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A Police Force Without a State: A History of the Palestinian Security Forces in the West Bank And Gaza

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Recent years have been unkind to the Fatah party as David Schenker reminds us 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 one being Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories after the Oslo.

A Police Force without a State covers the pre-Oslo days of Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) "self-policing" in the Middle East, including the presence of endemic levels of corruption, vigilantism, and collaborator killings in the West Bank and Gaza--problems that were central to the unraveling of Oslo. One of the early justifications for self-policing was the concern among Palestinians that the police "would be used to squelch the intifada." "By accepting that role for their police force," Lia writes, "the Palestinians would be acknowledging the end of the armed struggle." This was a step that many, apparently, were loathe to take.

The book includes extensive discussion of police recruitment, which included a "strong preference for Fatah paramilitaries and activists to the exclusion of other factions" and a focus on bringing Palestinian prisoners, jailed by Israel for security and political offenses, into the force. As Lia writes, the "deliberate use of police recruitment for repatriation purposes further undermined efforts at building a professional police force."

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.

This book is a highly readable account of the evolution of the Palestinian police and security forces that have been built up within the framework of the 1993 Oslo Accords. The author recounts the mixed legacy of previous Palestinian attempts to establish self-policing structures in the context of revolt against state authorities - as within the `PLO-state' in Lebanon in the early 1970s and during the first Intifada of the late 1980s. The Palestinian police inherited a legacy of insurgent-based policing culture which proved to be one of many obstacles to the development of civilian-oriented policing. Add to this the fact that the Palestinian police saw themselves as a vehicle for achieving national independence - a goal that clashed with the more technical requirements of creating a professional police force. The Palestinian Authority pursued a negotiated solution with Israel, while preparing for the possibility of war. Against this background, the author investigates the basic question of whether a national police force can successfully be created without the framework of an independent state. According to the signed agreements with Israel, the Palestinian police's main mandate was to provide security for the occupying power and its settler-colonial project, rather than caring for the Palestinian inhabitants. Given this fundamental anomaly, the author concludes that `the Oslo framework was not and could not have been conducive to the evolution of civil-democratic policing in the PNA-ruled areas' (p. 431). Lia's insightful analysis is based on a unique host of unpublished primary sources, making this publication a solid reference work. It is a worthwhile read, not only for Middle East scholars, but for anybody interested in the complexity of internal security part of peacebuilding efforts.

REVIEWS OF 'A POLICE FORCE WITHOUT A STATE' AND 'BUILDING ARAFAT's POLICE'

"This is a marvelous and rich scholarly work [...]. The strength 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, in its depth of description and the theoretical/political analysis, exists right now on any other police reform and assistance project."

- Professor Otwin Marenin, Washington State University, USA


"One of the key problems in assessing donor assistance in any area, and particularly in the areas of CIVPOL, security sector reform, and police training, is an absence of analyses that are based on a detailed empirical study of the issues concerned. Very often, the `devil is in the details' as far as donor assistance is concerned: poor coordination, inappropriate training models, linguistic or cultural barriers, political friction, bureaucratic politics, and even key personalities can be important obstacles to capacity-building. In the Palestinian case, however, Brynjar Lia has provided a masterful account of the evolution of security assistance to the Palestinian Authority during the Oslo era. In doing so, he has called upon an impressive array of sources, including diplomatic archives, personal interviews, and press accounts. This work is, and is likely to remain, the definitive account of its topic - the post-Oslo, police equivalent of Yezid Sayigh's seminal work on an earlier era of Palestinian `armed struggle'.

Moreover, in providing an impressive degree of detail and evidence, Lia has not neglected neither the analytical component of his study. The initial discussion of policing and police assistance is clear and useful, without falling into the sterile theoretical name-dropping [...]. Throughout, I found his explanation for developments to be well-reasoned and convincing. His final conclusions are sound, and indeed offer a number of `lessons learned' that are of much broader significance."

- Professor Rex Brynen, University of McGill, Montreal, Canada