Weeks after the torching of a Palestinian home in the West Bank town of Duma that killed an 18 month old infant and his father, Palestinians are taking safety matters into their own hands. Unable to rely on the Palestinian Authority or the Israeli military for protection from renegade Israeli settlers, some Palestinian villages have organised self-defence units that roam the perimeters in the dark of night as a kind of unarmed early warning system against settler incursions.
That the situation on the West Bank has reached such a level speaks to a real horror of Israel’s continuing occupation. According to the Oslo Accords signed in 1993, the Palestinian Authority (PA) is empowered to provide security for many Palestinian towns and villages like Duma. The reality, however, is that it is unable to do so, because it was primarily designed to enforce the status quo on the West Bank.
The PA has received ample training and weapons from the United States, Jordan and even Israel. The aim of this training, however, was to design a PA force that could contain internal dissent or challenges to the leadership in Ramallah. Despite increasingly close security cooperation with Israel over the past five years, the PA is essentially unable to provide average Palestinians protection from settler violence.
Then there is the Israeli military itself. In certain areas of the West Bank where the Palestinian Authority has no legal mandate, it is responsible for protecting Palestinians. But, as The National reported yesterday from Hebron, this seldom becomes a reality. One family in Hebron, a notorious flashpoint of violence, have become prisoners in their own homes. The Israeli military recently served notice that it would cease protecting the family from settlers hellbent on obtaining their property through a programme of violent intimidation and forceable entry.
These developments underscore the point that the Palestinian people can count on no one but themselves – and then only at the grass roots level. Their official leadership, and the international community, has failed them, so they must go back to the most basic community levels and attempt, against all odds, to provide themselves with a thin veneer of protection from the violence of their occupiers.
