Britain’s Secret Palestinian Authority Control

By Kit Klarenberg – Feb 11, 2025

Mere weeks after a ceasefire in the Gaza genocide was finally reached, the agreement already appears on the verge of collapse, due to brazen – and self-admitted – Israeli violations of its terms. Tel Aviv’s abrupt resumption of hostilities and refusal to abide by the armistice’s obligations has a clear motivation. Namely, mass state and public-level outrage throughout the Arab and Muslim world at the rancid ultimate end goals of the ‘armistice’, as articulated by Donald Trump at a February 4th summit with Benjamin Netanyahu.

During that meeting, and in various public remarks since, Trump made clear the millions of Palestinians displaced by Israel’s 21st century Holocaust since October 7th 2023 would have no right to return, and instead be forcibly resettled in Egypt and Jordan. However, both countries, and every major government in the region, flatly reject this proposal as a non-starter. Meanwhile, Trump’s bizarre declaration on February 9th that he was “committed to buying and owning Gaza” has only redoubled Hamas’ dedication to remain, and resist.

The issue of how to reconstruct a Hamas-free Gaza has long-bedevilled Israeli and US leaders, and become considerably further complicated in the wake of October 7th. While the Zionist entity’s assault has displaced, mutilated, and slaughtered countless civilians – predominantly women and children – Hamas was essentially unscathed. In fact, its ranks swelled significantly every step of the way, leaving the group’s fighting forces bigger and stronger than ever before, while its public support among Palestinians has reached record highs.

The Palestinian Authority, a brutal Zionist appendage that has ruled Palestinian portions of the illegally occupied West Bank with an iron fist since 1994, and the legitimacy of which is repudiated by all they claim to govern, has indicated an eagerness to “clash” with Hamas to purge the group from Gaza. Ever since late 2024, PA security forces have been savagely attacking the West Bank’s Jenin refugee camp, a Resistance stronghold, murdering and maiming civilians and journalists along the way.

This indiscriminate campaign has been enormously counterproductive. Western defence analysts have charged that the effort is “a suicide mission”, desperately conducted to prove the PA can serve as an effective security actor, and defeat Hamas. Its leaders reportedly fear that if an alternative governance structure emerges in Gaza without their involvement, the Authority could be sidelined altogether, and “their funding will be channelled away.” Having served as the Zionist entity’s ever-dependable attack dog in the West Bank for decades, this would be quite some loss.

It would also represent a major blow for Britain. As far back as December 2023, it was reported London had dispatched military apparatchiks to the West Bank, preparing the Authority to take power in the Strip, building their “capacity and ability” for the purpose. This represented a uniquely rare mainstream acknowledgement of Britain’s virtually unknown but intimate, long-running, clandestine control of PA security forces. Such is this covert bond’s depth and intensity, the conclusion the British encouraged the Authority’s recent calamitous West Bank crackdown is irresistible.

‘British-Centric’
Numerous leaked documents on the clandestine operations of Adam Smith International, a British intelligence cutout, lay bare the depth of London’s infiltration and control of the Palestinian Authority. The files show that since 2012, the company has reaped millions “building the capacity of the Palestinian Authority security forces,” and “discrete areas” of its Interior Ministry, in order to “professionalize” the PA’s other “security institutions.”

Through a nexus of “embedded mentors,” ASI provides “technical assistance, training, and on-the-job guidance” to different security force departments, including the PA civil police, intelligence agencies, and “civil protection” units. “Strategic advice” is also provided “on the institutional development of the police sector.” Meanwhile, the PA’s media centre receives assistance in “strategic communications” campaigns to “support their programme for achieving statehood by maintaining public support.” In other words, by manipulating and pacifying Palestinians in the West Bank.

Other leaked files demonstrate that the training and services provided by ASI to PA security forces are distinctly British in character. A self-professed “highlight” of this support was the establishment of a “Palestinian Officers Academy” styled on Sandhurst military school, where the British Army’s elite class are trained. ASI brags that it drafted the Academy’s “business case”, cleared its “design and development plans” with PA security forces and Interior Ministry, while securing “a multi-million-pound budget” for its launch and operation.

Trump Pledges to ‘Take, Not Buy’ Gaza in Meeting With Jordanian King

Academy students receive a nine-month-long “practical leadership curriculum” with “over 1,700 lesson plans” in English and Arabic, overseen by 12 international and 30 Palestinian staffers. ASI also advised the PA’s military training director “on how to strengthen the design and delivery of training” across the PA security forces, and “course design, delivery methodology, organizational structure, as well various training-related operational matters, such as resourcing, course coordination and management of training infrastructure.”

