Word: pa
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...Washington has wisely urged the Israelis to keep out of any attempt to remodel the PA - which would strip it of any credibility as a negotiating partner - and is hoping to enlist Arab help in making some concrete changes, particularly in the areas of finance and security...
...International donors will be expected to come up with hundreds of millions of dollars to rebuild Palestinian infrastructure, and the administration wants to ensure that the money is spent on its intended purpose. The days of Israel paying a substantial chunk of the tax revenue earmarked for the PA into personal discretionary accounts controlled by Arafat are, no doubt, over. It may well be that the guiding principle of Arab and Western funding to the PA from now on will be to keep Arafat's hands as far as possible from the treasury. Even though that would weaken Arafat...
...Reforming the PA's security services into a single structure is the more complex challenge, particularly in the light of Israel's continuing military operations. Perhaps to safeguard his own rule by preventing the emergence of strong power centers to challenge him, Arafat has created nine different Palestinian security structures, each with its own budget and chain of command, and each ultimately answerable to him. When the militant grassroots of his own Fatah organization began to organize armed militias to wage the intifada, Arafat sought to bring those, too, under his wing - often to the chagrin of his security chiefs...
...Even as he found himself increasingly at odds with the mood on the Palestinian streets in the final years of the Oslo Accords, Arafat relied on his relationship with these competing security forces and militias for his power. Any move to consolidate the PA's security structures into a single force - much less to disarm the militias as envisaged by CIA director George Tenet's cease-fire plan - is likely to provoke fierce power struggles. The rivalry between West Bank security chief Jibril Rajoub and his Gaza counterpart Mohammed Dahlan has been increasingly open since the Israeli invasion, while...
...While it's hard to find a Palestinian politician today that isn't calling for reforming the PA, the big question remains how. The intifada and the Israeli invasion of the West Bank has disrupted and fragmented the PA, which has strengthened Arafat's own hand. Not only has Sharon's siege restored Arafat's political standing in the eyes of his own people, it may have also deepened the extent to which any institutional changes in the PA require his endorsement. But democratizing the PA necessarily weakens Arafat's own power, and with the Israelis having made clear that...