Who will protect the guards?
The signature of the Wye River Memorandum on 23 October confirms two developments that have emerged since the Israeli–Palestinian Declaration of Principles (the Oslo Accords) was signed in September 1993. The first is Israel's success in replacing the land-for-peace formula that governed the 1991 Madrid Peace Conference and the various UN resolutions pertaining to the Arab–Israeli conflict with its own formula of peace for (Israeli) security. After Wye, all progress in the Oslo process – indeed, each percentage of West Bank land from which Israel 'further redeploys' – now hinges on measures undertaken by the Palestinian Authority (PA) to safeguard Israel's 'vital security needs'.
The second and more important shift is Yasser Arafat's success in raising the PA's relations with the US to the status of a virtual security pact. This forms part of a closer and tougher US policy of engagement in the Middle East designed to contain Iraq and create some kind of Israeli–Palestinian peace. However, this is on a far less ambitious scale than the `New Middle East' hoped for by President Bill Clinton's administration during the previous Israeli Labor government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres. The premier security relationship now governing the Oslo process is no longer that between Israelis and Palestinians; rather, trilateral US–PA–Israeli and bilateral US–PA security committees are empowered not only 'to deal with all security matters' to do with the Oslo process, but also to `introduce … mechanisms to fight terror at the regional level'.
As a result of Wye, for the first time US officials – in the form of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) – are to be directly involved on the ground, not just in monitoring PA compliance with the agreement and its actions against terrorism, but also in helping to train and support the PA's security forces. The CIA has established small, heavily protected local headquarters in Gaza and Ramallah, and has several dozen operatives in the Palestinian territories, working especially closely with the Palestinian Preventive Security Service (PSS). The head of this force in Gaza, Colonel Mohammed Dahlan, is arguably the most important Palestinian security figure, and is widely tipped to play a central role in any collective post-Arafat leadership. CIA involvement brings considerable opportunities, but also great dangers for Arafat, the PA and the US.
The generally negative regional reaction to Wye demonstrates the risks in Arafat's attempted realignment. With the exception of his Fatah movement, every Palestinian faction, both nationalist and Islamist, has opposed Wye. It was also received coolly by Egypt and denounced outright by Syria and Iran. Given this lack of domestic and regional support, it is not surprising that Arafat has entrusted neither the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) nor the elected Palestinian Council to implement and 'sell' Wye. Instead, his chosen vehicles are the PA's myriad police and intelligence forces, which have served both as the basis of Arafat's rule in the occupied territories and as his crucial conduit to the US and Israel. However, these forces are deeply divided and some are increasingly unpopular with most Palestinians. The CIA therefore risks being drawn into a complicated and potentially dangerous situation in which the different Palestinian groups, the PA leadership and the Israelis all seek to exploit the US presence for their own ends.
The PA security services
According to the May 1994 Cairo and September 1995 'interim' agreements, the PA police force is supposed to be the only `Palestinian security force' in the self-rule areas. The force has four designated divisions – civil, public order, emergency and intelligence – with an official personnel strength of around 24,000. By the start of 1998, however, there were 36,000 security officers on the PA's payroll, out of an overall Palestinian public sector of 89,000. There were in all 13 separate security services, some of whose members were paid out of the PA's public coffers, but with several thousand more supporting themselves from less transparent sources, including unofficial 'taxes' – effectively extortion – corruption and black-market activities. This has caused concern in the US and European countries, whose aid largely funds the PA.
In its attitude to the PA security services, the Israeli government is caught between two largely contradictory impulses: it wants them to be strong enough to crack down on Hamas and other militant groups, but not to put up a serious fight should Israel ever feel the need to reoccupy PA-ruled areas. At Wye, the Israelis therefore pressed successfully to have the PA forces limited to 30,000 men.
There are three main reasons for this multiplicity of forces:
Arafat's need to entrench the PA as the 'only national authority' in the self-rule areas, by authoritarian means if necessary. On 2 November, the PA issued new regulations preventing Palestinian and foreign news agencies from covering stories that `contradict security measures related to the PA interest'. Similar constraints were imposed on mosques and on rallies organised by the PLO's opposition factions. These measures were justified in the name of the PA's obligation under Wye to prevent anti-Israeli 'incitement';
his need to provide numerous state jobs to retain the loyalty of Palestinians (especially young men). This is the central tool in Arafat's 'neo-patrimonial' form of government. The reduction in numbers will therefore damage Arafat politically, although he should be able to absorb most into other structures; and
Arafat's pursuit of a 'divide-and-rule' strategy to diminish possible threats to his leadership.
