[IsraelTimes]
Bill Burns says his meetings with leaders during last week’s trip to the region left him more concerned about prospect of increased violence
The director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency expressed his concern last week that the current period of tensions between Israel and the Paleostinians is beginning to resemble the violence of the Second Intifada.
"I was a senior US diplomat 20 years ago during the Second Intifada, and I’m concerned — as are my colleagues in the intelligence community — that a lot of what we’re seeing today has a very unhappy resemblance to some of those realities that we saw then too,"
Bill Burns said during a live interview at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in Washington on Thursday.
The
Second Intifada lasted from 2000 to 2005 and for Israelis became synonymous with the
suicide kaboom
s and bus bombings that led to the deaths of over 1,000 civilians and soldiers. The uprising that followed the Camp David peace negotiations also saw intense
festivities with Israelis troops that left over 3,000 Paleostinians dead.
Burns made the remarks days after returning from the region, where he met with senior Israeli and Paleostinian leaders, as the
Biden administration, the same old faces in slightly different places, the same old ideas, the same old graft
...the pack of self-imagined masterminds of strategy and intrigue at the service of the Biden Crime Family and a grateful nation...
has intensified its efforts to calm tensions between the sides.
But Burns said he did not leave the trip feeling optimistic. "The conversations I’ve had with Israeli and Paleostinian leaders left me quite concerned about the prospects for even greater fragility and even greater violence between Israelis and Paleostinians.
"Part of the responsibility of my agency is to work as closely as we can with both the Paleostinian security services and the Israeli security services to prevent the kind of explosions of violence that we’ve seen in recent weeks. That’s going to be a big challenge, and I’m concerned about that dimension of the landscape in the Middle East as well," he added.
Ties between Jerusalem and Ramallah have been strained for months. The previous Israeli government took some steps to bolster the PA, but still refused to engage in diplomatic negotiations. Tensions have soared since the swearing-in of a new coalition in late December led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Widely seen as the most right-wing government in Israel’s history, it slapped a series of sanctions against the Paleostinian Authority in early January in response to the latter’s successful initiative at the
United Nations
...an organization conceived in the belief that we're just one big happy world, with the sort of results you'd expect from such nonsense...
to have the International Court of Justice weigh in on Israel’s conduct in the territories.
Then on January 26, the IDF conducted a raid in the northern West Bank city of Jenin during which nine Paleostinians were killed, including one civilian. Israel has defended the operation as a necessary anti-terror measure. The PA responded by announcing the severing of its security coordination with the IDF (though Abbas later told Burns ties were only partially cut).
A day later, a Paleostinian gunman opened fire outside a synagogue in East Jerusalem, killing seven Israelis.
The IDF has pressed on with an anti-terror campaign to deal with a series of attacks that left 31 people in Israel dead in 2022, and seven more in an attack last month.
The IDF’s operation has netted more than 2,500 arrests in near-nightly raids. It also left 171 Paleostinians dead in 2022, and another 41 since the beginning of the year — many of them carrying out attacks or during
festivities with security forces, though some were uninvolved civilians.
The US has pressed the PA to walk back its announcement cutting security ties with the IDF, which the Israel security establishment has long touted as crucial for maintaining stability and preventing terror in the West Bank. The PA’s supporters have warned, however, that it will be harder to sustain in the long term in the absence of diplomatic negotiations that boost its image in the Paleostinian street.
Abbas told Burns on Sunday that intelligence sharing with Israel — a key component of the sensitive security ties — has continued, an official familiar with the details of their meeting told The Times of Israel.
Among other elements, the security coordination includes regular communication between Israeli and PA security forces to prevent entanglements when the IDF enters Paleostinian towns. The PA also assists in extracting Israelis who mistakenly enter Paleostinian areas and carries out arrests of terror suspects on Israel’s behalf.
The official, who requested anonymity, said the PA president also assured Burns that PA security forces will continue arresting terror suspects and that the security coordination would be fully reinstated once calm is restored.
US Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Abbas two days later, during which he encouraged Ramallah to adopt a plan aimed at boosting the PA’s security presence in the northern West Bank, where fighting between Israeli forces and local
gangs has grown increasingly deadly, two US and Paleostinian officials told The Times of Israel.
In recent months, the PA has seen its control over growing swaths of the West Bank slip away, particularly in northern West Bank cities such as Jenin and Nablus. Israel says that as a result, it has been forced to send its own troops into those areas — which under the Oslo Accords are supposed to be under full PA control — to carry out arrests of security suspects.
In the past, similar raids may have been carried out by the PA.
Many of the Israeli raids have sparked increasingly
violent mostly peaceful festivities with armed Paleostinians frustrated over the Israeli incursions and the PA’s willingness to cooperate.
The US plan would see the establishment of PA Civil Police SWAT teams in Jenin and Nablus in order to re-establish the PA’s control in the area. It would seek to reduce friction between PA police and Paleostinian civilians by deploying civil police to operate and carry out arrests instead of paramilitary forces normally used, according to a source familiar with the matter.
While Abbas did not provide Blinken with a final answer regarding the proposal, PA officials have given a chilly response to it thus far, lamenting its lack of inclusion of an Israeli commitment to cease raids into PA-controlled Area A of the West Bank, a Paleostinian official said.
The official added that recruitment for such a force would also be difficult amid growing public frustration with the PA. Israel, meanwhile, supports the US plan, according to Axios.
Commenting Monday on Burns’ remarks, State Department
front man Ned Price said the CIA director’s concern "is precisely the reason Secretary Blinken from Israel, from the West Bank, from Egypt, encouraged Israelis, Paleostinians to take urgent steps themselves that would de-escalate this situation and lead to greater degrees of security and stability for Israelis and Paleostinians alike."
