Friday, January 27, 2006
An indication of the extent to which the Palestinian Authority became a client of Iran was the January 2002 attempted delivery of arms purchased by the Palestinian Authority from Iran with the assistance of Hezbollah. The arms delivery was thwarted when the Israeli Navy intercepted and seized the 4000-ton Karine A, a Palestinian freighter that was transporting 50 tons of Iranian manufactured weapons, including missiles equipped with Tandem-Charge warheads capable of piercing heavy armor, and 122 mm Katyusha rockets with a range of 12 miles. Other weapons included Strela anti-aircraft missiles, mortar tubes and bombs, land mines, Russian manufactured wire-guided Sagger missiles, ammunition, anti-tank missiles, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and explosives.
The Iranian effort to infiltrate the Palestinian areas has only increased. Hezbollah serves as a conduit for the distribution of Iranian funds to the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and Tanzim, both affiliated with Fatah, for terror attacks against Israelis.
Thus, there are an ever-increasing number of terror operatives from these factions that now work for Iran. As of October 2004, 80% of the terror attacks that took place in or originating from the West Bank against Israelis were coordinated by Hezbollah. Nearly all of the terror activities carried out by the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades were reportedly directed and financed by Hezbollah and Iran. Hezbollah reportedly awards bounties of $5,000 for each Israeli killed by Fatah terrorist cells. As a result, these operatives remain agents of the Fatah factions in name only.
Viewed as a whole, Palestinian organizations funded by Hezbollah were responsible for 20% of terror attacks against Israelis in 2004. Nine million dollars - nearly 10% of Hezbollah's $100 million annual budget - was devoted to funding Palestinian terrorist groups operating in Palestinian Authority areas. Each cell was provided between $5,000 and $8,000 a month by Hezbollah for expenses, including arms, cell phone calling cards, and spending money...
This is way off topic, but there's a talk at Boston College next week by The Weekly Standard's Christopher Caldwell that I thought you might want to post on your events section:
http://www.bc.edu/schools/cas/polisci/events/
A bit of irony: I'm am right now reading this site from a terminal in a coffee bar (my new computer isn't online yet). At a table behind me there were three or four young(ish) people talking about Israel (one of them may have been Jewish, I don't know). I'm left of center myself, but their own talk made me bristle. They exchanged anecdotes about awful things Mossad has done ("They poisoned someone in the neck...Can you believe that?...This is what they do..."), talked about some "sleazy" spokesperson for Bibi. And then went on to talk about the rhetoric of Bibi defending Israeli hits against the Palestinians, quoting the Israelis as saying that it's a matter of crime and punishment, i.e. our punishment for the Palestinians' crimes. They decried the Israeli "macho" and "stupid" approach, and said that the wall was a horror that belongs more to the Middle Ages.
They weren't totally ignorant of Israel; they even referred to its socialist roots. But, though I also despise Bibi and the Likud, I found these people to be very annoying, and sometimes downright stupid.
The fellow who was loudest among said that he couldn't understand why the wall wasn't placed along the old Green Line. He didn't understand the need for the wall at all. He didn't seem to know that most of the wall is a fence and that, as awful and embarrassing as it is, it has cut down on terrorism dramatically. Also, I understand that there are indeed similar barriers elsewhere in the world (N. Korea, also the border between Iran and Turkey I think; Derschowitz has a list of them in his book about Israel's right to exist).
He said that vicious rhetoric towards the Palestinians will only push them into the arms of Hamas, that the thing is to give them "gifts" (I'm not kidding, he used that word), push back the Israeli border, etc. God, even I know that that's naive. Especially so given Iran's support for terrorist activities in Gaza.
Even if Israel can be heavy-handed and one-sided in its views, one still has to take into account the context of those views, the dilemma that Israel faces, and also the behavior of the Palestinians. Israel isn't acting in a vacuum. No word about that from this crowd.
And then the group agreed that Israel will never depart from its idiotic rhetoric because a change in its worldview would mean that it would have to face all the murders it's committed.
This is a point of view that is hard to argue against. It requires a shared experience or at least knowledge of Israel's experience to get them to realize that there is another point of view.
Very frustrating to listen to.
Thanks for the on-scene report. I wouldn't have been able to keep my donut down. Sometimes there just isn't enough common ground to even begin a discussion is there?
It was just as well that I happened to be reading a (somewhat) relevant posting of yours just at that moment. Your site gave me a place to vent. What's sad is the pervasiveness of views like these, especially among people who consider themselves well-informed, and who know just enough to seem well-informed to others.
Joanne, though it probably would have been a futile exercise, you could have mentioned the greenhouses that were given as "gifts" to the Palestinians not so long ago.
I suspect there is only one thing that the Israelis possess that would mollify Palestinians who reject all lesser gifts. And still much of the world, even now, seems not to know or care what it is.