The decision to approve the transfer of armored vehicles from Jordan to the PA is an act of incomprehensible stupidity on the part of the Israeli government. It's a fact that every weapon system provided to the PA by Israel has eventually been turned against us. It's likely that the same thing will occur with these vehicles as the number of terrorists serving in the PA security forces has skyrocketed over the past few years.
For example, the Fatah terrorist organization, which is associated with the Abbas regime has even bragged about the number of its members in the PA security forces who have died while carrying out murderous attacks against Israelis!
So what will happen if one or more of these transferred armored vehicles are "hijacked" by such uniformed terrorists and used to storm an Israeli settlement in the territories?
It's likely that by the time the armored vehicles are neutralized a massacre of our citizens will have occurred. Then what? Hand wringing by our government that such an eventuality could not have been foreseen?
The fact of the matter is that the PA has more than enough security forces to reimpose control over places like Jenin and Nablus if they really wanted to do so. However, Abbas can't have his forces do this without running the risk of inflicting a large number of civilian casualties that will further inflame the Palestinian masses against his regime. And the PA regime itself has been largely responsible for the growth of the terrorist groups now operating in the Territories due to its rampant corruption and radicalization of its population. The PA has even approved "pay for slay" payments to those individuals belonging to the very organizations it now claims it needs armored vehicles to defeat!
But for the sake of argument, let's assume that the PA attempts to storm a terrorist urban enclave with their new armored force. If the past is any guide, this effort will undoubtedly fail. At that point, the PA will simply turn to the Americans for more heavily armored vehicles and the transfer of a 10,000 man Jordanian trained commando force, which could presumably do the job. I think people can see where this process would lead to: namely, the creation of yet another "front" that we would have to deal with during a multi front war.
We have to remember that Oslo was originally premised on the PA undertaking security measures against terrorist groups that our own forces presumably couldn't perform because of Supreme Court imposed operational restrictions.
Or, at least, that was the theory. The actual reason behind our readiness to hand over security responsibilities to the PA was due to a failure on the part of the Israeli government and military to do what was necessary to clamp down on Palestinian violence with whatever force was required.
So we subcontracted the dirty job to Arafat and armed him to the teeth only to have him repeatedly turn those weapons against us. And now we're repeating this lethal mistake by handing over armored vehicles to the same corrupt PA regime that will undoubtedly, one way or another, turn these weapons against us.
Providing the PA with heavier firepower will just postpone the day we'll finally have to do go in and clean out the terrorists' urban enclaves ourselves. We should just get on with it before the job becomes much harder.
