Arafat's Police also touches on the important question of how many police Arafat actually had. According to Lia, by September 1994, the number of policemen already exceeded the 9,000 stipulated in the Oslo accords. By 1995, some 17,000 police had been assembled. Lia notes correctly that Israel is hardly blameless for its handling of the Palestinian police. Indeed, Israel did not object to this gross violation of the agreement, especially, when it came to recruitment into the Preventive Security Agency (PSA), which was supposed to undertake counterterrorism initiatives.

It was the Israeli-backed PSA that later became a primary engine of PA corruption and the lead Palestinian agency hunting collaborators and, subsequently, the organization that generated much of the backlash against Fatah and fueled the rise of Hamas. Lia mentions that, as early as 1995, the Coordinating Committee for the International Assistance to the Police Force described the PSA as "illegal" and as "the most significant problem in the security field today."

The two volumes are important and comprehensive, but they have their problems. The author's uncritical sympathy for the Palestinian cause at times gets in the way. In A Police Force without a State, for example, Lia argues that Israel's arrest warrant for a Palestinian police chief "soured the atmosphere for joint police cooperation in car thefts." Only later do we learn that the officer was wanted for his role in coordinating police attacks against Israelis. Lia leaves the impression that the Palestinians were to blame neither for their frequent disregard for agreements with Israel nor for the corrupt, brutal, crony-filled, and inept security apparatus that evolved under PA auspices. To be sure, Lia's works are somber academic publications, but his detached tone is disconcerting. Given continued Palestinian and Israeli suffering--in large part due to the failure of the Palestinian security apparatus--he should have adopted a more critical view of Fatah's role.

4.0 out of 5 stars Masterly on police assistance, March 12, 2008

By 

Are Hovdenak (Oslo, Norway) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories After the Oslo Agreement (Hardcover)

'Building Arafat's Police' discusses the role of the international donor community in establishing the Palestinian police and security forces that were built up within the framework of the 1993 Oslo Accords. A strong Palestinian police force was seen as a key to the success of the peace process, and donor countries went a long way towards providing the resources needed. However, rivalry between the United States and the EU, and US insistence on sidelining the UN, complicated the Norwegian-led donor coordination and fund-raising. The author finds that the donors' declared goal of supporting democratic policing institutions was often overshadowed by other political or security-related considerations in the difficult tripartite relationship between the PLO, the donors and Israel. The Palestinian leadership saw the donors' emphasis on civil-police training as only partly relevant for its larger ambition of forming a national military defence apparatus. Social and humanitarian aspects interfered with professional police priorities, as the police force was used as a large-scale employment and patronage vehicle, aiming to pacify social discontent by distributing jobs to thousands of youths. The efficiency of the police institutions was weakened by Israel's policy of administrative obstructions and by the Palestinian president's formation of separate intelligence agencies operating outside the agreed structures of the police. By the late 1990s, the balance between the various security branches was affected by the donors' shift towards counter-terrorism assistance at the expense of democratic police reform. Both the CIA and the EU started dealing directly with Palestinian intelligence branches on covert counter-terrorism programmes, thus undermining donor coordination efforts. This is an impressive account of how foreign assistance affected the creation and growth of the Palestinian police. Lia's insightful analysis is based on a unique host of unpublished primary sources, making this two-volume research a solid reference work. It is a worthwhile read, not only for Middle East scholars, but for anybody interested in the complexity of security assistance as part of peacebuilding efforts.