Inserting UN peacekeepers between the Israelis and Palestinians is very obviously a bad idea, so much so that we didn’t really need a simulation to tell us so. But, since it was at one point the preferred policy of Obama adviser Samantha Power, expect it to start gaining currency. Obama never seems to meet a bad idea he doesn’t want to try out.
Here’s what the simulation, conducted by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy (affiliated with the Brookings Institution), found.
Maariv correspondent Eli Brandstein reported in the 21 April 2011 edition that a war simulation organized by the Saban Center with the participation of former senior American officials found that a large international force of 10,000 deployed in a sovereign Palestinian state could not prevent Palestinian terror attacks against Israeli targets despite receiving advance warning from Israel.
The simulation also found that official Palestinian security forces would not act themselves to prevent the attacks, relying instead on the ineffective international forces.
No. The Palestinian security forces are more likely to perpetrate the attacks themselves. In addition to its ineffectiveness, this simulation finding may be of interest to Power and Obama.
To make matters worse, the simulation found that the presence of the international force in the Palestinian state served to increase friction and tension between Israel and the United States in a way that impaired security cooperation between Israel and the United States.
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