Ynet reports on the latest palestinian demand.
Would you believe, an army?
Despite previous understandings that a future Palestinian state would be demilitarized, Ynet has learned that in talks held behind closed doors, the top negotiator for the Palestinian Authority, Ahmed Qureia, is demanding the establishment of a regular army.
High-level Israeli and Palestinian officials confirmed the newly revealed developments on Monday night.
According to the information obtained by Ynet, the new and surprising demand first emerged as the negotiations teams sat down in Jerusalem last Sunday to discuss security arrangements. Qureia told Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni that the Palestinian state would require a regular army to defend itself.
Livni, though perplexed by the sudden demand, made clear that all previous accords specifically spoke of a demilitarized Palestinian state. A senior Israeli source said that Livni sought to clarify if perhaps Qureia had meant a Palestinian police force, but the latter was reiterated that it was a proper regular army the PA was after.
The source added that the new Palestinian stipulation incensed Livni, who ardently rejects the idea of such an army.
A very senior Palestinian source close to Qureia confirmed the exchange. “At the meeting in question we raised the demand for a regular army, meant to defend the independent state,” he told Ynet.
“This isn’t an army intended to launch an attack against Israel. We are not asking for F-16 jets but rather a force that would be able to defend the nation from threat and realize its basic right to exist in security.”
The palestinians claim they need an army to defend their yet-to-be-established state from threat, even though every country in the world supports such a state, and they have never been threatened.
No, the palestinians want an army for entirely different reasons.
The so-called “moderate” PA – lauded as Israel’s “peace partners” – have never given up on their true aim to destroy Israel and liberate all of “Palestine.” The PLO Charter still contains provisions calling for Israel’s destruction (despite promises otherwise), as does the Fatah constitution. Then there’s the matter of PA textbooks, and the actions and statements of “moderate” Mahmoud Abbas himself.
This is how former PA Minister Faisal Husseini once described the PA’s tactics:
“…the [ancient] Greek Army was unable to break into Troy….they left a harmless wooden horse as spoils of war. So they opened the gates of the city and brought in the wooden horse. We all know what happened next.
“Had the U.S. and Israel not realized, before Oslo, that all that was left of the Palestinian National movement and the Pan-Arab movement was a wooden horse called Arafat or the PLO, they would never have opened their fortified gates and let it inside their walls.
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“So come down out of the horse and start working for the goal for which you entered the horse to begin with. In my opinion, the Intifada itself is the coming down out of the horse. Rather than getting into the old arguments…this effort [the Intifada] could have been much better, broader, and more significant had we made it clearer to ourselves that the Oslo agreement, or any other agreement, is just a temporary procedure, or just a step towards something bigger…
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“…We distinguish the strategic, long-term goals from the political phased goals, which we are compelled to temporarily accept due to international pressure. If you are asking me as a Pan-Arab nationalist what are the Palestinian borders according to the higher strategy, I will immediately reply: ‘From the river to the sea.’
In asking for an army, the PA has once again revealed its hand. Yet despite the high stakes, the Israeli government and much of the Israeli population are seemingly not playing with a full deck.
