Dahlan’s “Security” Scheme for Controlling Borders and Uprooting Settlements

mg class=”picture” src=”/dynmedia/pictures/Thumb.jpg” align=”right” border=”0″>Leading Palestinian factions are marking the Aqaba summit period as open season for terror. Sunday morning, June 8, the three dominant groups, Fatah – with suicide arm al Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, Hamas and Jihad Islami, for the first time publicly admitted acting in unison to murder four Israelis and injure four at the Erez checkpoint between the Gaza Strip and Israel. Each named the gunman it had sent for the strike. All three were shot dead in the ensuing gun battle. To subscribe to DEBKA-Net-Weekly click HERE.
The spot chosen for the attack – the Gaza-Israeli checkpoint through which ten thousand Gazans were allowed to go back to jobs in Israel as a pre-Aqaba summit gesture by Israel – signaled their rejection of any but violent Palestinian interchanges with the Jewish state and their defiance of efforts by Abu Mazen and Dahlan to carry out understandings reached under the aegis of the US president, George W. Bush.
This was first signaled hours after the Aqaba summit broke up on Wednesday, June 4, when terrorists used axes and knives to hack an Israeli couple to death in a Jerusalem wood. From that moment on, as terror threats spiraled, Israel began to reverse the goodwill gestures made for the Aqaba summit – first closing the Ramallah-Jerusalem highway and put the capital on a high alert for suicide attack, then beefing up security in additional areas and, finally Saturday night, June 7, clamping down the closure on the West Bank that was lifted only three days earlier.
At Aqaba, the Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon shocked many Israelis from the center as well as the right by three epic concessions that appeared to be scripted from Washington:
1. Explicit recognition of the legitimacy of an independent Palestinian state.
2. Recognition of the need for territorial contiguity between the two parts of the Palestinian state, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
3. Perhaps the most sweeping and least understood concession Sharon made was buried in his declaration: “No unilateral actions by any party may prejudge the outcome of our negotiations.” The reference was to the past and to Jewish settlements – not just the unauthorized outposts. These settlements were established “unilaterally” by democratically elected Israeli governments led by both major parties on land which Sharon recently indicated may be judged retrospectively as “occupied”. Their presence thus becomes an obstacle to a final peace accord and their removal justified.
In return for these concessions, did the Palestinian prime minister Mahmoud Abbas say he recognized Israel as Jewish state? Did he renounce the demand for the return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees? He did neither.
But the concession of greatest relevance to the current terror assault and its future prospects was not published. We disclose here that Sharon gave the nod to a comprehensive plan formulated by Dahlan for converting terrorists into cops, after the proposal was endorsed by President George W. Bush – even though it was pronounced unworkable or worse by Israeli security and anti-terror chiefs
That plan was first revealed by DEBKA-Net-Weekly 112 on June 6:
Mohammed Dahlan, whose CV includes service as head of the Gaza Strip Palestinian preventive terrorist agency turned terrorist mastermind and initiator, is now bent on demonstrating his bona fides as counter-terror tactician to Americans and Israelis.
Nonetheless, his first 42-page master-plan submitted in early May was rejected by US counter-terror experts – mainly because of a glaring omission. It harped at length on the prospects of a ceasefire deal with Hamas and Islamic Jihad (since proved premature), but said not a word on how he intended to disband and disarm the groups under the direct command of Yasser Arafat – the Fatah, the Fatah-Tanzim and al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, the main engines of anti-Israel terror.
His second effort, submitted just before the Sharm el-Sheikh and Aqaba summits, was accepted. It provides for two Palestinian armed forces to be created and the uprooting of Israeli settlements – and not just outposts.
Dahlan proposes detaching 20,000 to 25,000 armed men from Arafat’s terrorist army and pressing them into service under the new anti-terror regime. (The Associated Press meanwhile reported the cost of this “detachment” – $6,000 for every illegal rifle turned in by a member of the al Aqsa Martyrs (Suicides) Brigades of Arafat’s Fatah and another $6,000 – cash on the barrel plus a salary for signing up with the new Palestinian security force. The money is to be put up by the United States, Britain and the European Union)
These putative ex-terrorists would be removed from their power and support bases in Palestinian West Bank towns and reorganized into military frameworks as a Palestinian border police force, commanded by loyalists of the new Abu Mazen-Dahlan administration and trained by US military advisers. They would be deployed as guardians of the Palestinian Authority’s borders with Israel, the Golan Heights and Jordan
(Click here for a debkafile Special Map showing Dahlan’s plan for Palestinian control of borders with Israel and Jordan and evacuated Israeli settlements.)
