Palestinian Police Walk a Thin Line

As thousands of angry youths trotted down a hill toward Palestinian police lines on Friday, a lieutenant from Yasser Arafat’s Force 17 presidential guard grabbed the microphone mounted on his jeep and pleaded with the crowd to turn back.

The protesters were headed for an Israeli army checkpoint on the outskirts of Ramallah, itching for renewed battles with Jewish soldiers that already had left 16 Palestinians dead in their town. The lieutenant had orders to block them.

“Please, my brothers, go back. We are the military here to protect you. Let us do the work!” he shouted.

“There is a massacre at Al Aqsa mosque. Let us through!” cried an impatient youth.

“Listen to the call of your national army. We are with you, not against you,” the officer implored hundreds of demonstrators making an end run down another street.

The encounter underscored the complex role of Arafat’s police and security forces in autonomous Palestinian territory.

Ever since their arrival in the Gaza Strip and seven West Bank cities under the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, Yasser Arafat’s police forces have ridden a seesaw of public opinion that judges them alternately as heroes and traitors.

Palestinians greeted police in crisp new uniforms with kisses as they arrived in West Bank cities such as Ramallah last year to keep order after 27 years of Israeli occupation.

Then, when Arafat ordered the arrest of hundreds of suspected Hamas activists after a spate of suicide bombings in Israel last spring, Palestinians jeered their police for doing the Israelis’ dirty work. They accused the police of abusing prisoners as the Israelis had.

Now Israel is assailing the Palestinian police for fighting pitched gun battles Wednesday and Thursday against Israeli soldiers, while average Palestinians are cheering their forces again.

“Seeing what they did makes me hold my head high,” said an elderly woman who identified herself as Um Muhammad--the mother of Muhammad.

“They were defending our rights,” added her toothless friend.

But as Palestinian police and security forces tried to keep the protesters from further clashes with Israeli soldiers on Friday, the police again lost support.

“They should let us go fight,” said Mohammed Saleh, 21. “When they keep us back like this, I feel they are protecting the Israelis from us.”

According to the Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, Arafat’s self-rule authority is allowed to have 30,000 armed police and a fixed number of registered weapons provided by Israel and international donors.

The agreement is so specific on this that, for example, the town of Yatta near Hebron is allotted 80 police officers, three vehicles, 15 rifles and 27 handguns.

Palestinian political observers say the actual number of police is closer to 40,000 in about 10 different, sometimes competing, security services. Among them are the Civil Police, Preventive Security, National Security Forces and Force 17--Arafat’s presidential guard.

Israeli intelligence officials say the number of police may be even higher, and, after this week’s combat, they estimate that there are about 80,000 armed Palestinians, counting police and civilians.

Moreover, Israeli intelligence sources say that even though the Palestinians are not supposed to have an army--Palestine is an “entity,” not a state--their police forces looked and acted a lot like soldiers.

To Palestinians, in fact, police and soldiers are one and the same, dedicated to a common cause.

“There is no difference. We are all in the service of the homeland,” said a captain in the National Security Forces who used his old nom de guerre, Abu Amer.

“Money does not mean anything to us,” added a policeman who said the average monthly pay is about $250. “We are defending our pride and our people.”

Most of the Palestinian police are veterans of Arafat’s Palestine Liberation Army who did battle in Beirut, or street fighters from the the 1987-93 intifada, the uprising against Israeli rule. Many, such as Force 17 Lt. Abu Thaer--his nom de guerre--are also veterans of Israeli jails.

“I was sentenced to life in prison for disturbing the peace,” Abu Thaer said. “I was released in the prisoner exchange from the 1994 Cairo agreement.”

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Poorly trained as police officers, the Palestinian forces nonetheless earned high marks from Israel in recent months for their close cooperation on joint patrols, intelligence gathering and fighting Islamic terrorism.

Israeli security officials had been urging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to move forward with the peace process that he once opposed to keep up security cooperation.

But this week’s combat broke a fragile trust.

Netanyahu claimed that several Israeli soldiers wounded in the fighting told him from their hospital beds that they were shot by Palestinian police officers they knew. Israeli military leaders said the combat demonstrated a breakdown of Palestinian police command: Arafat allowed his people and police to demonstrate but then lost control.

Some Palestinian police acknowledged that Thursday’s orders to refrain from shooting were disobeyed in fits of emotion as they witnessed Israeli soldiers firing on Palestinian civilians.

“Do you think the Israelis would stand idly by if we were firing on their people?” asked one Palestinian who declined to give his name.

Many Palestinian police believe that the Israelis used an unnecessary show of force--gunfire aimed to kill--to provoke them into battle.

They believe that by shooting civilians in front of them, the Israelis meant to humiliate the Palestinian police. And yet the National Security captain, Abu Amer, did not see the gun battles as an obstacle to future cooperation with the Israelis.

“When I started shooting, it was to protect our civilians,” he said. “We are soldiers. We follow orders. When our orders are to protect our civilians, we act in any way we have to. And when there is a political decision to work with them [the Israelis], we can do that too.”