Here we go again:
High-ranking defense officials told the Post Wednesday that security chiefs in Abbas’s office passed on a “weapons shopping list” to Gen. Keith Dayton, the US security coordinator to Israel and the Gaza Strip, in the middle of May, asking for millions of bullets and thousands of rifle magazines, hand grenades and Kalashnikov automatic rifles.
The officials said Dayton then passed the list on to the Egyptians, who would need to provide the arms and ammunition, as well as to Israel’s Defense Ministry, which would need to authorize the transfer.
The defense officials said that Dayton personally recommended that Israel permit the weapons supply…
Israeli officials stressed that the weapons would not be transferred by Israel to the PA. “We do not physically supply the Palestinians with weapons,” an official in Defense Minister Amir Peretz’s office said. “We just allow it to happen.”– Jerusalem Post
Why this is dumb:
- It won’t work. Fatah can’t defeat Hamas because Fatah’s people are not as well motivated as Hamas’ people. It doesn’t depend on how many bullets they have. Both sides have more than enough already.
- The weapons will sooner or later end up in the hands of Hamas. The Fatah people will sell them, Hamas will take them, or the Fatah people will become Hamas people. All these things have already happened.
- Fatah is also an anti-Israel terrorist group. Didn’t Israel learn this in the Oslo period?
This analysis is so surely right that the fact that Israeli government officials do not see it is truly distressful. It appears to be that when there is no good alternative human beings invent another one- deluding themselves.
So the Israeli government would delude itself that by allowing weapons to Fatah it is keeping open the possibility of ‘ moderate'(?) Palestinians’ defeating the extremists. Or perhaps I am wrong it is not delusion but a cynical sop thrown to the Americans without regard to possible cost of Israeli lives for as Rosenthal points out giving people weapons who have weapons already- when what they really lack is any kind of will to fight Hamas.