For the second force, Dahlan intends scouting new recruits with no attachments to the Fatah, Tanzim or the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, for securing Palestinian cities and villages as a counter-terror force. They will also prevent the former terrorists-turned border police from heading back to their old urban lairs.
Dahlan wants Israeli military units to continue to hold strategic points in the West Bank in order to block terrorist squads from access to Israel, as well as keeping the new Palestinian border policemen from reverting to their old habits and infiltrating Israel as terrorists on behalf of their former masters.
Under this blueprint, the creation of the Palestinian border police will drain Arafat of much of his terrorist manpower and trap the former terrorists in a tactical Israeli-Palestinian sandwich held together by American military advisers and monitors.
Dahlan and Abu Mazen are using this program to persuade the Bush team to lean hard on the Israeli prime minister and extract much more than the promised evacuation of unauthorized West Bank outposts. They want to reverse the order of the road map and have Israel uproot two blocks of veteran West Bank communities in the very first stage of its implementation – one in the north and one in the south. (As shown on attached debkafile Special Map).
The two Palestinian leaders contend that those eight settlements stand in the way of the Palestinian territorial contiguity Sharon promised at Aqaba and will also attract terrorists.
Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz opposes the Dahlan program on the following grounds:
A. The organization of tens of thousands of armed Palestinians, well trained by US advisers and established in new bases built at US taxpayer expense along the West Bank’s borders with Israel – would be a dream come true for Palestinian terrorist tacticians. The fledgling Palestinian force will quickly turn those bases into strongholds and shut them against the new Palestinian leaders and American monitors. The new force would confront Israel not merely with classical terrorists, but a new breed of trained Palestinian troops capable of professional warfare.
B. A Palestinian border force stationed in the Jordan Valley along the Israeli-Jordanian border – even in limited areas – will directly threaten the Hashemite kingdom by strengthening the operational links and gunrunning routes linking the Palestinian communities of Jordan and of the West Bank. There would no longer be any outside control over those links.
A similar situation would develop on the northern West Bank frontier near the Sea of Galilee and the Golan where the give-and- take between Dahlan’s border police and the heads of Palestinian terror groups based in Syria and Lebanon would be unrestrained. Palestinian interchanges with the Hizballah would be eased. In a word, all Israeli security restraints would be removed allowing the Palestinians to indulge in a smuggling spree of fighters and weapons into the West Bank through routes currently policed by Israel.
C. The expensive state of the art security fence Israel is in the middle of building along the Green Line will be made redundant by the proposed Palestinian border police. While Israel pours resources into an electronic barrier to keep the terrorists out, American dollars will be flowing into a human fence equipped with equally sophisticated resources that provide the Palestinians with a military front line versus Israel’s defensive wall.
D. The Palestinian deployment a la Dahlan will leave the 250,000 Israelis living on the West Bank high and dry. To reach Israel without going through Palestinian checkpoints, they will have to take a roundabout route through Jerusalem. This will condemn Israeli West Bank settlements to a slow death.
Every lesson of survival past and present has taught Israel not to risk rolling up these communities and foregoing the security provided by this minimal strategic depth.
The presumption at the bottom of the Dahlan blueprint – that terrorists can be bought and will stay bought – was painfully refuted after the 1993 Oslo Accords when Arafat’s terrorists, including Dahlan himself, were supported and trained by American experts as a terrorist force, only to regress in numbers large enough to provide Arafat with his Intifada terror legion in September 2000.
Last week in Baghdad, thousands of former Iraqi officers and troops protested outside the offices of the US administration demanding “compensation” and threatening to resort to a suicide campaign if their demands were not met. It is no secret that entire Iraqi units were paid to shed their uniforms and not raise their guns against the coalition forces invading Iraq. Now they are no doubt watching the progress of the Dahlan buy-a-terrorist scheme to gauge how far they can reach into the American cornucopia.
debkafile hears from American and Israeli political sources that the Palestinian internal security minister’s makes frequent demands for more money to get his program going.