Stop Subsidizing the Palestinian Authority

If the president really is interested in helping improve Palestinians’ quality of life, he could start by holding the rulers of the Palestinian Authority to the same standards of governance that he applies elsewhere.

Quite appropriately last Tuesday, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens called President Obama’s recent speech in Ghana the best of his presidency. In it the President declared, “We must support strong and sustainable democratic governments. We must support those who act responsibly and to isolate those who don’t.” Obama further declared that, “History has shown that countries thrive when they … create space for small and medium-sized businesses that create jobs.” This is a sharp break with the policies of the past. Over the last half century, “Western policy toward Africa has been a matter of throwing money at a guilty conscience, (or a client of convenience) no questions asked. The result, as Mr. Obama points out, was that countries like Kenya, which had a larger GDP than South Korea in 1961 [in the President’s words] ‘have been badly outpaced’.” The reader could almost hear Stephens sigh as he wrote, “Now if Mr. Obama would apply those same principles to the rest of his agenda, foreign and domestic.” The gap between these principles and actual policy is evident from the approach of the United States to the Palestinians. From 1994 (just after the signing of the first Oslo Accords between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority) until 2000, the United States contributed generously to the international aid that amounted to an average of a half billion dollars per year. Once Arafat and the Palestinians launched their Second Intifada or uprising, which has been more accurately named as the Palestinian Terror War by Moshe Yaalon a former chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, the amount of aid actually rose to an annual average of about one billion dollars between 2001 and 2004. The amount of aid to the Palestinians has been increasing since Arafat died in 2004, in spite of the freezing of the assets of Hamas, after the radical Islamist group, outwardly opposed to peace with Israel, was elected to power in Gaza during 2006. A 2003 report prepared by the International Monetary Fund found that between 1995 and 2000, 900 million dollars of this aid was transferred to a bank account controlled by Arafat. Yaalon has said that nobody knows how much of this money was used personally by Arafat, and how much was used for other purposes, such as the funding of terrorism. Still. in 2003, Forbes magazine ranked Arafat sixth on its “Billionaires: Kings, Queens, and Despots List.” Arafat shared the spoils with his cronies. Prominent figures from the PLO were awarded monopoly ownership over large sectors of the Palestinian economy. For instance, the Queri family, of which former Abu Ala is a member, was awarded control over the cement industry. Muhammad Rashid, who controls fuel and oil production in the PA, is the cousin of Hassan Afour, who was one of Arafat’s advisers. Another prominent Palestinian politician, Nabil Shaath has a monopoly on the importing of computers. Muhammed Dhalan, the former chief of the Preventive Security Services in Gaza, enjoys a monopoly on gravel. Yaalon claims that terrorism has even been more disastrous for the Palestinian economy than corruption. He has claimed,

Constant terrorist attacks forced Israel to impose intermittent closures of PA territory and to restrict Palestinian movement with roadblocks and checkpoints in the West Bank and Gaza. These restrictions – essential to Israel’s security – sentenced the PA economy to death by slow suffocation. Tens of thousands of Palestinians lost their job because they were unable to trade freely with Israel or to work within its borders.

The rulers of the Palestinian Authority did not even provide for the basic physical security of their citizens. Upon the creation of the Palestinian Authority, Arafat established no fewer than twelve armed groups, ostensibly to perform police and intelligence functions. It was estimated that by the year 2000, these armed groups had over 40,000 members. The militias drew their manpower from groups like Fatah and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which had long histories of terrorism against Israel. The responsibilities of each of these armed groups were never clearly defined. The members of the various groups, consequently, often fought with each other.  They also took part in terrorist attacks against Israel, extorted protection money from other Palestinian Arabs, ran illegal businesses, hounded reporters and opposition political figures, kidnapped and executed individuals whom they suspected of co-operating with the Israelis, and they occasionally in Yaalon’s words, “put on a show of seizing explosives and arresting wanted terrorists”. In reality the PA had a “revolving-door policy” of releasing those who had committed terrorist attacks against Israelis shortly after they were arrested. Certainly this was not an environment that was conducive to the PA’s development. As we have seen long before Barack Obama became president, the United States and the rest of the international community (mainly other Western democracies) were subsidizing a Palestinian regime that combined anarchy with tyranny. But the Obama Administration’s policy will probably be worse. In his Africa speech, the President declared, “The West is not responsible for the destruction of the Zimbabwean economy, or for wars in which children are enlisted as combatants.” Yet, he is not willing to acknowledge that the Palestinian leadership is any way similarly responsible for the misery of ordinary Palestinians. In his Cairo speech last month, President Obama lectured:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, blacks in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and persistent insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding.

Obama was comparing the Palestinians to American blacks and Israelis to the slave-owners and segregationists who oppressed them. By asserting that “resistance” to Israel is the key to ending Palestinian suffering, he is implying that Israeli oppression is responsible for Palestinian misery. If the president really is interested in helping improve Palestinians’ quality of life, he could start by holding the rulers of the PA to the same standards of governance that he applies to the leaders of African countries.