The foreign minister of Germany is touring the Middle East this week to pitch one of the stupidest proposals that the region — already a landfill of sorts for all manner of bad ideas — has ever seen. Frank-Walter Steinmeien is peddling an EU “action plan” that would bring European peacekeepers to the Palestinian territories. As reported in the Washington Times, Steinmeier says that a “‘modern and democratic’ international force could serve to protect Palestinians from crime while safeguarding Israelis from suicide bombings and terrorism.” One really doesn’t know where to begin.

For one, such forces have a track record of total failure in the region, from the U.N. peacekeepers that Nasser demanded be removed from the Sinai in the run-up to the Six Day War (U.N. Secretary-General U Thant promptly complied) to the role that UNIFIL has played since its inception 30 years ago in helping Hezbollah remain ensconced on Israel’s northern border.

In the case of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel has spent decades developing an extraordinarily effective intelligence operation, employing everything from informants to audio and video surveillance — and it is precisely this kind of grueling and meticulous work, put at the service of the IDF and the Shin Bet, that keeps buses and restaurants from blowing up in Tel Aviv. How do the Europeans propose to duplicate the competence of the Israeli operation? Are German soldiers really going to interrogate members of the Al-Aqsa Martyr’s Brigades and conduct 4AM raids on terrorist safe houses in Nablus? The truth is that the EU soldiers wouldn’t even know who to talk to or where to start looking, and their failure wouldn’t matter to them anyway — their families would remain safe and sound, a thousand miles away.

The reflexive call for “peacekeeping” or “international” forces as ready-made solutions to conflicts is of course a manifestation of Europe’s embrace of soft power, and in the case of the Palestinians it is also a byproduct of Europe’s love affair with welfarism. The EU, which funnels hundreds of millions of dollars per year to the Palestinian territories, aren’t the least bit uncomfortable creating a situation in which there is virtually nothing the Palestinian people — or Palestinian officials — need do for themselves. This is supposed to prepare them for statehood?