Because Israel and America need stability, they will keep paying off the Palestinian murderers
Copyright: Hans Jørn Storgaard Andersen [Public domain], from Wikimedia Commons
When a couple of burly guys stop by your falafel stand and explain to you that you are in danger from bad people in the neighborhood and unless you pay them a certain amount each week, these bad people are likely to burn your falafel stand to the ground, but not before your hand magically finds its way into the deep fryer, you know that these “bad people” are talking to you this very minute. And you pay. This kind of “protection” racket is probably the oldest one of all. It’s time-tested.
When the Palestinian Authority was formed and Yasser Arafat’s PLO was brought from Tunisia to run it as part of the Oslo accords, there was a fundamental belief that was an essential part of why Israel agreed to this move. The belief, one that was an axiom, something that by definition does not require proof, was that the Palestinian Liberation Organization, the PLO, was accurately named. That there was truth in advertising, that this was indeed a national liberation movement akin to Zionism. In the point of view of the Israeli leftists that led the push to Oslo, Zionism, in its infancy, also had to resort to “terror-like tactics”, in its struggle against the British colonial authorities in particular. They believed that once the PLO is allowed to get on with the job of governing, with building schools and sewage systems, if it is given a path to achieving its aspirations for Palestinian independence, it will do what the pragmatic Zionists, in fact these same people that were now negotiating with the Palestinians, have always done: take the deal.
On this axiom, this definition of the Palestinian leadership as pragmatists who only fought to achieve a political end, the Israeli left bet the entire future of Israel, of the Zionist movement, and of the Jewish people. They lost. The details of the arrangements did not and still do not matter. A mathematical proof, no matter how elegant, that relies on an erroneous axiom, can never be correct. It is disproved at the source. The PLO, as it quickly turned out, is nowhere near a national liberation movement, which makes sense, because there is no Palestinian nation. What they are and have always been is a criminal gang, a mob, a mafia. As far as such organizations go, the Palestinian ones, whether they’re called the PLO, the Hamas, the Islamic Jihad, or anything else, are rather poorly diversified; they only have only one source of revenue, the protection racket. They are a one trick pony, but at their one trick they are very good. The Palestinian mafia has become amazingly adept at collecting from everyone: the Europeans, the Americans, the Russians, the Arabs, and even the Israelis. The trick lies in their high degree of sophistication as far as understanding the trigger points of each “mark”. Their amazing public relations operations, undoubtedly the best that any criminal organization has ever had, does not hurt either.
Europeans want to feel good about themselves and wash away their guilt for first allowing the Holocaust to happen or, in the case of Germany actually causing it and then “giving” the Jews Israel as compensation for the Holocaust at the “expense” of the Arabs. This is a narrative that the Palestinian mafia invented and carefully cultivated in the minds of Europeans and it paid them many billions in revenues and allowed them to use Western Europe as their own back yard for staging terror attacks with impunity. There was no Western European country that was not totally compromised by Palestinian terror from the 1970’s onward. For the Russians, Palestinians were intrepid warriors against the Western alliance. Their total penetration of Western intelligence gave them ample supply of trading goods for Russian favors such as refuge in Eastern Europe for certain individuals when things became tricky in the West, the use of privileged diplomatic mail for weapons smuggling, and much much more. The Arab countries were an even easier mark. Their population demanded that they support the Palestinian cause against the Jewish infidels and their governments wanted to wage war against Israel without committing their armies and suffering humiliating defeats. Palestinians made it possible for all Arab countries to wage war against Israel, to cause it pain, to kill Jews, with only a very minimal expense and almost no risk.
Israel and America were a tougher nut to crack, but with Oslo they finally did it. By guilting the founding generation of Israeli leaders, people who were as much humanists as they were fighters, into giving them a chance at independence, the Palestinian mob finally gained a foothold directly bordering the soft underbelly of Israel proper. From this perch, they proceeded to initiate ruthless attacks against the Israeli civilian population, attacks that they knew would invite Israeli retaliation and destabilize the entire strategically crucial Middle East region. There was and still is nothing Israel can do to stop the Palestinian mob from attacking it short of kicking them out and restoring status quo ante, something that is all but impossible now. So the Palestinian mafia bosses are sitting pretty. The more Israel retaliates, the more Arabs are killed, the more Arab infrastructure is destroyed, the happier they are, because mayhem is what they are after. Both Israel and the US can ill-afford mayhem. They need stability so they can find the cure for cancer and develop the next generation of technologies that are used by all humanity. So they pay.
As is widely known, Palestinian mafia pays its soldiers whether they live or die. It pays them if they get wounded in action and it pays their families if they are killed. These blood payments are unpopular in Israel and in America. Measures have recently been taken in both countries to “stop” them. The US has discontinued its “aid” (in reality protection payments) to the Palestinians, and the Netanyahu government, pandering to its voters ahead of the coming general election, has vowed to deduct these payments from the duties that it collects on behalf of the Palestinians at the ports of entry. None of this is anything more than pulling the wool over the eyes of Americans and Israelis alike. Money is fungible; a shekel has no address. Israel and America pay the Palestinians for their “security collaboration”. In other words, they pay them to keep their dogs at bay. There is no way for either country to dictate to the Palestinians how to spend this money and neither can they stop paying without risking plunging the region into full-bore chaos.
The truth isn’t pretty; by inviting one of the most effective and ruthless mobs to settle on its bosom, Israel has exposed itself and by extension America to extortion on gargantuan scale and eliminated any incentive for the Arabs who reside west of the Jordan River to seek peaceful coexistence with Israel on mutually equitable terms. Nobody knows what the future will bring, but we do know that no mafia has ever voluntarily given up on easy money and neither should we expect this from the Palestinians. Israel and America can try to fool their own citizens, but the truth is that Israeli and American money will keep flowing into the pockets of those who kill Israelis and Americans and there is not a thing that anyone can do about it.
