Weinberg - An empty PA threat

David M. Weinberg..
A Citadel Defending Zion..
23 April '12..

The uncompromising, blustery and high-handed diplomatic letter that Palestinian officials handed to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu last Tuesday contains a thinly-veiled threat.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas implicitly warned that unless Israel does as he demands (which is to immediately concede every point of contention on borders and settlements) the Palestinian Authority (PA) will dissolve itself and dump responsibility for West Bank Palestinians back into Israel’s lap.

Is the threat serious and is it even a threat? I doubt it.

First of all, it is hard to imagine a $2 billion enterprise collapsing itself. The PA receives over $2 billion a year in international aid, more than any known political entity in the present or past that I can think of, anywhere in the world. (Ethiopia with 80 million people and a GDP one-fourth that of the Palestinians, receives far less aid than the PA).

These funds pay the salaries of tens of thousands of Palestinian real and imaginary civil servants, supporting families in every Palestinian town and city. Despite all the talk about the economic boom in the PA, there is no daily existence for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians without international assistance.

So I don’t believe that any Palestinian leader is going to give up this largesse, and the power to distribute this bounty, by dissolving the PA just to get at Israel.

But what if, in a fit of Palestinian spite and self-immolation, the Palestinian Authority were to declare itself defunct? How would Israel handle this? Could Israel handle this?


I don’t know much about the garbage collection and municipal health services that the PA might be providing these days for Palestinians, and which Israel might have to take over. I assume that we won’t like doing this, but that it can be managed.

A bigger and more pressing issue is the 5,000 men under arms in the PA, in one of five security services (Preventive Security, Military Intelligence, General Intelligence, National Forces and the Presidential Guard). Israel can’t allow 5,000 armed men who answer to nobody to run around the territories. Israel would have to round up weapons and shut down PA military facilities.

Without a doubt, this too is doable. The danger, however, comes from Iran. Iran would be only too glad to pick up the tab for the salaries of these military men – they each earn about $1,000 a month, currently paid by Western donor countries — in order to buy a mini-army to operate against Israel. At the paltry price of $500,000 a month, this would be a bargain for Tehran.

Israel would have to block such Iranian influence, and collar any Palestinian military or police figure that reverts to terrorist activity. Prof. Hillel Frisch of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies (who wrote a book published by Routledge on the Palestinian militaries) says that most of the armed Palestinians are family men (married with children) and thus unlikely to take to the underground and to terrorism. But even if only ten percent of them did so, that still amounts to 500 terrorists that the GSS and IDF would have to hunt down.

According to Frisch, there were about 300 active terrorists in the territories at the height of the Second Intifada. Today, he says, the GSS and the IDF closely track every single member of the Palestinian militaries, and Israeli intelligence would be quicker and more effective than it was back in 2002 at identifying and arresting any militiaman who turns to terrorism. “While it won’t be painless or happen overnight, the IDF can and will crush a revanchist Palestinian terrorist threat,” Frisch evaluates.

There is also a Palestinian threat of mass civil disturbances and non-violent marches that overwhelm Israel’s defensive lines. But this threat exists even today, when the PA is still functioning.

The point is that Abbas would better off not threatening us with his own demise. We can manage without him and his “authority” if we have to. It won’t be fun for Israel, but it will be also be very painful and uncomfortable for Abbas’ people. And the Palestinians will recede farther than ever away – light years away – from the independent statehood that Arafat and Abbas and all their international donors had promised them.

Link: http://davidmweinberg.com/2012/04/23/an-empty-pa-threat/

Published in Israel Hayom, April 23, 2012

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