Palestine Think Tank

France24 An international conference in Berlin on Tuesday aims to help Palestinians create their own state through grassroots security measures like putting policemen on the beat and building courthouses.

But the one-day conference, attended by 41 countries and due to be followed in the evening by a meeting of the Middle East Quartet a week after a truce between Israel and Hamas, is focused only on helping the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank and does not cover the Gaza Strip.

The Gaza Strip, home to 1.5 million people, has been subject to a near-total Israeli blockade since the seizure of power a year ago by the Islamist Hamas, which the international community refuses to talk to until it renounces violence and recognises Israel’s right to exist.

The EU Police Mission in the Palestinian Territories (EUPOL COPPS), set up in 2005 to train the Palestinian police force, will call on donor nations gathered in Berlin to earmark 187 million dollars to help the PA.

The cash, which comes out of a total of seven billion dollars pledged to the PA in Paris in December, is not aimed at tackling militants but at building up the basic infrastructure needed for a functioning state, organisers said.

The projects include training criminal and traffic police and building police stations, prisons and courts, as well as a forensics lab.

The conference’s “key aim is to emphasize the commitment of the international community to the development of policing and justice” in the PA, said Colin Smith, a retired British officer who heads the EU training mission.

“The Palestinian police are a capable police force that has a great deal of skills. What they lack is capacity, equipment and infrastructure,” he said in Ramallah, political capital of the occupied West Bank, on Tuesday.

“They do a remarkable job with very little.”

A German foreign ministry spokesman said Berlin was confident the conference would produce “substantial results” both in terms of financing and in expanding EUPOL COPPS and widening its scope of activities into the justice sector.

Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad is to head the Palestinian delegation to the German capital, while US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was also due to attend.

Also present will be Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Arab League secretary general Amr Mussa, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana, Quartet envoy Tony Blair and 23 foreign ministers including Russia’s Sergei Lavrov.

“The conditions for a peaceful solution are better today than they have been in the last 10 years,” German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier said at an Israeli-European security forum ahead of the conference.

But he added that for violence to stop and for a two-state solution to become reality it was vital that the Palestinians themselves are in a position to create more security.

“More security for the Palestinians also means more security for Israel … Only when people in Israel and the Palestinian territories start to see an improvement in their lives will they put their trust in talks,” he said.

Volker Perthes from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs agrees, saying that the establishment of a “functioning state” is vital for Israel too.

The conference is all about helping the Palestinians stand on their own two feet, so that ordinary citizens feel confident that “the anarchy is over, that statehood is coming,” Perthes told AFP.

However by ignoring the Gaza Strip the conference risks being “more symbolic politics that serious state-building,” said Margret Johannsen from the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at Hamburg University.

But the Gaza Strip will be on the agenda at a meeting of the Middle East Quartet — comprising the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia — that according to German government sources was to take place in Berlin following the conference.