PALESTINIAN WEAPONS SURVEY

Palestinian Weapons: The Ominous Facts By P. David Hornik (FrontPageMagazine.com)
The common denominator of the road map and other notions of Israeli-Palestinian peace is Israeli land concessions. Although the territory between the Jordan and the Mediterranean is only fifty miles wide, such visions assume that Israel and a sovereign Arab entity will coexist comfortably in this small space. President Bush says he’s determined to bring this about during his current term.

Not so long ago, before the Oslo era, the word “demilitarized” was automatically attached to the phrase “Palestinian state” by all those, including Israeli left-wingers and foreign liberals, who favored that option in good faith. They readily conceded that an armed Palestinian state abutting Israeli population centers would be too dangerous for Israel. Today, though, the Palestinian Authority is already heavily militarized, well beyond what the various Oslo agreements stipulated, and no one seriously believes that in the process of attaining statehood it would disarm itself.

Anyone who today seriously considers the “two-state solution” and genuinely has Israel’s best interests at heart will want to have a look at a new website, Weapon Survey, that gives an overview of the already-existing weapons in the Palestinian Authority and the illegal ways in which many of them were brought there. The site also gives daily coverage of what are in fact ongoing, daily incidents of armed Palestinian attacks on Israeli communities and soldiers, as well as references to more extensive, expert discussions of weaponry and security.