False, intoxicating calm
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas suspends terror in a way that ensures another eruption
The current calm is intoxicating, but also false. The potential inherent in it, though, is significant, and should be used to implement the disengagement plan. Still, it is important to realize this is not even the beginning of the end of Palestinian terrorism.
Indeed, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is attempting to suspend terror in a way that ensures it would erupt again.
The key to understanding the expected eruption is the disintegration of Palestinian society.
Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades hooligans, who managed to take over sensitive junctions within their society, are willing at this point to back a temporary, “booby-trapped” lull in order to escape the IDF’s manhunts.
Still, they have no interest in institutionalizing the calm and renouncing the violent chapter in their struggle against Israel. After all, their social and political status is premised on this conflict.
Under the guise of their “contribution” to the struggle against the Jews, they sow fear among their people and justify internal terrorism, too. Even if some Brigades’ members would want to reject terrorism, they would not be able to enforce their authority on the various gangs, which are not subject to a common framework.
Mahmoud Abbas is their leader as long as he grants them legitimacy and refrains from demanding that they renounce the violent, reckless source of their power. He cannot, even if he wanted, disarm them and get them to join the process of building Palestinian society and reaching a compromise with Israel.
The Palestinian public has recently expressed its opinion on those elements most associated with terrorism, and open to a lull at the most, by pushing the Hamas to overwhelming success in municipal elections.
Meanwhile, we haven see a unilateral reduction of Palestinian terror and the efforts to thwart it.
Palestinian preconditions for a continued calm and cooperation include at least two demands that Israel must not accept: a halt on security fence construction, and an Israeli acceptance of an apparatus that would allow Palestinian terrorism to hit Israel whenever the IDF threatens the terror infrastructure.
According to the Lebanese precedent, Israel would only be able to act in a way that each Brigades, Hamas, and Popular Committees terrorist would allow.
Last week, the Palestinians killed a girl during a local celebration. The blame for their wanton behavior was laid, as usual, on Israel, and led to mortar attacks on a civilian Jewish population.
This is how they will react each time the IDF foils a terror attack against civilians and hurts terrorists, or those around them.
Israel would then be forced to choose between accepting the deliberate murder of its citizens (if it fails to thwart it) and the murder of its citizens in the form of retaliation, should it choose to act.
In most cases, the Palestinian Authority would refrain from acting against terrorism; at times it would do too little too late. Over time, this pattern would not hold.
A delay in completing the fence would be akin to criminal abandonment of Israeli citizens. A complete fence that blocks Palestinian infiltration would spare the life of Israelis and maintain the Jewish majority.
A demand to postpone the fence’s completion in order to maintain a temporary lull in terror attacks is as legitimate as a serial rapist’s demand to refrain from installing doors and locks, because he decided to go on vacation.
The fence is vital, regardless of terror, to the existence of the Jewish national home, its sovereignty, and its citizens’ quality of life. Indeed, the fence is an essential prerequisite in the face of a Palestinian leadership that sticks to demands for the “right of return” into the State of Israel.
Moreover, this is the same Palestinian leadership that refuses to dismantle a terror infrastructure comprised of tens of thousands of its citizens, who have spread death through out cities in the past four years.
