United States security assistance to the Palestinian Authority

United States security assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) has been provided since the Palestinian Authority was established by the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s. The security assistance was given on an ad hoc basis and often covert at the outset. Since 2005 the U.S. State Department has provided direct financial and personnel assistance to Palestinian security organizations when they established the office of the United States Security Coordinator (USSC) for Israel and the Palestinian territories through their Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs (INL). In 2007 the USSC team began training certain Palestinian Authority Security Forces (PASF) including the Palestinian National Security Forces (NSF) and the Presidential Guard with the intent to train, equip, and garrison 10 NSF battalions by the end of 2010. U.S. security assistance to the Palestinian Authority has expanded over the years and has received praise as well as criticism from American, Palestinian, and Israeli groups.

U.S. security sector assistance began publicly at the conclusion of the Oslo Accords, through aid to the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) for the Palestinian Police under the authority of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat. While Arafat requested international donor assistance for his police force in early 1993, substantial coordination did not occur before the deployment of the Palestinian Police to Gaza and Jericho in 1994. According to Norwegian scholar Brynjar Lia, in his book Building Arafat's Police: The Politics of International Police Assistance in the Palestinian Territories after the Oslo Agreement, the international community, especially the European Union (EU) and the United States, was at odds regarding the appropriate means by which to facilitate donor aid to the newly established Palestinian Authority. Additionally, though concerns about inadequate police equipment, training, and resources were paramount to the PLO and Arafat, international actors did not emphasize this component of their overall efforts to support the Oslo agreements. Lia argues that this was predominantly because many donor countries already had covert bilateral security sector assistance programs unrelated to the new international donation structures, and also because the PLO did not successfully convey their requests to Western donors who lacked confidence that the PLO would coordinate security aid to donor satisfaction.

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