Mordechai Questions Ability of Joint Patrols to Cooperate

Re-establishing trust between the Israeli and Palestinian forces that jointly patrol in the West Bank and Gaza Strip may be difficult to achieve after last month’s violence.

This was the assessment of Israeli Defense Minister Yitzhak Mordechai, who spoke Wednesday at a news conference here about the aftermath of last month’s clashes that left 76 Israelis and Palestinians dead.

Israel’s opening of a new entrance to a tunnel near the Temple Mount in Jerusalem was used by the Palestinian leadership as “an excuse” to issue a call for mass demonstrations that turned violent, Mordechai said.

Speaking a day after conferring with U.S. Defense Secretary William Perry in Washington, Mordechai addressed the role played by the Palestinian police in the Sept. 25-27 clashes.

“We gave them the weapons, we allowed them to have them,” and then the Palestinian police turned them on Israeli soldiers, he said. Fifteen Israelis died as a result of the clashes.

To underscore his point, Mordechai spoke movingly of one incident that occurred near Kfar Darom, a Jewish settlement in Gaza.

When an angry mob of Palestinians approached the settlement accompanied by Palestinian police, he said, an Israeli soldier came out from the settlement and asked a police officer to disperse the crowd.

Apparently satisfied that the police officer had agreed to the request, the soldier started to return toward the settlement compound.

At that point, the Palestinian officer shot the soldier in the back.

The soldier, Mordechai added, was still in an Israeli hospital recovering from his wounds.

Prior to September’s violence, the cooperation of the joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols had been one of the success stories of the peace accords.

But in the aftermath of the bloodshed, it remains unclear how the patrols will attain the measure of mutual trust necessary for their operations.

Mordechai also spoke with some frustration about the course of current Israeli- Palestinian negotiations aimed at implementing the long-delayed Israeli redeployment in Hebron.

Earlier this week, Israeli officials had said an agreement on the West Bank town was imminent.

But their Palestinian counterparts repeatedly issued contradictory statements and by Wednesday, Mordechai was pessimistic about reaching an agreement soon.

“Maybe the Palestinians are waiting until after the [U.S.] presidential elections,” he said.

The Israeli daily Yediot Achronot questioned in an editorial this week whether Palestinian Authority leader Yasser “Arafat is genuinely interested in reaching an agreement,” a question that has often been directed at Netanyahu.

Given the support he got from his own people, the broader Arab world and in the international arena in the wake of last month’s violence, Yediot suggested that Arafat “seeks to perpetuate the current situation, in which Israel has the lower hand.”