Collabarative dissonance

With the recent report that the U.S. monitors concluded that the PA has not been doing what it should to prevent terror, the PA has been making an effort to show that it indeed has been doing all it can and that problems, well blame those on Israel. Earlier this week Ha’aretz reported:

Omran sounds enthusiastic about the changes he expects, but does not hide his criticism of the Israel Defense Forces commanders he meets with frequently.”I’ll give you an example. Last night, about 3 A.M. a van with yellow [Israeli] plates crashed into a wall of the Bank of Palestine, about 200 meters from here. I couldn’t send even one soldier because we’re not allowed to operate in the city after midnight according to the agreement with the IDF.

“I asked the civilian police to check it out, but they were afraid; they thought it might be your undercover unit,” he told Haaretz.

“We decided to wait until 6 A.M. when we’re allowed to operate again. To send out a patrol, I had to wake up the Palestinian liaison unit, who had to contact with their Israeli counterparts, who had to wake up the Israeli sector commander, who would check whether they were his people or not. If this was a criminal or security matter, the suspects would be long gone,” Omran says.

Omran says the PA security forces are working energetically against armed men in the sector. “I’ll arrest anybody who dares move around with a rifle, even our own intelligence people,” he says. “We’ve given every bomb we’ve found to the Israeli side, we’ve prevented attacks and they know it,” he adds.

I don’t believe Omran’s boasts, though I suppose there can be some problems with coordination. Of course the fact that there are still these problems after 15 years go back to the trustworthiness of the Palestinian police until now. (And it was a Palestinian policeman who murdered Ido Zoltan recently, so caution is still important.)

And there’s this:

But Israel and the U.S. say you’re letting Hamas and Jihad activists go.” In Israel they forget that we also have laws and I have to bring every suspect to a remand hearing within 24 hours. Suspects are often set free on bail. Other times, I let people out after they agree to give us information. So Israel comes and arrests them.

I wonder about this. It’s not like the PA has ever been so good with laws before. They never really fulfilled Rabin’s vision of going after terror suspects as if they didn’t have to worry about B’Tselem. I kind of doubt that they pay attention to such niceties all the time now either.

Reuter picks up on another Palestinian complaint.

When a Palestinian law and order campaign started in the occupied West Bank late last year, Western advisors quickly realised they had a problem: Palestinian forces had no place to put all of their prisoners.Many of the Palestinian Authority’s prisons, some dating back to the Ottoman era, were destroyed by Israel after a Palestinian uprising erupted in 2000 and peace talks broke down.

The few prisons left and the dysfunctional judicial system, plagued by backlogs long before statehood talks were relaunched in November alongside the security crackdown, can’t cope with the influx, Palestinian officials and their Western advisors say.

Not enough jails. James Taranto, focusing on the complaint that Palestinian police were complaining about the lack of prison space and improved security in some places, joked that the filled jails is the reason that there’s improved security in some places.

He focused on the wrong thing though.

In the town of Jericho, near the Dead Sea, 51 detainees cook, pray and wait in sweltering concrete cells so small they barely have room to stand up and stretch. The facility is meant to hold 40 people. “You sit here and you rot,” said Yousef Judeh, a 34-year-old father of five accused of collaborating with Israel. His case still pending, he has been languishing here for two years.

I don’t know if this guy is typical of the inmates, but he was accused of “collaborating with Israel.” I have no idea if the charge is even accurate, it can be made when someone wants to get someone out of the way. But the fact that someone who was helping Israel is in jail says something about the Palestinian Authority’s mindset. They’re not doing enough to fight terror against Israel and they’re punishing their own citizens who are accused of making an effort to do so.

Maybe if the PA wasn’t arresting people who are accused of fighting terror, they’d have more room in their prisons for the real troublemakers.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.