On Thursday, in the village of Tell near Nablus, a reservist of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) was shot and wounded by a man subsequently identified as an officer in the Palestinian Authority's own police force. The IDF, in the course of its lawful operations, returned fire and killed the gunman was killed. A second officer of that same Palestinian Authority police force, having opened fire with a long-range weapon, sensibly chose to surrender and was arrested.
Let us linger on that phrase for a moment: "an operative in the Palestinian Authority’s police force." These are not, as the usual apologists would have it, random hotheads or unaffiliated militants. These are salaried employees of the very entity that the international community continues to insist is a credible “partner for peace." The men who are paid, trained, and uniformed by the Palestinian Authority, the body that receives hundreds of millions in Western aid on the explicit condition that it combat terrorism, are here recorded shooting at Israeli soldiers engaged in counter-terrorism operations.
In Burqin and Far’a, further arrests were made of additional Palestinian police officers who had chosen to fire upon Israeli forces rather than, one supposes, perform the duties for which they are so generously remunerated by European and American taxpayers.
The IDF statement is characteristically restrained: "The terrorist was later confirmed to be an operative in the Palestinian Authority's police force." One almost admires the understatement. A less disciplined commentator might describe it as conclusive proof that the Palestinian Authority is not merely failing to rein in terrorism but is actively participating in it, through the very institution meant to suppress it.
Yet tomorrow, without the slightest trace of embarrassment, the same diplomats who wring their hands over "cycles of violence" will return to the tired script demanding that Israel negotiate with, make concessions to, and ultimately cede strategic territory to this same Palestinian Authority. They will do so in the serene confidence that no one in the press will remind them that the PA's police force has, once again, been caught trying to murder the soldiers of the only democracy in the Middle East.
The photographs released by the IDF, of the weapons seized, of the Carlo-style submachine guns and M-16 rifles wielded by these "police officers," will be quietly ignored by those whose worldview depends upon pretending that the conflict is sustained by Israeli intransigence rather than by the incurable habit of Palestinian officials opening fire on Jews.
It has been this way for decades, and, barring some unforeseen outbreak of honesty in the international community, it will remain this way for many more. The Palestinian Authority will continue to pay salaries to terrorists, its police will continue to shoot at Israelis, and the bien-pensant classes of Europe and North America will continue to avert their eyes, murmuring that the only obstacle to peace is the absence of a Palestinian state.
One is almost longs for the day when someone in authority will simply say what is manifestly true: that the Palestinian Authority is not a failed state in waiting; it is a successful terrorist organisation in waiting, and its police force is merely its most respectable-dressed battalion.Until that day arrives, incidents such as this one in Tell will recur with grim regularity, each one quietly confirming what any honest observer has long known: the emperor’s new clothes are blood-stained, and they were tailored in Ramallah.
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