Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, recently explained his role as training Palestinians to essentially manage the Zionist occupation.
This is clearly the “vision” Barack Obama imagines for a supposedly independent Palestinian state.
Now a profile in Israel’s largest newspaper worries that Dayton thinks very differently to the Israelis:
For three years now, Dayton has been hanging around here, and for the last two, since the summer of 2007, he has been intensively overseeing the formation of the Palestinian army in the West Bank. Israel prefers to keep its eyes wide shut and to call it an “upgraded national defense force.” Like an organized police force, something along the lines of an enhanced Border Police, a kind of force for riot dispersion destined to serve the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah in matters of public order and to supply it with more security from within: security from Hamas.
The Americans and the Palestinians – each in its own way – have completely different visions of this force. The Palestinians see it as yet another symbol, another step on the way to statehood. The Americans also see it as an internal security mechanism which is presently being developed in order to serve an independent Palestinian state one day.
Not autonomy and not anything resembling it. Statehood. We, on the other hand, prefer to play the ostrich’s role with our heads in the sand. That is how we operate. Even the statesmen, in the end, see everything through the lens of daily security, through the daily patrol in Nablus’s casbah. So Dayton’s three battalions have arrested 600 opposition members, mostly Hamas, since the beginning of the year? Fine. As far as we are concerned that makes 600 less terrorists. Dayton plans on establishing ten additional battalions? Great, we applaud this. This way the arrests will double.
Palestinians should be not trained to manage their own population.
That’s called colonialism.