On 4 May 1996, I was slightly concerned to see these guys, dressed up in balaclavas (right), running around the streets of Ramallah outside my house 300 yards from Ramallah town center. Obviously an arm of the Palestinian security forces, but who? A chilling sight after a long day at work.
On 19 May, it was announced that there was a graduation ceremony for a special unit of the Preventative Security Service (PSS).
Attended by Minister of Civil Affairs Jamil Tarifi, Minister of Local Affairs Saeb Erekat, and West Bank PSS head Jibril Rajoub (pictured below, from left to right), the baffling ceremony at the Ramallah Friends School Football Field began with the aforementioned balaclava-ed indivuduals running onto the field as pictured right.
On one level these sorts of events are a frightening 1984-esque glimpse into the future of life in the future Palestinian state.
On another level, the obvious pride as these men attend the first graduation ceremony for anything in their lives is something not to be mocked.
Right: Ramallah's population and the families of the PSS special unit members look on as the graduates stand to attention before the Palestinian flag.
The duties of the PSS special unit would seem to be similar to the British SAS's or U.S. Navy Seals' anti-terrorist activities. The demonstrations offered of their talents included the storming of a hijacked bus and the interception of assassins.
This would seem to be rather an odd set of duties for a preventative force. Call me a nitpicker, but it would be rather more appropriate for the bus not to have been hijacked in the first place and the PSS to concentrate on working out there was to be an assassination attempt before the fact, not afterwards.
I must point out that I left the ceremony feeling uncomfortable well before these fireworks but was told about them later by a Palestinian friend who, although of a cynical mould, described them as "Great!", on the level that, "Hey, after all, Ramallah doesn't have a cinema".
The theatrical nature of the event was heightened by the fact that someone was shot in the leg with live ammunition during the storming of the bus.
The PSS is ironically known as an intellegence force, as apparent in their incarnation in the pre-redeployment period. For the text of an article I wrote for Middle East International (1 March 1996) about the activites of the PSS during this period, check out this link to another diary entry - The hand-over of human rights violations".