USrael's Palestinian Recruits

"O leaders, O Jews! You whom I have risked my life to defend, you who do not acknowledge favors and who do not display gratitude. You make friends with people when you need them, and if evil befalls them because of you, you shake off their hands as you did with me. And what would you do to the Arabs if you reached an agreement with them? I think that you would plague their sleep and push them to their deaths. Is that not so?" (Palestinian collaborator Muhammad Tawil to his Zionist handler Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, 1931, quoted in Army of Shadows: Palestinian Collaboration with Zionism, 1917-1948, Hillel Cohen, 2008, p 87)

"The Israeli army has permitted a battalion of the Palestinian security forces, trained in a special camp in Jordan under the supervision of US Army Lieutenant-General Keith Dayton, to deploy in the Jenin area, where it continues to harass Hamas and Jihad militants by acting against their civilian infrastructure: mosques, charities, businesses and educational and health institutions. The level of co-ordination between the Palestinian commanders and their Israeli counterparts is surprisingly high, and the co-operation is producing results daily. A second Palestinian battalion has completed the training in Jordan and now operates in Hebron, where it has racked up considerable success against Hamas terror cells and stymied the Islamist movement's other functions." (Israel's strategy pays off: terror has been defeated in the West Bank, Ehud Yaari, The Australian, 10/12/08)

"Keith Dayton... has praised the new recruits as 'the most capable Palestinian security forces that have ever been fielded here', and firmly played down the notion that they might one day come to turn their weapons on Israel... Dayton told The Jerusalem Post that the trainees are taught over and over again that 'you are not here to learn how to fight against the Israeli occupation'... Dayton repeatedly stressed in the interview that none of his work here... would harm Israel's security. Indeed, the reverse was true, he said... 'Nothing I or my team do here will jeopardize the security interests the security interests of the State of Israel. Period. Full stop. We won't do it. It's not what we do as Americans." (Dayton: New PA forces are most capable ever, David Horovitz, 11/12/08)

[Palestinian collaboration & its context is discussed in my 4/11/08 post The Bigger Picture.]