“It’s like déjà vu all over again.” - Yogi Berra.
New York Yankee philosopher Yogi Berra, the creator of the tautology quoted above, would have understood. Long after Israel’s grievously failed Oslo agreements with Palestinian authorities and recent US disclosures of a Qatari military facility going up at an Air Force base in Idaho, American president Donald Trump added a special enhancement to his “20-Point Plan for Peace in the Middle East.”
This addendum orders the US Department of State to provide SWAT training of “Palestinian security forces.” More precisely, the American objective is to provide “advanced tactical courses” - including “live-fire and urban combat simulations” - for these "peacekeepers" in Judea/Samaria (aka "West Bank").
There is more. Reassuringly, the State Department solicitation includes the following specific demand: “Proposals must include a work plan, liability insurance, team details, prior project experience, and a plan for compliance with anti-human trafficking regulations.”
Credo quia absurdum said the ancient philosopher Tertullian: “I believe it because it is absurd.” How comforting it must be for Israelis to know that the next batch of US-trained Palestinian Arab terrorists will be properly insured and also opposed to human trafficking.
Nonetheless, this second expectation will be problematic for American trainees who participated in the October 7th massacre or its hideous aftermath. To be sure, because the Trump “peace” has already freed more than a few jihadi terror-criminals with blood on their hands, a worst case scenario is not only plausible, but distinctly probable.
On its face, the Trump plan is a caricature. Israelis should finally learn that the core requirements of a genuine peace must always be analytic and intellectual. Simplistic remedies concocted by well-meaning but unrealistic politicos can never rise above parody.
To be purposeful, Israel’s national security hazards will need to be examined hierarchically, in some tangible rank-order. In this connection, threats from Hamas and other jihadi organizations should never be viewed as mutually exclusive. Supporting an alternative Palestinian Arab military force to war against Hamas is destined to fail. Moreover, perils from Hamas and Palestine Authority could quickly become intersectional or “force-multiplying.” By definition, these perils would create cumulative harms greater than the sum of their “parts.”
For Israel, intricate security matters can never be fathomed or sorted out ex nihilo, “out of nothing.” Instead, policy-makers in Jerusalem and Washington will require more logic-based forms of strategic and legal understanding. Regarding international law, the law of war addresses ongoing questions of military obligation.
To the extent that Hamas, Islamic Jihad et. al. continues to use “human shields,” the pertinent jihadi forces will be guilty of “perfidy.” Historically, Palestinian Arab terror has its roots in the Palestinian National Covenant, a document which provides ongoing theoretical underpinnings for terror-crimes in the region. This document calls “officially” for sustained violence against Israel without any regard for the laws of war. Significantly, it was adopted in 1964, three years before the 1967 Six Day War. This means that the PLO’s core guidance on terror was first published - together with variously explicit references to the intended annihilation of Israel - three years before there were any “Israel occupied territories.”
For the Palestinian Authority, the basic commitment to waging protracted war was always part of its broader strategy to incorporate all of Israel into “Palestine.” Such overtly irredentist incorporation has certain “official” cartographic antecedents. But the most consistently blatant call for the “removal” of Israel as such remains the PLO’s “Phased Plan” of June 9, 1974.
In lay language, perfidy means “human shields.” It is identified as a "grave breach" at Article 147 of Geneva Convention IV. By law, deception can be acceptable in armed conflict, but The Hague Regulations disallow any placement of military assets or personnel in populated civilian areas. Related prohibitions of perfidy can be found at Protocol I of 1977, additional to the Geneva Conventions of August 12, 1949. These rules are also binding on the discrete but still-intersecting basis of customary international law, a jurisprudential source identified at Article 38 of the U.N. Statute of the International Court of Justice.
What should happen next?
Increasingly imperiled by President Trump’s “peace plan,” Israel will need to proceed diligently in fashioning both its legal and strategic directions. Optimally appropriate steps would ensure that soon-to-accelerate Palestinian Arab terror crimes could not get in the way of Israel’s essential self-defense and that Jerusalem could support its national security by staying mindful of humanitarian international law.
Ultimately, this key obligation could become most urgent when Palestinian Arab terror attacks involve weapons of mass destruction. Ironically, this worst-case narrative is being made more likely by the US State Department’s “Request for Quotations (RFQ) for the Provision of Special Tactical (SWAT) Training for Palestinian Security forces in Jericho, West Bank.”
In pertinent law, considerations of distinction, proportionality and military necessity set limits on any use of armed force, whether by state or sub-state actors. Always, under the customary and codified expectations of the law of war, these interpenetrating criteria remain binding and overriding. To wit, whenever Israel’s enemies declare an IDF attack to be “disproportionate,” they willfully ignore that the rule of proportionality does not demand equivalent military harms. It expects only a level of force that is “militarily necessary.”
On multiple occasions, the practice of "human shields" has been justified by the Palestinian Arab side in terms of combatting Israeli "disproportionality." Though arguably successful as propaganda, these justifications were never more than carefully manipulated adversarial claims. Accordingly, whenever Palestinian Arab terrorists claim a right to “any means necessary,” they are citing to nonexistent law.
“Justice,” as we may learn from Plato’s Republic, means “a contract neither to do nor to suffer wrong." Unless there should be improved understanding that perfidious or perfidious-type behavior by insurgents places legal responsibility for correlative harms on that insurgency, Palestinian Arab jihadi foes could more easily escalate hostilities. Under relevant law, perfidious tactics are not "only" mala prohibita ("evil as prohibited"), but also malae in se ("evil in themselves"). This distinction, moreover, includes “lone wolf” terrorist criminals.
A further point concerns US foreign policy. President Donald J. Trump points with pride to the “Abraham Accords,” but these “remedies” do nothing to reduce the probability or intensity of Israel-terrorist conflict. Indeed, they accomplished presumptively improved relations with Arab states that had never been authentic anti-Israel belligerents. Should Israeli civilians sleep better now that they no longer have to fear attacks from Morocco, Bahrain or the UAE?
We have come full circle. It is never sensible for Israel to assume that one Palestinian Arab terror group would be better than another, and that it would make sense to extend military training and assistance to “good terrorists.” On this argument, at least, the linguistic insight of Yogi Berra displays much greater intellectual merit than does the plan to actively support one terror group (PA) against another (Hamas). Recalling the New York Yankees’ famous philosopher, yes, “it’s like déjà vu all over again.”
LOUIS RENÉ BERESwas educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971) and is the author of many books and articles dealing with war, terrorism and international law. Dr. Beres was Chair of Project Daniel (PM Ariel Sharon, 2003-2004). He was born in Zürich at the end of World War II.