Around 50,000 PLO cadres have returned to the West Bank and Gaza from exile since the PA was installed in May 1994. These form the bedrock of the PA's political and military administration, and have been deployed to penetrate and take over Palestinian political and civil society in the West Bank and Gaza. However, Arafat's forces have also recruited widely within the self-rule areas. The PA's two most powerful intelligence forces – the PSS and the General Intelligence Service (GIS) – recruit largely from among Palestinians within the occupied territories. They mainly comprise young Fatah activists who participated in the intifada as prison leaders, youth cadres and 'fighters'.
Excluding these cadres from the spoils of self-rule could have prompted them to form an armed opposition to it, possibly in alliance with Hamas. Incorporating them has, however, not led to internal harmony in the PA forces, which are riven by feuds over patronage and black marketeering, often underlain by clan differences. In November 1998, members of Fatah rioted in Ramallah after their offices were raided by the PA's Military Intelligence (headed by Arafat's cousin, Musa Arafat) as part of an internal feud; a teenager was killed by intelligence officers in the ensuing clashes. Arafat has been trying to absorb Fatah into the new security structures but, in the West Bank at least, he has not succeeded.
PA and Hamas
The secret negotiations that led to the Oslo accords resulted in January 1994 in an unwritten 'understanding' that PA intelligence forces would be given a free hand to establish 'order' in the occupied territories in return for intelligence on, and action against, the Palestinian opposition, principally the Islamist movements Hamas and Islamic Jihad. However, this agreement was initially limited by Arafat's preferred strategy of co-opting his Islamist opponents, rather than unleashing a fully-fledged assault against them.
This approach ended in February–March 1996, following four suicide bombings in Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad in response to Israel's assassination in January of Hamas 'engineer' Yahya Ayyash. Following the attacks, PA security forces took over mosques and other Islamic civic institutions in Gaza, arrested around 1,200 Hamas and Jihad `suspects' and outlawed all non-PA militias, including Fatah's erstwhile military wing, the Fatah Hawks. In 1997, after more suicide attacks, the PA moved with some success to disable Hamas' military wing in the West Bank.
US strategies
The background to the CIA's direct involvement was Arafat's decision to suspend all routine security cooperation with Israel in April 1997 in protest at Israel's first redeployment offer and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's decision to build the Har Homa settlement on Palestinian land. In October 1997, under US pressure, Arafat agreed to resume negotiations and security cooperation 'without conditions', a pledge reaffirmed in the Wye agreement. Arafat's price, also confirmed at Wye, was CIA mediation and approval of cooperation, thereby making the US, not Netanyahu, the judge of the PA's compliance. In this way, Arafat has secured a role for the CIA as both arbiter and guarantor of the Oslo process. The CIA's importance to the process was underscored by the prominent role played by its Director, George Tenet, in the Wye talks.
As agreed at Wye, the CIA will monitor the PA's compliance with the agreement and, in particular, act as the arbiter of Israeli requests for arrests and transfers of prisoners to Israel. The CIA is meant to ensure that the PA does not arrest suspects and then quietly release them a few days later (the so-called 'revolving-door' policy). Arafat is hoping that the CIA's involvement will protect the PA from malicious Israeli accusations the real goal of which is to delay the handover of territory.
In practice, the CIA's role will inevitably be much greater; it already involves training PA forces, monitoring (although not attending) interrogations and sharing intelligence on Islamist groups inside Palestinian areas and across the Middle East. Given both Israeli and Palestinian interrogation methods, this is almost bound to lead to the CIA being accused of implication in human-rights abuses. The US organisation Human Rights Watch is already beginning to focus on this theme. Furthermore, if the CIA monitors endorse a number of Israeli complaints, they may lose all credibility with the Palestinians; if they reject them, they and the US administration will come under attack from the Israeli lobby in the US.
The CIA has been placed in an exposed position which has some analogies to the disastrous US involvement in Lebanon in the early 1980s. Many Palestinians and Arabs detest its presence. Moreover, the CIA's new role risks involving it in Palestinian internal politics just when they threaten to become increasingly bitter and divisive, and the struggle to succeed Arafat may be getting under way. The aged leader is visibly ailing and may have Parkinson's disease.
The US and Israel want successors to Arafat who are not only amenable to their agenda but also wedded to them through political and economic ties. These links are being formed in the increasingly close security relations between Israel, the CIA and the heads of the PA security services. However, the CIA's deep unpopularity in the Arab world, and Israel's continued intransigence, mean that any CIA role will be controversial. The Agency may find that it has once again been turned, not into a tool, but a target.
