by Nicola Nasser
Global Research, April 11, 2007
".......The security chaos was highlighted by the kidnapping of BBC reporter, Alan Johnston, 44, in Gaza city on March 12th, in the longest captivity a foreign journalist has endured in Gaza over the past three years. The Dogmush family, who is thought to have a militia of about 2,000 men, is suspected of abducting him and was blamed for the abduction of two Fox TV journalists held for two weeks last summer; the family denied these accusations. “This has become a country of mafia,” said Hani Habeeb, a sociologist with Gaza's al-Azhar University......
But there remains the overall violence-breeding incubator of the prevailing security chaos.
First, the blurred national role of the PA security apparatus is eroding public confidence in this role. Externally what is the point in having more than 80,000 of national security personnel when they could not stand up to the IOF to defend their people or at least make their daily onslaughts with a price? Internally, according to Hassan Khraisheh, deputy speaker of the PLC, “What's the point in having 85,000 security officers if they can't free a foreign journalist who has been held in the Gaza Strip for three weeks?” The PA has become the most heavily policed territory in the world, with an officer-to-resident ratio of 1:50; compared to 1:400 in the United States, according to one estimate.
Second, disarming all but the government is a security prerogative, but it will not certainly be a very popular move by the PA to disarm people of personal and overwhelmingly primitive self-defence weapons while they are still under Israeli occupation and their “national” security forces are practically unable and politically committed not to defend them against the ongoing military incursions, extra-judicial assassinations (dubbed by the Israelis “targeted killings”), house demolitions and mass arrests.
Third, the absence of what the US Administration and PA officials have been recently fond of describing as “political horizon,” the deadlocked “vision” of a two-state solution, Israel’s undermining of the Road Map and her rejection of the Arab Peace Initiative are all factors contributing to a destabilizing no-war-no-peace situation that is playing on an already edgy Palestinian nerves and their collective sense of insecurity......."
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