Soccer Dad

A piece of the baksheesh

When you read the following summary of The Murder of Musa Arafat and the Battle for the Spoils of Gaza by Pinhas Inbari and Dan Diker:

Israeli assessments have pointed to both Fatah and Hamas as responsible for the murder of Gen. Musa Arafat - security advisor to PA Chairman Mahmud Abbas and former head of Military Intelligence and the National Security forces in Gaza - on September 7, 2005. However, ongoing Palestinian investigations have led some senior officials to assign responsibility to Mohammed Dahlan, the PA Minister of Civil Affairs and former head of PA Preventive Security in Gaza.

Dahlan's Preventive Security force established local racketeering networks that generated hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly in protection money and from suppliers of gasoline and cigarettes. Dahlan was also accused of receiving kickbacks for issuing licenses and for charging illegal fees for VIP border crossings into Israel.

Beginning in 1997, taxes collected at the Karni cargo crossing between Israel and the Gaza Strip were transferred to a new account controlled personally by Dahlan. Documents captured by the IDF show how Dahlan's Preventive Security force was involved in joint investments in the Gaza construction business, from cement production and gravel import to resort development.

An unprecedented competition among local Gaza warlords and crime families has broken out over control of Gaza real estate, as well as for hundreds of millions of dollars in international financial investment and aid earmarked for infrastructure development. According to Palestinian assessments, the market price of Gaza land adjacent to the evacuated Jewish settlements has risen from approximately $52,000 dollars per acre just six months ago to $300,000 per acre near the Gaza coast.

At present, all international investment activities in Gaza are subject to the ultimate control of local warlords and terror groups. The current instability in Gaza and the West Bank makes it virtually impossible for foreign investment and, to a degree, foreign aid to be managed transparently and distributed properly. The security problems in Gaza do not emanate from the Hamas-Fatah rivalry alone, but also from an internal crisis within Fatah that pits one Palestinian security organization against another.

Does it remind you of:

The planet Sigma Iotia II's last visit by the Federation was by the U.S.S. Horizon ... a hundred years before. Realizing the lapse in monitoring the planet, the Federation sends the U.S.S. Enterprise to observe the progress of Iotia's population.
Beaming down to the planet's surface, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are surprised to see a much different society — an Earth-like 1920s gangster culture — than was reported by the U.S.S. Horizon crew. Bodily seized, the landing crew are taken before one of the major planetary leaders, mobster Bela Oxmyx. Wishing to unite the population under his rule, Bela offers Kirk "a piece of the action" in exchange for the technologically advanced weapons of the U.S.S. Enterprise.

Meanwhile, the other lead gangster, Jojo Krako, has his own idea about being the head mobster and captures the Enterprise officers. Struggling to gain the upper hand in this comical power struggle, Kirk creates a diversion ... a little card game known as fizzbin. Without knowing the nuances of the culture, Kirk and Spock try to accomplish their mission when Kirk attempts to drive a car and Spock strives to speak in gangster slang.

If it's not too impolitic I'd point out that articles showing the PLO/PA as gangster style governments are too uncommon but not unheard of. For one there's "The man who swallowed gaza" from 1997 and for another there's "How important is the PLO?" from 1983. (There's also "In Arafat's Kingdom" from 1996 but that's not available online for free.)

Here's a nice summary of the situation:

When asked at the time of the Oslo accords if the PLO could run Gaza and Jericho, Arafat cited his "government" in Lebanon as a credential. "We ran all of Lebanon until 1982; Gaza and Jericho will be child's play."62 By this he implied that the Palestinian Authority would be modeled on the PLO's state-within-a-state in Lebanon of 1971-83 that relied on terror, kidnapping, and murders to assert its authority.63 As David Bar-Illan noted, it would take inspiration from a regime "so corrupt and so savage that even the Syrians were welcomed by the local population as a relief."64

The chairman spoke the truth more than his listeners at the time may have realized, for the Palestinian Authority does in fact closely resemble that earlier PLO rule. In the assessment of a well-versed European diplomat, Arafat

has begun to reproduce in Gaza the atmosphere of his days in Beirut, with an administration marked by inefficiency, corruption and cronyism, trying to keep all power to himself while juggling various warlords, including half a dozen paramilitary police agencies, the armed Islamic militants and criminal bands that control their own turf for narcotics and car theft operations.65
Anyone who thought the nitty-gritty of governing would transform Arafat and his methods of governance was wrong. "Everything has remained the same: Arafat's one-man rule, the manipulation of people and groups associated with him, the work patterns"66—as well as the corruption and the violation of human rights. At the moment when democracy is surging worldwide, Arafat is obstructing this process in favor of his own autocracy.

The absurdity of a society based on a gangster ethos should have been unique to the world of (science) fiction. The urge to create such a state as a solution to instability is simply insane. Yet the world holds sacrosanct the grail of Palestinian independence even if it's run by the likes of Mo "Krako" Dahlan and Mahmoud "Oxmyx" Abbas.

Technorati Tags: Palestinian Authority, Star Trek.

Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.