The Palestinian Authority’s Security Forces Are Crucial to Keeping the Peace. The “Peace Process” Could Be Their Ruin

When, in 1994, the Oslo Accords first went into effect, fighters from the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s military wing took over police and security duties in Jericho and Gaza; later they would assume control throughout the West Bank. Yasir Arafat, as Neri Zilber and Ghaith al-Omari explain, quickly turned his new security services into personal armies that would maintain his grip on power and, eventually, make war on Israel:

Agreements signed between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization [allowed for] the creation of an armed internal-security force in order to ensure law and order. Yet what was created in practice through Arafat’s personalized, ad-hoc style diverged sharply from the letter of the agreements. Various competing security services proliferated, rejectionist terrorist groups like Hamas were never brought to heel, and, writ large, Arafat never established a monopoly on the means of violence. Most damaging for the peace process, close Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation was on several occasions undermined by armed clashes between the Palestinian Authority Security Forces [PASF] and the IDF. . . .

Arafat never truly relinquished the military option vis-à-vis Israel. The PASF, along with other Fatah elements, was directly implicated in the ensuing terrorism campaign; Israel responded directly, reoccupying the West Bank and bringing about the PASF’s effective collapse. In the wake of the second intifada, which ended around 2005, reform efforts focused on the security sector, yet they could not forestall the subsequent takeover of the Gaza Strip by Hamas. . . .

But since the suppression of the second intifada, Arafat’s death, and the Hamas takeover of Gaza, the PASF have been reformed, thanks in no small part to U.S. involvement, and, whatever their faults, have worked with their Israeli counterparts to curb terrorist activities. Indeed, they are a paragon of Israeli-Palestinian cooperation. Omari and Zilber conclude their history of the forces with some recommendations for the future:

U.S. officials must urge both parties not to allow political considerations to affect the security realm adversely. This guidance applies in two areas. The first involves keeping any proposed security initiatives—oftentimes coordinated [with U.S. representatives]—secret and negotiated at the professional/technical echelons. (Previous efforts are known to have been undermined by Israeli leaks to the media by partisan political players.) This requires senior U.S. officials to make clear to their Palestinian and Israeli counterparts that keeping such initiatives depoliticized is an American priority.

[They must also make] clear to both parties that security—in particular, the mutually beneficial coordination—must not be used as a tool during political crises, as the PA did in partially suspending coordination after the July 2017 al-Aqsa crisis erupted. U.S. officials would do well to heed this advice in terms of their own policy choices: developments on the high diplomacy track, including the quixotic goal of restarting Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, cannot be allowed to trickle down and thus to have adverse effects on stability on the ground.

Read more at Washington Institute for Near East Policy

More about: Israel & Zionism, Oslo Accords, Palestinian Authority, PLO, Second Intifada, Yasir Arafat

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society