Inside the police station car park, the Palestinian Police were preparing their new cars. It was like Christmas. I'd never seen a Palestinian police vehicle before.
The car pictured here on the left was donated by the Spanish government to the Palestinian Authority. This car is so new that plastic still covers the headrests in the front seats.
The police mechanics in the back of the picture are fitting police lights to the roof of the car, also donated by Spain.
It was hard to imagine how this police force would fare. It was a nice thought, that heavily armed Israeli soldiers were to be gone from the streets, but I was beginning to have doubts about the prevelance of AK-47s amongst the policemen.
Left: A Palestinian Policeman adjusts his AK-47 rifle on the back of a Ford transit van, donated, as shown by the plaque pictured on the right, under British Aid.
As a British passport holder myself, I hold a not surprising interest in how my country supports the fledgling Palestinian Authority via its aid programme. When John Major visited the poverty-stricken, over populated, developmentally-retarded Gaza Strip in 1995, he announced that Britain would be donating....30 police vehicles to the Palestinian Authority!
Nice call, John! Although it has been nice to see the Palestinian Police enjoying themselves by playing with their sirens while driving at high speeds in Ramallah, it would have been nice to see a more suitable purchase.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. After all, Britain does have other aid packages for Palestine, it's just that it does not rank highly amongst the other donors of the European Union.
I must point out that in May 1996, the ODA (British Goverment Aid Agency funded a proposal I wrote in December 1993 for a food quality control unit in the Birzeit Environmental Health Centre. Better late than never, although several "shops" have aparently been set up by less than scrupulous individuals in the meantime, to pocket the available funding from other countries.
The two photographs above show examples of the new Palestinian Authority licence plates that begun to appear on vehicles in the Gaza Strip and Jericho after the PNA takeover in 1994. Since the various redeployments, the plates have also spread to the Jenin, Tulkaram, Qalqilia, Nablus, Ramallah and Bethlehem areas.
These replace the unpopular Israeli licence plates (below), that identify the area of origin with a Hebrew letter in the left hand rectangle. Having said that, these plates still distinguish the drivers of the cars as Palestinians when compared with the yellow Israeli plates, and the first number (a "1" in the example, above left) apparently defines which area of the West Bank the owner is from.
The red letter plate (above left) is a military plate on a Palestinian vehicle. The English letter "P" and the Arabic letter "F" below it on both of these plates refers to "Palestinian" ("Falesteeneeyah" in Arabic).
For an earlier discussion of the politics of car licence plates in Israel-Palestine, check out Car licence plates: the road to apartheid.