Three Months?

The Palestinian Authority is claiming to need at least three months to establish some sort of security in the territories. They claim that Israeli interference has degraded their security force to the point that is has to be rebuilt in order to perform its job.

Israel asked them provide security along one border within one month if Israel promised to withdraw from the area. One border. Not the entire territory, mind you. One single border, the northern Gaza-Israeli border, that isn't all that long.

And the Palestinian Authority says it needs three months. Why?

It's not like they don't have the weaponry to arm a security force. How many police forces really need to arm every officer with AK-47s? Do they not have enough missiles? Do they need a few more Scuds to secure the border?

Or maybe the three months is a crock. Maybe it's going to take three years or even three decades.

Maybe they've understood that they won't be able to provide real security until the Palestinian people learn the basics of self-government.

Why is it that in the US we have relatively safe cities and yet the standard officer on the beat is armed with only a 9mm pistol while the Palestinian's feel that they need to arm their cops with military style weapons?

It's a basic cultural difference. In the US we are, to a large extent, self-policing. Not self-policing like a Stalinist society, but more along the lines of peer pressure. Our society values the ideas of private property and personal rights. We also put enormous pressure on those who violate those ideas. It isn't so much the official sanction that keeps people in line; it is the societal pressure that keeps us in line.

In regions like those under the control of the Palestinian Authority, there is no value to private property, personal rights, and to an extent human life. In order to bring real security to the area, they would have to bring about a reeducation of the people in the territories. The only alternative is to impose a martial law type of regime like Israel has done. But since that would be politically unacceptable to the PA, it won't be done.

With the alternatives being Israeli occupation, reeducation of the population (and the PA itself), or imposition of martial law, the PA has come up with a fourth alternative: lie.

What will happen in three months? Will there be real security? I don't think so. I think in three months we'll hear about how the evil Israelis haven't properly supported the PA in setting up a security force based around the concept of armored warfare, or some such thing. And then we'll hear about how they need three more months or six more months or more money or more weapons, anything but the truth that they are incapable of providing security.

It wouldn't matter if they had asked for three years instead of three months. They're really asking for the impossible.