Text & Subtext
Text: Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, USA, has been charged by the U.S. government with expanding, arming and training the Palestinian Force 17 – formerly Yasser Arafat’s Praetorian Guard and now Abu Mazen’s personal protection agency. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, training includes “airport and event security planning to securing motorcades, residences and offices. Suggested tactics included the use of ‘protective intelligence,’ ‘counter-snipers’ and a ‘counter-assault team.'”
Subtext: America is training another private Fatah army.
Text: Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, USA, has been charged by the U.S. government with expanding, arming and training the Palestinian Force 17 – formerly Yasser Arafat’s Praetorian Guard and now Abu Mazen’s personal protection agency. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, training includes “airport and event security planning to securing motorcades, residences and offices. Suggested tactics included the use of ‘protective intelligence,’ ‘counter-snipers’ and a ‘counter-assault team.'”
Subtext: America is training another private Fatah army.
Text: Lt. Gen. Dayton told an Israeli newspaper, “We are involved in building up the Presidential Guard, instructing it, assisting it to build itself up and giving them ideas. We are not training the forces to confront Hamas.”
Subtext: The U.S. has taken Fatah’s side in the burgeoning Palestinian civil war with the expectation that Abu Mazen will oust Hamas and then deliver on peace with Israel.
This is the third incarnation of American support for Palestinian security/paramilitary/terrorist forces. The U.S.-trained Palestinian “police” under the Oslo Accords even after the “police” fired on IDF soldiers in 1996 and the Israeli government named 12 terrorists wanted by Israel but serving in the Palestinian “police” – including two involved in the mutilation of two Israeli soldiers in Ramle and tossing their bodies out a second story window (immortalized on the cover of Time). Only after Arafat began the “second intifada” – an early victim of which was an Ethiopian-born Israeli policeman killed by his Palestinian joint patrol partner – did the U.S. cut off its aid.
Aid resumed in February 2005 when Lt. Gen. William Ward, USA, was charged with “providing a focal point for training, equipping, helping the Palestinians to build their security forces and also for monitoring, and if necessary, to help the parties on security matters.” In September of that year, Gen. Ward told a House Committee that the Palestinian Authority had met none of the State Department’s goals for administration and security operations, including those that would have brought international financial and material assistance to the security forces.
Subtext: The U.S. has always wanted to believe that under the right circumstances, the Palestinian security forces would create security for Israel so that Israel could be induced to make further concessions toward an independent Palestinian state.
Reality: It won’t happen. Expecting any Palestinian force to kill Palestinians on behalf of Israeli security was always naive. Expecting Abu Mazen, who had little enough courage when Fatah was the only dog in town to destroy Hamas – armed and trained by Iran and Syria – on behalf of Israeli security, is naive in the extreme. The Palestinians have taken our training and used it to be better terrorists. “Counter sniper” and “counter assault” training interests Palestinians only insofar as they plan to “counter” the IDF. American military complicity would make a mockery of our presumed interest in peace.