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Security ties between Palestinians and Israel begin to fray

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Jonathan Cook
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Abbas, however, failed to implement the decision. After a series of apparently empty threats, he affirmed in December that the coordination would continue.

On Israel's side, Sukari's attack has raised fears in Israel that the current wave of violence could start to resemble the days of the second intifada, which erupted in 2000.

Then the security cooperation ushered in by the Oslo Accords of 1993 rapidly broke down. Palestinian security officials found themselves dragged into the uprising as the Israeli army used massive force to repress protests.

Israel's invasion of Palestinian-controlled areas of the occupied territories led to the widespread destruction of police stations and prisons.

Cooperation only returned when Abbas took over the Palestinian presidency in 2005, following Yasser Arafat's death.

Abbas moved to disarm the Palestinian resistance groups and transform the security forces into a means of ensuring "stability" -- defined as protecting Jewish settlements and other Israeli interests in the occupied territories from Palestinian resistance as well as protecting the PA elite, according to Dana.

The reorganization, which created a range of security units from police and various intelligence agencies to a 6,000-strong presidential guard, was enthusiastically backed by the United States and Europe.

US figures show that between 2007 and 2010, the US spent nearly $500 million rebuilding, training and equipping the PA security services.

The US has also relied on help from Egypt, which supplies weapons, and Jordan, which trains the Palestinian forces. Israel vets new recruits.

$1bn security budget

Dana said some 65,000 Palestinians were paid from the defence budget. The ratio of one security official for every 70 civilians is one of the highest in the world.

The PA's annual spending of $1 billion on security is about 30 percent of its total budget, more than its spends on education, health and agriculture combined. Proportionally, the PA spends significantly more than the US on defence and three times more than the UK.

The Palestine Papers, leaked documents covering more than a decade of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, revealed that Israel initially opposed US moves to bolster the PA security forces.

Even in 2010 a senior Israeli commander, Avi Mizrahi, publicly doubted the policy's wisdom. He said: "This is a trained, equipped, American-educated force. This means that at the beginning of a battle, we'll pay a higher price. They have attack capabilities and we don't expect them to give up so easily."

However, in practice, the Israeli military has found coordination beneficial, with reports of more than a thousand joint operations each year.

Better armed

Israeli politicians from Netanyahu to opposition leader Isaac Herzog have insisted that, should there ever be a Palestinian state, it must be demilitarized.

Brom said the Palestinian security services were better armed and trained after US involvement but still posed only a limited threat to Israel.

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Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the 2011 winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East" (Pluto Press) and "Disappearing Palestine: (more...)
 

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