The Real Hot Issue of the Sharon Plan – Not the Settlements Near Gaza

The hot issue of dismantling Israeli settlements contiguous to Gaza provided a distraction for the even hotter issues that are inherent in the Sharon Plan that was voted on in the Israeli cabinet oN Sunday, June 6th, 2004.

What promises to be the most hotly debated issue when the Knesset parliament considers the Sharon Plan is the almost unnoticed Clause Five of the Sharon Plan, which mandates the provision of further military training for Palestinian armed forces, in conjunction with the US, the UK, Jordan and Egypt, while Clause One of the same Sharon Plan continues to declare that there is no Palestinian partner to peace”.

In other words, the Sharon Plan, ratified by a sovereign Israeli government, offers to arm an entity recognized by Israel as hostile to the State of Israel.

Has this happened before?

Well, yes.

Back in 1993, with the genesis of the Olso Process, Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres offered to provide military training for Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Army.

At the time, Rabin and Peres had come to the conclusion that the Palestinian armed forces would use their weapons in the context of a peace process.

Yet in September. 2000, Rabin and Peres were proven to be wrong, when the arms and military training that they had provided for the Palestinian armed forces then turned against the people of Israel, in a terror campaign has resulted in the premeditated cold murder of more than 1,000 men, women and children, and the maiming of more than 10,000 people

It is that same Palestinian armed force at war with Israel that the Sharon Plan proposes to arm once again.

In that context, Sharon’s government has bestowed security responsibilities on Muhammad Dahlan as the warlord of Gaza, while Israeli intelligence warns that Dahlan is directly responsible for the current terror campaign against the Israeli population.

Indeed, it was Ehud Olmert, now Israel’s deputy defence minister, who exposed Dahalan’s security file, when Olmert authored an impassioned essay in the Wall Street Journal on June 2, 2002, when Olmert in which he called for Dahlan to be “eradicated”.

Two years later, senior officials who serve in Israeli intelligence say that there has been no change in Dahlan’s “modus vivendi”, and that Dahlan continues his direct involvement with the planning of lethal terror acts. Indeed, Dahlan is the head of the Palestinian organization known as the Popular Resistance Committees which took credit for the May 2nd 2004 killing of Tali Chantual, murdered in her 8th month of pregnancy, and the point blank shooting deaths of her four little girls.

Yet Olmert is now the prime proponent of the Sharon Plan, and he will not comment on why he suddenly places his trust in a terrorist whom he had called on Israel to get rid of – exactly two years ago.

Meanwhile, in what promises to develop into yet another hot security issue, the Sharon Plan calls for the Egyptians to move their armed forces into Gaza, while officials in Israeli intelligence gather daily documentation which shows that Egypt knowingly facilitates weapons tunnels to supply arms into Gaza from Egyptian territory.

In conclusion, the Sharon Plan, which many people have scrutinized in terms of how it would affect the lives of 7,500 Israeli farmers near Gaza, should be examined in terms of the security threat that is may pose to people who live anywhere in Israel.