Building the Palestinian Contras

Comment by Khalid Amayreh in
Occupied Jerusalem

"Israel, the Bush Administration and the Palestinian
Authority (PA), headed by Mahmoud Abbas, are
collaborating to build a depoliticized Palestinian
security force whose main task and raison d’être
will be to crush any popular uprising against a
prospective “peace deal” imposed upon the Palestinians.
The new force, whose members are being trained in
neighboring countries, particularly Jordan, is being
prepared to gradually replace the vast bulk of
existing Fatah-dominated security forces in the
West Bank.......

Many of the people being laid off, however, are in
their early and mid 40s, which suggests that the
PA is trying as much as possible to “dispose of”
elements deemed “too patriotic” and “indoctrinated
in hostility to Israel and Zionism.”

According to one cadet from the Hebron region, the
force, whose members had to be thoroughly sifted
by the Shin Bet, Israel’s chief domestic intelligence
agency, is being trained in crowd-control tactics,
conducting arrests, suppressing demonstrations
as well as using rifles........

One disgruntled officer, a traditional Arafatist from
Dura, near Hebron, intimated to this writer that
“ignorance is the main and sought-after qualification
of these recruits.” “The more ignorant, the more
uneducated, the more stupid one is, the better
qualified he will be viewed. They want blockheads,
people whose brains are empty so that they would
be able to handle them the way the want,” said the
officer, who asked for anonymity for obvious reasons.
“They are following the old adage which says
‘a good soldier doesn’t think, he only obeys orders’.” ......

“They are trying to brainwash a given cadet in a
way that if and when they instruct him to shoot
his father, for example, he would shoot father,
mother and brother as well,” said the disgruntled
officer from Dura.......

A few months ago, PA Interior Minister General
Abdel Razak al Yahya told hundreds of trainees at
the village of Jeftilik near Jericho that
“your mission is not to fight Israel, your mission
is to establish security and restore law and order.”
“You are not here to confront Israel, the conflict
with Israel has until now led nowhere. You must
show the Israelis that you can do the job!!”

Earlier this year, more than 250 trainees were sent
to Jordan for a four-month crash course sponsored
and financed by the United States under the close
supervision of Lieutenant General Keith Dayton.

Last year, Dayton botched up a plot conceived by his
boss, Elliot Abrams, a neocon Jewish member of the
Bush Administration, which would have seen forces
loyal to Gaza’s former strongman Muhammed Dahlan
topple and possibly crush the democratically-elected
Hamas government. However, Hamas preempted
Dahlan’s planned coup, by carrying a
counter-coup during which Hamas’s smaller but more
disciplined and better trained forces decisively defeated
and ousted Fatah forces, thus consolidating its control
over the entire Gaza Strip.

As a result of the ‘Gaza fiasco’, the Bush Administration
reportedly sought a more ‘authentic alternative’ namely
to establish a more bona fide Palestinian quisling force
that would help the American-backed PA regime impose
a possible ‘peace deal’ with Israel, presumably one
that would allow Israel to annex large parts of
the West Bank, including the bulk of East
Jerusalem and surrounding Jewish colonies,
in return for the creation of a deformed Palestinian
entity, to be called a State, made up of disconnected
Bantustans and truncated territories.

Hence, the ongoing efforts to create the new Palestinian
Security Forces, whose main task is to repress and,
if deemed necessary, kill Palestinians who dare
oppose the liquidation of their just cause.

I asked Professor Abdul Sattar Qassem of the Najah National
University in Nablus what could be done to thwart efforts to
create a ‘quisling force’ whose main job is to repress Palestinians
on Israel’s behalf. Qassem said he thought that the term
‘quisling’ accurately described the new force or forces
being created and trained by the CIA.

“First of all we have to tell our sons who are being
trained in Jordan that they are being trained to carry out
immoral and unpatriotic acts, that they will be instructed
to kill Palestinians in defense of Israel.” Qassem said he
was certain that the PA was effectively a tool to liquidate
the Palestinian cause in exchange for some money
from the US.

He dismissed the PA claim that the new forces were
necessary for re-establishing the rule of law and protecting
the personal security of the Palestinian people. “I think
we can uphold the rule of the law without sending our
sons to be trained by the CIA to kill their own countrymen
on Israel’s behalf. Let the PA take its hands off the justice
system, let them rein in their thugs, and law and order
would be restored immediately.”

“The problem, the main problem, is that we
are dealing with a lying authority."