ASI guaranteed access to “discrete areas” of the PA Interior Ministry, and “buy-in” to its training operations from senior Security Forces staff, by embedding a “specialist military technical advisor” within the latter’s ranks. While unnamed in the files, the company refers here to Anthony Malkin, former head of leadership training at Sandhurst. From 2000 – 2005, he was Britain’s defense attache in the United Arab Emirates.

Per Malkin’s LinkedIn profile, there he served as “the interface between the UK Ministry of Defence and the UAE General Headquarters…[developing] policy lines at ambassadorial and ministerial level whilst supporting defense sales.” For ASI, Malkin worked to “improve operational capability” of all the PA’s security, intelligence, military and policing units, “training, mentoring and advising leaders and staff.”

Along the way, he “[showed] he can operate well in a culture of ambiguity, and has been flexible in adapting as the job has evolved to reflect wider political and military influences.” ASI further bragged in submissions to the Foreign Office:

Malkin left ASI in 2016, after three years. In December that year, he authored a blog post outlining his experience building the Officers Academy. It’s rife with extraordinary insights, such as the “considerable intelligence liaison between the Israeli and Palestinian Security Forces,” both in regards to alleged threats posed by the West Bank’s “immediate neighbors”, but also “internal threats to safety and security” posed by Palestinian resistance.

Along the way, Malkin explained how he encountered numerous obstacles in getting the Academy off the ground. “The most taxing” was ensuring “Israeli acceptance of the project and their tacit approval,” given it would necessitate training Palestinians in using rifles and pistols. The Zionist entity bans Palestinians from owning or possessing “any heavy weapons.” As luck would have it, Tel Aviv eventually greenlit the project, “provided that no sniper training was involved!”

Garnering US funding for the endeavour was likewise “not the easiest of tasks.” After all, the Academy was “an essentially British-centric project based on UK’s [sic] leadership doctrine, but with a US budget.” Nonetheless, “despite considerable initial misgivings and protestations, a multimillion-dollar budget was released” eventually by Washington.

‘Five Techniques’
Subsequently, Malkin conducted “battlefield tour presentations regarding Israel’s military history” throughout the Zionist entity. He also self-published a book, The Tortuous Birth of a Nation, “for the enthusiast wanting to explore and discover more about Israel’s military history,” while moonlighting in “cross-cultural consultancy” between Israel and the UAE.

Such exploits are instructive as to where Malkin’s affiliations and sympathies truly lie. So too does his account of the project expose the bleak reality of the corrupt, unelected Palestinian Authority. It is a foreign-created and controlled entity that does not govern or exert power in the interests and service of residents of the Occupied Territories, but Western governments, and Zionist apartheid and genocide.

From Britain’s perspective, steering the PA’s activities and composition ensures it not only remains “supportive of UK values and interests,” but also permits London’s domestic and foreign security and intelligence agencies to train an unblinking eye on residents of the West Bank. As a result, potential threats of retaliatory violence arising from the Zionist entity’s brutal assaults in the Occupied Territories – both to Israel and Britain – can be neutralised, using local actors.

British infiltration of the Palestinian Authority is a long-running story, and its security, intelligence, and military infrastructure has always been a primary target. In 2004, the government of Tony Blair dispatched veteran senior British police officer Jonathan McIvor to assist the body. The next year, he was employed by the European Union to establish the Coordinating Office for Palestinian Police Support (COPPS), Brussels’ first “security” mission in Palestine, in advance of its formal launch in early 2006. He then served for some time as its first chief.

COPPS increases cooperation between the PA’s military, security, policing, and intelligence wings, and Israeli Occupation Forces. Questions can only abound as to whether McIvor’s high-level stint with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, a now-defunct Northern Irish police force notorious for vicious discrimination against the province’s Catholic minority, and intensive collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, informed tactics employed today by the Palestinian Authority.

It was in Northern Ireland that Britain perfected “five techniques” of psychological and physical torment, which formed the basis of modern torture worldwide, along with a strategy of “internment without trial” for terror suspects. In 1976, a secret directive gave the Royal Ulster Constabulary free rein to employ these techniques whenever its officers wished, which endured well into the 1990s, concurrent with McIvor’s tenure with the force. Coincidentally, the Palestinian Authority widely engages in arbitrary arrests and torture of detainees, at Israel’s behest.

Fast forward to today, and on top of its chaotic West Bank crackdown, the PA is doing its best to ingratiate itself with the Trump administration. Longtime President Mahmoud Abbas has signed a highly controversial decree, ending financial support for the families of Palestinians jailed or killed by the Zionist entity. Such subservience may well be attributable to the Authority’s secret backers in London once again seeking US funding for a “British-centric project” – this time, the foreign takeover of Gaza in its entirety.

 

(Substack)