The Financial Times
reported last week on a “sharp rise” in torture
cases in the West Bank, which is governed by the Fatah-affiliated
Palestinian Authority and thought to be a good deal more moderate
than Hamas-ruled Gaza, as well as a peace partner for
Israel.
The rise has, indeed, occurred since a Hamas terror attack
in the West Bank in August that killed four Israelis. The PA, which
saw the attack as implying a threat to its own rule, rounded up
over 700 suspects — “almost all,” FT says, “without
proper warrants and held…without the assent of civilian judges or
prosecutors.”
That, of course, was hardly the worst of it. Among others,
FT notes the horrific case of Ahmad Salhab, a 42-year-old
former mechanic who was first tortured by PA security officers in
2008, and then again in the latest wave, by a method called
Shabeh, “in which detainees are handcuffed and bound in
stress conditions for long periods.”
The first time, in 2008, Salhab emerged from the ordeal
with torn spinal discs. This time, in September and October, he
was
held in solitary confinement, deprived of the medication
he requires as a result of the earlier abuse and subjected again to
Shabeh. His condition deteriorated so badly that he could
neither walk nor stand upright…. [He] was released on October 16
but had to spend 10 days in Hebron hospital before he could return
home. Now he walks on crutches and has little hope of ever making a
full recovery.
FT also cites a
more detailed report on PA torture posted by
Human Rights Watch a month ago. It notes that “more than 100
allegations of torture [have been] registered so far this year,”
including one involving a man tortured for ten days; that “the PA
has been extremely lax in prosecuting security officials for
torture and ill-treatment of detainees”; and that eight detainees
have allegedly died in custody since 2007.
Troubling here is that the PA security forces making the
arrests, if not those actually carrying out the torture, are
largely U.S.-funded and trained. As Israeli commentator Caroline
Glick
noted in a recent column,
between 2007 and August 2010, U.S. assistance to the PA
security services totaled $400 million.… This assistance has paid
for the training and outfitting of 400 Presidential Guards and
2,700 soldiers in the National Security Forces. The U.S. plans to
train five additional 500-man NSF battalions.
The 2007 starting-date of the program, which until
recently was run by General Keith Dayton, was not arbitrary: that
was when Hamas staged a bloody coup in Gaza against Fatah, with
which it had been purportedly sharing rule. The U.S., fearing a
repeat performance in the West Bank, set out to build a more
capable PA force that would keep Hamas at bay.
But that wasn’t the only aim. The creation of a modern,
competent PA force is also supposed to enable the transition to
Palestinian statehood — a goal that has been pursued obsessively,
if unavailingly so far, by the Obama administration.
From a cold realpolitik perspective, one could
say that, if the PA force has succeeded so far in suppressing
Hamas, one shouldn’t quibble too much about the moral aspects.
Relatively moderate Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan also crack
down hard on their Islamists, and their methods are no prettier.
Comme ci, comme ça.
But the situation is indeed problematic, and partly for
moral reasons. If the point of Palestinian statehood is supposedly
to free the Palestinians from Israeli occupation, then creating
another Arab police state for them seems of dubious value at best.
At least, it is hard to see why the U.S. should invest so much
money and diplomacy — including harsh pressures on Israel —
toward that goal.
And pragmatically speaking, the fact that PA forces fight
Hamas hardly means they can be counted on to be moderate; such
internecine conflict is rampant in the Arab world. Indeed, the PA
continues to be an entity no less steeped
in anti-Israeli, anti-Semitic incitement than
Hamas-ruled Gaza.
So much so that Israeli security forces are quite worried
about the growing PA capacity, with General Avi Mizrachi, head of
Central Command, saying
in a speech last May that “the IDF must be prepared for an
escalation in fighting against Palestinian security personnel
trained in Jordan by U.S. General Dayton.”
He added:
This is a trained force, better equipped by an American
mentor, and the upshot is that at the beginning of combat, the
price we pay will be higher. Such a force can close down a built-up
area with four snipers, it’s deadly…. It is an infantry force
standing in front of us and we must take that into
consideration.
The U.S. has already gone far down the road of nurturing
the Palestinians, and it is not easy to turn back. But with the
U.S. slated to spend another $150 million on the Palestinian
security services in 2011, it is not too late to consider whether
building up both internal repression and a threat to Israel is a
rational course to take.
Or, if too late, perhaps not by 2012.
